Volume 12, Issue 1

The narratological concept of unreliable narration is subject to constant debate. While this debate affects different kinds of problems associated with unreliability, one of the central issues concerns the application area of ›unreliable narration‹. Here, theorists discuss, for example, whether there are certain types of narrators that cannot be unreliable, whether some kinds of narrators are necessarily unreliable, or in which way other characters apart from narrators can also be unreliable. It is the first one of these questions that I am addressing in this paper: Are there types of narrators that cannot be unreliable? As I lay out in the first section of my paper, my argumentative starting point is the observation that previous contributions to the application area discussion neglect two basic theoretical distinctions that are necessary to find robust and detailed answers to the relevant questions. The first of these theoretical distinctions will be addressed in the second section of the paper. It concerns the narrative phenomena that are usually referred to as »unreliable narration«. As I will argue, these phenomena are very heterogeneous, and we must distinguish at least five basic types of unreliability whose application areas partially differ: (1) fact-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s claims about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete, (2) fact-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s beliefs about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete, (3) value-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative utterances are in conflict with a relevant value system, (4) value-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative opinions are in conflict with a relevant value system, and (5) value-related actional unreliability: the narrator’s actions are in conflict with a relevant value system. In the third section of the paper, I will then proceed to show that four kinds of narrator types have been conflated or confused in the application area debate: (a) heterodiegetic narrators: narrators who are not part of the narrated story world, (b) non-personal narrators: narrators of whom we know no features apart from them telling a story, or narrators whom we are not invited to picture, (c) all-knowing narrators: narrators who have complete knowledge of the story world facts, and (d) stipulating narrators: narrators who generate the story world facts by narrating them. In discussions concerning the question of whether one or more of these narrator types cannot be unreliable, some theorists seem to assume that some or all of these types are necessarily connected. I will show, however, that there are hardly any necessary connections between them. After this preparatory work, I am showing in a step-by-step analysis in section four which of these narrators types can or cannot be unreliable in which way – and why. The results are as follows: Both heterodiegetic and stipulating narrators can be unreliable in all of the five ways outlined in section two. This outcome may seem surprising for the case of stipulating narrators. It becomes more comprehensible, however, if we bear in mind that only fact-related utterance unreliability is really impugned by a narrator’s ability to create facts by narrating them – and even here we can find a case where unreliability is very likely possible: the case of narratorial self-correction. All-knowing narrators, however, can only be unreliable in four of the five ways: It is, for conceptual reasons, impossible that all-knowing narrators are unreliable on the cognitive level with regards to the story world facts. Since they have complete knowledge of the story world facts, they cannot be wrong or ignorant about them. The case of non-personal narrators, finally, is the most complex. Here, it may first seem that non-personal narrators can never be unreliable – because as soon as a narrator is unreliable, we would know one significant feature of theirs, namely their being unreliable, which makes them personal. However, I will argue that, according to one reading of the non-personality concept, this type of narrator can in fact be unreliable on the utterance level both with regards to facts and values. This is because neither two conflicting reports by the same narrator nor the occurrence of problematic evaluative utterances in a narration – while often being sufficient for fact-related or value-related utterance unreliability respectively – necessarily invite us to picture a narrator. I am closing my paper in section five by summarizing the results and pointing to some possibly debatable theoretical assumptions on which my analyses are based.

