Volume 5, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Unreliable Narration. Guest Editors: Tom Kindt and Tilmann Köppe

Unreliability has been discussed from the vantage point of literary theory and in particular narratology for several decades; as the predominant concepts in these disciplines have shifted, so has the notion of what constitutes the notion of unreliability in a narrative. The account presented here approaches unreliability not from within literary theory but from a linguistic and pragmatic perspective. It is rooted in the pragmatics of cooperation and interaction and the associated pragmatic models: Gricean conversation maxims, relevance and politeness theory, speech act theory and conversation analysis. Based on this theoretical framework, unreliable narratives are described as utterances that have, at their core, a deceptive and thus uncooperative stance; unreliability is thus based on the violation of the Gricean Cooperative Principle and its maxims of quality and quantity. The fact that such maxim violations, when not intended as an implicature, go against the grain of purposeful and cooperative communication helps to explain the striking aesthetic effects that unreliable narratives often create, such as suspense, humor and a distinct sense of surprise in the reader. Based on this initial description, this paper discusses the question of author and narrator and their respective roles in the creation of unreliability; the model presented here conceives of unreliable discourse as dual or echoic utterances that are shared between the fictional narrator persona and the real-world author in a case of simultaneous use/mention semiotics. In addition, the existence of so-called unreliability markers, or microlinguistic cues for unreliability, is discussed. Based on the pragmatic and linguistic framework employed here, it is emphasized that microlinguistic features are neither sufficient nor necessary for a narrative to be unreliable; the fact that certain bundles of features are nevertheless frequently observed in such texts is here explained in terms of recurrent politeness strategies, as well as the simulation of orality and thus closeness in such discourse. Finally, an outlook is provided that links up this pragmatic account of unreliability with certain trends in cognitive linguistics and stylistics, thus suggesting that the cognitive turn that has influenced recent literary studies and a linguistic approach to literary discourse are far from irreconcilable but share, in fact, a lot of common ground.

This paper explores supposable emotional functions of unreliable narratives on a systematic level. It discusses (1) what kind of research in the field of narrative unreliability has already been done regarding emotional functions of unreliability, (2) which concepts derived from emotional psychology may be of help to shape a typology of emotional response to narratives for analytical purposes focusing on textual features, (3) what it means to linguistically refer to a ›function‹ of a literary text in general, (4) between which types of functions one may distinguish here, which kind of functions of literary texts are of central interest from the perspective of narratology and what it means to speak of ›supposable emotional functions‹ in particular. Finally (5) some proposals are made to provide an outline for future research concerned with supposable emotional functions of unreliable narratives. (1) Taking Bläß's narratological typology of functions of unreliable narratives as a starting point, it is shown that received narratology so far has not established convincing categories for the description of emotional functions of unreliability - at least not on a systematic level. This is somehow surprising as Booth's approach in The Rhetoric of Fiction seeks to combine analytical descriptions of textual features with their supposed effects. Consequently, it can be claimed that findings derived from the field of emotional and reader psychology should be combined with traditional narratological categories to further shape a typology of emotional functions of unreliable narratives. Diegetic emotions form the centre of interest here, namely those that can be ascribed to the characters and the narrator of the fictive world as well as emotions that are aroused or at least influenced by the way in which the diegetic world is presented. (2) Following Vogel, emotions are described as emergent properties of the physical system. Phenomena of empathic and other sorts of emotional interaction with the characters of a piece of literature are discussed in further detail as well as diegetic emotions that stem from the structure of the discourse, namely suspense, surprise and disorientation. Naturally, there is a huge variety of other emotional phenomena that prove to be crucial during the reception process, i. e. thematic as well as communication emotions, but these lie beyond the viewpoint of narratology which focuses on textual features rather than on contextual factors. (3) Regarding the term ›function‹, I propose to employ Stecker's explication: A piece of art has a function F, if relative to a context, it has the present ability or capacity to fulfill a purpose, with which it is made or used, of F-ing or fulfills such a purpose. (4) This explication gives way to a wide range of actual as well as potential functions of an artwork. Following Eder's considerations regarding fictional as well as metafictional communication processes, one can distinguish between intentional, ideal, supposable, group-specific as well as individual empirical functions of literary artefacts. (5) Unreliable narratives function as appropriate instruments to engender emotions that mainly derive from the structure of the discourse, namely suspense, surprise and, to a certain extent, disorientation. Unreliability, in addition, can also be held responsible for influencing the emotional relationship of the reader with the characters and a potential figurative narrator. More precisely, it can be presumed that axiologically unreliable narratives are more likely to engender morally coloured emotions whereas mimetically unreliable narratives without a narrator tend to disorient on a global level, while mimetically unreliable narratives with a narrator give way to specific effects of suspense and surprise. As far as the emotional relationship to the characters of the fictional world is concerned, it is argued that processes of emotional attachment with fictional characters should be conceived as a complex set of interactions between both structural factors and a particular content. For analytical purposes, it is proposed to distinguish between momentary empathic mental processes and processes that derive from evaluations resulting in a stable emotional attachment to a character. While interpreting a text, literary critics can bring out different strategies of how appreciation and/or sympathy for a character or narrator is established or destroyed. In general, it is assumed that the emotional attachment with characters depends on the type of unreliability provided in the narrative. Future studies concerned with supposable emotional functions of unreliability should (1) take into account a broad understanding of the term ›unreliability‹, and (2) refer to a distinguished typology of emotional reactions towards literary texts.

