Title: Dancing to Ollie's Tunes: The Rhetoric of Narrative Stutter
Abstract: Stories told by mentally deranged character narrators provide a rich field of investigation for narrative theorists interested in rhetorical effects and ethical implications of autodiegetic narratives. Indeed, narrators' troubled psyche acts like an optical instrument magnifying certain features of character narration (1) in general while functioning as a metaphor of subject's limitations and slippery nature of self-knowledge, with ideological corollary that, regardless of self-assurance of individual narrators, homo- or autodiegetic narratives implicitly preclude possibility of a totalizing vision. In this essay I will concentrate on a single novel, Dermot Healy's Sudden Times, (2) published in 1999, and use it as a case study to examine rhetorical power of a narrative haltingly growing out of mental confusion of its narrator. This will ultimately lead me to suggest that stabilization of narrative operates in a paradoxical way and challenges reading practices, still informed, to a large extent, by naturalized conventions of realist fiction, in spite of nearly three centuries of experimental departures from it. At outset of this case study, I wish, however, to make a few further observations about narratives of deranged narrators. Such narratives false questions of boundaries between reason and unreason, sanity and insanity, which exceed restricted perimeter of textual analysis and yet bear upon our own reading, as do context and ideology in general. (3) In turn ways in which rhetoric of these narratives engages us emotionally may well destabilize our conceptions and perceptions of mental disorders. Thus Patrick McGrath's remark about his experience when writing Spider could easily be adapted to fit reader's experience at receiving end: the deeper I went more I realized that not only was I telling stories about insane, but much of it read over to lives of ostensibly sane. (4) This blurring of neat distinctions does not, however, erase fundamental differences in our reading experience depending not just on degree but also on nature of narrator's mental dysfunction: what is at stake here is not effect of character's madness on events in story bur impact of narrator's mental state on telling of that story and on reception of narrative. French Encyclopediste who wrote folie entry, quoted by Foucault in his Histoire de la Folie, (5) and by Shoshana Felman, in Writing and Madness, considered to one's own insanity to be defining feature of madness: blindness is distinctive characteristic of madness: to deviate from reason knowingly, in grip of a violent passion, is to be weak: but to deviate from it confidently and with firm conviction that one is following ir, is to be what we call mad. (6) Oliver Ewing--Ollie--the narrator of Sudden Times, who is thoroughly aware of his mental, verbal and perceptual confusion, does not fit this definition. By contrast, say, with Francie in Patrick McCabe's Butcher Boy, (7) or with Spider in McGrath's novel, (8) he does not follow a systematic logic of his own: his occasional groping for causal relations does not lead to certainty and he repeatedly acknowledges randomness of events, incoherence of life in general, and of his own story-telling in particular. His tentative telling, exemplifying a form of humble narration, (9) stands ar opposite pole from that of Poe's narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart, whose very insistence on pre-empting imputations of madness achieves reverse effect of arousing at once audience's suspicion: How, then am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily--how calmly I can tell you whole story. (10) Ollie's narrative cannot, in other words, be regarded as a verbal manifestation of madness inducing on readers' part an interpretation diverging widely from narrator's. …
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot