Narratives And Explanations

Willingly suspending disbelief, we accept many accounts of fictional events and sometimes - by no means always - there is also an explanation of how it is that we are able to read about such events, assuming, for narrative purposes, that they did in fact occur. Of course, I am leading back to a discussion of some works by Poul Anderson but, as always, we locate Anderson in a literary tradition that also includes:

Arthur Conan Doyle;

HG Wells;

CS Lewis;

Ian Fleming.

 

Doyle presents the most straightforward explanation: the Strand magazine published Dr Watson's accounts of Sherlock Holmes's adventures. 

 

Wells: One of the Time Traveler's dinner guests published an account of what he had told them. The Time Machine has an inner narrator, the Time Traveler, and an outer narrator, who sounds like the author. Thus, we might believe the latter but not the former? Except that, at the end of the story, the outer narrator does witness the second departure of the Time Machine.

 

Lewis presents a third person account of Ransom's journey to Mars, then, in the concluding chapter, adds:

 

"This is where I come into the story. I had known Dr Ransom slightly for several years..."

-CS Lewis, Out Of The Silent Planet IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), 22, p. 136.

 

(Consequently, Lewis had correspondents who asked him whether the story was true.)

 

In his eleventh novel, Ian Fleming informs us, first, that foreign press coverage of some of Bond's adventures had made him an unwilling public figure and, secondly, that a friend and colleague of Bond had written a series of popular although inaccurate books... Thus, Bond's real world public image is incorporated into the fiction and, furthermore, any inconsistencies in previous books are explained away. Perfect.

 

Needless to say, Poul Anderson gives us as good a deal as Doyle, Wells, Lewis or Fleming.