Overt Unreliability and the Metarepresentational Frame: On the Limits of Henry James’s Unreliable Narration

In this paper, I argue that Henry James’s unreliability in his short fiction shows a recurring peculiarity hitherto undiscussed or, at best, subsumed under the standard approach to this phenomenon. Even when his character-narrators report questionable information at odds with the authorial design as inferred by the reader, they seldom fail to trace such information to their own subjectivities and distinguish it explicitly from authenticated fictional fact. Relying on the metarepresentational capacity of real (and realistic) minds to process information inseparably from its source and aided by key rhetorical notions, I theorize this special kind of unreliability which I call overt, transparent, or self-acknowledged. Then I explore its different manifestations in “The Diary of a Man of Fifty” (1878), “The Aspern Papers” (1888), and “The Way It Came” (1898), three Jamesian tales whose narrators variously manage to keep track of their own minds as the source of their (often unwarranted) representations. On the resulting evidence I conclude that the limits of James’s unreliable narration are narrower and less disruptive than customarily held to be.