The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology 9783110922646, 9783110183146

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The Dynamics of Narrative Form

Narratologia Contributions to Narrative Theory/ Beiträge zur Erzähltheorie

Edited by/Herausgegeben von Fotis Jannidis, John Pier, Wolf Schmid Editorial Board/Wissenschaftlicher Beirat Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik Jose Angel Garcia Landa, Peter Huhn, Manfred Jahn Andreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Matias Martinez r

Jan Christoph Meister, Ansgar Nünning

Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer Michael Scheffel, Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert

w DE

G Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

The Dynamics of Narrative Form Studies in Anglo-American Narratology

Edited by John Pier

w DE

G Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

1

Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The dynamics of narrative form : studies in Anglo-American narratology / edited by John Pier, p. cm - (Narratologia ; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-018314-5 (alk. paper) 1. Narration (Rhetoric) — Congresses. I. Pier, John Holmes. II. European Society for the Study of English. III. Series. PN212.D96 2004 808-dc22 2004020597

ISBN 3-11-018314-5 ISSN 1612-8427 Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at . © Copyright 2004 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin Printed in Germany

Preface The contributions to the present volume all reflect, in different ways, some of the directions taken by narratology since the early 1990s under the banner of what has come to be called in many quarters "post-classical" narratology. As the readers of a volume such as this are likely to be aware, developments in narrative theory in recent years do not necessarily mark a clean and revolutionary break with the earlier "classical" narratology, for the crisis to which the original paradigms, models and methodologies led—quite diverse in themselves—has proved to be less an impasse than to have given rise to a new impulse in the principled study of narrative so innovatively exemplified by the initial narratological studies. The majority of these contributions originated during the Narratology Panel at the sixth congress of the European Society for the Study of English held in Strasburg in September 20021. No precise topic or methodological approach was set, but participants (and subsequently the other contributors) were invited to engage in stocktaking on themes of their own choice, charting out vistas of potential interest for the future of narratologically-inspired research. Given the diversity of topics and, in some cases, the divergent theoretical premises adopted by the contributors, no claim can be made to a unified body of research or to a fundamental postulate shared by all. This is as it should be. Readers of the following pages will not fail to notice the rigor and coherence running through each of the essays in their own right, and on this basis alone any attempt to seek out a centralizing doctrine would be largely fruitless, and unfortunate. Various groupings and cross-groupings will nonetheless crop up, not so much as a matter of common presuppositions or concurrent conclusions as that of a stimulating contrast of views on similar or related narratological topics. Most striking in this regard is Rene Rivara's critique of focalization as inherited from Gerard Genette and his successors and the poststructuralist reformulation of focalization proposed by Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck. The former, based on French enunciative linguistics and the insistence of reuniting "Who sees?" with "Who speaks?", is a Papers by Jose Angel Garcia Landa, Peter Huhn, Dieter Meindl, Ansgar Nunning, John Pier and Michael Toolan.

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Preface

systematic exploration of the viewpoints available to narrative fiction, while the latter investigates how focalization is woven into other features of narrative such as plot, theme and metaphorical and metonymic devices: one employs sophisticated analytical tools to refine a concept as it was synthesized in "classical" narratology; the other is a "post-classical" expansion of that concept aimed at exploring new dimensions of established narratological categories. In different ways and to various degrees, this pattern corresponds to the tendencies illustrated by many of the other contributions. This is not to say, however, that each article is to be paired with another or that the order in which the articles appear precludes groupings that may highlight other problems of interest for narrative study. Again, each contribution stands on its own, and while Michael Toolan's "Graded Expectations" and John Pier's "Narrative Configurations," for instance, both bear in part on the sequential ordering of narrative texts, this is neither for the same reasons nor with the same consequences, even though each approach may possibly shed light on the other. Jose Angel Garcia Landa draws attention to the rarely studied question of how narrative tends to be "overheard," with the intrusion of a parasitical "unaddressed" reader into the universe of discourse upsetting the neat fit so readily assumed to exist between narratological schemes and communicative processes. The twists and turns thus caused in the functioning of narrative communication may open the way to further analysis on the basis of Dieter Meindl's "pronominal" theory of reliable and unreliable narration. In yet another departure from earlier tenets, there is a growing awareness that narrative features are not restricted to discourses (verbal or other) dominated by the telling of stories. Thus, Peter Huhn, in focusing on the implementation of narrative sequentiality and mediacy through an act of articulation as this occurs in lyric poetry—a form of discourse not generally characterized by the present recounting of past happenings or by the prominence of focalization associated with prose fiction, for example—puts forth a compelling argument for the insights to be gained from "transgeneric" applications of narratology. With regard to story, moreover, one of the practices of the structuralist narratologies, now contested, is the story-oriented analysis of plot. Hilary P. Dannenberg approaches this problem through possible worlds theory, showing how, in the "temporal orchestration" of alternative possible worlds, but also of counterfactual worlds and transworld identity, plot emerges as

Preface

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ontological layering, rather than as mere anachronic or proleptic inversions of a unilinear and chronological "actual world" story by discourse. And finally, while all the articles in this collection tend to reposition issues formulated by earlier narrative theories in light of the broad spectrum of recent developments, Ansgar Nunning's contribution on metanarrative, studied only sporadically by both the "classical" and the "post-classical" narratologies, is exemplary in clarifying a heretofore confused concept, providing it with a theoretical foundation, a detailed typology with numerous examples and suggestions for further study. These questions and their possible convergences are but a sampling of the paths of inquiry that readers might be tempted to follow up. Indeed, the topics debated in the following pages have all been examined more or less extensively in earlier studies. It is, however, in redefining and in reorienting concepts and methods in light of past and recent evolutions that the contributors to this volume have sought to capture the dynamic processes of narrative and of narratological research. On behalf of all contributors, I wish to thank Michail Tavonius and Karin Pafort for their superb devotion and expertise in preparing the layout of this volume. John Pier

Contents ANSGAR NÜNNING On Metanarrative: Towards a Definition, a Typology and an Outline of the Functions of Metanarrative Commentary

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DIETER MEINDL (Un-)Reliable Narration from a Pronominal Perspective

59

RENE RIVARA A Plea for a Narrator-Centered Narratology

83

Luc HERMAN, BART VERVAECK Focalization between Classical and Postclassical Narratology

115

PETER HÜHN Transgeneric Narratology: Applications to Lyric Poetry

139

HILARY P. DANNENBERG Ontological Plotting: Narrative as a Multiplicity of Temporal Dimensions

159

JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA Overhearing Narrative

191

MICHAEL TOOLAN Graded Expectations: On the Textual and Structural Shaping of Readers' Narrative Experience

215

JOHN PIER Narrative Configurations

239

NAME INDEX

269

ANSGARNÜNNING (Gießen)

On Metanarrative: Towards a Definition, a Typology and an Outline of the Functions of Metanarrative Commentary While the importance of the concept of metafiction has long been widely recognized, the difference between metafiction and metanarrative has generally been overlooked. This paper argues that one needs to distinguish between metafiction and the phenomenon of metanarration. It addresses some of the terminological and typological issues pertaining to the concept of metanarration, providing a definition and a typology of metanarrative comments as well as an outline of the functions they can fulfil in fictional narratives. The first two parts of the paper are devoted to the introduction and definition of the notion of metanarrative and to the discussion of some of the problems surrounding it. Section three develops a set of categories for the analysis of and typological distinction between different kinds of metanarrative commentary. The fourth section provides a brief historical overview of the functions that metanarrative comments have fulfilled in British novels from the end of the seventeenth century to the present. The final section gives a brief summary and suggests that much more work needs to be done1. I wanted this whole thing to be poetic. It started out poetic. Now it's just me, yakettyyak. I'll let you into a secret: I spent half a night-flight on the first three paras. I think I might have mentioned this already. I didn't read Norman for more than about ten

I would like to thank Monika Fludernik (Freiburg), Peter Huhn (Hamburg), Jörg Schönert (Hamburg) and other members of the Hamburg research group on "Narratology," as well as Werner Wolf (Graz) and my wife Vera for various important ideas, textual examples, and critical comments (e.g. on the definition of metanarration and metafiction) on earlier papers covering roughly the same material (cf. A. Nünning [2001 a], [2001b]). I am particularly grateful to my assistants Gaby Allrath, Dorothee Birke and Rose Lawson for their splendid help with the English version of this paper.

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Ansgar Nünning minutes. Mailer, not blahdy Barry. I spent four and a half hours composing the start. (Adam Thorpe, Still [1995])2

1. Introduction: Metanarration as a gap in literary terminology Metanarration, i.e. the narrator's commenting on the process of narration, has been one of the constitutive elements of the 'rhetoric of fiction' (sensu W.C. Booth) since the beginnings of the novel. Moreover, self-reflexive references are an integral component of everyday narration, anecdote, ballad and urban legend. In many literary narrative texts, both first-person and authorial narrators frequently address a fictitious interlocutor and talk about their own narrative. Some quotations from well-known works of English narrative literature since the Middle Ages can serve as a first indication of how widespread the phenomenon of metanarration actually is: Er that I ferther in this tale pace, Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun To teile yow al the condicioun Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, And whiche they weren, and of what degree, And eek in what array that they were inne; And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne. (Geoffrey Chaucer, "General Prologue", The Canterbury Tales [ca. 1380-1400])3 Now the reader I suppose to be upon thorns at this and the like impertinent digressions, but let him alone and he'll come to himself; at which time I think fit to acquaint him, that when I digress, I am at that time writing to please my self; when I continue the thread of the story, I write to please him; supposing him a reasonable man, I conclude him satisfied to allow me this liberty, and so I proceed. (William Congreve, Incognita or, Love and Duty Reconcil'd. A Novel [1692])4 Now it is our Purpose in the ensuing Pages, to pursue a contrary Method. When any extraordinary scene presents itself (as we trust will often be the Case) we shall spare no Pains nor Paper to open it at large to our Reader; but if whole Years should pass without producing any thing worthy his Notice, we shall not be afraid of a Chasm in our History; but shall hasten on to Matters of Consequence, and leave such Periods of Time totally unobserved. (Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling [1749])5 Thorpe (1998: 34). Chaucer (1957: 17). Congreve (1930: 250). Fielding (1975: 76).

On Metanarrative

13

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. (Charles Dickens, The Personal History of David Copperfield [1849/50])6 If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like [...] and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it. (J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye [1951])7 If you're late and you missed the beginning then frankly you won't understand a single thing for the next twelve hours, you might as well go learn some manners someplace else. (Adam Thorpe, Still [1995]8 I have a discovery to report. [...] Now, where do I start? (Michael Frayn, Headlong [1999])9

Given the fact that one could produce an endless list of metanarrative comments, it is striking that narrative theory has accorded only very little attention to such genuinely narratological phenomena as narratorial digressions and metanarrative interventions, despite their ubiquity in narrative literature: in spite of its indulgence in theory and terminology, narratology, with only one single exception10, has hardly devoted any attention to metanarrative comments. Neither in recent overviews or introductions to narrative theory11 nor in specialist studies like Monika Fludernik's Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (1996), Andrew Gibson's Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (1996) or Michael Kearns's Rhetorical Narratology (1999) has the phenomenon of metanarration played anything more than a subordinate role12. 6 7 8 9

Dickens (1966: 49). Salinger (1958: 5). Thorpe (1998: 1]. Frayn (1999: 1). Cf. Prince (1982: 115-128), who has devoted one subchapter to the phenomenon of metanarrative called "Metanarrative Signs." All other introductions to narrative theory include only very few remarks without, however, defining metanarrative comments or offering typological differentiations, narratological characterizations or functional distinctions. Some preliminary thoughts on this topic can be found in A. Nunning (200la), (2001b). See, e.g. the very good introduction by Martinez/Scheffel (1999), who at least discuss these problems in a short subchapter on the "Subjekt und Adressat des Erzählens (Wer erzählt wem?)" (ibid.: 84-89). Several seminal collections of essays likewise ignore this topic; see, e.g., Herman (1999) and Griinzweig/Solbach (1999). Cf., however, a recent paper by Fludernik

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Ansgar Nünning

The underlying thesis of this essay—that the phenomenon of metanarration has thus far been a lacuna in narrative theory—is actually confirmed by the few studies that are devoted to this topic or that just mention it in passing: they neither attempt to define the phenomenon of metanarration or to differentiate between the different types, nor do they consider which functions such expressions could fulfil in individual cases13. There is also a lack of studies examining the use of metanarrative forms in the works of individual authors or in given periods of literary history. This rough sketch of the neglect metanarration has suffered is the starting point of this essay, which will try to bridge the gap by staking out three aims: first of all, the terms 'metanarration' or 'metanarrative comments of the narrator', which have only been used sporadically in narrative theory so far, will be defined. Next, some steps towards a typology and a poetics of metanarration will be presented (section 3) which can then serve as a basis for a survey of the changing functions of metanarrative expressions in English novels from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century (section 4). A short summary and a brief look at some of the points that future research might explore will complete this article (section 5). 2. On the definition of 'metanarration' or 'metanarrative comments' Although the terms 'metanarration' or 'metanarrative comments' have been used in some narratological studies14, they have not become common or widespread categories of narrative theory or literary studies, let alone household words of narratology15. There are arguably two reasons for this:

14

(2003), which is partly a rejoinder to my earlier articles on the topic (see A. Nünning [2001a], [2001b]) and which elaborates on several of the topics addressed in this essay. The only exception to this is the subchapter by Prince (1982: 115-128) mentioned above, who also reflects on the functions of metanarrative passages. Cf., e.g. Genette (1980: 228, 255), Hamon (1977), Bonheim (1982: 13), Prince (1982: 115ff), Prince (1987: 51), A. Nünning (1989: 120-121, 147-148, 156-157, 160-161, 165-166, 250-251, 308), Fludernik (1993: 443), Madsen/Madsen (1995), A. Nünning (1997: 340-341), Scheffel (1997: 46ff.), Cutter (1998), and A. Nünning (2000), (200 la). Bonheim (1982: 13) offers a brief definition of the term 'metanarrative'; cf. also Prince (1982: 115-128). On the wide variety of seemingly related terms for various forms of self-reflexive narratives and metafictional techniques, cf. Scheffel (1997: 46-^7). Fludernik (2003) discusses the differences between the English and German usages of the terms 'metanarrative' and 'metafictional' and their derivatives in detail.