This paper explores why unreliable narration should be considered as a concept not only applying to single works of fiction, but also to whole series of fiction, and why impersonal (›omniscient‹) narration can also be suspected of unreliability. Some literary genres show a great affinity to unreliable narration. In fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), for instance, the reader’s »hesitation« towards which reality system rules within the fictive world often is due to the narration of an autodiegetic narrator whose credibility is not beyond doubt. Detective stories, in contrast, are usually set in a purely realistic world (in conflict with no other reality system) and typically do not foster any doubts regarding the reliability of their narrators. The only unreliable narrators we frequently meet in most detective stories are suspects who, in second level narrations, tell lies in order to misdirect the detective’s enquiries. Their untruthfulness is usually being uncovered at the end of the story, in the final resolution of the criminalistics riddle (›Whodunnit‹?), as part of the genre-typical ›narrative closure‹. As the new genre of detective novels emerged at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, its specific genre conventions got more and more well-established. This made it possible for writers to playfully change some of these readers’ genre expectations – in order to better fulfil others. Agatha Christie, for example, in 1926 dared to undermine the »principle of charity« (Walton) that readers give to the reliability of first person narrators in detective stories – especially when such a narrator shows himself as being a close friend to the detective at work, as it was the case with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Dr. Watson, friend to Sherlock Holmes. Christie dared to break this principle by establishing a first-person narrator who, at the end, turns out to be the murderer himself. Thus, she evades the »principle of charity«, but is not being penalised by readers and critics for having broken this one genre convention because she achieves a very astonishing resolution at the end of the case and thus reaches to fulfil another and even more crucial genre convention, that of a surprising ›narrative closure‹, in a very new and satisfying way. Fantastic literature and detective novels are usually two clearly distinct genres of narrative fiction with partly incommensurate genre conventions. Whereas in fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), two reality systems collide, leaving the reader in uncertainty about which one of the two finally rules within the fictive world, detective novels usually are settled in a ›simply realistic‹ universe. Taking a closer look at a contemporary series of detective fiction, that is, the Dublin stories of Tana French (2007–), I will turn to an example in which the genre convention of ›intraserial coherence‹ provides evidence for the unreliability of the different narrators – whereas with regard only to each single volume of the series, each narrator could be perceived as being completely reliable. As soon as we have several narrators telling stories that take place within the same fictive world, unreliable narration can result from inconsistencies between the statements of the different narrators about what is fictionally true within this universe. Additionally, the Tana French example is of special interest for narratology because in one of the volumes, an impersonal and seemingly omniscient narrator appears. Omniscient narration is usually being regarded as incompatible with unreliability, but, as Janine Jacke has already shown, in fact is not: Also impersonal narration can mire in contradictions and thus turn out to be unreliable. With regard to Tana French’s novel, I would add that it can also be mistrusted because the utterances of this narration can conflict with those of other narrators in other volumes of the same series. So in the light of serial narration, the old question of whether impersonal narration (or an omniscient narrator) can be unreliable at all should be reconsidered. In the case of narrative seriality, the evidence for ascribing unreliability to one of its alternating narrators need not be found in the particular sequel narrated by her/him but in other sequels narrating about events within the same story world. Once again, narrative unreliability turns out to be a category rather of interpretation than of pure text analysis and description. Again, Tana French like previously Agatha Christie is not being penalised by readers and critics for having broken this one genre convention of letting her detective stories take place in a purely ›realistic‹ universe because today, genre conventions are merging more and more. Tana French achieves an even more tempting ›narrative tension‹ by keeping her readers in continuous uncertainty about whether a little bit of magic might be possible in the otherwise so quotidian world of her fictive detectives. Thus, the author metafictionally (and, later also overtly) flirts with the genre of »urban fantasy«, practicing a typical postmodern merging of well-established, hitherto distinct popular genres.

