The Art of Fiction － David Lodge － 2. The Intrusive Author
《With a simple drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertook to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the 18th of June, in the year of Our Lord, 1799.》
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede(1859)
《To Margaret － I hope that it will not set the reader against her － the station of King’s Cross had always suggested Infinity. Its very situation － withdrawn a little behind the facile splendours of St Pancras － implied a comment on the materialism of life. Those two great arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering between them an unlovely clock, were fit portals for some eternal adventure, whose issue might be prosperous, but would certainly not be expressed in the ordinary language of prosperity. If you think this ridiculous, remember that it is not Margaret who is telling you about it；and let me hasten to add that they were in plenty of time for the train；that Mrs Munt secured a comfortable seat, facing the engine, but not too near it；and that Margaret, on her return to Wichham Place, was confronted with the following telegram：
All over. Wish I had never written. Tell no one. － Helen.
But Aunt Juley was gone － gone irrevocably, and no power on earth could stop her.》
E.M.FORSTER
Howards End (1910)
THE SIMPLEST WAY of telling a story is in the voice of a storyteller, which may be anonymous voice of folk-tale （“Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess”） or the voice of epic bard （e.g., Virgil’s “Arms and the man I sing”） or the confiding, companionable, sententious authorial voice of classic fiction from Henry Fielding to George Eliot.
At the beginning of Adam Bede, by a neat rhetorical trick with the drop of ink, which is both mirror and medium, George Eliot transforms the act of writing into a kind of speaking, a direct yet intimate address to the reader, inviting us “over the threshold” of the novel, and literary over the threshold of Jonathan Burge’s workshop. By implication she contrasts her own, minutely particular, scrupulously historical kind of story-telling, with the dubious revelation of magic and superstition. The nugget of information about the techniques of Egyptian sorcerers has no other narrative function, but is not without interest in itself. We read fiction, after all, not just for the story, but to enlarge our knowledge and understanding of the world, and the authorial narrative method is particularly suited to incorporating this kind of encyclopedic knowledge and proverbial wisdom.
Around the turn of the century, however, the intrusive authorial voice fell into disfavour, partly because it detracts from realistic illusion and reduces the emotional intensity of the experience being represented, by calling attention to the act of narrating. It also claims a kind of authority, a God-like omniscience, which our sceptical and relativistic age is reluctant to grant to anyone. Modern fiction has tended to suppress or eliminate the authorial voice, by presenting the action through the consciousness of characters, or by handing over to them the narrative task itself. When the intrusive authorial voice is employed in modern fiction, it’s usually with a certain ironic self-consciousness, as in the passage from Howards End. This concludes the second chapter, in which the Bloomsburyite Margaret Schlegel, having heard that her sister Helen has fallen in love with the younger son of a nouveau-riche captain of industry, Henry Wilcox, dispatched her aunt (Mrs Munt) to investigate.
Howards End is a Condition-of-England novel, and the sense of the country as an organic whole, with a spiritually inspiring, essentially agrarian past, and a problematic future overshadowed by commerce and industry, is what gives a representative significance to the characters and their relationships. The theme reaches its visionary climax in Chapter 19, where, from the high vantage-point of the Purbeck hills, the question is posed by the author, whether England belongs to those who have created her wealth and power or “to those who ... have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity.”
Both the auther and Margaret clearly belong to the visionary company. The Infinity that Margaret associates with King’s Cross station is equivalent to the eternity towards which the ship of England is sailing, while the materialism and prosperity on which King’s Cross adversely comments belong to the world of the Wilcoxes. The solidarity of sentiment between author and heroine is obvious in the style：only the shift to a past tense （“implied a comment” , “were fit portals”）distinguishes Margaret’s thoughts, grammatically, from the authorial voice. Forster is overtly － some might say, overtly － protective towards his heroine.
“To Margaret － I hope that it will not set the reader against her...” “If you think this ridiculous, remember that it is not Margaret who is telling you about it,” are risky moves, which come near to creating the effect Erving Goffman calls “breaking frame” － when some rule or convention that governs a particular type of experience is transgressed. These phrases bring into the open what realistic illusion normally requires us to suppress or bracket off － our knowledge that we are reading a novel about invented characters and actions.
This is a device much favoured by postmodern writers, who disown a naive faith in traditional realism by exposing the nuts and bolts of their fictional constructs. Compare, for example, this startling authorial intrusion in the middle of Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold (1980)：
Once again Gold found himself preparing to lunch with someone － Spotty Weinrock － and the thought arose that he was spending an awful lot of time in this book eating and talking. I was putting him into bed a lot with Andrea and keeping his wife and children conveniently in the background ... Certainly he would soon meet a school-teacher with four children with whom he would fall madly in love, and I would shortly hold out to him the tantalizing promise of becoming the country’s first Jewish Secretary of State, a promise I did not intend to keep.
Foster does not undermine, as radically as that, the illusion of life generated by story, and invites our sympathetic interest in the characters and their fortunes by referring to them as if they are real people. So what is he trying to achieve by drawing attention to the gap between Margaret’s experience and his narration of it? I suggest that, by making a playful, self-deprecating reference to his own rhetorical function, he obtains permission, as it were, to indulge in those high-flown authorial disquisitions about history and metaphysics （like the vision of England from the Purbeck hills）which are scattered throughout the novel, and which he saw as essential to its thematic purpose. Urbane humour is an effective way of deflecting and disarming the possible reader-response of “Come off it!” which this kind of authorial generalizing invites. Forster also makes a joke out of the interruption of narrative momentum which such passages inevitably entail, by apologetically “hastening” to return us to the story, and ending his chapter with a fine effect of suspense.
But suspense is a separate subject.
