Marta Puxan-Oliva, "Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel" (Routledge, 2021)

Marta Puxan-Oliva’s Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel (Routledge, 2021), engages with the intertwined relationship between narrative studies – centering on narrative reliability – racial conflicts and ideologies. Puxan-Oliva argues that the problem of narrative reliability in fiction, often mirrors and makes use of narrative reliability of historical discourse, and therefore urges literary critics to examine the historical context of a work of fiction to “comprehend technical modulations of narrative reliability.”  Her book offers a crucial contribution to narrative theory by insisting on a need to historicize the field itself to understand how historical discourses give rise to specific cultural and political discourses. In order to illustrate her methodology, Puxan-Oliva analyzes Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Albert Camus’s L’étranger, and Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo. In each chapter, Puxan-Oliva grapples with a specific issue on the problem of reliability in connection to historical contexts of each literary work. For example, she discusses in depth the role that the voice of persuasion has in Conrad’s Lord Jim, and the implications this has within the larger discourse of British imperialism. When focusing her keen analysis on Faulkner, Puxan-Oliva considers the degrees of reliability in the narrative, and the way the problem of reliability reflects historical discourses in the New South. In her chapter on Camus, she observes how Meursault’s ‘estranging narrative’ makes use of underreporting, which is an “ideological strategy common in colonial discourse”, thereby connecting narrative voice within a broader condition of discordant reliability within French colonial Algeria. To sum up, each chapter in Puxan-Oliva’s book consists of a necessary intervention in narratology, arguing that the field of narrative studies needs to release narrative from its exclusive eng