It has long been insisted that there is no actual heterodiegetic unreliability, since heterodiegetic narrators first stipulate the fictive world through their speech and hence are omniscient (see Martínez-Bonati 1973, 186; Ryan 1981, 531; Jahn 1998, 101; Fludernik 2003, 213; Cohn 2000, above all 312; Petterson 2005, 73). Moreover, as a consequence of this assumption about what is meant by heterodiegesis, it has been deduced that heterodiegetic narrators cannot make false statements – for whatever reasons – about the composition of the fictive world. In the present article, I would like to discuss the conditions which make heterodiegetic unreliability possible – with particular reference to the definition of heterodiegesis I have proposed (see Lang 2014a). First, I explain (expanding on my essay from 2014) in part one, under the heading »What Heterodiegesis Is Not«, why the concepts of »omniscience« and »auctoriality« only have possible but not necessary connections to heterodiegesis. The fundamental reason for this is that there are heterodiegetic texts whose narrative instances neither (a) are omniscient nor (b) exhibit auctorial narrative behavior. In particular, the reasons are as follows: a) Heterodiegetic texts can feature changing internal focalizations, and hence can withhold, in sections, knowledge they should in fact possess, if we consider the text as a whole. Whoever does not acknowledge that such heterodiegetic narrators are not omniscient would need to explain why it is that those narrators withhold their knowledge. However, that would only be possible on the basis of speculation. b) If, following Petersen (1993), auctoriality is understood as a narrator intervening with subjective evaluation into his or her narrative, then this can or cannot be the case as much for heterodiegetic texts as for homodiegetic texts. The refined consideration of these two terms leads, after a brief presentation of the theory of unreliable narration (2. What Is Unreliable Narration in the First Place?), according to which a two-pronged differentiation between mimetic and axiological unreliability is deemed sufficient, to the question of how these considerations can be connected to narrative unreliability and to what extent narrative stance and focalization are linked to narrative unreliability or even provide the conditions for it (3. Narrative Unreliability and Heterodiegesis). In this section, I demonstrate why both axiological and mimetic unreliability are possible in all forms of heterodiegesis. Through the strict separation of narrative standpoint (heterodiegetic or not), narrative behavior (subjectively evaluating or not) and focalization (epistemically limited or not), I argue that the parameter of narrative standpoint is mostly overestimated in the attribution of narrative unreliability. In the case of axiologically unreliable narration, the reason is that normative judgments can be passed on the behavior of both fictive and real persons and that – for reasons elaborated in the first section – these judgments (or evaluating stances) can be put forward by a homodiegetic narrator as much as by a heterodiegetic narrator. In both cases, the evaluations can either be consonant with the norms of the work as a whole, in which case the narrators are reliable, or not, in which case they are unreliable. What distinguishes heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrators in relation to axiological unreliability, is the fact that only homodiegetic narrators can prove to be axiologically unreliable through their actions in the narrated world, when these actions do not conform to their own norms; owing to their standpoint outside of the narrated world, this is not possible for heterodiegetic narrators. Whereas axiological unreliability in heterodiegetic texts is partly accepted in existing research, mimetic unreliability in heterodiegetic texts is much more strongly contested. It is true that not every internally focalized heterodiegetic narrative is unreliable in which information about the narrated world is withheld, marking the limited perspective of the focalized figure. Yet there are cases in which the introduction of internal focalization runs counter to the abundance of detail previously depicted and in this way amounts to a withholding of information that is not provided by a heterodiegetic narrator. He or she thereby keeps silent about the relevant information and can therefore be characterized as unreliable. Additionally, heterodiegetic narrators can also make contradictory statements, rendering them, at least temporarily, unreliable. The reasons for rejecting a connection between unreliability and heterodiegetic narrators lie in the observation that heterodiegetic narrators are inventors of their stories, but also in the suggestion that heterodiegetic narrators are the only ones who afford access to the narrated world. Against this view, we can argue that the invention of a story also leaves open the possibility of not telling relevant facts for a sufficient understanding, in other words, of keeping silent; and, in just the same way, the privileging of a heterodiegetic narrator can be suspended. To conclude, in the fourth section, I will use the short story »The Flight Simulator« by Christian Hardinghaus to substantiate my theoretical discussion and present a narrative that, first, is narrated heterodiegetically and, secondly, is mimetically unreliable in a twofold sense.