On Metanarrative

15

firstly, the term 'metafiction' is so widely used in English that forms of metanarration tend to be subsumed under this umbrella, and while 'metanarrative' is common as an adjective, the appropriate noun traditionally used is 'metafiction' and not 'metanarrative' or 'metanarration'. Secondly, in the few contributions in which the term 'metanarrative' is used at all, it is generally perceived as an English equivalent of 'grand recit' (sensu Lyotard) and thus as synonymous with 'master narrative'16. The rather shabby and contradictory treatment of different forms of metanarratives is indicated by the fact that in the English translation of Genette's "Discours du recit" (1972), Narrative Discourse (1980), the term 'metanarrative' appears in two quite different senses: On the one hand, it refers to the phenomenon of narrative embedding and to narratives on a hierarchically lower level: "[T]he metanarrative is a narrative within the narrative"17. On the other hand, Genette and his translator both use the term as an unspecific umbrella term to thematize the 'internal organization' of the text, i.e. for different forms of self-reflexive narration. Whereas for Genette, 'narrative function' refers to the story, metanarrative expressions rather take the text itself as their reference point: "The second aspect is the narrative text, which the narrator can refer to in a discourse that is to some extent metalinguistic (metanarrative, in this case) to mark its articulations, connections, interrelationships, in short, its internal organisation"18. Genette thus explicitly limits the term 'metanarrative' to the narrator's "directing functions" (functions de regie)19, although the spectrum of metanarrative expressions is much broader in practice.

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The MLA bibliography offers about 30 entries on the term 'metanarrative', almost all of which, however, are not related to narratology in a strict sense. As representative of various other essays that use 'metanarrative' as an equivalent of grand recit and synonymous with 'master narrative"", cf. Hutcheon (1989/1996), who is only concerned with the "incredulity toward metanarratives" typical of postmodernism and who uses the term synonymously with "grand totalizing master narrative" (ibid.: 262). Genette (1980: 228 n. 41). In the French original, however, Genette (1972: 239 n. 1) uses the term 'metarecit': "le metarecit est un recit dans le recit". Genette (1980: 255). "Le second [aspect du recit] est le texte narrative, auquel le narrateur peut se referer dans un discours en quelque sorte metalinguistique (metanarratif en I'occurrence) pour en marquer les articulations, les connexions, les interrelations, bref 1 Organisation interne" (Genette [1972: 261-262]). Genette (1980: 255).

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In most cases, moreover, no clear distinction is made between metanarration and metafiction20, although these are in fact two very different phenomena: the first concerns the narrator's reflections on the discourse or the process of narration, the second refers to comments on the fictionality of the narrated text or of the narrator. Metanarration and metafiction have one point in common—namely, that they are both related to forms of literary self-referentiality; however, these two types of narrative selfreflexivity differ considerably, and this point has tended to be overlooked in all typologies so far21. Therefore, the widely used umbrella term 'metafiction' not only needs to be elaborated22, but a clear distinction also has to be made between metanarration and other forms of self-reflexive narration. Following Wolfs definition of metafiction as a form of discourse which makes the recipient aware of the fictionality (in the sense of imaginary reference and/or constructedness) of the narrative23, it becomes clear that the term cannot be put on a par with 'metanarration'. The latter refers more to those forms of self-reflexive narration in which aspects of narration (and not the fictionality of the narrated) become the subject of the narratorial discourse. Moreover, whereas metafiction can by definition only appear in the context of fiction, types of metanarration can also be found in many non-fictional narrative genres and media. Metanarrative interventions may result in a destruction of aesthetic illusion, if they disclose the fictionality of the characters at the same time; this, however, does not alter the basic theoretical difference between metanarration and metafiction.

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Cf, e.g. the following definition of 'metafiction', which is very misleading because it actually describes the term 'metanarration': "Metafiktion liegt immer dann vor, wenn das Erzählen zum Gegenstand des Erzählens wird und damit seinen unbewußten oder 'selbstverständlichen' Charakter einbüßt" (Löffler et al. [1974/2001: 113]). Elsewhere in the same introduction, the authors refer to "modern anmutenden Techniken von Selbstreflexivität und Metanarration" (ibid.: 153), however, without defining the term 'Metanarration'. The most comprehensive typology of literary self-reflexivity to date can be found in Wolf (2001). Even though metanarrative is alluded to several times (cf. ibid.: 56, 70-71), it is not discussed as a category in its own right. On a more detailed subdifferentiation, cf. Wolf (1993), (2001) as well as Scheffel (1997: 48): "[Ijnsofem ist der Begriff der narrativen Selbstreflexion schon a priori von dem der 'Metafiktion' zu unterscheiden." Scheffel is right when he argues that metanarrative comments do not have to undermine the 'fiction of a factual narration' (ibid.: 58). Cf. Wolf (1993), (2001).

On Metanarrative

17

Narratological research has so far focused on self-conscious fiction and self-conscious narrators24, concentrating on metafictional forms of narrative self-reflexivity or self-referentiality. In contrast, metanarrative comments which do not destroy the illusion of a narrated world have hardly received any attention25. In principle, one may assume that metanarration, depending on the type and context, can just as well support the illusion of authenticity created in a text and in the act of narration. The novels written by Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, for instance, as well as quite a number of 'postmodern' novels—from William Boyd's The New Confessions (1987) to Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans (2000)—can testify to this. It is precisely the concept of narratorial illusionism, i.e. narrations evoking the illusion of a personified voice, suggesting the presence of a speaker or narrator, which I have explicated and defined elsewhere26, that renders obvious that metanarrative expressions do not have to disturb the aesthetic illusion; rather, they can serve to create a different type of illusion by accentuating the act of narration, thus triggering a different strategy of naturalization, viz. what Fludernik has felicitously called "the frame of storytelling"27. In contrast to the widespread mingling of metanarration and metafiction, then, one must be aware that metanarrative comments are a distinct form of narratorial utterances displaying a variety of textual functions. This is also indicated by the entry in the one single specialist encyclopaedia of narratology, in which the term 'metanarrative' is defined as follows: metanarrative. About narrative; describing narrative. A narrative having (a) narrative as (one of) its topic(s) is (a) metanarrative. More specifically, a narrative referring to itself and to those elements by which it is constituted and•}o communicated, a narrative discussing itself, a self-reflexive narrative, is metanarrative .

Those commentaries and reflections which explicitly address aspects of narration in a self-reflexive manner can thus be subsumed under the term 24 25

26 27 28

Cf. Booth (1952). This differentiation is also at least implicitly made by Chatman (1978: 248): "A basic dichotomy has suggested itself between discourse comments that do or do not undercut the fabric of the fiction. The former have come to be called 'self-conscious' narration." On self-conscious fiction, cf., e.g. Alter (1975), Hutcheon (1984), Waugh (1984), and Wolf (1993). Cf. Nunning (2000), (2002). Fludernik (1996: 341). Prince (1987: 51).

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Ansgar Manning

'metanarrative expressions'29. Although such comments are detached from the narrated world, they still do not possess a high degree of generality since they refer to one specific object, i.e. the act of narrating. In metanarrative expressions, a narrator can discuss questions of literary production or aesthetic problems, or s/he can even foreground the process of narration itself. Metanarrative functions are dominant in those expressions of a narrator in which attention is drawn to the narrative functions30. It thus becomes clear that the phenomenon of metanarration cannot be restricted to the narrator's 'directing function', and that it has to be distinguished from metafiction. Directing functions, flashforwards and flashbacks, as well as other metanarrative utterances of the narrator do not just lead to a higher degree of self-reflexivity; they also foreground the act of narrating. Since such self-reflexive comments can be defined according to their reference to the act of narration, they make the reader realize that what s/he is dealing with is a narrative. It is precisely an accumulation of such metanarrative expressions, which Fludernik calls "a deliberate metanarrative celebration of the act of narration," that helps to create the illusion of a 'teller', a personalized voice serving as a narrator: "This reading strategy may be actively encouraged by the text if the self-reflexive or metanarrative mode is a prominent feature ofthat novel"31. In contrast to Genette's limiting of the term 'metanarrative' to narratorial 'directing functions', one can assume that all comments referring to the narrative process or to one of its aspects will have a metanarrative character. Not only statements referring to the process of narrating are metanarrative, but the narrator's references to his or her communication with the narratee on the discourse level also have metanarrative character: "The overt narrator [...] can comment both on the content of the narration (story world) and on the narrating function itself; the address to a narratee 29

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31

According to his basic differentiation between story und discourse, Chatman (1978: 248ff.) refers to such metanarrative comments of the narrator as "commentary on the discourse": "'Self-conscious' narration is a term recently coined to describe comments on the discourse rather than the story" (ibid.: 228). For a more precise definition, see Prince (1982: 115ff.). For a similar definition, cf. Bonheim (1982: 13): "For works of literature contain some elements outside the space/time continuum of the fictional world, including titles, mottoes, prefaces, postscripts, reflections of the author or narrator concerning his literary endeavours, and addresses to the reader. I shall call such elements metanarrative." Fludernik (1996: 275,278).

On Metanarrative

19

is part of this metanarrative performance"32. All narratorial functions relating to the mediation, i.e. comments which refer primarily to the act of narration or the communication situation on the discourse level, are therefore 'metanarrative' in a wider sense. On the basis of these definitions, it seems reasonable to argue that not all forms of self-reflexive narration should be called 'metanarrative'33. A procedure like mise en abyme, for example, is self-reflexive, but not metanarrative. The same holds true for all those forms of literary selfreflexivity which Scheffel subsumes under the term 'mirroring'34. Rather, the term 'metanarration' or 'metanarrative' is only appropriate when the act of narrating or factors of the process of narration are discussed. Comments with dominantly metanarrative functions are thus to be distinguished from metalinguistic comments35, in which attention is focussed on the language itself or on the polysemy of words36. Unlike metalinguistic comments, metanarrative statements are characterized by the fact that the narrator reflects on the process of narration. In contrast to the widespread equation of metanarration with metafiction or metalinguistic comments, Lanser uses the category ''narrative self-consciousness''' in the sense of narrative self-reflexivity or metanarration: "We can posit a succeeding continuum of diminishing self-consciousness of the narrative act"37. According to the model she puts forward, different levels of intensity of narrative self-reflexivity can be graded on a scale in which the poles represent a well-defined level of "narrative self-consciousness" and "narrative unconsciousness" (which she defines as "narrators who show 32

Fludernik( 1993: 443). " Cf. also Hempfer (1982: 136), who explicitly limits the term 'autoreflexivity' to immediate self-reflexivity concerning comments on the 'narrative discourse'. On a differentiation between metanarrative utterances and other forms of self-reflective narrative, cf. also Prince (1982: 117-118), Scheffel (1997), and the section on "Models of Meta-ization" in Fludernik (2003). The most comprehensive and detailed discussion of forms of literary self-reflexivity can be found in Wolf (1993), (2001). 34 Scheffel (1997: 54ff.). Cf. Roman Jakobson's (1960) model of verbal communication, in which he distinguishes six functions of language, among them the metalinguistic function. For a systematic attempt to integrate Jakobson's model with the various functions of the narrator, including metanarrative utterances, cf. Nunning (1989: 124), (1997: 339ff, esp. the model on page 342). 16 Metalinguistic commentary can have an implicitly metanarrative character, but the differentiation between metalinguistic and metanarrative comments is not sufficiently obvious in Prince (1982: 121). 37 Lanser (1981: 176,177).

