...of the narrator

If she can't go on, I suppose I'll have to. I am not Mira of course, though many readers think I am. For one thing I have little Latin and less Greek. Curious how one can invent knowledgeable people without possessing their knowledge. One cheats, quite simply.
I didn't attend that I-narrator's little meeting - well, I wasn't even on the roll-call, any more than she was - because so far I haven't said I. As eye-narrator I've kept pretty quiet, effaced as they say, not a narrator at all, not fully-fledged, participating, not a character in my own right, a part entire, an expression which, as a child, I always heard as a parent tires, a phrase that would mean, if it existed, 'with a third-party parent', and that too could have its ring of truth in this context. But then, as a child, I was perpetually mishearing what I was taught. I would sing 'Le belge sortant du tombeau', a line in the Belgian national anthem, as 'Le belge sortant tambour'. A Protestant hymn learnt in Geneva went 'Avec allegresse, montons vers le ciel, Et chantons sans cesse notre Emmannuel'. But I sang 'Avec le negresse, montons vers le ciel'. Those were joyful visions. Clearly I do have that much in common with Mira, except she does it on purpose.
I say not a narrator at all because, when came the fashion for the vanishing author, the silent author, the transparent text (not language at all but window on the world), the critics, always quick to adapt their vocabulary to the latest bandwagon, started calling narrator both the character who narrates and the producer of the text, that is, the author, not of course the real author, who misheard anthems as a child, who had marital troubles or who is undergoing a long and painful dental treatment of implants, but the Author, Implied, Ideal, or whatever, thus losing an important distinction: the character who narrates is limited to what he can know, the producer of the text can move among many knowledges. He used to be called Omniscient. Well, anti-God intellectuals (anti-author-ity) objected to that. Objected to the rigging, the fateful feel of divine providence. The author was out. All authority rested in the text. And later all authority rested in the Reader, Implied, Ideal, or whatever. And so they passed imperceptibly from phrases such as 'the author's intention here is clearly' to 'the text clearly says', and then to 'the reader clearly infers'. But behind this lip-service to fads, what the author intends, what the text says, what the reader infers, is in every case what the one critic interprets. He too is Reader, he too is God.


[Textermination, Brooke-Rose, C.]