Heterodiegetic narrators are not present in the story they tell. That is how Gérard Genette has defined heterodiegesis. But this definition of heterodiegesis leaves open what ›absence‹ of the narrator really means: If a friend of the protagonist tells the story but does not appear in it, is he therefore heterodiegetic? Or if a narrator tells something that happened before his lifetime, is he therefore heterodiegetic? These open questions reveal the vagueness of Genette’s definition. However, Simone Elisabeth Lang has recently made a clearer proposal to define heterodiegesis. She argues that narrators should be called heterodiegetic only if they are fundamentally distinguished from the ontological status of the fictional characters: Heterodiegetic narrators are not part of the story for logical reasons, because they are presented as inventors of the story. This is, for example, the case in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809): In the beginning of this novel the narrator presents himself as inventor of the character’s names (»Edward – so we shall call a wealthy nobleman in the prime of life – had been spending several hours of a fine April morning in his nursery-garden«). Based on that recent definition of heterodiegesis my article deals with the question whether such heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable. My question is: How could you indicate that the inventor of a fictitious story tells something which is not correct or incomplete? In answering this question, I refer to some proposals of Janina Jacke’s article in this journal. Jacke shows that the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators should not be confused with the distinction between personal and non-personal narrators or with the distinction between restricted and all-knowing narrators. If you make such differentiations, then of course heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable: They can omit some essential information or interpret the story inappropriately. Heterodiegetic narrators of an invented story can even lie to the reader or deceive themselves about some elements of the invention. That means: A heterodiegetic narration cannot only be value-related unreliable (›discordant narration‹), but also fact-related unreliable. My article delves especially into this type of unreliability and shows that heterodiegetic narrators of a fictitious story can be fact-related unreliable, if they tell something which was not invented by themselves. In that case, the narrator himself sometimes does not really know whether he tells a true or a fictitious story. Such narrators are unreliable if they assert that the story is true, although they are suggesting at the same time that it is not. I call this type of unreliable narrator a ›fabulating chronicler‹ (›fabulierender Chronist‹): On the one hand, such narrators present themselves as chroniclers of historical facts but, on the other hand, they seem to be fabulists who tell a fairy tale. This type of unreliability occurs especially if a narrator tells a legend or a story from the Bible. My article demonstrates this case in detail with two examples, namely two novels by Thomas Mann: The Holy Sinner (1951) and Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943). My article also discusses some cases where it is not appropriate or counter-intuitive to call a heterodiegetic narrator ›unreliable‹: i. e. the narrator of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) and the narrator of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795/1796). On the one hand, these narrators show some characteristics of unreliability, because they omit essential pieces of information. On the other hand, these narrators are barely shaped as characters, they are nearly non-personal. However, in order to describe a narrator as unreliable, it is – in my opinion – indispensable to refer to some traces of a narrative personality: Figural traits of a narrator provoke the reader to identify all depicting, describing and commenting sentences of a narration as utterances of one and the same ›psychic system‹ (Niklas Luhmann). Only narrators who can be interpreted as such a ›psychic system‹, provoke the reader to assume the role of an analyst or ›detective‹, who perhaps identifies the narrator’s discordance or unreliability. In my article the unreliability of a narration is understood as part of the composition and meaning of a literary work. I argue that a narrator cannot be described as unreliable without designating a semantic motivation for this composition by an act of interpretation. Therefore, my suggestion is that a narration should be merely called unreliable if it encourages the reader not only to imagine the told story, but also to imagine a discordant or unreliable storyteller.

Research has shown that the present-tense novel poses significant logical problems of narrative mediation. For this reason, the current essay addresses the question of whether, due to these problems, the heterodiegetic present-tense novel is a case of unreliable narration. To this end, the essay first discusses the sustainability of the concept of unreliability. Its point of departure is the observation that researchers have created significant confusion by applying a characterological concept to literary phenomena. Despite an overwhelming amount of pertinent essays and monographs on the topic, the central questions raised by this concept are still highly contested: To which narrative instances can we plausibly apply the category of unreliability? Precisely which narratological aspects of the mediating instance can we account for using the category of unreliability? Using the example of Holden Caulfield, the narrating protagonist from J. D. Salinger’s novel The Cather in the Rye , this essay demonstrates which difficulties arise when we impute unreliability to a complex narrative instance. The lack of conceptual precision which comes to light in this novel not only leads – as in the case of Catcher in the Rye – to contradictory assignments of the category of unreliability in one and the same text but also to the constitution of a text corpus that is primarily characterized by its heterogeneity. This undermines the intersubjective use of concepts and, as a result, further literary knowledge. Therefore, this essay argues that we should abandon the concept of unreliability in favor of more precise analytic categories, instead of making the discussion of this category even more unwieldy than it already is by adding new definitions and thereby impeding agreement within the scientific community. In order to more precisely define the logical problems of narrative mediation of the heterodiegetic present-tense novel, the essay will first define the speech acts of narration, taking the temporal relation between the narrative procedure and the narrated events as the identifying feature. In the process, the use of the simple-past tense proves to be constitutive, not only because of experience in daily life with the speech act of narration but also and above all for logical reasons. Here, the preterit retains its deictic function of referring to the past. In terms of genre, the present-tense novel