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not the slightest awareness of a narratee or a communicative context"38), respectively. VI

s

I

· A la recherche du temps perdu

This rather complex table calls for a number of remarks. One is that, when a given narrative work appears as an example of a type of viewpoint, this does not mean that this viewpoint is kept up throughout the text, or even in all the passages dealing with the type of object concerned. The most typical illustration of this choice of viewpoint given to a type of narrator is that of a human consciousness in an anonymous narrative. In Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), the characters are often the object of a moral portrait, of psychological analysis, but they are also sometimes "shown from within" by means of interior monologue. This technique is used much more systematically by novelists such asWoolf or Faulkner, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) providing a

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particularly elaborate example of the "internal vision of human minds." The above table makes it clear that, like Toolan17, I basically distinguish two types of "focalizer" and two types of "focalized," although I do not understand the two types of focalizers in the same way. First and foremost, the "focalizer" (the subject of the viewpoint) is no other than the narrator, except in the remarkable case of the narrated monologue, where an anonymous narrator reports in free indirect speech the exact utterances of a character. In the second place, I distinguish between two types of "focalization" (viewpoint), as Toolan does ("external" and "internal"), although I do so in very different terms. Focalization is characterized by Toolan, not by its nature (a way of perceiving things), but by its source: the focalization is "from" a certain position (or "orientation"). It follows that "external" focalization occurs when its source is "outside the story." In other words, it characterizes the anonymous narrator, whom Genette already defined, not by its remarkable properties, but only by its position outside the story ("extradiegetic" position). Both authors overlook the extraordinary powers of the anonymous narrator who perceives things from any position he chooses to occupy in the fictitious world, and with the power of entering the minds of his characters. He is by no means bound to a given type of viewpoint—quite the opposite: he is the narrator who can perceive and describe either the appearance of a human being or the working of his mind. As for internal focalization (viewpoint), it does not in any way characterize a participant of the story who, like any human being, can only enjoy an external vision of things and an internal vision of his own mind, and in particular his memory. As regards the types of "focalized" (for us, the "object" of a viewpoint), I agree with Toolan in distinguishing two types: those which can only be viewed from outside (perceptible phenomena), and those which are the feelings and thoughts of characters. However, I must stress here a distinction which, to my knowledge, is rarely made: human minds can themselves be viewed from outside by an anonymous narrator who "knows" and "tells" us about them, but does not "show" their working. This is the case in James's novels, where the 17

Toolan (2001: 61).

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main characters' thoughts are described, analyzed, reported in the nonliteral indirect speech, but never reproduced. Thoughts and feelings can be viewed "from within" when the character's consciousness is given the floor and can express itself through interior monologue. In this case, the character's mind is both "focalized" (perceived by the penetrating eye of the anonymous narrator) and a "focalizer," since it expresses itself. As noted earlier, the object of the viewpoint is then itself a subject whose ideas, feelings and viewpoints are in their turn given expression. As a closing remark, I will stress once again the fact that viewpoints (or "visions") cannot be studied in themselves. Saying that they can be either external or internal is of limited interest in itself: in enunciative narratology, each type of viewpoint includes a subject and an object. Identifying a viewpoint involves answering the question: Who perceives what and how? The table above makes it clear, I hope, that, given a certain type of narrator and a certain type of object of the viewpoint, the nature of a viewpoint is thereby determined in most cases (hence, the arrows connecting the second and third columns). True, an author can occasionally choose to have an anonymous narrator describe the behavior of his characters without mentioning their motivations in any way, as is the case of Flaubert in Salammbo or Hammett in The Glass Key. Human beings are then treated simply as perceptible objects, although this particular choice is a very unusual one in fiction. There is no reason why this choice should not be made by an autobiographical narrator. It is in fact the case of at least one famous French novel, Albert Camus' L'Etranger (1942), in which the hero narrates his experiences without ever mentioning either his own motivations or what he may guess about the other characters' motivations. In this novel, the viewpoint can be defined as an "autobiographical narrator's external vision of himself," making it a new viewpoint to be added to the seven listed in the table above. The strict behaviorist description by the hero of his own actions and the absence of interest in people's psychology is of special literary interest, and can be related to Camus' favorite philosophical theme of the absurdity of human life. It also bears witness to the unique power of literary narration.

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The above analysis leads us to distinguish not three or five, but eight viewpoints. They are determined by relevant properties of the narrator (except for the case of interior monologues, where the narrator gives expression, in free reported speech, to a character's viewpoints) and those of the object of the viewpoint. Further viewpoints can be added, but this would require a change to the defining properties either of the narrator or of the object. For instance, the autobiographical narrator's mind could be endowed with the superhuman power of penetrating other minds, but this would require positing an internal vision of all minds under the heading "auto-biographical narrator (marvelous)." The essential point is that a narrator-centered narratology, working within the framework of Culioli's T.O.E., provides us with rigorously determined linguistic criteria for defining and exploring viewpoints.

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References Austen, Jane 1952 [1813] Pride and Prejudice (London: Everyman's Library). Austin, John L. 1962 How to do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford UP). Bal, Mieke 1977 [1975] "Narration et focalisation. Pour une theorie des instances du recit," in Narratologie. Les instances du recit, 21-58 (Paris: Klincksieck). 1997 Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd edition (1s1 edition 1985) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Banfield, Ann 1982 Unspeakable Sentences. Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Bennett, Arnold 1975 [1910] Clayhanger (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Benveniste, Emile 1966 Problemes de linguistique generate. Bibliotheque des Sciences Humaines (Paris: Gallimard). Bouscaren, Jeanine 1992 Initiation a une grammaire de l'enonciation (Paris: Ophrys). Bouscaren, Jeanine / Chuquet, Jean 1987 Grammaire et textes anglais (Paris: Ophrys). Bouscaren, Jeanine / Chuquet, Jean / Danon-Boileau, Laurent 1992 Introduction to a Linguistic Grammar of English. An Utterer-Centered Approach (Paris: Ophrys). Bouveresse, Jacques 1992 "Fait, fiction et diction," in Cahiers du Musee National d'Art Moderne, 41: 15-32. Cohn, Dorrit 1978 Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP). Culioli, Antoine 1990 Pour une linguistique de l'enonciation, vol.1 (Paris: Ophrys). 1999 Pour une linguistique de l'enonciation, vol. 2 (Paris: Ophrys). 1999 Pour une linguistique de l'enonciation, vol. 3 (Paris: Ophrys). Danon-Boileau, Laurent 1982 Produire le flctif (Paris: Klincksieck). Danon-Boileau, Laurent / Duchet, Jean-Louis 1993 Operations enonciatives et interpretation de l'enonce (Paris: Ophrys). Dickens, Charles 1961 [1850] David Copperfield (London: Collins). Eco, Umberto 1979 The Role of the Reader. Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Advances in Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana UP).

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Genette, Gerard 1972 "Discours du recit: essai de methode," in Figures HI. Collection Poetique, 67-282 (Paris: Editions du Seuil). 1983 Nouveau discours du recit. Collection Poetique (Paris: Editions du Seuil). 1991 Fiction et diction. Collection Poetique (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Grellet, Francois 1996 A Handbook of Literary Terms (Paris: Hachette). Groussier, Marie-Line / Riviere, Claude 1996 Les mots de la linguistique. Lexique de linguistique enunciative (Paris: Ophrys). Hammett, Dashiell 1989 [1931] The Glass Key (New York: Vintage). Hemingway, Ernest 1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: C. Scribners Sons). Jakobson, Roman 1960 "Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 350-377 (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press). James, Henry 1950 [1903] The Ambassadors (London: Dent & Sons). Kindt, Tom / Müller Hans-Harald (eds.) 2003 What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Narratologia, 1 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Kristeva, Julia, et al. (eds.) 1975 Langue, discours, societe. Pour Emile Benveniste (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Lehman, D. / Boone, A. (eds.) 1998 Du percevoir au dire. Hommage a A. Joly (Paris: L'Harmattan). Lintvelt, Jaap 1989 [1981] Essai de typologie narrative: le "point de vue". Theorie et analyse (Paris: Corti). Lubbock, Percy 1973 [ 1921 ] The Craft of Fiction (New York: Viking Press). Murdoch, Iris 1962 Under the Net (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Pier, John 2003 "On the Semiotic Parameters of Narrative: A Critique of Story and Discourse," in What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, Narratologia 1: 73-97 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Pouillon, Jean 1946 Temps et Roman (Paris: Gallimard). Proust, Marcel 1987 [1913/27] A la recherche du temps perdu. Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard).

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Rabatel, Rene 1997 One histoire du point de vue. Recherches textuelles 2 (Metz: Universite de Metz). Rivara, Annie / Rivara, Rene 1990 "Aspects illocutoires des monologues de theatre," in Sigma (Publications de l'Universite de Provence), 14: 27—44. Rivara, Rene 1998 "Pour une approche enonciative du monologue interieur," in Du percevoir au dire. Hommage a A. Joly, edited by D. Lehman and A. Boone, 399-410 (Paris: L'Harmattan). 2000 La langue du redt. Introduction a la narratologie enonciative (Paris: l'Harmattan). Sarraute, Nathalie 1946 L 'ere du soupcon (Paris: Gallimard).p 1959 Le Planetarium (Paris: Gallimard). Searle, John 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge UP). 1975 "The Logical Status of Fiction," in New Literary History 6: 319-332. Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.) 1960 Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press). Simonin, Jenny 1975 "Pour une typologie des discours," in Langue, discours, societe. Pour Emile Benveniste, edited by Julia Kristeva, 85-121 (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Todorov, Tzvetan 1968 "Poetique," in Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme?, edited by Fra^ois Wahl, et al., 97-166 (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Toolan, Michael 2001 Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. 2nd edition (1st edition 1988) (London and New York: Routledge). Vitoux, Pierre 1982 "Le jeu de la focalisation," in Poetique 51: 538-568. Wahl, Francois (ed.) 1968 Qu 'est-ce que le structuralisme? (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Woolf, Virginia 1994 [1925] Mrs. Dalloway (Oxford: Oxford UP).

Luc HERMAN, BART VERVAECK (Antwerp, Brussels)

Focalization between Classical and Postclassical Narratology In 2002, almost twenty years after the publication of Narrative Fiction, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan added a postscript to her book, which had come to be regarded as one of the best summaries of classical, structuralist narratology. Under the heading "Towards...," she comments on the move toward new forms of narratology, called "postclassical" since the publication of David Herman's Narratologies (1999). She highlights various shifts involved in that move: from text to context, from closed systems to open and dynamic processes, from objective text properties to readerly constructions, and so on. There are many ways to label this transition, but taking our cue from Rimmon-Kenan, we would like to refer to it as "an attempt to reinstate representation and rehumanization"1. The term "representation" admits that a narrative text may in some way represent social reality after all, a view that structuralists regarded as a form of damnable referentialism. "Rehumanization" embraces the anthropomorphic approach to narrative rejected by classical narratology. On the whole, classical narratology tries to live up to a positivist view on science, banning subjective and human interventions as much as possible, whereas postclassical narratology tries to take into account the subjectivity and humanization involved in any theory. However, this is not a clear-cut dichotomy, for while the structuralists may have dreamed of an objective theory of narrative, their concepts and methods were partly anthropomorphic and referentialist. They adhered to human centers in a text, such as characters and narrators, and they bestowed human psychology and epistemology on these centers. They wondered how reliable a narrator might be, or how much knowledge a character might have of the world he or she was living in. When dis1

Rimmon-Kenan (2002: 143).

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cussing time and space in a narrative text, they fell back on common sense notions such as chronology and three-dimensional space, thus referring the spatiotemporal organization of a text to common forms of organization in social reality. In other words: objective classical narratology embraced quite a lot of subjective and representational postclassical traits, without acknowledging them2. The reverse holds as well. Postclassical narratologies still use a lot of classical terms and methods. In general, this looks like a search for legitimacy3. No matter how much they stress ideology or readerly intervention, most postclassical narratologies still cling to some form of objective textual power, supposedly informing and legitimizing their interpretations. A brief look at postclassical narrative ethics will illustrate this. Adam Newton may expand the classical levels of narrative and narration by adding a level for the reader, but he still considers readerly response to be a form of responsibility toward the text. He may regard the narrative text as a person making an appeal to the reader, but his humanist metaphor (inspired by the philosophy of Levinas) does not do away with the idea of a text as a force influencing the reader. Quite a powerful force, too, as Newton talks about "the imperative aspect of literature"4. Along the same lines, Wayne Booth (1998) considers narrative texts as would-be friends who exert a persuasive, sometimes compelling force upon the reader. Reader-oriented postclassical narratologists such as Ross Chambers, James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz recognize the freedom of the reader, while still maintaining the influencing power of the text. According to Chambers (1984), the text exerts its "authority through seduction." Rabinowitz (1998) interprets the work of the reader as a form of rule-following behavior, more or less structured by the rules imposed by the text. And Phelan (1996) regards the text as a polyphonic weave of voices that enter into a multi-voiced dialogue with the reader. For these authors, human characteristics inform the theoretical presentation of the interaction between text and reader. Many postclassical narratologies use subjective, anthropomorphic metaphors to develop a theory about the interaction between text and reader, with texts beA critique of anthropomorphic and referentialist traits prevailing in classical narratology can be found in Gibson (1996). We have elaborated this point at some length in the third chapter of Herman and Vervaeck (2005). Newton (1995: 2If.).