The idea that unreliable narration can be analyzed in terms of testimony is attractive for two reasons. Firstly, the very idea of unreliable narration seems to be informed by the concept of testimony Secondly the concept is quite rich and allows for interesting insights into unreliability Despite these advantages, applying the concept of testimony to unreliable narration is problematic. It can be shown that in interpreting narrations with covert narrators it is not helpful to talk in terms of testimony, while the concept does not apply at all to narrations without fictional narrators. The applicability further depends on the content of knowledge at stake. I argue that no narrations involve testimony by a fictional narrator, but that some narrations authorize imagining a fictional narrator giving fictional testimony. A short consultation of epistemology reveals that in fictional testimony two kinds of warrant are relevant, one fictional itself, one real. Finally, I argue that neither is it possible to stick to our everyday concept of testimony in analyzing unreliable narration, nor can core cases of unreliable narration be completely conceptualized in terms of testimony.

The article aims to clarify literary and film-theoretic notions of unreliable narration by detaching a narrow, rhetorically specific subcategory, discordant narration (DN), from the wide range of mimetic and normative narrative anomalies the term ›unreliable‹ has come to cover in the course of its conceptual history. While a frequent if not the paradigmatic form of literary unreliability, DN occurs only rarely in a film-specific way because its complex rhetorical layout does not easily merge with the medial peculiarities of film. Since the few cases where it nonetheless does are not considered unreliable in film studies, one has to conclude that film-theory has only adopted certain areas within the wide literary notion, excluding what is at least one of its most characteristic and most prevalent materializations in literature. Comparing their rhetorical structures, however, DN and what is considered unreliable in film studies, appear to be almost completely distinct. Hence it seems questionable in how far film-theoretic notions of unreliability can be based on literary theory, or if the two notions should better be treated separately. By answering the latter question positively the article also calls for a precision of the wide literary notion of unreliability Section 2 introduces a newly defined notion of discordant narration in contrast to the general literary notion of unreliability DN conforms to what is called an ironic sermocinatio viz. conceptual irony in rhetoric. Whereas mere irony is marked, simply speaking, by a contradiction between what is said and what is meant, DN involves two contrarian notions of what is meant in uttering one and the same discourse. An illustrative case of this is Forrest Gump's verbal narration in the film named after him. Forrest Gump sincerely means what he says (and no more) but in the mouth of the extra-fictional producer, responsible for the composition of the film's fictional content and hence also for what Gump narrates, these words create another incompatible meaning and let the recipient in on aspects of the story that go unnoticed by Gump. The specific requirement of such a DN is that the discourse deemed discordant can be ascribed to different utterers or, more generally speaking, producers. This requirement is fulfilled by the verbal narration in Forrest Gump but not by the film as a whole. Section 3 states the difference between discordant (verbal) narration in film and discordant film narration and briefly refers to the fictitious propagandistic TV-programmes inserted in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers as an example for the latter. These programmes not only display objectionable events but display them in an objectionable way that can be traced back to the fictitious producers of a fictitious television report. Hence we can find the same ironical distance between fictitious and real producers of these TV-programmes that characterizes the discordant verbal narration in Forrest Gump . In section 4 the prerequisite for such an ironical distance is set forth in more general terms as a production fiction . Applying Peirce's type/token distinction to filmic discourses, one can theoretically account for the fact that the moving images of an actual film, playing in a cinema or on our DVD-players, are sometimes considered as being produced within the fiction, either by a fictitious film crew - as shown in section 5 - or within the perception, memory