Language, Mimesis and the Numinous in Joyce Cary’s Second Trilogy

Abstract

The problems entailed by first-person narration and the novel of the ‘unreliable narrator’ are well known. A first-person narration will give the reader a fuller experience of a particular subjective view of the world, which is a desirable end, while at the same time it will make it impossible for the reader to see how this subjective point of view is meant to square with the world as experienced by others. What value are we supposed, or ought we, to give to any one point of view in the search for truth? The first-person narration poses an implicit question of evaluation: how important is this evidence? If the subjective point of view is also untrustworthy, that is, if we cannot take everything reported as being made up of true or sincere reports, then we have a problem of validity as well as one of evaluation. In Joyce Cary’s trilogy we find three first-person narrations which are apparently the tales of ‘unreliable narrators’. It is perhaps not surprising then that Robert Bloom concludes his study of Cary’s second trilogy with the belief that the reader’s attempt to extract a coherent vision from the three novels is hopeless, frustrating, impossible: But his inclusiveness is a liability as well as a strength, for it impedes his ordering of his own energies and the energies of his characters. He fails to provide us with a reliable means of concluding from the novels themselves something more than that the world is senselessly divided and sustained by a compelling, frequently disastrous, vitality.1