The fourth wall, as you know, is the space which separates a performer from the audience; or, if you will, the conceptual barrier between a fictional work and its viewers or readers.
In Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, Frances de la Tour’s role is not the biggest but she has her moments; “ Durham was very good for history. It’s where I had my first pizza. Other things too, of course, but it’s the pizza that stands out”. She also broke the fourth wall, at least in the stage version; “I have not hitherto been allotted an inner voice, my role a patient and not unamused sufferance of the predilections and preoccupations of men”.
To digress hardly at all, one of the history boys, played by James Corden, went on to smash the fourth wall to smithereens in another West End hit, One Man, Two Guvnors, when he asks the audience for a sandwich. Now I come to think of it Harry Worth may have broken the fourth wall on TV.
Maybe he didn’t, but it’s a gag that made me laugh fifty years ago. So who broke the fourth wall before anybody had the courage to chip at the Berlin Wall? May I nominate Anthony Trollope in 1857?
” It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr Slope or Bertie Stanhope. And here, perhaps, it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers, by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage. Nay, more, and worse than this is too frequently done. Have not often the profoundest efforts of genius been used to baffle the aspirations of the reader, to raise false hopes and false fears, and to give rise to expectations which are never to be realised? Are not promises all but made of delightful horrors, in lieu of which the writer produces nothing but most commonplace realities in his final chapter?”
One might argue that Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy was the first novel to break the 4th wall. Another one might go further, arguing that the great Irishman’s novel was the first literary example of ‘stream of consciousness’ narration. A still bolder one could even suggest that The L&O of TS was (unknowingly, of course) the first fictional foray into existentialism, but that’s to digress – an aberration I know you abhor. This one’s going to eat a bacon sandwich, take a gout remedy and prepare to watch some rugby in a pub.
Cervantes’ Don Quixote is another contender in the ‘earliest to……) stakes.
It is amusing, and sometimes tedious, when Trollope inserts one of his authorial asides through the fourth wall (though aspiring writers can find much sound wisdom about the craft in most of them). Trollope likes to have it both ways, though: despite his slightly smug aside disclosing Eleanor’s ultimate virtue here, he is just as fond of keeping the reader in suspense as any other serially published novelist, leaving one to wonder if we ever can forgive her, if she really will never marry, if his name will be cleared, etc. The wonderful Madame Max as almost the deus-ex-machina is a favorite example that would be much less effective, had there been any authorly asides such as the one above (though I suppose as there is a *Phineas Redux* novel still to come in the series, the modern reader can feel at least some confidence that all will somehow be resolved).
I remember staying up half the night reading in order to resolve the suspense or agony of the various plot devices Trollope devised for one novel or another. He happily abandons the “proper confidence between the author and his readers” to keep us completely hooked until the end. If he hadn’t done so, I don’t imagine most of his 47 novels would be remembered today.