A narrator who pretends to have consulted several prior chronicles of the life of his hero finds his chief source runs out in the middle of a battle. But it is full of surprises, and whatever crudeness it has is usually paired with immense sophistication, especially in the question of hidden cameras. Who is holding the invisible camera, what hidden authority or confirmation supports the angle of vision and choice of material? Salman Rushdie is, among many other things, a master of the missing camera, endlessly reminding us of what it is doing, and it is a pleasure to see him, in his new novel, working so closely with Cervantes, perhaps greatest of all ancestors in this art.Ī lot of Cervantes’s humour is pretty broad, and Nabokov wasn’t entirely wrong to call Don Quixote ‘a cruel and crude old book’. This thought is clearly relevant to narrative in general, whether reportage or fiction. There would still be a camera we can’t see. We could put the currently working camera into the picture, of course, but that would just change the subject, as Cavell remarks. The missing camera is ‘the one working now’, and its recurring absence makes Cavell feel there is ‘something unsaid’. He is writing of a literal movie camera, but he suggests a metaphorical reach for the claim too.
‘O ne can feel that there is always a camera left out of the picture,’ Stanley Cavell writes in The World Viewed.
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