Decoding Narration: Falling Down the Rabbit Hole into the Wonderland of Modernism
Reading is an escape for many people, including myself. It is easy to get wrapped up in story and forget to pay attention; this is something I warn against when reading any twentieth-century British Literature, especially when it comes to modernist authors. When I began reading Modernist literature for the first time I felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland, and I quickly realized that a close reading of modernist works was necessary in order to navigate myself in this curious realm.
Forgetting to pay attention to the small details as you travel down the rabbit-hole of modernism can take you into the most confusing of places, and if you don’t watch out you’ll be tricked, just like Alice, by white rabbits, chesire cats and mad hatters at every turn.
This is what I learned when reading works like Ford’s The Good Soldier and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier.
While I enjoyed the plots and the story lines, I found myself cursing under my breathe every time Dr. Heather Fielding, creator and editor of The Grimpen Mire, laid out what had actually happened in the excerpt I’d read the night before. I couldn’t believe it. How could these authors fool me so easily? How had I missed so much?
One work that specifically got under my skin was Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.
I felt like I had a grasp on the story until one day, when discussing the story with my fellow writers, Dr. Fielding brought up a particularly horrific scene that I had totally forgotten about. In the scene, the narrator beats a helpless, elderly African American man who has served his family for years, and the narration makes it seem very unimportant. It was as if I’d just skimmed over and forgotten about this one absolutely terrible event. How?
As we discussed, I had an epiphany. It was that damned Dowell! Ford’s overly-feminine and seemingly passive narrator. He had tricked me. He had used his narration to make me like him, even when I was reading about the terrible things he had done. I was determined not to let him con me again, and I went at Ford’s work with a sort of paranoid skepticism that I’ve continued to uphold through the rest of the works we’ve read.
While I’ve noticed that not every Modernist narration I’ve encountered has been deceptive, I do think that the way that Modernist works are narrated have a large impact on the way the reader perceives the story and plot. An article about James Joyce’s Ulysses discusses the way that the narration of his work affects the information received by the reader. Patrick A. McCarthy, author of the article “Joyce’s Unreliable Catechist: Mathematics and the Narration of “Ithaca””, takes things a step further by using mathematical codes to decipher some of the errors that Joyce strategically places in his narration; while I am most certainly not a mathematics person and don’t plan on implementing that exact form to analyze these works, I do think that every single error and detail in narration of these modernist works is deliberate and has a purpose.
McCarthy looks at Joyce’s chapter “Ithaca” and describes “its tendency to set up a surface of straight-forward factuality and to trick us into trusting a narrative point of view which at times turns out to be not altogether reliable.” McCarthy explains that Joyce and Modernist writers like him use this technique in different ways and with different narrators to portray the mind of the narrator and even to possibly deceive the reader. The real question, it seems is why? Why would the narrator want to deceive us, the unsuspecting and trusting reader? The answer, while complex, starts, I think, with the idea that various Modernist authors use different narration styles to reflect how he or she feels about the current state of reality; fiction is, after all, always about the real truth of things. In the Wonderland-like world of Modernism I think that the narrators, even the trustworthy ones, have a significant role to play in showing the reader the reality of twentieth century Britain.
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Even though it will be an undertaking, I am willing to descend into the rabbit hole and discover the truth about these sometimes endearing, mostly devious narrators of various works from modernist writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rebecca West, Ford Madox Ford, and maybe even J.K. Rowling! Come with me into the Wonderland that is Modernism as we explore who we can trust, who we can’t, and what it all means!
