Authorial Intrusion and Reliability

When the author intrudes into the narrative and jolts you out of the carefully constructed place, you have a problem. Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction elegantly and thoroughly describes all the ways in which an author is legitimately present in his work, but points out that there are transgressions of authorial presence that cause problems and should be purged.

The various kinds of purge—whether of unrealistic author's voice, of impure human emotions, or of the moral judgments which help to produce them—can be understood only in the context of what cannot be purged; some kind of interest that will grasp and sustain the reader throughout the work." (p.164) Booth argues that there are three lines along which the reader follows the author: curiosity about the facts, completion of pattern or form, and human attachment. Anthony Marra's Chechnya will serve as a good example where human attachment (the overriding connection for author/reader) was not enough to keep the story intact.

Chechnya, as the title indicates, is set in a war torn country. Marra uses primarily the point of view of Sonja, who has returned from the west, to relate the events. On first reading of this story, the human desire to see the protagonist "succeed" (in this case survive), takes over and allowed me as a reader to just soak up the complete and utter horror of the story. Distance from the actual events, and the tragedy of the situation are framed by the title (conjuring up news reports, and a western familiarity with the general sadness associated with that area of the world) masked problems with the story. Initially, a reader is at just the right distance from the story to be emotionally involved.  A closer reading reveals a number of way in which Marra intrudes on the text.

Absence (of information) does not make the reader fonder

Sonja has medical training and is working in a hospital. Marra doesn't tell us exactly what that training is until late in the story. He allows the reader to infer, decipher what her role in the hospital is but never just clearly states it. Everything in Chechnya is fluid; people acting in self preservation will commit all kinds of acts of perversity and kindness alike. Throughout the story the reader is asked to question everything. In order for Sonja to be the protagonist Marra sets her out to be, questions about her legitimacy are unnecessary and distracting.

"'A man is waiting here to see you,' a nurse says." (p. 216) The sentence is not "another nurse". Thus the reader knows that Sonja is not a nurse. Later, through her eyes we see the hospital corridor "a handful of patients, no doctors." (p.217) Marra does not use the terms "no other doctors". A seemingly irrelevant detail that intrudes into continued reading without asking "Is she a doctor or not?" The questions of whether women in Chechnya are commonly doctors, creates a question about her role. Two pages later, she is at her medical school in London City College, did she finish? Is she acting as a doctor or is she one? The answer isn't important, clearly. The fact that is important is that the reader is interrupted by the absence of the information. One has to deduce there is a reason for the withholding; that intentionally not telling the reader is important.

"Natasha slept for sixteen hours a day, after returning from Italy. Sonja worried about her and didn't need a medical degree to know something was wrong." (p.221)

Here Marra continues his absence of absolute, but also uses what may be judged to be a common English language expression. He could have written, "didn't need her medical degree" which would have both answered my question questions about role and distanced him from the western colloquial expression. Sonja tells Akhmed "I went to medical school in London. I stayed for six years." (p.226) Again, reader inference will conclude she has a degree. But it's not explicit until the passage below:

"Was Sonja no better? She dismissed the question as soon as she asked it. There was no question. She returned from London, leaving a second-year residency, a Scottish fiancé, and a land unbroken by war. She left all that to return to her sister. And why? She dismissed the question. Because blood is thicker than water, and guilt is thickest of all." (p.227) Aha, she's a doctor, but I'm already two pages from the end of the story. It also feels like this is a somewhat clumsy reveal by Marra. This is the compact few sentences that uncover exactly what sacrifice Sonja made to come back to Chechnya that the story built us up to this as a critical juncture. But the impact of it has been hampered by his coyness in the earlier story. This strikes me as a common mistake, not wanting to "tell" the reader everything in order to create the author/reader connection of curiosity, not realizing that the context is more important. The reader will feel the weight of Sonja's return to this misery with the facts in hand about her status prior to this moment, perhaps more so.

What does it mean?

