Fussin' 'Bout the Narrator

Last time, I proposed discussing the effect of utilizing an inanimate narrator in Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child. Here goes:

This is not the first story to have an inanimate narrator. Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red features narration by the color red; a fig tree does the job in Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees. (‘Kay, a tree is alive, but you get the idea). Indeed, we could say that many novels feature an omniscient narrator with no identifying information provided about this entity—it is a voice which seems to be human, but is not identified as to gender, age, or ethnicity. A famous example: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Who is speaking here? Is it the author, Leo Tolstoy? To some extent yes, but it’s a particular version of Tolstoy, an omniscient narrator who is not just a gifted Russian aristocrat of the late nineteenth-century.

Is there a difference between this kind of narrator and the wax child?

There is a fascinating passage in the story that clearly shows the inanimate narrator speaking: “But then I’ve already told you, I am not a child, only something that looks like one. Something that longs to be one. I’m an internal event…condemned to anticipation.” An intriguing comment, no? “I’m an internal event.” Who is speaking here, or writing? A narrator entity who, as we discussed last time, has human thoughts and feelings but who now says of itself, I’m an internal event. Is this the real human author writing? Disclosing that her narrative tool is an expression of herself? Using a narrational sleight-of-hand to express something as the author of a book? Again, on one level, the answer is yes. No one but the human author of The Wax Child is responsible for its content, just as no one but Tolstoy is responsible for Anna Karenina. Ms. Ravn created the text. What is expressed? What if the wax child were a fictional representation of an adult Norwegian woman named Olga Ravn? A woman who made no pretense of distance from the characters? —because that’s what we’re talking about here, best B. Despite the wax child’s never commenting on it, the narrational device of having an inanimate, omniscient narrator creates distance between the author and the story/characters. And that distance contributes mightily to a particular mood in the writing—mysterious, oracular, eerie at times.

There is irony here, my friends. As we read, we are asked to believe that this doll of wax “talks” to us, and because of the magical rules of fiction, we accept this impossibility. I doubt if anyone who takes the time to read this book goes along, thinking “Oh, well, this voice is really Ms. Ravn. How clever.” No, we accept this “rule” of the story, that a wax doll is the narrator, and it is outside of time and space. There is irony; however, the doll is not ironic. It claims no awareness of being a character in a book. It sticks to a rather self-absorbed script, relating the tragic events of the story but never expressing any personal emotion about them. The wax child lacks awareness. “I talk all the time but no one listens.” One of the ways this is expressed is that the fact that the story occurs in historical time—early seventeenth-century—is not made explicit by the narrator, which gives the effect of the narrator just assuming the reader knows. We’ll delve into this next time.

The structure of the book, with the wax child as narrator and Christenze as protagonist, creates a nice tension in that the wax child knows Christenze’s fate; Christenze remains stubbornly in denial about it. The omniscient narrator cannot warn the protagonist of the danger that approaches because as it tells we the readers again and again, it has no mouth. But more seriously, the wax child is distinct from Christenze and the other characters. It witnesses the events of the story; by the rules of the novel, it cannot alter them.

‘Kay. Let’s wrap up today and continue next time.

Till then.

#TheWaxDoll #OlgaRavn #AlanBray