Je est a third person
Publicado en Literatura y crítica. com. José Ángel García Landa
A running thread in the
Narrative List
discusses third-person autodiegetic narratives, which wouldn't make any
sense from a classical narratological viewopoint, but... Many people
propose examples of problematic first person / third person
relationships, or "first-person narratives told in the third person".
This is my post:
I suppose in a technical narratological sense Julius Caesar is the author and the protagonist, but not the narrator, of The Gallic Wars.
The same for Henry Adams. Therefore, can a first person narrator refer
to him/herself as a third person narrator? In principle, no: if s/he
refers to him/herself as a third person narrator, it is a third person
narrator we have – with the author and the protagonist coinciding, which
is not the same thing.
That said, of course there may be some cases (perhaps even those I have
ruled out, one woud have to examine the text in detail) in which a
narrator alternates between first and third person, with the first
person establishing itself as a narratorial mode so that we can justify
speaking both of a "first-person narrator" (and not just an
autobiographical work - for autobiographies can be written in the first
and in the third person), AND of "a first-person narrator referring to
herself in the third person" in many, or most, sections of the text.
This is the case, for instance, with Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries (1993).
Jose Angel Garcia Landa
Review (in Spanish) of /The Stone Diaries:
http://garciala.blogia.com/2007/071705-the-stone-diaries.php
And I've got an interesting response from Brian Richardson (thanks!):
As
always, José raises a number of important points and distinctions. I
can add that many narratologists do not bother to distinguish between
pronominal usages in a character's self narration: one may tell one's
story using an I, a "royal" we, or a "he" (Caesar, Adams) without
altering the speaking subject or, for the most part, its reception (ie,
we may think the writer is affected but we all know his or her her
identity: eg, that Adams is writing about himself in the third person);
in each case we have what Genette calls an autodiegetic narration. For
me, things get much more interesting when a first person narrator
pretends to be a third person, usually onmiscient voice for most of the
narrative. One of the classics is Borges' "The Shape of the Scar";
Woolf's Jacob's Room is another early example. Others can be found in Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth, Beckett's Company and Calvino's The Nonexistent Knight. In this last one, gender changes as well as person. Some funny things happen in the narrator's self-referencing in Camus' The Plague as well. An especially interesting case is that of Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil,
where a naturalistic explanation is given by the for the forays into
other person's minds during the course of the novel by the narrator who
admits to merely being a mere homodiegetic character (I got this from
Suzanne Keen's work). I briefly discuss these and some other specimens
in the first chapter of my book, Unnatural Voices; in the fourth chapter, I talk about texts that oscillate between 1st and 3rd (and, at times --eg, Nuruddin Farah's Maps--) 2nd person narration.
Brian Richardson
University of Maryland
I was trying above to bring back to the discussion the basic
distinction between real author, fictional author and narrator, which
seemed to have gotten lost along the way. The question of the identity
of the narrator, of course, cannot be reduced to a matter of
narrative person—
the use of first person or third person is in the last analysis a
rhetorical move which can be modulated in an infinite number of ways,
played off against other rhetorical strategies such as the use of a
single or multiple focalizer, the ascription to the speaker of a
definite identity, through explicit attribution or through the play of
attitudes, judgments, opinions...
It is no doubt always
significant that we should choose to speak about us in the third person,
or for that matter in the first person plural. But the analysis of that
significance must be always contextualized and related to the whole
play of identity, agency and representation in the discourse in
question.
Here's a paper I wrote back in 1991, on Beckett's use of narrative person and identity:
"Personne: Aventuras de 'yo' en la trilogía de Beckett".
One would have to coin a special vocabulary to deal with Beckett's
personal paradoxes. Or with mine indeed, one is not so alien to them.
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