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coming friends, voices, seducers, and so on. If texts are humanized in this way, we would like to ask to what extent they can still be studied as texts in the classical, structuralist sense of that word. That is: how can texts impose their supposedly formal and structural characteristics if they are, right from the start, regarded as non-formal? If one starts from a non-classical view of narrative, how can one use classical arguments? In the following, we will try to answer these questions with reference to focalization. We have selected focalization because it exemplifies what we consider to be the two main strands in the shift from classical to postclassical narratology, i.e. rehumanization and representation (or referentialism as it is sometimes negatively called). As we will show, the debate between Gerard Genette and Mieke Bal on the topic of focalization reflects the difference between a strictly objectivist view on the text and a more flexible, subjectivist interpretation. In this respect, focalization clearly shows that classical narratology carried the seeds of postclassical rehumanization in itself. Moreover, focalization is directly linked to the problem of representation, since it is regarded as the means by which the reader gains access to the narrative world of characters and events. If a character acts as focalizer, he or she presents the events to the reader via his or her (i.e. the focalizer's) perception, feelings, and thoughts. He or she provides the reader with an image of the narrative world. As we will show, this image is directly linked to the metaphorics of the narratologist (e.g. the metaphor of the text as seducer or persuader) and the activity of the reader. In our discussion of focalization from the viewpoint of rehumanization and representation, we would not like to stray too far from the actual literary text and from the practical narratological interpretation of that text. Therefore, we will make use of two gender-informed readings of two different texts, Robyn Warhol's reading (1996) of Persuasion (1818) by Jane Austen, and Susan Suleiman's reading (1986) of Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (1928). The choice is not arbitrary, for not only do these analyses concern themselves with focalization, they both highlight the rehumanization and representation of postclassical narratology by focusing on the interaction of text and reader and by stressing the power-relations in this interaction. The confrontation of two widely different literary texts is a good way to address the question of the power texts may exert on readers: seductive persuasion playing upon readerly expectations and desires, or brutal force

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disrupting those expectations and desires. In our own reading of Story of the Eye, we will show that focalization is intimately connected with the imagery central to the story: the network of metaphors and metonyms—in our view the two basic tropes of any text—opens up the narrative world to the reader, while at the same time it reflects the experiences of the characters. This leads us to a broader view on focalization that holds the middle between classical and postclassical definitions of the term, enabling us to answer some, if not all, of the questions above. Focalization in classical narratology is a problematic issue. Gerard Genette considered it a textual device, limiting the reader's access to what is going on in the narrative. This access could be provided by a character, in which case Genette talked about internal focalization, or by a narrator who is not a character, in which case he talked about external focalization5. Mieke Bal elaborated this scheme by making a distinction between the subject and the object of focalization, the first called focalizer, the latter focalized object6. Genette did not exactly approve of this revision, which he considered "incompatible" with his conception of focalization. "For me, there is no focalizing or focalized character: focalized can be applied only to the narrative itself, and if focalizer applied to anyone, it could only be the person who focalizes the narrative—that is, the narrator"7. He is willing to link focalization with "person" (character and/or narrator), but he prefers to see this agent as a textual property of "the narrative itself." This implies a rejection of the two human factors that might come into play here: the agent in the text is devoid of human characteristics, and the reader's activity is discarded in favor of devices that are supposedly inherent in the text. Since Bal distinguished between the subject and the object of focalization in her discussion with Genette, it is not surprising that she evolved away from his view and went on to rehumanize focalization, a position which emerged in the first edition of Narratology (which appeared in Dutch in 1978). Later, she tried to compensate for what she called "the absence of the subject in Genettian narratology" by invesAs a third possibility, Genette (1980: 189), (1988: 73-74) mentions zero focalization, in which case there is no obvious center of perception. For our argument, this possibility is not important. Bal (1997: 146-147). Genette (1988: 73).

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tigating the female subject in Biblical narratives8. In that effort, she defined the focalizer as the "cognitive subject" and the "ideological center" of the narrative9. This not only turns the focalizer into a human center, but it also links focalizing with a set of visual images such as "subject of vision," "image" and, more broadly, "worldview." Hence, many Biblical narratives, she found, do away with the female vision, representing female characters only through the eyes of males. Focalization, then, cannot be restricted to seeing, even though the importance of the visual act is not to be overlooked: "The question 'who sees', raised by Genette (1972) and from which he later distanced himself in a discussion (1982), thus has great pertinence"10. This pertinence is underscored by the shift from seeing to vision, world-view, and ideology, and it thus reflects the interdependence of representation and ideology. Focalization in Biblical texts is seen as representative of a certain world-view, and more specifically, of a view on women that can be correlated with prevailing views in social reality. In other words, focalization is closely bound up with ideology, which we tentatively define as a vision on reality and humankind implying a hierarchy and power-relations between at least two different poles". In this case, the poles would be male and female, the hierarchy stressing the male as subject and the female as object. Thus, Bal moves further away from Genette's initial concept of focalization. A concept that was intended to pertain only to textual traits is humanized and then turned into an ideological process of representation. This evolution is not limited to Bal, nor has it been brought about by her, but rather reflects the general shift from classical to postclassical narratology. No doubt the rehumanization of focalization also derives from the pre-structuralist point of view tradition, exemplified by Norman Friedman. As Jaap Lintvelt (1989) has shown, this tradition typically links perception to human centers, stressing view and vision, sometimes even ideology. It exists in many forms and varieties, including early structuralist versions by the Russian Formalists and Czech Structuralists. Whether inspired by pre-structuralist point of view or by Bal (1986: 15). We quote and translate the original French edition of Bal (1986). This book was translated in a thoroughly revised version (reducing and abridging the theoretical sections) as Bal (1987). 9 Ibid.: 73, 77. j° Ibid.: 79. For an excellent overview of the various meanings of the term, see Hawkes (1996).

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the recent rehumanization and representation of narrative theory, approaches to focalization seem to be moving away from the objective structuralist view on narrative texts. So, the question we raised earlier crops up again: to what extent can such a postclassical view still make use of focalization as a textual argument for interpretation? Let us look at Warhol and Suleiman reading. One characteristic that stands out in both readings is the stress on the corporeal. Where Bal spoke of focalizers as subjects of cognition, they now seem to be primarily subjects of sensation. In her "genderconscious look at Austen's management of focalization," Warhol focuses on "the heroine's access to knowledge (through the act of looking) and to pleasure (through textual consciousness of the body)" 12 . In her attempt "to understand the ideological aims and implications" of Bataille and of various Bataille-readings, Suleiman starts with the observation that Bataille's pornographic transgressions of boundaries are basically boundary-breaking moves from the corporeal to the textual, involving "transgression from the realm of experience—whose equivalent, in fiction, is representation—to the realm of words, with a corresponding shift in the roles and importance accorded to the signifier and the signified"13. Both Warhol and Suleiman adapt focalization to the postclassical rehumanization and representation we have discussed above, linking textual with bodily experience, thus turning the text into a kind of "corpus," a metaphoric representation of the body. The combination of text and body is in both cases regarded as a violent form of confrontation. Thus, Warhol contends that "the novelist subjects her heroine's body to a kind of textual violence" which reflects the violence performed on the female body by androcentric focalization (24). Male dominance results in all sorts of polarities such as external appearance versus intrinsic value, seeing and being seen, public and private. The female body is dominated by the male look, which is interested only in appearances, will not tolerate females actively looking, and relegates female feelings and perceptions to private space. The female body, described metaphorically, is inscribed by this dominant way of seeing, thereby becoming a vulnerable, painful body. In fact, pain, sensation, and agitation are words the narrator often uses

13

Warhol (1966: 22). Further references to this source will be given in the text. Suleiman (1986: 120).

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to describe the heroine's feelings, with the result that female focalization is "the site of much discomfort." The heroine's "physical discomforts usually result from what she must—as focal character—see or overhear by being present in situations that do not directly involve her" (35f.). By turning a female character, Anne Elliot, into the heroine and central focalizer of her novel, Austen seeks to counter male dominance and redress the balance by inverting the traditional dualisms. This would gradually relieve the pain and lead to "Anne's own increasing comfort with female bodily experience" (37) and finally to the "happy-ending closure in her sexual union with Wentworth," the man she loves (34). Now, what are the textual arguments for this interpretation of focalization as the bearer of ideology and the site of an emancipatory evolution? Does the use of female focalizers automatically mean that a female vision and ideology is turned into text? And are focalizers necessarily centers of power and empowerment, merely by their act of seeing, perceiving, feeling, and thinking? Warhol's textual argumentation begins with the questions also raised by Genette: "Who is speaking? and Who is seeing?" (24). The answer is easy: Persuasion combines an extradiegetic narrator with an internal focalizer. The narrator, who never appears as a character in the story, uses Anne as the prime center of perception. In his wording, he stays so close to Anne's perception that it would almost seem the reader is sitting inside her head. There is nothing out of the ordinary about this form of narration and focalization, described by Dorrit Cohn as traditional consonant psycho-narration14. How can such a wellestablished device become the bearer of a critical, mildly revolutionary ideology? Thousands of ideologically uncritical novels have been written using precisely the same arrangement of narrator and focalizer. Warhol complicates or elaborates this traditional arrangement by confronting "the notion of 'gaze' as it has been developed in film studies" with "the look." The gaze, she says, "occurs in the realm of the 'extradiegetic,' outside the world of the story, whereas the second [the look] can be located inside, as something exchanged among characters 'intradiegetically'" (25f.). According to her, Austen combines the gaze with the look because the extradiegetic narrator does not insist on his own perceptions (gaze), but stands back to let Anne's per14

Cohn (1983: 21-57).

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ceptions (look) come to the fore: "When a novel is as carefully focalized through one character as is Persuasion, the gaze imitates that of the focal character; in this novel, then, the extradiegetic gaze and Anne's intradiegetic look are often identical" (26). In this way, Austen would counter the male-dominated tradition of the sentimental novel in which women are only looked at and men are the active, feeling instances. The traditional woman as an object to be wept over by men is replaced by a female heroine actively looking and interpreting the scenes she is perceiving. Anne is not only the main character who is always "in the picture," that is, visible; she is also the crucial focalizer. Warhol concludes "that Anne's gaze, as well as her visibility within the text, are sources of unprecedented power for the heroine" (27). Before we pursue the argument, we would like to indicate that Warhol somewhat overdoes the exclusivity of Anne's focalization. Many scenes—particularly those where Anne is not present—are focalized through other characters or via the narrator. Warhol seems to regard these as secondary focalizations embedded in the hierarchically higher perceptions of Anne. For instance, in the first chapter, the narrator is talking about Anne's father, Walter Elliot. This man gives his view on his daughter. Anne is no longer beautiful in his eyes and he thinks she will never find a suitable, that is rich, spouse. Interestingly, sentences such as "Her father had found little to admire in her" and "he had never indulged much hope"15 are read by Warhol as though they were focalized primarily through Anne: "Since Anne is the focal character, I read this passage as her understanding of her father's view of her appearance" (23). There is no textual evidence for the suggestion that this passage would reflect Anne's understanding of her father's image of her. If the sentences quoted by Warhol are internally focalized at all, the center of perception is Walter, not Anne. The description appears at the beginning of the book before Anne has been introduced as focal character, and in general the expose is externally focalized—i.e. perceived by the narrator, who sometimes allows internal focalization when he makes way for the character's (i.e. Walter's) perceptions. One might even argue that in such instances there is consonance between the gaze of the narrator and the look of Sir Walter Elliot, although, admittedly, this consonance is restricted to fewer passages than the consonance between narrator and heroine, despite the fact that the narrator some15

Austen (2003: 7).