Booth argues that the author needs to make sure the reader understands the value system or context to satisfy "the reader's need to know where, in the world of values, he stands –that is, to know where the author wants him to stand."(p. 161) Chechnya is a story about ambiguity, confusion, desperation. So there are many legitimate unanswered questions regarding what is actually happening. However, Marra extends that to Akhmed in a manner that leaves the reader distanced from the question.

"For a moment she thinks he is a religious man, then remembers that most men have grown their beards out." (p.217) This seems like it might be important that he is/is not a religious man. But why? Later Sonja "wonders if Akhmed is religious after all" (p.217), after using the word "fucking" in front of him. Is Akhmed a religious man? And what does that signify in Chechnya? In the story setting all meaning is completely subjective. Marra doesn't help the reader to interpret this question. Sonja wonders about it, but we are given no insight into her character about what she thinks about that. The readers value structure doesn't necessarily make him/her want or not want him to be religious. What would Akhmed being religious mean and what actions would a religious man take actions that are different? We don't know and Marra doesn't tell us. The only action Akhmed does take that seems mildly religious is to pray when the men (either soldiers or rebels it doesn't matter) come for him.

"He prays for his wife, that Allah may welcome her in paradise. He prays for Havaa, that she might live to have a natural death. But when the men start beating him, when they throw him into the back of the waiting truck, Akhmed prays only for himself." (p.232)

This seems a reasonable response from anyone who is about to be disappeared, who will probably be tortured and then killed. What is the reader to take from this then? The result is merely a feeling of missing something.

Where authors dare to tread

Emotional distance to the wreckage that is life in Chechnya is the universal despair that even a reader who doesn't know war associates with those who experience it. Horror, shock, sadness. So by his setting Marra has leveraged those emotions. These are heightened by Natasha, Sonja's sister, who has been trafficked as a heroine induced prostitute in her attempt to escape the city. But this emotional closeness doesn't mean that culturally or experience-wise the reader is at the right distance to this world. Marra intentionally plays upon this by interjecting commonplace rituals of life into a setting infused with insanity.

The war has been going on for ten years in this story. When Akhmed's dying wife asks him where he has been he says, "Just checking the mail. He says in explanation of his absence."(p.220) The point that is being made, he's been gone all day, is that she is out of it. There has no doubt been no mail for years. The phrase is hangover from a civilized world.

"There has always been a war. That shouldn't get in the way of daily exercise." (p. 221) Sonja is serious when she says this, and the irony of the statement is intentional. She doesn't worry about getting cancer. We know this explicitly. Her sister has been raped and sold and raped again, and Sonja's response to this is "daily exercise. The comment being completey out of alignment with the situation. Marra has revealed himself here as author because we know that Sonja's comment is completely irrational, and he doesn't have her reflect on that. So this is him telling the reader directly.

"Their lips were blue from drinking windshield wiper fluid." (p. 222) Marra delivers this (through Natasha) without commentary. In contrast, on the following page he takes the time to direct us to the fact that "Tobacco was considered a luxury." (p.223) I would argue here that he has under-distanced the story. That tobacco is a luxury in a war zone is self-evident, especially in this story since Sonja was rewarded with cigarettes by a war lord for delivering his wife's baby. So there is no need to shore up tobacco as a luxury yet leave the reader to rationalize for him/herself that people are sitting around drinking a poisonous liquid.

"We're in the wilderness, "Ramzan says, patting the trunk with his gloved hand. "A wilderness without Moses, without prophets or angels to guide us." (p.231) Distance here was too far. A reader with no knowledge of the Koran would wonder if Moses was integral to it. It is reasonable to think that Marra intentionally uses Moses, common prophet in both Christian and Islamic religions to demonstrate that the difference is negligent. Again, his presence being firmly felt outside of his characters. It raised questions that the common reader may have asked, may have researched, and these questions could have been avoided had Marra reached across the divide brought the reader into the religious context completely.