resembles drama, since there too the mediating instance makes use of the present tense as the marginal text does in drama. This is why we can also no longer refer to a narrative speech act in the case of the present-tense novel. Rather, the present-tense novel creates the same impression as the speech act of live reportage in daily life. Connected to this, however, are perspectival restrictions of the spatial and temporal type (predominantly zeitdeckende Vermittlung , where narrating time matches narrated time; uncertainty about the future, spatial fixity), but primarily with respect to the representation of another consciousness (extremely limited introspection). However, because the mediating instance in the present-tense novel tends not to adhere to these restrictions, we are confronted with a paradoxical form of narrative mediation. Depending on the design of a text, the reader can either become aware of this paradox or it can remain hidden from him or her. The latter is the case in Andrea Camilleri’s crime novel Il tuttomio (2013), which aims to make the recipient as focused on the plot as possible and hence to heighten the suspense that is constitutive for the genre of the crime novel. It is probably for this reason that the present tense emerges more frequently in recent crime novels. This is also the case for Stefan Slupetzky’s novel Das Schweigen des Lemming (2006), although in this text the form of narrative mediation – in contrast to Camilleri’s text – is extremely conspicuous. The rhetorical prominence of the mediating instance and the technique of montage, coupled with the use of the present-tense, work to disrupt the illusion. Accompanying the suspense on the level of the plot is a meta-fictional layer that prompts the reader to reflect upon the conventions of the crime novel. The essay then briefly presents two texts which, each in a different way, legitimate the use of the present tense, so that the impression of a paradoxical form of narrative mediation does not at all arise. In Wojciech Kuczok’s novel Senność (2008), the mediating instance repeatedly creates the impression, through its particular behavior, that the present text is a screenplay, a genre for which the present tense is constitutive. In Vladimir Makanin’s short novel Laz (1991), on the other hand, the present tense functions as the tense which signals timelessness, thus underscoring the allegorical character of the text. Even when such strategies of legitimation significantly attenuate the paradoxical effect of present-tense usage, we nonetheless have to remain cognizant of the fact that the transgression of its restrictions raises fundamental logical problems of narrative mediation, since we cannot plausibly explain the accompanying enlargement of the mediating instance’s perceptual perspective. In this sense, we could regard the specific form of narrative mediation in the present-tense novel as a case of unreliable narration. This would entail, however, that we broaden even more the umbrella term of unreliability, as scholars have already been doing for some time now. But that would accomplish precisely the opposite of what scientific concept-building should in fact strive for: namely, to describe textual phenomena with the greatest terminological precision and thereby to ensure agreement within the scientific community.

This essay asks whether the attribution of unreliability to the narrator of a literary text is always dependent upon interpretation. The bulk of narratological research answers with »yes«. Yet the content of the term »interpretation-dependent« is understood in radically different ways. As a minimal consensus, it is commonly accepted that the attribution of unreliability cannot be described as »interpretation-neutral«, in the way that, for instance, the statement »The narrator in text T is a homodiegetic narrator« is interpretation-neutral. Following a few preliminary explanatory remarks on terminology, I propose two arguments for why this majority opinion is false. I argue that the statement »Text T is unreliably narrated« is not always interpretation-dependent. Within the framework of the first argument, I attempt to show that the criterion of »interpretation neutrality« depends upon some meta-theoretical assumptions. If one assumes that basic linguistic characteristics are valid independent of their interpretation and argues that a sentence such as »Call me Ishmael« establishes a homodiegetic narrator because the word »me« signals that he belongs to the narrated story, then one implicitly excludes as inadequate certain idiosyncratic theories of meaning that would ascribe a different meaning to »me«. That is not problematic in and of itself. But it shows that there are conditions of adequacy for theories of meaning that are fundamentally negotiable. And the set of statements which can be attributed the attribute of being »interpretation-neutral« can vary depending upon how these conditions of adequacy are defined. In a corresponding adaptation of the conditions of adequacy for theories of meaning and interpretation, it is therefore inherently possible that even statements about the reliability of a narrator could be granted the status of being interpretation-neutral. The second argument focuses on the praxis of interpretation. I seek to reconstruct how exactly the qualification of a narrator as homodiegetic (an attribute that is usually considered as interpretation-neutral) and as unreliable (an attribute that is usually not considered as interpretation-neutral) can come about in a process of interpretation. There appear to be cases in which criteria commonly cited to qualify a statement as an interpretation-neutral description of a text are also applicable for the attribution of narrative unreliability. Such cases are literary texts like Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge , in which the unreliability of the narrator is apparent. The knowledge that the narrators in these texts at least temporarily withhold facts relevant to the plot, tell lies, make mistakes, hallucinate, etc. can just as much be attained on the basis of an unreflective understanding of the linguistic meanings of words as can the knowledge that the narrators are part of the stories they tell. If one wishes to not relinquish the interpretation-neutral status of statements about the ontology of a narrator (the qualification, that is, of a narrator as homo- or heterodiegetic) to a relativism that includes linguistic interpretations, then one is forced in principle to also retain the status of interpretation neutrality for statements about the reliability of a narrator. Both arguments lead me to conclude that the universal quantification that all determinations of the reliability of a narrator are dependent upon interpretation is false. I propose that we limit ourselves to more modest existential quantifications and that we do not attribute the attributes »interpretation-dependent« and »interpretation-neutral« to entire literary categories or types of statements in general, but rather to individual statements . Moreover, I give a short and tentative definition of the criterion »interpretation neutrality« that follows from these considerations.