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times clearly disapproves of Walter Elliot, as when he observes: "Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character"16. This exaggeration of Anne's focalizing presence and capabilities is important for Warhol's argument to stick: "By making Anne the focal character, Austen's text grants her the power to read others' looks, a power that this text [...] genders as specifically feminine" (27). First, this argument is not generally valid: focal characters may be powerless, unable to see through events or to understand things they perceive. For this reason, the textual status of the focalizing instance is no guarantee for its ideological and epistemological functioning. Second, if this argument is restricted to Persuasion, it does hold on the whole, but it needs some amending. Anne sometimes fails to read others' looks, as Warhol admits. Moreover, to call the power to read beneath the surface "specifically feminine" is simplifying matters a bit. That power does not seem to be possessed by other female characters, and the desire to stick to superficial appearances is referred to as stereotypically feminine in the novel itself. Interestingly, this happens when the narrator is talking about Walter's vanity: "Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did"17. Warhol comments: "Sir Walter occupies a stereotypically feminine viewing position" (28). This, to us, suggests that femininity is not restricted to female characters. To call Anne's power "specifically feminine," then, is dubious on two counts: it does not hold for all female characters and it does not even hold for feminine characters, since feminine does not completely coincide with female. What we said about the focalizer also goes for the character: his or her status (in this case: Anne's gender) does not automatically lead to a specific ideological or epistemological functioning18. Warhol sometimes admits this as when, for instance, she suggests that class-distinctions are even stronger than gender: workingclass women are not consciously perceived by the better classes (even Anne fails to notice domestic servants), and they never become actively perceiving agents. Perhaps power is not just or not even primarily gender-informed. Perhaps it is part of a complex structure that should not be reduced to one strand. And certainly, as a textual, narratological device, a particular type of focalization is in itself no argument for a particular type of ideology or knowledge. 16 17 18

Ibid.: 6. ,,. ,

Ibid. We borrow the term "status" from Lanser (1981: 149-174).

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More generally, this suggests that there is no compelling link between, on the one hand, the classical concept of focalization as a purely textual device, and, on the other, a postclassical reading that insists on ideology and power-relations. Put simply, ideology and powerrelations do not spring from textual focalization ä la Genette. Postclassical narratologists may therefore have to broaden the concept of focalization if they are to use it as an argument for their readings. We think this broadening typically takes the form of a metaphoric and/or metonymic interpretation of the supposedly neutral structuralist term of focalization. In other words, the concept is read figuratively instead of literally. A metonymic reinterpretation would, for instance, focus on certain parts of the concept, such as seeing, to the detriment of other forms of perception, resulting in a shift from whole to part. This metonymic narrowing might then be expanded metaphorically by interpreting seeing as a form of vision, a world-view, an ideology. Or it might be interpreted, equally metaphorically, as a meeting between textual and corporeal domains. Something of all this can be found in Warhol's elaboration of focalization as a corporeal form of language. In the world of Anne Elliot, verbal language cannot be trusted, for it is a means of disguising and hiding things. To understand things, it is necessary look and observe rather than to listen. By careful observation, one may see through the disguise, leading not only to deeper insight, but also to better understanding and thus to a superior form of communication. Looking, says Warhol, "comes to function for Austen's last heroine as an alternative language, a means of communication without recourse to words" (23); "she looks to communicate and to understand" (31). Looking and being looked at replace talking and being talked to. While the male look does not go any further than superficial appearances, the female look penetrates the surface and deduces a person's interior world from the way he or she looks. This way of looking "functions as a feminine form of language," in which "bodies are not merely objects but are signs to be read" (31). Significantly, female power is related to penetration, a stereotypically male activity. The feminine language of the look is a superior alternative to the male language of the word: "The feminine look, then, has the power to penetrate male desire; the masculine character must resort to words to find out what he needs to know about the woman's desire"; this "shifts the balance of the power of reading looks to the feminine side"

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(32), allowing for a combination of poles that are normally kept apart: interior and exterior, private and public, feeling and language. And this, ultimately, is what enables Anne to shift from a vulnerable focalizer who finds bodily experiences painful to an empowered focalizer who embraces the pleasures of bodily experiences. We see here that focalization first metonymically restricts the concept to seeing and looking, and then metaphorically expands this seethrough look to a symbolic diagnosis (of male superficiality) and to a deeper form of communication: the feminine language that links body and words. One interesting consequence of this situation is that, paradoxically, it produces a dichotomy between (male) talking and (female) looking, while at the same time it rests on the consonance between narrating (the gaze mentioned above) and seeing (the look). As a focalizer, Anne is instilled with power, on the one hand through consonance with the narrating instance, and on the other hand through dissonance in relation to the language used by male characters. Seeing and talking are on one level consonant, on another dissonant, and this paradox reflects the ambiguous relations between words and perceptions, language and body. On a theoretical level, we feel this ambiguity reflects the recent intermingling of text and context, language and body, focalization and ideology. The penetrating look and the transformation of corporeal experience into a new language are not just feats performed by the character Anne, but also by the postclassical narratologist who turns focalization into a road to deeper understanding, and who does so by infusing language with corporeal desire and experience. The image of Anne Elliot is no doubt informed by the imagery suggested by Warhol, who turns seeing into a form of knowing and ideology. More generally, the image is influenced by the imagination of the narratologist who reads beneath the surface of Jane Austen's words. It may be that the type of focalization (as defined by Genette) can be diagnosed by sticking to textual clues, in this case leading to diagnosis of a consonance between the main internal focalizer and the extradiegetic narrator, but the meaning of this type of focalization must be construed by the narratologist. Whether a given interpretation is persuasive or not depends to a large extent upon the willingness of the narratologist's reader to entertain the chain of metaphors and metonyms used in the analysis. If this chain is found by the reader to be compelling, the look of the narratologist will be recognized as a deeper, more penetrating,

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and hence more powerful look than that of the superficial reader. If the chain fails to convince, the reader will not be persuaded, and may even feel abused by the deeper understanding and penetrating look sought by the narratologist. Brutalization is essential in Bataille's combination of body and language. The Bataille-readings that Susan Suleiman calls "textual"—and by this she means interpretations by Derrida, Barthes, Sontag and others—stress the metaphoric link between body and text. More specifically, they are predicated on "a metaphoric equivalence between the violation of sexual taboos and the violation of discursive norms that we associate with the theory of textuality"19. Bataille's writing violates the rules that give the narrative text its literary and self-contained status, doing away with the purity of the text and infusing it with impure bodily transgressions. His text can thus be called deconstruct!ve in the sense given to this word by Derrida: the text deconstructs its own purely textual structure. The phantasmal and political implications of this deconstruction are not covered by textual readings, but are rather borne out by interpretations that Suleiman calls "ultrathematic," and which are found in a number of highly critical gender readings. The disadvantage of these approaches is that they sometimes lose sight of textual and literary aspects, reducing form to content, imagery to image. Thus, one critic accuses Bataille of confirming and even reinforcing pornographic violence against the female body. According to Suleiman, this critic overlooks the textual ways in which Bataille presents that body, neglecting the "metaphoric and metonymic equation" between body parts and non-human things (metaphoric relation) or between various body parts (metonymic relation)20. A closer reading reveals that Bataille sometimes equates the female genitals with a jewel, sometimes with a face. As a result of such pervading imagery, the female body-image in Bataille's literary works is very ambiguous and not at all reducible to the onedimensional, stereotypical female image in pornography. In a third type of reading, called "thematic," Suleiman explains this ambiguity by linking it with the Oedipal desire which apparently informs Bataille's textual drive. His compulsive attempt to expose to his readers the obscene and sexual aspects of all body parts and func19 20

Suleiman (1986: 119). Ibid.: 126f.

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tions would thus seem to originate in an Oedipal blindness for the sexual aspects of the maternal body. Once lifted, this blindness turns into compulsive seeing and showing. In terms of focalization (not discussed explicitly by Suleiman but clearly implied in her Oedipal interpretation), this means that the penetrating look of the focalizer both literally and figuratively penetrates the body that should normally be covered so that transgression is not only a violation of the female body, but also of privacy, decency, and readerly expectations. If the penetrating look in Persuasion aimed at understanding and communication, the equally penetrating look in Story of the Eye seems to be aimed at the destruction of all sorts of limits, prohibitions, and prescriptions. As a textual argument for her thematic reading, Suleiman refers to the last chapter of Story of the Eye. In this chapter, the narrator tries to explain his compulsive pornographic writing and staring by referring to an incident in which his blind father shouted to the doctor who was in the next room with his (i.e. the father's) wife: "Doctor, let me know when you're done fucking my wife!"21. The narrator believes that "this sentence, which destroyed in one instant the demoralizing effects of a strict upbringing, left behind it a kind of constant obligation [...]: the necessity to continually find its equivalent in every situation in which I find myself and that is what explains, in large part, Story of the Eye"22. Suleiman concludes: "The recognition of the mother's body as female, and desirable [...] is thus designated as the source of the narrator's pornographic imagination. This, I think, might explain why in Bataille's fiction it is always a woman [...] in whose body the drama of transgression is played out"23. Pornographic imagination is thus combined with imagery and body-image. Strangely enough, Suleiman falls back on the male Oedipal desire as a compulsive force driving narrative development. She ends her analysis asking whether there is "a model of sexuality possible in our culture that would not necessarily pass through the son's anguished and fascinated perception of the duplicity of the mother's body" 24 . She expresses hope that such a non male-influenced model might be found, but she leaves the question unanswered. Bataille's paradoxical combination of seeing and blindness, transgressing and 22 23 24

Bataille (2001: 73). Further references to this work will be given in the text. Quoted by Suleiman (1986 : 130). Suleiman (1986: 130f.). Ibid.: 132.

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prohibiting, is, in our view, too complex to be reduced to some sort of Freudian deep structure. It is our aim to propose an alternative look at his so-called pornographic writing by analyzing focalization in Story of the Eye. The story is told by an extradiegetic and homodiegetic narrator, using the I-form to talk about things experienced by him a number of years previously. The focalizer is the younger I, i.e. the active character, not the older writer. It is only in the last chapter, entitled "Reminiscences" in French, that the writer emerges as a distinct voice25, as it is the focalizing character who prevails in the rest of the work. The phrasing stays so close to the experiences of the younger I that it seems as though the reader has direct access to that young man's mind, a situation which, in Cohn's terminology, can be characterized as consonant self-narration. Actually, both the consonance and the exclusivity of the focalizing center are more prominent than in Jane Austen's Persuasion, since almost everything is rendered through the thoughts and feelings of the young I, with the older I refraining from dissonant comment on those thoughts and feelings. Here again, we encounter a traditional form of narration and focalization, although the form cannot in and of itself be used as an argument for the transgressive and sometimes shocking nature of Bataille's narrative. To account for this, the concept of focalization needs to be elaborated into something more than a formal device. We will start with metonymic narrowing, scrutinizing the look of the I-character, and then go on to expand this look at the metaphoric and symbolic level. In Bataille's narrative, these two steps—metonymic narrowing and metaphoric broadening—are comparable to focalization in Austen as discussed by Warhol. At the same time, we will refer this elaboration back to the actual metaphors and metonyms present in the narrative, and as a result we will recover some aspects of the classical, textual approach. To simplify matters a bit, we would like to start from three basic aspects of focalization in this story: the gaze, the violent epiphany, and the obscene look. Taken together, they can be called the "apocalyptic look," a fourth aspect, forming the common denominator of the first three. When the last chapter stages the narrator as the writer of the story, it becomes clear that his writing rests on this apocalyptic form of Translated into English as "Coincidences" in Bataille (2001: 69). When necessary, we will refer to a recent French edition of the text: Bataille (1998).

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focalization. To be sure, these four ways of seeing—specific to Bataille's text—intermingle throughout the text, but for clarity's sake, it is convenient to treat them one by one. In general, the focalized feelings and thoughts in Story of the Eye are a combination of sadness and pleasure, horror and arousal. This combination is exemplified in the gaze, which has the onlooker standing transfixed with a mixture of terror and excitement. Both the witness of a terribly violent scene and the witness of a sexually exciting scene lose themselves in the spectacle and are turned into stone. Their eyes no longer move and neither do they. In the figure of the main character, these two witnesses melt into one. Thus, the I-character stands petrified when he loses himself in a long, staring look at Simone's vagina, "those heart-breaking regions, which Simone, in an abandon presaging only violence, allowed me to stare at hypnotically" (22). The focalizing subject seems to lose his force and activity, becoming a passive thing looked at. This transformation from looking to being looked at—and thus from subject to object—is elucidated at the end of the story, when Simone puts the eye of the dead priest into her vagina and the I-figure recognizes the eye of the dead Marcelle, for whose death he blames himself. "I even felt as if my eyes were bulging from my head, erectile with horror; in Simone 's hairy vagina, I saw the wan blue eye of Marcelle, gazing at me through tears of urine" (67). The erect eye, the eye of Simone, the priest, and Marcelle—all these images melt into one. Through his gaze, the onlooker is carried along by this chain of images, drawn into a web of strange coincidences. As Roland Barthes (1981) has shown, a basic metaphoric association between eye, egg, and testicle is elaborated through products of these three elements: tears, yolk, sperm, and urine. These products—metonymically related to the body parts by which they are produced—become metaphorically intertwined in an orgiastic combination of urinating, crying, and ejaculating. The gaze is a transfixed look at this network of equivalences, a network that reduces the looking subject to an object. The gaze not only intermingles activity with passivity, but also combines all other polarities so typical of Bataille's eroticism: joy and terror, desire and violence, lust and death, On the level of visual focalization, the gaze reflects the more general focalization of emotions and thoughts, all centering around the combination of sex and death. Just as the staring onlooker finds it impossible to regain control and to move away from the spectacle, so the I-character finds it

