In thee (author) I trust?

I’m currently reading a historical novel, Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, which tells the story of the machinations of the Royal Society in the late seventeenth century and the row between Newton and Leibniz over who first invented the calculus. The book is a mixture of real and imaginary characters and it’s narrated by the latter. I think it’s these imaginary characters that move this book firmly into the realm of fiction, without them the reader would be more likely to wonder if what we were being told about Newton, Hooke, Leibniz, Charles II et al. were ‘real’. The addition of the fictional makes us feel secure that to a large extent all the interactions, even those between the real characters, are made up. (To that extent they’re not real characters at all).

The relationship between the reader and the author needs trust on several levels, overtly in the case of scientific narratives, less so for fiction. The most general trust requirement that the reader has, is that what they are about to read is interesting and worth spending their time (and perhaps money) on. In fiction, the reader needs to trust the author to invent a coherent universe, one that operates according to some specific laws (even if the author is the only one that knows those laws). If something happens in the story that seems to violate its fabric, then the reader stops trusting or caring. (See John Gardner’s excellent book ‘The Art of Fiction for a more detailed discussion of this point).

Of course, you don’t need to trust the narrator who may be unreliable and whose vision of events may be completely skewed. For example, Pip in ‘Great Expectations’ assumes that his mysterious benefactor is Miss Havisham and initially there is no reason to doubt this. The interest in the novel partly lies in exploring how this error affects Pip’s development. Barbara in ‘Notes on a Scandal’ tells us she only has Sheba’s best interests at heart. By the end of the novel, this is patently untrue.

Part of the fun in reading novels with unreliable narrators is working out the reasons for this unreliability. And even here, I think there needs to be some initial trust in the narrator. Someone, who from the very first page is clearly lying, is going to have to be incredibly engaging to keep the reader involved, because it will be so much more hard work just to figure out how this universe works.

Novels with unreliable narrators tend to be written in the first person, so are all first person narrators inherently unreliable due to their necessarily restricted and partial outlook?

Trust in scientific papers operates at various levels, some of them more explicit than others. Most obviously, the reader has to trust the authors’ integrity and believe that what is reported in the work actually happened. If this is violated it can have a huge far-reaching impact on the science. For example, one infamous case of scientific fraud is that of Paul Kammerer and the midwife toads in the twenties. Kammerer said he’d shown that the Lamarckian version of evolution was correct, in that an organism’s environment can directly affect how it develops and the attributes that it passes onto offspring (in violation of Darwinian natural selection which holds that genes mutate randomly and those organisms which are better adapted to their environment – by chance – are more likely to survive and mate and produce offspring, thereby ensuring that their genes are passed on.)

Male toads, from toad species which mate in water, have nuptial pads on their feet to enable them to hold onto their females. Toad species which mate on land don’t need, and therefore don’t have these pads. Kammerer claimed that by forcing the landlubbers to mate in water, he’d got them to develop nuptial pads in only a couple of generations. This caused a furore until it was shown that the nuptial pads on one of his specimens had been faked, and were caused by injections of ink. Kammerer committed suicide shortly afterwards.

This discredited Lamarckian ideas. And yet, how can a fake result be used to disprove a theory? Just because it doesn’t disprove Darwinian ideas, it doesn’t mean that the alternative is wrong. But this is what happened – bad science has been used to discredit Lamarckianism. (Alongside good science which favours Darwin, of course).

Fraud is (presumably) rarer than inadvertent mistakes. Science is difficult to do, mistakes happen. So how does the reader know whether to trust that the author hasn’t messed up?
Popper argued that science should be falsifiable i.e. you should be able to refute a theory if you get an experimental result that disagrees with it. In practice because of the possibility of mistakes there is more caution than this implies, and scientists are unlikely to chuck away an entire framework on the basis of a single result, simply because that result could be wrong.

More insidiously, scientists can be skewed towards a specific reading of their results based on their prejudices. So, trust is required to assume that the author has been open-minded and considered all options.

Of course another factor that influences the reading of a scientific paper is the authors’ reputations. If you know the authors, and accept their previous work, you are more likely to believe their current work. Is this true in fiction? Are you more likely to read a book based on the author’s reputation? Can the book ever stand alone?

You also have to trust what you are not being told. In fiction, much of the art lies not in writing but in editing, the cutting out of extraneous words to leave only the essentials. You have to trust that what has been left out is inessential. In science this is more problematic. Many experiments go unreported, because they don’t give interesting results. This is a particular problem in medicine with the testing of new drugs. If the results are inconclusive or unfavourable, they are more likely to go unreported than if they appear to support the hypothesis that the drug ‘works’.