Some days I like being at Brown. This afternoon I saw the Department of Theatre’s production of Six Characters in Search of an Author. It only kept rather loosely to the original script of the play, taking self-reference, and non-traditional production values about as far as they can go. The quality and quantity of creative thought that went into the performance were mighty impressive. Apart from the slight misfortune of getting caught in the crossfire of one of the waterpistol fights (it was that kind of production) I had a great time. Given how wild the production was, it was also pretty good news for my thesis that everything that can be represented in fiction can be represented on stage. Or off the stage, if the actors insist on spending half the performance roving the aisles and seats, as they did today.

Anyway, before that I had been trying to hunt down references on Dubliners and truth in fiction, and I couldn’t get into one of the databases from off-campus. So I sent an email to the technicians in charge of those databases about it, thinking it wouldn’t be worked on until tomorrow at the earliest, but already I’ve had some feedback about the problem. I’m sure no other university I’ve spent time at had people doing helpdesk work on the databases Sunday afternoon.

I’m a little surprised at how little critical discussion there is of Dubliners. A quick search on MLA only turned up 31 references to Eveline. It seems I could plausibly make new critical points here as well as philosophical points. I’d have thought Joyce, of all people, would have been done to death by now. Amazingly, most of the critical commentary I found takes Eveline’s comments about Frank at face value, and believes that what he tells Eveline is the truth. None of this sounds remotely plausible to me, but it does suggest that it will be harder to write something about Eveline’s plight than I thought.

From a very brief search, it seems all the examples of unreliable narrators in literature in the literature concern stories told in the first person. This is somewhat odd. Greg Currie corrects the bias a little by discussing unreliable narrators in film, but I think third person narrators who have a clear (and mistaken) point of view are more interesting philosophically.

Having said all that, I looked up Alex Byrne’s 1993 paper on Truth in Fiction, and like the 1999 Phillips paper mentioned below, it also seems immune to the most obvious objections arising out of unreliable narrators. In fact, but for the fact that Byrne’s theory is more carefully developed and motivated, the papers are pretty similar I thought, especially in form but to some extent also in content. And in the fact that both papers suggest that authors can make the moral facts in their stories be whatever they want, which seems false. (In After the Race, Joyce says that the Irish are gratefully oppressed. Assuming this judgement about the true Irish is too harsh, is it true in the story that the Irish are gratefully oppressed?)

Alex’s paper has a nice puzzle, which I’d been looking for a way to frame for a while. Is it true in the Holmes stories that Holmes lives before the age of computer databases? I am inclined to think it is – all the facts about the late 19th century that are not explicitly or implicitly rejected get carried over into the stories, and one of the facts about those decades is that they are before the age of computer databases. Alex says that this should be indeterminate. We could ask a few other similar questions – is Hamlet descended from monkeys, and was his country occupied by Germans in WWII? Again, my intuition is that the answers here are strongly yes and yes. Alex’s theory, and it looks like his intuitions, suggest that these answers are not determinately right. What do you think?