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impossible to distance himself from the almost bestial drives of Eros and Thanatos. As he is compelled to stare, he is forced to follow these drives. His erotic desire is equally a desire to be turned into stone and to die. When the I and Simone are staring at the sleeping Marcelle, they hope to be inert forever: "We didn't dare budge, and all we desired was for that unreal immobility to last as long as possible" (41). This link between the gaze and inertia is not merely a matter of visual and general focalization. It links up with the main events and themes of the story. Ultimately, the gaze is the look of the dead. For instance, the dead Marcelle has her eyes wide open, and this irritates and excites Simone, who urinates on the eyes. To her, "the open eyes were more irritating than anything else" (43)26. Sir Edmund replays this scene, replacing Marcelle with "a wax mannequin": "he had then laid the figure out on the floor and asked Simone to urinate on its face, on the open eyes, in the same position as she had urinated on the eyes of the corpse" (46)27. And when the priest dies, Simone "completely opened the eye" (65). Staring is a form of life-in-death, the visual symbol of a more general combination of dualistic poles. From the perspective of the network and the chain, we study focalization not merely as an activity pertaining to a clearly defined center (a character, for instance), but rather as the unfolding of a centerless chain of tropes. Traditionally, focalization is said to give the reader access to the narrative world through the prism of a character or narrator. In our view, however, this prism is constituted first and foremost by a network of tropes. To be sure, we do not do away with the importance of textual devices such as speech representation or narratorial stance, since these make up the actual form in which the network appears in the narrative. To the extent that this network is textual, our view aligns itself with the classical concept of focalization; however, to the extent that we broaden the center of experience and cognition, our view reflects newly-gained insights on focalization. Focalization gives the reader access to the narrative world by unfolding images that make up this world and that constitute the feelings The original here reads: "Surtout les yeux ouverts la crispaient." (Bataille [1998:

27

This is a long-winded and not really accurate translation, since the original states that the "same position" refers to the position of Marcelle's corpse, and not to that of Simone urinating. The French mentions a "mannequin etendu les yeux ouverts dans la position de Marcelle." (Bataille [1998: 142]).

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and thoughts central to it. Bataille's narrative is grounded in the gradual unfolding of the chain of tropes, and the reader is presented with the narrative by means of these tropes. He or she is therefore limited in his or her experience by this chain, seen now as a constricting device. This means that we do not subsume every aspect of the narrative under the heading of focalization. The latter is limited to the imagery of perception as it informs the experience of the character and the reader. Focalization passes strictures on both the text and its audience. Conceived of in this way, focalization loses some of its anthropomorphic characteristics. It is no longer a property of a human center, but rather a process particular to the textual unwinding of the story. Thus, Story of the Eye does not restrict the gaze to the main character. All characters are captured by it, suggesting that it is not a subjective trait but a textual process. The body of Marcelle is "as beautiful as her fixed stare" (27). Sir Edmund stares at the agony of the priest: "Sir Edmund's gaze, fixed on the stunned eyes of the young cleric, was so imperious" (62). When Marcelle and Simone are masturbating, they stare at each other, "their eyes gaped with unrestrained joy" (27). After the death of Marcelle, Simone "kept staring into space all the time, looking as if she belonged to something other than the terrestrial world" (46). This last remark leads us to the second way of seeing: the violent epiphany that transports the focalizer to another realm than social reality, usually indicated by Bataille with the word eclat, appearing time and again in the narrative. Unfortunately, this word has been variably translated in the English edition, for instance as "total joy," "blaze" or "glows" (29, 50, 56), so that the links between the eclat-passages in the original28 are lost on the reader. Each appearance of the word is linked with words such as "le vide" or "I'irreel." When Simone and the I-character are staring at the window of the hospitalized Marcelle and the girl falls to the floor, battered down by her desire, this window becomes a passage to the other world: "And all that remained before us was an empty, glowing window, a rectangular hole piercing the opaque night, showing our aching eyes a world composed of lightning and dawn" (27). The description suggests that the void of this other world is not peaceful and quiet, but filled with rage, the raging drives and passions uncontrollable by man. 28

Bataille (1998: 118, 146, 154).

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The violent epiphany pierces through the veil of social reality and brings to the surface the bestial drives that normally remain concealed. In this, it resembles the look provided by dreams: "It is not astonishing that the bleakest and most leprous aspects of a dream are merely an urging in that direction, an obstinate waiting for total joy [eclat], like the vision of that glowing hole, the empty window, for example, at the very moment when Marcelle lay sprawling on the floor" (28f.)· This explosive form of focalization is like a journey into the world of the unreal, the unacceptable and even the impossible. It is a "ride through the impossible"; "We had abandoned the real world" and gained access to the nightmare suppressed by society, "the total nightmare of human society" (29). Again, this violent way of seeing is not restricted to human characters, but resides in the network of tropes. For a start, it is disseminated, spread out across all characters. For instance, Simone is said to be plunging into an abyss when she kneels down on the eye of the priest, who has an ecstatic look on his face when he is tortured and killed, that is, when he is about to pass to the world of the unreal (65). Secondly, the look is metaphoric. When the I-character stares at the stars and the Milky Way, his view explodes into a world where everything symbolically refers to everything else: I stretched out in the grass, my skull on a large, flat rock and my eyes staring straight up at the Milky Way, that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine across the cranial vault formed by the ring of constellations: that open crack at the summit of the sky, apparently made of ammoniacal vapours shining in the immensity (in empty space, where they burst forth absurdly like a rooster's crow in total silence), a broken egg, a broken eye, or my own dazzled skull weighing down the rock, bouncing symmetrical images to infinity. (42)

The infinite shift between symmetrical images is precisely what enables the focalizer to see the world of infinity, the unreal and the impossible. People who do not see the endless chain of images, are blind. They only see the superficial, social reality. Metaphorically speaking, their eyes are castrated: "To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes" (42). However, next to this socially accepted form of blindness, there is the literal blindness of the I's father. Sitting on the toilet, his eyes would turn blank, literally, the pupils disappearing under the eyelids, leaving a completely white eye, staring, and looking like an egg. Actually, this is part of the network of images, for the man is not physically

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blind: he can see the other world. His eyes had "a completely stupefying expression of abandon and aberration in a world that he alone could see and that aroused his vaguely sardonic and absent laugh" (72). Maybe the narrator cannot see what his father is seeing, but the words "abandon" and "aberration" already give some indication of the world the father has access to, and the remainder of the story confirms that indication. The father sees obscene things, which explains his "absent laugh," a reflection of the absent look and the world of emptiness. This can be deduced from the scene Suleiman mentions. When the doctor comes to look at the old man, he goes into a room with the old man's wife. The father then rudely asks when the doctor is going to stop rucking his wife. He can't see it literally, it probably is not even there, but his obscene look allows him to see more than "decent people" who "fear lewdness" (42). The obscene look is the third type of visual focalization, a form of penetrating look that sees the dirt behind decent appearances. The Icharacter claims not to be like decent people, preferring obscenity to the acceptable pleasures of the flesh. "I cared only for what is classified as 'dirty'. [...] My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe" (42). This is the exploding universe mentioned above, where the obscene look sees not merely a testicle in an egg or a jewel in a vagina, but, through the chain of intertwined metaphors and metonyms, focuses on the foul things that decent people consider to be depraved. It is the look that links high and low, respectability and depravity. Whether staring, explosive, or obscene, visual focalization is always geared to the chain of tropes that reveal the deeper reality behind our superficial, social reality. As a form of unveiling deeper truths, these types of focalization have an apocalyptic air about them. They reveal the ultimate things, which invariably turn out to be things of violence and death: rape, murder, suicide. Bataille's tropes always carry overtones of death, but as long as they remain figures of speech, they keep the chain going. It is only when they are literally acted out that death takes over life and that the ultimate truth is revealed. This is the case in the suicide of Marcelle as it is with the murder of the priest: they have turned figures of speech into corporeal reality, they have reached the Apocalypse.

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In the last chapter, the narrator reveals that writing itself is a form of Apocalypse. In these pages, all sorts of equivalences are triggered, as for instance the equivalence between the sheet of the narrator's youth and the wet sheet of the hospitalized Marcelle: "I realized there was a perfect coincidence of images," the narrator says (70)29. He shows that the central images used in his narrative are transpositions of lived experiences in his younger years, such as the blindness and insanity of his father. He explains that he has become a writer because he feels " a steady obligation, unconscious and unwilled: the necessity of finding an equivalent to that sentence [the obscene exclamation, "Doctor, let me know when you're done fucking my wife!"] in any situation I happen to be in" (73)30. He is constantly looking for homologies, metaphoric and metonymic echoes and thus never reaches the thing itself, only its metaphoric or metonymic image. In that sense, his equivalences are deformations. As the last sentence of the book says: transposed experiences can never be restored "to life except by transforming them and making them unrecognizable, at first glance, to my eyes, solely because during that deformation they acquired the lewdest of meanings" (74). To no negligible degree, such deformation results from language as occurs, for instance, with sound associations between words such as aeufand ceil or between uriner and buriner (to engrave), producing metaphorical associations that tend to equate the body with the text31. As Warhol said about Austen's text, discourse in Bataille is a form of mutilation of the body, which in this case is subjected to the logic of sound associations. In Bataille's story, the discursive association of similar sounds appears to be connected with the narrator's focalization, since he is always looking for new associations and similarities. The eye and, more generally, the emotions and the mind, of the writer-character can be summarized as a constant look, a stare, ferreting out ever more comparisons between ever more things normally thought to be incomparable. This leads to a paradoxical combination of narrative develop29

The original reads: "Les deux images etaient superposables" (Bataille [1998: 174]). The original text talks about "la constante obligation inconsciemment subie de trouver dans ma vie et mes pensees ses equivalences" (Bataille [1998: 177]). This gives a better view on the generality of the search for equivalences than the English translation. For the association between uriner and buriner, see Bataille (1998: 126). In the English translation "urinate" is associated with "terminate" (Bataille [2001: 34]).

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ment and repetition. As a form of "looking for," focalization is always dynamic, searching for new equivalences. As a hypnotized look, focalization seems to be calling attention to the same things time and again, a form of staring, both literal and figurative. This revealing focalization of the narrator and of the writercharacter does not reveal things completely and directly, and in that sense can hardly be called pornographic. It reveals things in figures of speech. Thus, the ever-present blushing that the focalizer notices in many characters is both literally and figuratively a rush of blood coming to the surface: blood, standing for the bestial drives, manifests itself on the blank skin, just as the bloody desires of mankind manifest themselves on the white page of Bataille's narrative. Marcelle blushes from shame and excitement, "the sense of shame that made her redden and, painfully red, tear off her own clothes and surrender lovely blond buttocks to impure hands" (2 If.). Shame and excitement reinforce one another, not just with Marcelle, but also with the I and Simone looking at her: "The sight of Marcelle blushing had completely overwhelmed us" (15). The same can be said about "the reddish eyes of sir Edmund" which "would turn purple" (67, 55) in his excitement. This form of focalization, combining shame and excitement, may extend so far as the reader of the text, unsettled by shame and by the shameful things unveiled in the narrative. The apocalyptic look, combining the stare, the violent epiphany, and the obscene look, is also the look of the reader. Analysis of Bataille's story shows that focalization is intimately connected with the look of the reader. While this look will inevitably deform the text, we feel that this deformation may be easier to account for when focalization is no longer restricted to focalized subjects and objects (as proposed by Mieke Bal), but rather tied up with the imagery that builds and unfolds the narrative. Instead of reducing focalization to the image imparted to the reader through a character or narrator, we would prefer to consider it as part and parcel of the process of imagery explored and experienced by the reader. This broadening of the concept is not limitless, however, for it is restricted to imagery connected to perception as elaborated through the tropes of metaphor and metonymy. Our reconsideration of focalization may be felt to move away from the rehumanization and representation so typical of many postclassical approaches, and in this way it might be considered a return to the text.

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However, the text is no longer seen as an objective and static structure, since it exists only through the experience of the reader. Concentrating on one aspect of this experience, we have studied focalization as the exploration of textual tropes governing perception. In linking text and reader, we have tried to build a bridge between classical text-oriented and postclassical reader-oriented views on focalization.

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References Austen, Jane 2003 [1818] Persuasion. Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Bal, Mieke 1986 Femmes Imaginaires: L'Ancien Testament au Risque d'une Narratologie Critique. Collection EF/ Ecrire les Femmes (Utrecht: Hes). 1987 Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomington: Indiana UP). 1997 Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd edition (P1 edition 1985) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Barthes, Roland 1981 [1964] "Lametaphore de l'oeil," in Essais critiques. Collection Points Essais, 248-254 (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Bataille, Georges 1998 [1928] "Histoire de l'oeil" in Madame Edwarda / Le Mori / Histoire de l 'ceil, 87-182 (Paris: 10/18). 2001 [1979] Story of the Eye by Lord Auch. Translated by Joachim Neugroschal. With Essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Booth, Wayne 1998 The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press). Chambers, Ross 1984 Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Cohn, Dorrit 1983 [1978] Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP). Genette, Gerard 1980 [1972] Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin, Foreword by Jonathan Culler (Ithaca: Cornell UP). 1988 [1983] Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell UP). Gibson, Andrew 1996 Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Postmodern Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP). Hawkes, David Ideology (London and New York: Routledge). Herman, Luc / Vervaeck, Bart 2005 Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Frontiers of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press) (forthcoming). Lanser, Susan Sniader 1981 The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP).