or imagination of a character - as is argued in section 6. Although the first option provides ideal conditions for DN, according constructions are rare and apparently completely neglected by film-theoretic studies to unreliability. Such studies mostly concentrate on the second option, attributing unreliability most commonly to films that feature sequences which later turn out to arise from a more or less troubled mind. However, as shown with a classic example of such films, Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind , the sequences in question do not essentially refute themselves, due to the rhetoric double-structure specific of DN, but mainly through correction on a superior level of narration. Judging the narrative conduct on this level requires some adjustments however, which are discussed in section 7. When not applied to a fictitious entity but an extra-fictional producer, everyday notions of narrative normalcy have to be replaced by fiction- and art-specific constraints, making it very hard to distinguish violations of such norms and hence unreliability from regular genre-specific narrative strategies, e. g. the suspenseful structures of thrillers and criminal stories. The article concludes that in the transfer from literary to film theory the notion of unreliability suffered a loss of its already low accuracy that can and should be compensated for by reverting to a more finely tuned typology including, besides unreliability and DN, such notions as false plants, false alarms, red herrings, hanging ends, blind motives, fakes and hoaxes .

The article outlines an explication of the concept of ›mimetically unreliable narration‹ i. e. the idea that a fictional narrative is reliable if it gives an unobjectionable account of the fictional facts, and unreliable, if it does not. While we agree with the majority of contemporary narratology that a narrator can be distrusted in a number of different ways, we argue that the diversity of mimetical unreliability runs deeper than is generally acknowledged. There is a distinction to be made that is based on the question whether the unreliable narration has, or has not, a narrator in the first place. Thus we claim that there are two kinds of mimetically unreliable narrations: ones with a narrator and ones without a narrator. The paper explains this distinction and defends it against a number of objections. In the introduction of our paper, we argue for the assumption that not every fictional narrative has a fictional narrator by drawing on a certain understanding of fictionality According to the so-called ›institutional Theory of Fiction‹, fictional texts ask their readers to adopt a particular, rule-governed attitude of reception towards the text. Adopting this attitude means, centrally, to treat the sentences of the text as an invitation to imagine certain things. Some fictional texts invite their readers to imagine that there is a fictional narrator. This means that the text prompts us to imagine that we are reading or listening to someone's narrative. Some fictional narratives do not prompt us to imagine anything of the text of the work or about a teller. Instead, these narratives require us to merely use the sentences of the work as a prop to imagine certain things based on their content. Based on this observation, we argue that both kinds of fictional narratives can be mimetically unreliable and propose to clarify the concept of mimetical unreliability as follows: The narration expressed by a literary work is mimetically unreliable if, and only if, the work authorizes imagining that the narrator does not provide completely accurate information, or the work does not authorize imagining that there is a narrator; instead it seemingly, or prima facie , authorizes imagining states of affairs that are not completely accurate. We elaborate on the components of this proposal, dwell on some of its apparent problems, comment on several competing understandings of unreliability in fictional narratives, discuss the question whether it should be seen as a comparative or as a classificatory term, and briefly address the concept's ascription in the context of textual interpretation. The distinction between unreliable narrations with a narrator and without is not meant to replace other current distinctions between varieties of unreliability in fictional narratives. The main interest of our proposal lies in the way it uses the theory of fiction in order to shed light on narrative unreliability. Narrative unreliability, in our view, is a complex phenomenon in that its explanation presupposes some such theoretical underpinning.

