On Unreliability
Saleem Sinai of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the eponymous heroes of Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Like them, we are all not just narrators, but unreliable narrators and necessarily so. Rather than leaving them as a subsection of creative writing, a fictional device, our foundational understanding is that any speaker in any social context is not just a narrator, but an unreliable narrator. Including the speakers with whom you are engaged in reading these words.
So two propositions stand: we are all narrators, and all narration is unreliable. To begin with the latter, the map is not the territory. The narration is not the thing narrated. It’s not even really a version of it. What can we describe a story as being in relation to the thing of which it tells — a description? Perhaps. A manual? Partially. An expression? Certainly not directly… An evocation? In some senses… A summoning? Occasionally, but not really… Whatever a story is, it is a thing separate—or perhaps it exists in the moment of being separated?—from its subject, even when that subject is speaking about itself. We are unreliable even—or perhaps especially—when we narrate ourselves.
It gets murkier still. A narration requires a narrator—and who makes no contribution to the we of stories we are all telling ourselves about ourselves? And then any given narrator requires a perspective: however broad or focussed, necessarily a restriction of view. Within a narrator, we must also assume a specific, given will, and so a series of expectations, exclusions, choices and emphases in how they will that understanding of the world into being. And so, a series of active selections and occlusions in the stories they tell. Even when our intention is to ‘faithfully present’, we do still present nonetheless: we highlight, we omit, we speak from the dead concrete reality that has brought us to this moment and the positions with regards to reality that these represent.
Straddling both of these chasms of unreliability, Michael White and David Epston, founders of narrative therapy wrote of the central function of storytelling itself,
It is clear that the sense of meaning and continuity that is achieved through the storying of experience is gained at a price. A narrative can never encompass the full richness of our lived experience.
- Michael White and David Epson
Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (New York: Norton, 1990)
At the risk of pedantry, it is possible to complicate this yet further. Our existence is shaped by all manner of ordinary forces, ranging from light beyond the spectrum that our eyes can detect, or motion at a subatomic level in every fibre of our being, which our lived experience cannot but fail to catch the full richness of. If we’re talking about access to reality in any way, the storytelling ‘price’ of which White and Epston spoke is greater still.
And what is more, our unreliability—even our outright untruthfulness—is intimately bound up with the creative component of storytelling that makes it precious. We are not only our inert facticity, our inheritances, our past choices, our decisions already made, our triumphs and defeats. They exist as if they were inevitable, given our present existence. And yet they were not always so. From the reality of now, in the creative absence of our being in the present moment, we can make choices, we can add to the present moment. To be a storyteller is to be a transcendent being, in the sense that you exist in the totality of all things plus the addition that you make as you act, and speak - and as you do, create, and perceive that action in a storied way. But this, again, returns to us, our fundamental unreliability as story tellers. As psychoanalytic thinker and practitioner Wilfred Bion wrote:
... the difference between a true thought and a lie consists in the fact that a thinker is logically necessary for the lie but not for the true thought. Nobody need think the true thought: it awaits the advent of the thinker who achieves significance through the true thought. The lie and the thinker are inseparable. The thinker is of no consequence to the truth but the truth is logically necessary to the thinker. His significance depends on whether or not he will entertain the thought, but the thought remains unaltered […] By contrast, the lie gains existence by virtue of the epistemologically prior existence of the liar. The only thoughts to which a thinker is absolutely necessary are lies. Descartes's tacit assumption that thoughts presuppose a thinker is valid only for the lie.
- Wilfred Bion,
Attention and Interpretation (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995:102-103)
The choice for the narrator, from here, seems stark. Condemned to unreliability, discovering the lie to be the most creative contribution, do we give up on storytelling—which is to say, give up on speech, on communication, on our fundamentally social selves—or do we live our creative lies anarchically and destructively like the broken heroism of Joker: fixated on our ability to concretely exist in the form of chaotic addition to a reality from which we are ourselves believe we are immune.
As with most binary questions, the answer is neither, both, and/or. As our forms of explicit storytelling have become more sophisticated, the ranks of consciously unreliable narrators have swelled well beyond those with which we started these thoughts. We are reliably intrigued and fascinated by descriptions of our evasive unreliability, and gaze at them with an awe-some narcism. We must, therefore, find that recognising our unreliability is not injurious to our ability to narrate, rather, if we allow it to, Bion’s conception of ‘the lie’ animates it. The temptation to be resisted is falling back into solipsism and so inertia right at the moment that we trespass on the power of unreliable narration—that of Molly Andrews ‘not yet real’. For this recognition places the creativity of the storyteller in the transcendent role of triangulating between the real (Bion does not exclude encounters with truth, even if through a glass darkly), the not real (perhaps what we understand most straightforwardly as ‘the lie’ in Bion), and this not yet real. This final category is the dialectical meeting of our facticity with our transcendence: what we are by dint of all previous reality and the projects we set up against these received limits. Reading Bion back from this perspective, we have to come to a conception of ‘the lie’ which is grand enough to include our fictions, our dreams, our nightmares, our unconscious and conscious hopes, our best selves, and even the desires we possess which disgust and appal us. Storytelling emerges as both utterly ordinary—our primary method for organising the contents of our consciousness—and heavily freighted with responsibility. When unreliability emerges as the primary quality of our engagement and exchange with reality, then our narration, unreliable as it is, becomes precious and significant. We cannot afford to either withdraw in disgust, nor to luxuriate in apathy, to mangle the already mangled Michael Stipe. Storytelling is too precious for either of these flights from our freedom.
Near the start of one of his early works of history, on the coup that brought to power Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Karl Marx observed:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(New York, International Publishers: 1869:15)
This truism elucidates the position of the unreliable narrator. Just as Marx would wish to emphasise the enduring capacity to still make history as opposed to embracing, as so many of his adherents have done, only to the constraints and limitations offered by this formulation, so the unreliable narrator retains a significant power: to tell stories. We may be condemned to unreliability, we may speak in circumstances not of our choosing, but we do still narrate. And within our encounters with truth—however partial and restricted—and our additions to reality which go beyond the not real, into the not yet real, there are reasons for living, hoping and continuing to engage creatively with this singular feature of consciousness as storytelling animals.
Making the starting point and given fact of our storied engagement with the world, our unreliability in doing so does not limit our storytelling capacity—it animates and enriches it. We can live experimentally and insurgently in this moment of transcendent becoming. As Picasso made the picture detailed at the start of this piece, he was liberated in his unreliability, and so engaged not only with the real in the flesh and person of the sitter in front of him, but with the not real nature of his painterly narration as he saw and ‘recorded’ it—his singular gift coterminous with his unreliability—and with the constant becoming of our self-understanding as the sitter gazes, themselves unreliably still, and perhaps the not yet real self might look back. We are condemned to our unreliability, and, without the vision Picasso’s facticity gifted him, many of our not-yet-real stories will fail.
But we go on. In sure and certain hope that sometimes, in earnest with reality and in Picasso’s tempestuous company, our unreliability will be transformative and gloriously beautiful beyond our current imaginings.
