Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [52]
The same cognitive predisposition, however, could be used to disorient the reader, as in Clarissa. To begin with, Lovelace seems to have a selective problem with monitoring sources of his representations, regularly failing to keep track of himself as the source of his fantasies about the world. In other words, unlike Milton's Satan, when Lovelace lies, he at times appears not to know that he lies. Moreover, because Clarissa is an epistolary novel (unlike, for example, Don Quixote, which also features a self-deceiving protagonist), we do not have here an omnipresent narrator who would alert us to the glaring discrepancy between Lovelace's version of what is going on and an alternative, perhaps truer, version. Instead, Clarissa is, in effect, a first-person narrative split between the two main protagonists. Consequently, it takes us some time—about five hundred pages or even much longer—to realize that one of the narrators of the story is misleading not just Clarissa but also himself and, consequently, us.
What it all adds up to is that in Lovelace we have an early instance of an unreliable narrator (a literary device typically associated with modernist and postmodernist fiction). As discussed in previous sections, the presence of such a narrator forces us to begin to question at some point during our reading numerous pieces of information that we would have otherwise processed as true within the fictional world of the story. Worse yet, since the narrator himself seems to believe in what he is saying and marshals evidence that supports his version of events, we may never find out what has "really" happened. We thus close the book with a strange feeling that the state of cognitive uncertainty that it induced in us will never be fully resolved. We will never know which representations within the story deserve to be treated as "true" and which have to remain metarepresentations with a source tag pointing to the first-person narrator.
Let us see now how Clarissa draws us into this state of metarepresentational uncertainty. Writers wishing to spring an unreliable narrator onto their readers frequently begin with a sly maneuver of establishing him/her as not only quite reliable but also more reliable than other characters in the story. As Ronald Blythe puts it, "[Qharmers must charm before the charmed begin to smell a rat."3 That's exactly what Richardson does in Clarissa. He opens the novel with a description of a familial turmoil that spins out of control, and he then introduces Lovelace as somebody who sees clearly into the messy passions of everybody else and can tell us what is really going on.
Here is what happens. Clarissa's parents, siblings, and uncles are angry at her because she refuses to marry an obnoxious wealthy suitor of their providing. Her rejection of that man, they are convinced, stems from her secret preference for Lovelace. The argument escalates quickly, with both parties afraid and mistrustful of each other. Clarissa is grounded, denied the right to correspond with her best friend, all but disowned by her mother and father, threatened with forced marriage, and physically assaulted by her brother. It matters little that she proclaims her indiffer
10: Richardon's Clarissa
ence to Lovelace and her willingness to abide by the wishes of her elders if only they don't make her marry