The paper surveys two different functions that may be ascribed to unreliable narratives. Derived from the notion of technique (Russian »priëm«, German »Verfahren«), function is a key concept of literary theory, which relates textual properties to effects. One of the functions, in recent time related to unreliable narration, is deception. In order to appreciate the literary effect of deception, the reader must finally understand that s/he has been deceived for a certain time. In other words, in order to recognize that s/he has been deceived, the reader must find out what is the case in the narrated world, i. e. fiction, and distinguish it from what was told without being the case. Another effect will be introduced. It is related to narratives in which it is impossible to find out what is true in the fiction. In those cases, readers will be perplex or helpless. In the next step, these effects – that of deception and that of helplessness – being effects of reception shall be substituted by their hermeneutic counterparts. If one is deceived by an unreliable narration, one finally finds out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the reason for the deception); if one is left helpless by an unreliable narration, one cannot find out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the unexplained fact that is the reason for the helplessness). The first one of these hermeneutic counterparts of the reception functions will be called the closed function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation can be closed by an interpretation; the second one will be called the open function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation is left open and cannot be closed. The remaining parts of the paper deal with literary examples which show different cases fulfilling those functions. The first two examples are taken from stories by Stefan Zweig. In »The Fowler Snared« (»Sommernovellette«, 1911), the closed function is fulfilled because the trustworthy extradiegetic narrator finally corrects the unreliable intradiegetic narrator. The next example of Zweig, »The Woman and the Landscape« (»Die Frau und die Landschaft«, 1922), lacks an explicit correction, since the narrator deceives not only the reader but also himself. A thorough interpretation, however, shows that it is more plausible to assume that the narrator’s account referring to certain facts is not true than to assume that it is correct. In this case, the gap can be closed, too, although there are more assumptions required than in the first case as the second text gives no explicit trustworthy evidence. The evidence must be inferred by hermeneutic conclusions. In contrast to the closed function, the open function of unreliability is much more complicated to ascribe. The first case, the (very) short novel The Castle of the Brothers Zanowsky ( Das Schloß der Brüder Zanowsky , 1933) by Paul Zech presents several contradicting versions of a fact of the fiction (narrated world). The narrator renders them without preferring one of them. He is even unable to account for, let alone to recognize the fact that these versions are contradicting each other. So, it seems impossible to determine which one of these versions is true in the fiction. The version the narrator believes to be true may be true or not. On the one hand, the narrator can be considered to be plainly unreliable; on the other hand, his unreliability is not the point of the story. It is its point that what the narrator tells us is inevitably vague; it is not its point that he lies or is not able to find out what is true in his world. – The last example stems from the novel The Poor Squanderer ( Der arme Verschwender , 1936) by Ernst Weiß. In this case, the narrator’s discourse is full of single contradictions and omissions. Some of the gaps can be closed, some of them not. However, there is no explanation which accounts for the narrator’s misreporting and underreporting tout court. The overall setting of the narrator’s putative unreliability is left open due to the lack of self-awareness the narrator reveals in his discourse. – The paper closes with a short outlook on the literary/poetical difference between the closed and the open function of unreliable narration. Texts that close the gaps caused by the unreliability of their narrators display other literary properties than texts that leave the gaps, caused by the unreliability of their narrators, open. Additionally, the difference between texts whose open gaps are caused by unreliable narration and texts with similar gaps, which are not unreliably narrated, is hard to explain.

