WAP Jour fixe – Michael IGNATIEFF: "The unreliable narrator in fiction, biography and memoir

Literary critics have helped us to understand how novelists have mastered the technique of the unreliable narrator,

an apparently authoritative voice, who subverts a reader’s trust in the story he is telling. From literary criticism, biographers have
learned how unreliable their biographical subject can be when they tell the story of their lives. Memoirists, telling their own
life story, inevitably seek to convince their readers that they are reliable narrators, but any properly skeptical reader will
wonder what murky parts of real life have been concealed from view. Psychoanalysis, finally, has been enormously influ-
ential, across the whole culture, in making us all aware that we are unreliable narrators of our own lives, ceaselessly weaving
tales about ourselves that are a complex mixture of fantasy, projection, avoidance and wish fulfillment, as well as hard
truth. Having been both a biographer—of Isaiah Berlin—and a memoirist—author of a family memoir, The Russian Album —Michael Ignatieff reflects on how psychoanalysis has
helped him decode some of the narrative strategies that biographical subjects deploy when they are being interviewed for a biography, as well as the narrative illusions that a memoirist
has to confront when telling a story about his own family.

Michael Ignatieff is a Canadian-born writer, historian and former politician. He is currently Rector Emeritus of Central
European University in Vienna and teaches in the history department. His many books include Isaiah Berlin: a life, On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times and The Needs of
Strangers.

Moderation: Jeanne Wolff Bernstein