Fictional Strategies

As a connoisseur of fictional technique, I enjoy authors who mess with me a little. That's one reason I adore Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, whose narrator is so spectacularly unreliable that he refracts all facts that enter his zone of consciousness. I also love the way that the deliberately flat narration of Flaubert's Sentimental Education suddenly and spectacularly gives way after some 400 pages to one of the most famously expressive passages in all of literature, and also skips forward more than a decade in doing so:

He traveled.

He came to know the melancholy of the steamboat, the cold awakening in the tent, the tedium of landscapes and ruins, the bitterness of interrupted friendships.

He returned.

He went into society, and he had other loves. But the ever-present memory of the first made them insipid; and besides, the violence of desire, the very flower of feeling, had gone. His intellectual ambitions had also dwindled. Years went by; and he endured the idleness of his mind and the inertia of his heart.

Gustave, mon cher, my heart almost stops beating when I read that.

In recent days, I've had similar encounters with fictional sleight-of-hand of various delightful types:

• In Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, the titular character does not make an appearance, not even by reference, until the last chapter of the first volume of a three-decker novel.
• Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent plays a dazzling (but fair) series of chronological tricks on its readers without ever acknowledging the case, not even at the very end. The novel forces you to go back and analyze what exactly happened (and to consult critics who can help you doing so). It's positively fiendish.
• At the three-quarter mark of Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters (Les Faux-Monnayeurs), the reader has probably completely accepted that the title of the novel is merely metaphorical, and aptly so -- only to have a real counterfeiting plot suddenly manifest itself! What the heck?
• Not only that, but up to that same point, I was reading the action of the novel as roughly contemporaneous with its date of publication (1925). It is possible that I was missing dating clues that a French reader would pick up; I'll have to look into that further. I did notice that no one seemed to be talking about the Great War, but figured, 1925, maybe they had tried to move on by then. Well, late in the novel a historical figure appears prominently in a party scene -- playwright Alfred Jarry, whose Ubu Roi scandalized France -- and immediately a loud alarm went off in my head; wasn't Jarry long dead by 1925? He was. He died in 1907, and Ubu Roi (referred to in the scene) was first produced in 1896. That restricts the possible time-frame of the book, and apparently a later reference to a 1904 wine narrows it still further, to the 1904-1907 period. I was twenty years off. Damn!

UPDATE (5/31/2009): Gide himself was confused about whether to set The Counterfeiters in the pre-war or post-war period, so that makes me feel better. He writes about this in the Journal of The Counterfeiters, at first coming to the conclusion that "I cannot be retrospective and immediate at the same time"; but that is, eventually, the route he did decide to go, in part because the historical incidents he was drawing on for his plot (there were several) were all pre-war. The immediacy is definite; the book doesn't read as "retrospective" although it in fact is, and that is what tripped me up.