In recent years, theories of rhythm have been proposed by a number of different disciplines, including historical poetics, generative metrics, cognitive literary studies, and evolutionary aesthetics. The wide range of fields indicates the transdisciplinary nature of rhythm as a phenomenon, as well as its complexity, highlighting the degree to which many of the central questions surrounding rhythm remain extraordinarily difficult even to state in terms that can traverse the disciplinary boundaries effortlessly transgressed by rhythm as a phenomenon. In particular, any theory of rhythm, whether in music, dance, sociology, or language, must grapple with two quandaries. First, the precise site of rhythm remains opaque: rhythms occur in, affect, and are produced by all of bodies, cultures, and universals (whether metaphysical or species-physiological). What is the relation between species-wide characteristic, individual body, cultural context, and the history of art making in the experience of rhythm? Second, rhythm is simultaneously a phenomenon of fixed, organizing form and one of dynamic, changing flow. How can rhythm encompass both the measurement of regular recurrences across time and the organizing of temporal phenomena as they unfold? In this article, I draw on Emile Benveniste and Henri Meschonnic to elucidate these quandaries or conflicts before turning to Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on rhythm. I argue that Nietzsche’s work with rhythm provides a historically situated model for how we might continue to take the questions and conflicts within rhythm seriously, rather than privileging an abstract and universally applicable theory of rhythm. This model is especially crucial for our own historical moment, when cultural-political emphasis on science and technology at the expense of aesthetics devalues all insights not presented in the form of countable data points or empirically testable facts. Nietzsche is, of course, one of the great critics of positivist-scientistic epistemologies, part of a long tradition questioning the naturalness of natural-scientific paradigms and alerting us to the metaphors at play even in the ›hard sciences‹. I use rhythm as one paradigmatic place to resist the importation of scientistic thought into discussions of language, literature, and culture. I show how Nietzsche’s writings on rhythm prove illuminating for contemporary understandings of rhythm because the tensions in his work are shaped by the quandaries inherent to rhythm that I have used Benveniste and Meschonnic to elaborate, namely the question of rhythm’s site as individual, cultural, or universal, and the conflict between rhythm as form and as flow. The question of the site of rhythm appears in Nietzsche’s discussions of Greek and Latin meters both in his philological works, in his aphorisms, and in his letters: on the one hand, he argues that Greek and Latin metrical and rhythmic resources are irrevocably lost to modern cultures (indicating that rhythm is a product of culture), while on the other, he emphasizes the impact of rhythm on the body and offers advice for replicating Ancient metrical and rhythmic techniques (suggesting that rhythm is based on physiological universals). And the conflict between flow and form appears as Nietzsche praises both the productive constraint created by large-scale, architectonic, or macro-formal rhythms and the freedom from such constraint enabled by small-scale, leitmotiv-based, or micro-formal rhythms. The conflicts in Nietzsche’s work between the loss and recovery of Ancient rhythms and between rhythm as small scale freedom vs. large scale constraint thus represent one particular unfolding of the dilemmas for rhythmical theory worked out by Benveniste and Meschonnic. The various modern disciplines engaged with rhythm will answer different sets of these questions in different ways. Most practitioners of, e. g., evolutionary aesthetics, neuroaesthetics, or cognitive poetics would no doubt contend that they are using the tools of the natural sciences to investigate long-standing humanistic inquiries. Nietzsche, as a critic of his own era’s scientific positivism who allows tensions inherent in these questions to remain open in his own work, is an ideal interlocutor with whom to ask whether even the adoption of these tools ends up placing excessive faith in natural-scientific paradigms and undercutting other—affective, bodily, metaphorical, poetic, etc.—ways of knowing, as I demonstrate briefly in the examples of evolutionary aesthetics and generative metrics. Because Nietzsche leaves open the conflicts over rhythm’s site and its qualities as form or flow, he can use individual bodily experience to make physiological arguments about the effects of rhythm on culture and vice versa: Nietzsche takes his bodily response to be an index of cultural values inherent to rhythmical practices. The particular values that Nietzsche critiques shift across his career—early on he condemns German musical and poetic rhythms for being too rigid, while later he sees them as pathologically heightening affect and emotion. In both cases, detrimental rhythmic practices lead to detrimental bodily practices and to the degeneration of culture, while rhythmic practices work as a bodily and cultural corrective. In his critiques of German forms and praises of Greek forms, and in the moments in which he brings them together, Nietzsche thus asserts the complex interrelation of culture, body, and history.

