The Only Teller: Readings in the Monologue Novel

Charles R. Steele was Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Hetty Clews identifies The Only Teller as a critical exercise based on the current fashion of reader-response criticism, in which authority in the literary enterprise has shifted from the writer to the reader, making the latter a participant in fiction’s dramatization rather than simply its audience. She suggests that this involvement has been accomplished through an evolution from eighteenth century fiction’s ostensible synonymity of author and narrator to the present use of a surrogate narrator for the entire tale. The latter strategy characterizes, in Clews’s terminology, the “monologue novel.”

Clews anatomizes five stages of the monologue novel. She begins appropriately with those novels in which monologues are significant constituents (Stendahl’s Red and Black, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady) or in which the stream of consciousness technique provides the aura of monologue (Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway). This first stage Clews names the “Incidental Monologue.” Her second is termed the “Formalized Monologue.” In novels of this stage, novels such as Woolf’s The Waves, and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, the entire novel is constituted by monologue but in multiple voices suggesting soliloquies. Such a strategy produces tensions between the fiction’s psychological and rhetorical dimensions, which are minimized by the sustained quality of self-absorption characterizing the fictions disguised as autobiographies of Clews’s stage three, which she terms “Autobiographical Narratives.” The classic of this category, as one would expect, is Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The category includes both novels that utilize the frame of a memoir (Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull and Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth) and those that do not (Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel).

Clews’s fourth category, the “Eyewitness Monologue,” intensifies the reader’s participatory role in the fiction by rendering her complicit in establishing the narrator’s credibility and by enticing her to seek meaning beyond the purview of the narrator. Exemplifying these strategies are Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Ford’s The Good Soldier and James’s The Turn of the Screw. Finally come the “Confessional Monologues,” such as Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Camus’s The Fall, and Golding’s Free Fall, which demand empathy from the reader in their enquiry into the meaning of personal experience. In the Confessional Monologue the speaker appears to create his own design, but the fictions also express the need for the reader to function as a significant other.

Clews’s anatomy is intriguing, and her readings of the several novels competent. Readers will undoubtedly find something in such a sweeping thesis with which to demur. But more than a few readers interested in the theory and practise of fiction will find something of value as well.