The omnipresent voice: authorial intrusion in Rudy Wiebe's "Games for Queen Victoria"

Perhaps even more significant than Wiebe's unacknowledged borrowings from Butler are the transformations he effects on them, sometimes subtle alterations that nonetheless reveal how a writer can deploy his or her characters to articulate the author's own views. The relationship between a fiction writer and his/her narrator is obviously a critical one. Writing specifically of longer narratives, Mario Vargas Llosa states that "the narrator is the most important character in a novel" (47). As the Peruvian author elaborates, whether the narrator is a major character in a work, or an invisible one, he is a crucial figure because of how he gives that work "coherence" (47). Jose Saramago agrees with Vargas Llosa but stresses that narrators are not autonomous entities but abstractions. The 1998 Nobel laureate contends that even when a narrator is used "to express a plurality of points of view or verdicts" his or her thoughts and actions are ultimately determined by "the Author" ("Narrador" 191). The primary object of Saramago's critique is to counter the thesis, promulgated by Roland Barthes and other poststructuralists, that the author is either dead or a mere discursive strategy. As the Portuguese novelist declares, "the resignation or the indifference" with which today's writers appear to accept the primacy in the narrative process of "an academically-blessed Narrator" over themselves, constitutes a more general "abdication of responsibility" by those writers (192). Saramago's intervention also underscores that literary figures, including narrators, are created by a "concrete" individual (or individuals, in the case of collective works). To echo the epigraph at the beginning of this essay, narrators are not free agents but personages in someone else's "story," since there is always an authorial hand behind them ("Entre" 191).(6) Or, as Bakhtin notes, "Behind the narrator's story we read a second story, the author's story; he is the one who tells us how the narrator tells stories, and also tells us about the narrator himself" (314). "A Night in Fort Pitt" is set against a real political backdrop. Butler is on "assignment" for the territorial government and a smallpox epidemic is causing havoc in the region, leaving in its trail "a brutal litany of disease and starvation and death" (240, 238). Yet, like "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" the story is less concerned with a historical incident than with the writing of a narrative about the historical past. It highli