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Lintvelt, Jaap 1989 Essai de Typologie Narrative: Le "point de vue". Theorie et analyse. 2nd edition (Γ1 edition 1981) (Paris: Jose Corti). Mezei, Kathy (ed.) 1996 Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Miller, Nancy K. (ed.) 1986 The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia UP). Newton, Adam Zachary 1995 Narrative Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard UP). Phelan, James 1996 Narrative as Rhetoric. Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State UP). Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1998 [1987] Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Columbus: Ohio State UP). Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 2002 Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. 2nd edition (1st edition 1983). New Accents (London and New York: Routledge). Suleiman, Susan Rubin 1986 "Pornography, Transgression, and the Avant-Garde: Bataille's Story of the Eye," in The Poetics of Gender, edited by Nancy K. Miller, 117-136 (New York: Columbia UP). Warhol, Robyn R. 1996 "The Look, the Body, and the Heroine of Persuasion: A FeministNarratological View of Jane Austen," in Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, edited by Kathy Mazei, 21-39 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).

PETER HUHN (Hamburg)

Transgeneric Narratology: Application to Lyric Poetry 1. Narrative Universals and Lyric Poetry Narrating appears to be an anthropologically universal device utilized by humans in all cultures and epochs within a wide spectrum of pragmatic and artistic contexts for structuring experience, making sense of the world and one's self as well as communicating such interpreted structures through a sign system to others or to oneself4. The ordering function of narrative primarily rests on the close combination of two distinct dimensions—the dimensions, first, of sequentiality, i.e. the temporal organization and concatenation of individual elements (existents and incidents2) into some kind of coherence, and, second, of mediacy, i.e. the presentation (and interpretation) of this sequence from a particular perspective. Such a basic distinction of two dimensions as the constituents of narrative is shared by most narratological models3, variously termed—if with marginally divergent definitions—e. g. as "story" (histoire) and "narrative" (recit)4, "story" and "text"5, "story" and "discourse"6, orfabula and sjuzet1. For a comprehensive modeling of narrative, one has to add a third dimension: the act of articulation or narration8 which produces the mediated sequence in the first place, leaving more or less perceptible traces in its form. 1 2 3

4 5 6

8

Turner (1996); Wolf (2002: 23-24). Cf. Chatman(1978). Cf. e.g., Martin (1986: 81ff, 107ff.); Martinez/Scheffel (1999: 20ff.); Herman (2002: 13, 21 Iff.). A radically different approach is adopted by Fludernik (1996). Genette(1980). Rimmon-Kenan (2002). Chatman(1978). Tomashevsky (1965). Genette(1980).

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Traditionally, narrative theory and, more recently, narratology have tended to restrict their focus exclusively to the analysis of narrative (prose) fiction as that one genre essentially defined by the device of storytelling. In the last few years, however, an increasing number of studies have started to advocate expanding the scope of narratology to other media, disciplines, and genres9, on the basis of the universality and ubiquity of the practice of narration. In this paper, I will argue that, since lyric poems generally feature the same fundamental constituents as narrative fiction—referring to a temporal sequence of incidents (in connection with existents), mediating it from a particular perspective, and indicating the act of utterance or articulation through which the sequence is mediated in the medium of a verbal text—narratological categories may profitably be applied to the analysis of lyric poetry10. It is assumed that because of the advanced methodology of narratology and the discriminatory capacity of narratological terminology, such a transgeneric approach may provide a fresh impetus to the deficient theory of poetry11 as well as suggest new interpretive methods for the practical analysis of poems12. For this purpose, I will proceed by giving an outline of the three fundamental narratological categories of sequentiality, mediacy, and articulation and suggest specific ways of applying and adapting them to poetry. The aim is not to subsume poetry into narrative fiction, but to use their common features as a means of exploring both the similarities and the differences between these two broad genres and, specifically, of highlighting the distinctly poetic forms and functions narrativity can adopt in lyric poems13. In this sketch of nar-

9

Cf. e.g., Nash (1990); Nünning/Nünning (2002). So far, narrative theory has only been applied to epic or narrative poetry; cf. e.g., Kinney (1992); Grossman (1998). The fVuitfulness of such an approach is also suggested by Müller-Zettelmann (2000), (2002). The argument pursued in this paper is based on the work of the project group P6 "Narratological Poetry Analysis," conducted by Jörg Schönert and myself, which is part of the Research Group "Narratologie," established and funded by DFG at Hamburg University since 1 April 2001 (see www.NarrPort.uni-hamburg.de'). See Hühn/Schönert (2002), whose argument the present article seeks to expand and develop further. Cf. also Huhn (2001), (2004). Furthermore, it will also be part of this project to determine the limits of a narratological approach to lyric poetry, i.e. describe the type of poem which does not lend itself to such an analysis.

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rative aspects in poetry, W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming" (1920) will serve as an illustrative example14: THE SECOND COMING 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. \ 3. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

2. Basic Features of Lyric Poetry Before this transgeneric project can be undertaken, a brief remark about the problem of delimiting the corpus of poetry is necessary. Attempts to define lyric poetry systematically and theoretically as a distinctive genre after the model of drama or narrative have failed to produce satisfactory results15. But this dilemma can be resolved if one adopts a more pragmatic approach, drawing on the actual common practice of literary histories and anthologies as a criterion for classifying texts as poems and ascribing them to the genre of lyric poetry, a practice which will be subject, of course, to historical change as well as to cultural variation. Recent critics 14 15

Yeats (1983: 187). Cf. e.g., Wolf (1998: 261ff.); Müller-Zettelmann (2000); Warning (1997: 18).

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have suggested delimiting the range of lyric poems not by systematic classifications and theoretical definitions, but rather by a cluster of features which constitute family resemblances, such as the tendency to brevity, heightened artificiality, self-referentiality, subjectivity, and deviation as well as the production of unstable illusion16. One such prominent feature of what during numerous periods of English literary history used to count as lyric poetry consists in an emphatic double referentiality of artistic language17: poems simultaneously establish a textual signified and refer to the materiality of the signifier by overcoding language in its phonetic, syntactical, metrical, and tropical (etc.) structures18. Although double referentiality is fundamentally characteristic of all verbal art-genres, lyric poetry can be seen to enhance and functionalize material self-referentiality to an exceptionally high degree. In addition, self-referentiality in poetry is not restricted to the material signifier, but also frequently extends to the semantic and thematic dimension, namely as the constitution of the self through poetic utterance. For in most periods, poetry functions as a specific medium for the self-articulation and self-stabilization of the subject19. 3. Sequentiality in Poetry The dimension of sequentiality is an aspect of the poetic text for which the interpretive categories offered by existing models of poetry analysis have proved particularly unsatisfactory20. To this aspect, namely the question of how poems organize their syntagmatic coherence, narratological concepts provide a more differentiated approach than hitherto available by specifying the techniques employed by poetic texts for connecting the elements into a causal, temporal, or otherwise "motivated" string, creating what may be called a poetic plot. Plots in poetry are typically constituted by mental or psychological incidents such as perceptions, imaginations, desires, anxieties, recollections, or emotions and their emergence, develop16

Cf. esp. Burdorf (1997); Wolf (1998: 261-267); Muller-Zettelmann (2000: 73-139);

17

Cf. Easthope (1983); Forrest-Thomson (1978); Huhn (1998). Cf. Jakobson (1960) and his notion of the dominance of the "poetic function" as a significant feature of poetry. Cf. Spinner (1975); Müller (1979); Huhn (1995). Most handbooks of poetry analysis do not address this question at all or only very obli-

19

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ment, and decisive change. For an explicit construal of the syntagmatic structures informing the sequential dimension in poetry (as well as in narrative fiction), I will draw on concepts from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. The underlying premise of such an approach consists in the notion that it is only through the paradigmatic reference to extratextual contexts and to world knowledge, i.e. to cognitive schemata already familiar and meaningful, that readers can make sense of texts21. The term world knowledge comprises culturally specific patterns from general experience as well as intertextual references to literature (and other arts). Accordingly, the analysis of the sequential structure of poems will attempt to reconstrue the schemata from experience or literature familiar to contemporary readers which can be shown to be relevant to the texts and endow them with meaning22. Such schemata serve to establish paradigmatic relations, i.e. equivalences, among textual elements, thereby making it possible to select and group individual incidents and existents and transform them systematically into a coherent and meaningful narrative sequence or plot. Two main types of cognitive schemata can be distinguished: frames and scripts (or scenarios). Frames designate the thematic or situational contexts or frames of reference within which poems are to be read, as for instance death, growing up, or sexual love23; scripts denote sequence patterns, i.e. natural processes or developments, conventional series of actions, or stereotyped procedures, usually in close connection with the relevant frame, such as, to take up the examples given, dying as crossing the border between this world and another, unfamiliar one; personal growth as the development from childhood to adulthood seen in a positive or negative light (gaining mature knowledge or losing spontaneous vitality, respectively); or the formalized ritual of courtly love barring the gratification of the lover's desires. Whereas identifying the appropriate frame enables the reader to connect various elements in different parts of the text and interpret a poem (like any other text) in terms of its situational and thematic significance and coherence in a primarily static respect, re21

Cf. e.g., Culler (1975: 139-160); Schank/Abelson (1977); Bruner (1990), (1991); Turner (1996). Cf. Herman (2002: 85-113) and Semino (1995a). Semino applies schemata to poems without, however, using the concept of narrativity. These examples of frames and the corresponding scripts refer to Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar," Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," and Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," respectively.

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ferring the sequence of the elements to one or more scripts within such a frame presents a specific means of modeling the dynamic, i.e. particularly narrative, dimension of the text. It is a typical feature of literary texts, to be sure, that they do not merely draw on existing schemata in a confirming sense, but tend to activate frames and scripts in order to deviate from them in significant ways, in fact, in certain epochs highlighting such deviation as an index of literary quality24. Because of the convention of brevity, situational abstractness, and generality25, poems are usually less explicit and circumstantial than novels in presenting textual signals for the activation of frames and scripts and therefore require greater effort on the part of the reader to infer the relevant schemata from implicit indications. For the same reason, narrative sequences in poems do not attain the degree of circumstantial particularity and elaborateness conventionally realized in fiction. In Yeats's "The Second Coming," the frame is to be identified as a general situation of political and social upheavals, implicitly activated by metaphors of disorder and violence ("Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," "the blood-dimmed tide," 4-5)—implications with specific reference to Europe after the First World War, as can be inferred from the poem's publication date (1920) in combination with the cryptic reference to the periodization of history (19-20: the termination of the Christian era two thousand years after its beginning, i.e. Christ's birth: "the rocking cradle"). As for the script, the poem explicitly enacts the search for the appropriate sequence schema as a prerequisite for interpreting the incomprehensible. In the first section, the speaker obviously lacks a script, so that in his helplessness vis-ä-vis his disturbing perceptions of the political situation, he is merely able to enumerate the incidents without really grasping their significance. It is only at the beginning of the second section that an appropriate script suddenly occurs to him and he can explicitly name it: "the second coming," i.e. the apocalyptic Biblical prophecy about the type and succession of events preceding as well as initiating the ultimate return of Christ, especially ubiquitous violence and destruction and the resultant triumph of evil26. Such conventional sequence patterns typically trigger particular expectations about the ensuing incidents—in this case, the anticipation of the approaching end of the world, the coming of a triumphant Christ, and the last judgment. This script now seems to provide the speak25

For different forms of schema modification, cf. Cook (1994). Cf. Müller-Zettelmann (2000: 73-83). This is an intertextual script, taken from the Bible: Matthew 24: 3ff.

