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Innocent/Corrupt

A narrator is a much stranger toy at the novelist’s disposal than is usually thought. It’s not just something as depressingly ordinary as a character—more a vast system of smuggling. And there’s one kind of narrative voice or tone in particular that offers a way to explore that difficult relationship at the hidden center of every art form: the one between writer and reader (or spectator). Although this tone seems to exist most easily in novels, it isn’t only to be found there—it appears wherever anyone tries to figure out what a monologue might mean, or how to talk to a you. It is garrulous, self-aware, hyper, charming, and occurs internationally, but what makes the voice a form is this: Narrators of the kind I mean are adepts of a confessional mode that’s actually designed to exonerate them completely. What could be more dangerous than someone convinced of his own goodness, his own innocence? Someone who believes that what he feels is far more important than what he actually does.

What I like about this sort of voice is that it takes in both the high aesthetic and the dirty political. And in fact perhaps the only route to the dirty political is through the high aesthetic, and vice versa—or at least that’s what this voice makes you think. I have no idea what name to give this voice I’m talking about. It seems to me an as yet undescribed category. So let’s call it something oxymoronic and impossible. Let’s call it the Innocent/Corrupt.