Some theorists on literary interpretation have suggested a connection between Monroe C. Beardsley’s anti-intentionalism and hypothetical intentionalism based on an implied author. However, a full exploration has never been attempted. I undertake this task in this paper. A close reading of Beardsley reveals that he assumes something very similar to the implied author in interpretation. I distinguish five types of fictional works in terms of their narrative mode and show that my claim stands in at least four of the five types. The significance of my argument lies in exposing the above version of authorism in anti-intentionalism. Beardsley is generally perceived as advocating the irrelevance of authorial intention to literary interpretation. The common interpretation of his theory is that work-meaning is generated by linguistic conventions, with intention playing no role in meaning-determination. All the interpreter needs is knowledge of public, linguistic conventions in order to recover textual meaning. Nevertheless, when dealing with the problem of interpretation, Beardsley explicitly talks about attributing textual meaning to a fictional speaker. Although he does not elaborate on the nature of this speaker, clues scattered in his writings point to the striking similarity of this theoretical apparatus to an implied author. The key lies in his presumption that every fictional work must have an ultimate speaker to whom meaning inferred from the text should be attributed. This claim is almost the core of an implied author theory of interpretation. A difficulty in classifying Beardsley’s view as a version of the implied author position is that his characterization of the story’s presenter might apply better to the story’s narrator than to its implied author. To test this, I examine different types of narrative modes to see whether the fictional speaker merges with the implied author in each of these scenarios. The first factor to consider for classifying narrative modes is whether the narrator’s presence is explicit or implicit. The narrative scenario in which the narrator is implicit can be further divided into two sub-types: either the story is told from an omniscient viewpoint or centers on the experience of a third-person character. In either case, the story is not told by any of the characters in the story; rather, it is told by an implicit speaker whose words the work purports to be. It seems reasonable to identify this fictional speaker with the implied author, for both function as the subject to which textual meaning is attributed. As for the narrative mode in which the narrator is explicit, this involves first-person narratives. In these, either the narrator is reliable or unreliable. When the narrator is unreliable, a transcendental perspective is required in determining the text’s meaning, because what is said ultimately in the work is not equivalent to what is literally said by the unreliable narrator. It follows that an implicit speaker has to be assumed and she again coincides with the implied author. Where the narrator is reliable but textual meaning transcends what is literally expressed, an implicit speaker is at play again. This narrative scenario is thus better classified as a case in which the narrator’s presence is implicit. This leaves us with the narrative scenario in which the narrator is a reliable spokesperson for the implied author. The identification of the narrator with the implied author in the case last mentioned is controversial. The crucial difference between them is that the former is dramatized in the story while the latter is not. I accept that the narrator here is not happily called an implied author, though I also point out several similarities between the two. Finally, I discuss four complications to my argument. The first concerns multiple points of view in a story. To accommodate this kind of narrative, Beardsley could argue that an implicit narrator is needed to explain the definite meaning concealed behind what is literally said by different characters. The second complication is about the ontological status accorded to the narrator and the implied author. It might be objected that the two reside in different fictional worlds and this is what makes their merging impossible. But it is questionable whether this is a definitional feature of the implied author; moreover, the interpreter can take the implied author to be an instrumentalist concept and hence avoid talk about the ontological status of fictional entities. The third complication claims that versions of the implied author position developed by philosophers tend to be based on a contextualist ontology of literature; however, Beardsley’s account is acontextual. This is not true, for Beardsley has exhibited contextualist leanings in his writings. Finally, it has been objected that the formalist resources Beardsley has are not enough to guarantee a single right interpretation. But if Beardsley is actually a contextualist, contextual constraints will come into play and raise the chance of getting a single right interpretation. The article concludes by reflecting on the significance of the misrepresentation of anti-intentionalism: it is the intention of the actual author which anti-intentionalism is against. The position in question is actually developed in an intentionalist framework based on the implied author.