In December, I read this collection of Bertie and Jeeves stories, which includes the first meeting of the renowned pair. The last story, Bertie Changes His Mind, is one of the few in the Wodehouse canon that is told from Jeeves’ point of view. Although it is a nice change of pace, I am glad that there are not many like this. I strongly suspect that this was done on purpose by Wodehouse, who, if he was certain of anything, knew what people would read again and again. Only the other day, I was talking about Wodehouse with the headmaster of my high school, and he noted that, after a while, he found it difficult to distinguish between one story and another. There are a lot of recycled plots, it is true, but I find that there are enough differences in the details to make them worth reading. Well, I would think that, wouldn’t I, given that I’m committed to reading the entire lot. Writing ninety novels and short story collections during one’s lifetime practically requires repetition.
It is not uncommon to have the seemingly less-intelligent character pose as the narrator. One of the more famous examples of this is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s device of having Dr. Watson narrate the Sherlock Holmes stories (Holmes himself is the narrator of a couple of later stories). Of course, I am hardly the first one to see parallels between Holmes and Watson and Jeeves and Wooster. In “Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes or Le Mot Juste,” Kristin Thompson likens Jeeves to Holmes, and expounds on textual similarities, including references to grey matter and that sort of thing, that indicates that Wodehouse was explicitly making a connection between the butler and the sleuth.
Why is it so common to have the less-brilliant relate the action? Two thoughts immediately spring to mind, and I would not doubt if a whole host of other reasons come in to play. The first issue is reader accessibility. After all, if one is aiming to be a popular author, then it would fly in the face of logic to alienate a group of potential readers who might feel as though they were being patronized by a superior mind. In the US, there is a general feeling of mistrust towards the so-called intellectual elite. Somehow I don’t think that this is a new phenomena, as people really have not changed much in the past couple of thousand years, and probably longer than that.
The second thought is that the character of Jeeves, and Holmes as well, is enshrouded by an air of mystery. While the reader is privy to the great mind’s solutions, we do not know exactly how that mind operates. At the end of each story, the reader is given some insight into Jeeves‘ thought process, although there is often the feeling that we do not know the entire story. Like God, Jeeves works in mysterious ways, and part of his allure is that element of the unknowable. Should Jeeves be the central narrator, that carefully cultivated air would erode. We would see too much of the man behind the curtain and lose part of the special quality of the Jeeves and Wooster stories. Revealing the man behind the curtain lead to the ousting of the Wizard from Oz, and perhaps something similar would have happened with Jeeves and Wooster had Wodehouse plotted a similar coup.