Many if not most unreliable narratives somehow fool the reader about what is the case in the fiction. Call this type of unreliability ›deceptive unreliability‹ In this paper I discuss and define deceptively unreliable narration. My argument proceeds in three steps. First, I argue that a reader can be fooled about fictional facts in two ways, as they might either be given wrong information about what is the case in the fiction, or relevant information might be kept from them. In both cases, the consequence is that the reader is justified in entertaining wrong beliefs about what is the case in the fiction. So, according to my preliminary definition of deceptive unreliability, a deceptively unreliable narrative is a narrative that justifies the reader in entertaining wrong beliefs about the facts of the fiction. This definition raises a number of questions, one of them being: »What determines what is the case in a fiction?« In the second step of my argument I give an answer to this question. Roughly, it is that fictional facts depend on interpretations in the following way: in a certain fiction p is the case if at least one optimal interpretation of said fiction claims that p in this fiction. As I argue in the final part of my essay, this finding is hugely relevant for my preliminary definition of deceptive unreliability. Accordingly, I propose to change that definition in order to avert an implausible consequence. The definition of deceptive unreliability I submit is, roughly, this: a narrative that is deceptively unreliable justifies a belief about the fictional facts that is not correct according to all optimal interpretations of it.

The concept of unreliable narration is intimately linked with the concept of fictional truth. The question what is true in the fictional world of a narrative fiction is in itself one of the most intriguing problems of literary studies, but the difficulties related to answering the question become even more severe when dealing with unreliable narration. The article addresses the inference of fictional truth in unreliable narrations (part 2) against the background of what it generally means to explore fictional worlds and to infer fictional truth (part 1). The discussions are based on an institutional theory of fictionality and draw upon various attempts to adapt possible-worlds theory to literary studies. Part 1 focuses on the critical discussion of the concepts of fictional truth and fictional worlds, especially in relation to the so called Reality Principle and Mutual Believe Principle. It is argued that inferring what is fictionally true in a work, i. e. making assumptions about the existing states of affairs of a fictional world, is based on a complex set of operations, and that the way they are used may differ to a certain extent from text to text and from interpretation frame to interpretation frame. Principles like the Reality Principle or the Mutual Believe Principle may have their share in these inferences, but only in a way that takes into account much more complex and broad considerations about norms of rationality in interpretation. Part 2 addresses specific difficulties concerning the inference of fictional truth in narrations that may be considered as unreliable. It is argued that unreliable narration in fictional texts can be described as the counterpart of the fact that in actual-world communication the Gricean Cooperative Principle can be violated. It is argued that interpretations of a fictional narration as unreliable based on this assumption can to a certain extent be described as being in accordance with the Reality Principle. Furthermore, the paper explores how specific insight about interpretive operations in connection with unreliable narration and fictional truth may be gained on the ground of Marie-Laure Ryan's adaptation of possible-worlds theory to literary studies. The explorations specifically draw upon Ryan's distinction between the textual actual world (TAW) and narrational actual world (NAW) and Ryan's elaboration of what she calls the domain of a character in a narration. This domain is divided in different worlds: the epistemic or knowledge world (K-world) for what a character knows, the wish world (W-world) for the wishes, needs and drives of a character, defined by axiological predicates, and the obligation world (O-world) defined by the social rules and moral principles of the group the character belongs to and by his own moral judgements. The different categories that Ryan proposes are understood as interpretational devices. When we deal with fictional narrations what we take as TAW, NAW or private character-worlds are always the result of our interpretative operations on the text. Bearing this in mind, Ryan's distinction between the different private worlds of a character and a close observation of the relationships of these worlds with NAW and TAW can help us to gain insights into what it means to interpret a fictional narrative as unreliable. We can ask e. g. how, to what extend and why a reader may construe NAW as different from TAW, and how, to what extend and why assumptions about character-worlds come into play Moreover, these questions help to reconsider the discussion about the relevance of the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration in regard to unreliable narration. Finally, a distinction can be made between temporary and persistent unreliability.