Jonathan Lethem (post 2) (interviews): Intends a Split Inconsistent Narrative; Says behavior of protagonist “is a deep confession of my own writerly process”

Split Inconsistent Narrative

Some narration is overtly split between named characters. But other fiction has narrative inconsistencies—sometimes between the first and second halves of a novel—for no clear reason. I have wondered whether the latter, which I call “split inconsistent narrative,” is inadvertent or intentional.

Jonathan Lethem says that for him, it is intentional: “At the start I meant to write a book in two halves. The first a third-person ensemble, with some degree of omniscience…And I knew the second half would be first person. Organized by a compulsive voice” (1, p. 61).

He does not say whether he meant to announce and justify the second-half switch to the reader, but it sounds like his making a split between the first and second halves was, in itself, not only intentional, but compelled by a “voice” (an alternate personality).

Interviewer: “And so oddly enough this narrator, Lionel Essrog, who’s constantly permuting phrases, Tourette’s style, is oddly as well a stand-in for the author because when he narrates the book, the narration doesn’t have any Tourette’s slippages. It’s only in dialogue that these occur, although this is a first-person novel. So it’s as if the book is being written in collaboration with Jonathan Lethem and the two…are finding homes in one another…

Lethem: “I love the description. And certainly I feel it’s a book…with masks on the verge of being ripped off. And certainly it’s always about to confess itself a book about the writing process and it never quite does. And the Tourettec compulsive generation of imagery and language, the compulsive reversals, the almost mechanical inversion of simple ideas or phrases or word forms, is a deep confession of my own writerly process” (1, p. 30).

He claims a “compulsive,” “writerly,” “voice,” which I interpret as a writing alternate personality with creative idiosyncrasies.

1. Conversations with Jonathan Lethem. Edited by Jaime Clarke. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2011.