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er with a satisfactory explanatory schema for the interpretation of the present situation as the final phase of human history. The remainder of the second section, however, radically violates these expectations and triggers a completely different script, the pattern of a cyclical development, suggesting not the end, but the indefinite continuation of history, in which one epoch determines the next through what it suppresses, as the Christian era suppressed man's animal nature and is therefore about to be succeeded by the return of the repressed (19-20). Equivalence among textual elements is further constituted by isotopies, i.e. semantic or thematic features ("semes" or combination of "semes"27) which recur in various words and expressions throughout a poem, thus establishing new connections within the text, adding layers of meaning, and thereby frequently supporting the activation of frames and scripts. The first section of Yeats's "The Second Coming" features a specific pervasive semic complex which can be circumscribed as "disintegration of order," which recurs in the phrases "cannot hear" (2), "fall apart," "cannot hold" (3), "anarchy" (4), "is loosed" (4, 5), "is drowned" (6) and "lack" (7). This isotopy hints at the cause for the growing political disorder—the inherent weakness of the old dispensation as the reason for its imminent collapse, thus serving as an impetus for activating the apocalyptic script in the speaker's mind. The dominant isotopy in the second section may be identified as "terrifying incomprehensibility," recurring in and linking the phrases "vast image" (12), "shape" (14), "gaze blank and pitiless" (15), "darkness" (18), "nightmare" (20), and "what rough beast" (21). This isotopy signals the terrible nature of the coming new era, thereby disappointing the expectations raised by the apocalyptic script of the imminent closure of the plot of history. In addition, the term event is introduced to refer to the decisive turning point in the poem's sequentiality, a central feature of its narrative setup closely connected with that which makes it worth telling ("tellability"). Eventfulness in the sense used here is specifically defined with reference to the degree of deviation from the expected continuation of the sequence

27

Greimas (1966); Rastier (1972); Greimas/Courtes (1972). Greimas's originally restrictive definition of "seme" and "isotopy" has subsequently been expanded by himself, Courtes, Rastier, and others to cover not only simple categorial features (such as "humanness" or "gender"), but also more complex semiotic phenomena including thematic, situational, and figurative categories which are apt to generate coherence through recurrence.

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pattern activated by the text28. Since sequences can deviate from expectations to varying degrees, eventfulness has to be conceived of as gradational. In "The Second Coming," the decisive turning point is of a relatively high degree of eventfulness, since the visionary apparition seems to prophesy a terrifying new beginning instead of heralding the expected end of the world together with the establishment of God's kingdom and the final destruction of evil. The expectation raised by the apocalyptic script ("the second coming") is thus radically thwarted. The overall organization on the discourse level of a poem (as of any narrative text) will be called the plot. A plot is constituted by the selection, connection, and correlation of meaningful sequences as well as the constellation and integration of schemata and equivalences. Plots are normally attributed to an agent (e.g. the protagonist) and derive their particular function from this attribution. Events form the crucial turning points in the progression of plots and are in turn defined by these. In poetry, a plot typically uses as its medium mental phenomena such as ideas, memories, desires, emotions, imaginations, and attitudes which the agent in a monological reflective and cognitive process ascribes to himself as his plot and through which he can then define or stabilize his self-concept or identity. The overall plot of Yeats's "The Second Coming" results from the interaction between the extradiegetic and the diegetic level29. On the level of articulation, i.e. within the ongoing (extradiegetic) process of the speaker's reflections, the sequence is constituted by a succession of changing states of mind: from the lack of understanding and the association of the Biblical script to the unexpected emergence of a visionary prophetic insight in which the speaker suddenly grasps the dynamic mechanism of historical developments. As a consequence, he can narrate—on the story level—the cyclical course of history: exclusion during one era (the exclusion of the "beastly" dimension of human nature by Christianity in favor of charity and compassion) ultimately leads to the return of the excluded in the next era (brutality governing the coming dispensation). The plot of "The Second Coming" is thus the specifically interactive correlation of these two narrative sequences: on the higher level, the speaker's (or narrator's) cognitive development from ignorance to insight; on the lower 28

29

Cf. Lotman's (1977) "transgression of boundaries"; Bruner's (1991) "canonicity and breach." Cf. also Wolfs notion of the "narreme" (2002: 44-51). Cf. the concept of "plot" in Brooks (1984).

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level, the narration of the historical development as a cyclical process propelled by the dynamic principle of exclusion and return. 4. The Dimension of Mediacy in Poetry The syntagmatic and paradigmatic organization of poems in terms of narrative sequences must be supplemented by the forms and levels of poetic mediacy through which these operations are performed or, more precisely, to which they are attributable. Two basic dimensions of mediacy are to be distinguished: first, agents and levels of mediation, and second, types of perspective. As for the first dimension, agents of mediation may be located on four different levels: (a) the biographical author; (b) the textual subject or subject of composition, i.e. the compositional organization of the text30; (c) the speaker or narrator; (d) the protagonist (i.e. the main figure featured in the incidents narrated). In this context, reference to the empirical author merely serves as a criterion for determining the historical and cultural plausibility of frames and scripts. The textual subject (commonly called the "implied author") can best be re-conceptualized as the "cognitive style" of the verbal and prosodic composition of the poem, the construct to which the norms inherent in the stylistic, rhetorical, and tropical organization of the poetic text are attributable and which functions as a means of backgrounding or foregrounding, of endorsing or exposing the speaker's stance31. To the reader, this level offers a superior vantage point, above the speaker's position, from which he may observe the latter's "blind spots" and, in general, his personal (partly unconscious) predispositions and limitations32. To be sure, the distinction between the levels of

32

The "textual subject" differs from the other three agents of mediation, to be sure, in that it is not a figure in the strict sense, but a construct. Nevertheless, this category has to be listed here, since it presents an important level of mediacy for poetic texts. The concept of the implied author has been criticized for its vagueness, inconsistency, indeterminacy between structure and intentionality, etc.; cf. Bal (1981); Niinning (1993); Kindt/Muller (1999). To avoid these associations, the term is here replaced by "textual subject" or "subject of composition" to be understood as a construct, a structural or cognitive perspective, which does serve a useful interpretative purpose. It has to be emphasized that the textual subject functions less as a positive norm (lacking a voice, of course) than "negatively," as it were, through the perceived discrepancies between the structure of the text and the propositional content of the utterance, i.e. through textual inconsistencies and contradictions; cf. Niinning (1999: 64-65). Cf. Huhn (1998).

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textual subject and personalized speaker is always dependent on interpretation and has to be determined on the basis of attribution. One notorious problem specifically connected with the distinction between these levels of narrator's voice and textual subject concerns the question of the narrator's reliability or unreliability. The extensive narratological discussion of this problem can profitably be employed for an analysis of comparable aspects in poetic texts33. So far, the problem of (un-)reliability has hardly been discussed systematically in poetry criticism, though reading poems raises basically similar questions. Interestingly, in attitudes towards poetry different conventions seem to obtain. Whereas in narrative prose, homo- and autodiegetic narrators are liable to be considered potentially unreliable as opposed to heterodiegetic ones, which do not at all raise such doubts34, readers of poems with dramatized speakers apparently are not normally inclined to question the veracity of the statements. This may be due to the conventional expectation that lyric poetry spoken by first-person speakers presents a subjective view anyway, to which criteria of veracity or falsity do not apply. Nevertheless, raising the question of (un-)reliability with lyric poems, defined by the specific relation between the speaker's and the textual subject's perspectives, will allow for a more differentiated analysis of the conditions and manifestations of subjectivity. It may be preferable, however, to avoid the moral connotations of "unreliability" and use the more neutral terms "limitation" and "limitedness" instead. In Yeats's "The Second Coming," the particular composition of the text permits the reader to observe the personal values, ideologies, and prejudices, the anxieties and desires which induce the speaker to interpret the incidents in a certain way: the speaker first assesses contemporary events in traditionally dualistic terms of good and evil, civilized and barbaric, apparently favoring quasi-aristocratic values of a hierarchical and ritual order (as can be inferred from the imagery of falcon and falconer and the reference to "ceremony"); furthermore, when he then constructs a particular historical plot of cyclical progression and assumes the specific role of a visionary narrator (self-confidently gifted with superior knowledge), this may be interpreted as a compensation for his anomie, anxiety, and desire by providing him at least with personal stability and cognitive certainty. However, to what extent the text of Yeats's poem is actually taken 33

Cf. Niinning (1999); Kindt/Müller (1999). Cf. Dieter Meindl's contribution to the present volume: "Un-Reliable Narration from a Pronominal Perspective".

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to endorse the speaker's confident self-image or expose the arbitrariness of his idiosyncratic reading of the signs as motivated by personal needs is obviously a matter of interpretation. The second dimension of mediacy concerns the two possible types of perspective"5, namely the distinction between voice and focalization, between the agent responsible for the language used in the text, the verbal utterance ("who speaks?"), on the one hand and, on the other, the position that the perception and cognition are ascribed to, i.e. the deictic center of the perceptual as well as cognitive, psychological, and ideological focus on the incidents ("who sees?" or rather, more generally, "who perceives?"). In poetry as in fiction, voice and focalization may coincide, as they do in "The Second Coming," but they can also be distinct, as in the case of retrospective homodiegetic narration, in which a subtle distance between the narrating and the experiencing (perceiving or reflecting) self typically occurs, a difference in temporal as well as cognitive and emotional terms. The analysis of both dimensions of mediacy can be based on Genette's approach and terminology as modified by his successors36. These two sets of differential categories, agents or mediacy and types of perspectives, allow for a more systematic discrimination and analysis of the levels and forms of mediation than are traditionally distinguished in poetry criticism. What can thus be described more precisely are such specifically lyrical phenomena as the suggested collapse or the emphatic separation of levels of mediation. Romantic but also modernist poems, for example, often suggest the congruence of speaker and protagonist (of narrator and character discourse) as well as the coincidence of voice and focalization through simultaneous narration by using the present tense and first-person pronouns, thus dramatizing the act of articulation. This impression, however, has to be seen as a carefully contrived effect designed to hide the manipulation and deliberate organization of a particular story and create the illusion of immediacy, spontaneity, and thus authenticity serving specific purposes which have to be analyzed in detail. The analogous phenomenon in prose fiction, which Ansgar Nünning calls "mimesis of narration," has only recently begun to receive detailed attention in narratological criticism: the forms and functions of dramatizing the act of narration or articulation through staging a "storytelling scenario" and cre35

36

Genette (1980); Bal (1997); Rimmon-Kenan (2002); Chatman (1990); Jahn (1996). "Perspective" is not used here as a synonym for "point of view," but as a superordinate term covering the different basic modes of presenting objects, persons, situations, etc. Cf. also Fludernik (2001).

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ating the illusion of an on-going process at the extradiegetic level37. Dramatizing the act of articulation may be elaborated to such an extent that the text in fact presents (i.e. narrates) the unfolding story of narrating the story38. Yeats's "The Second Coming" is a clear example of simultaneous narration and dramatized immediacy apparently designed to confer authenticity and credibility on the speaker and his vision and endorse his insight. Moreover, the poem exemplifies the phenomenon of dramatized articulation or narration in that it enacts the process of gaining visionary insight as an on-going "story": from the neutral registration of the as yet uninterpreted contemporary situation (1-8) through the excited conception of a possible meaningful interpretation (exclamations in 9-11) triggering (11-13) a contrary vision (13-17) to the sudden insight into the historical development leading to the present moment (18-20) and, finally, to the prediction of the coming era as a result of the past (21-22). This "story of narration" at the poem's extradiegetic level thus constitutes a narrative in its own right, situated above the narrative mediated or told by the speaker in his utterance39; it can be circumscribed as the "plot of history" which he narrates simultaneously (referring to the present state of the world), retrospectively (in the reference to the past twenty centuries), and prospectively (in the implications of the future as signaled by the "rough beast" approaching and willing its "birth"). Such performative presentation with the concomitant illusion of immediacy is a pervasive major strategy in poems of various periods from the Metaphysicals and Romantics to the 1950s and the present day. Narratological concepts may help analyze and clarify its historically variable functions, as in Donne's "The Sun Rising," Herbert's "The Forerunners," Marvell's "The Garden," Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples," Browning's "Two in the Campagna," Larkin's "Dockery and Son," and Heaney's "Punishment." At the opposite end of the scale are such diverse instances of divided or 37

Nunning(2001a). Cf. the term Erzählgeschichte (story of narration) proposed by Schmid (1982: 95). Nünning (200la), (200Ib) furthermore introduces the term "metanarration" for the explicit thematization or foregrounding of the narrative act and rigorously distinguishes this phenomenon from "metafiction," the thematization of the fictionality of the narrated story. See also his contribution to the present volume. "The Second Coming" is not, however, an example of metanarration, as the speaker does not explicitly thematize and comment on the act of narration (speaking or writing), but merely enacts it, a process which manifests itself in the text of the poem.

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multiple perspectivity as, for example, T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," where voice and focalizer are totally fragmented and no unified coherent speaking scenario emerges, Shelley's sonnet "Lift not the painted veil," in which a particular experience is attributed by a heterodiegetic narrator to a separate protagonist but presented through internal focalization, Robert Graves's "Beauty in Trouble," which uses (self-)irony as a means of separating voice and focalizer, or the Victorian dramatic monologue with the deliberate dissociation of narrator and text subject40. How far such internal divisions of perspective still suggest the mimesis of narration requires further investigation. 5. Specific Forms of Narrativity in Lyric Poetry The transgeneric application of narratological concepts to poetry is apt to highlight the specificity of poetry, notably in the following five respects. First, a spectrum of characteristic forms of "plotting"41 and narration can be specified in which poetry tends to differ from prose fiction, such as narrating from a position inside an ongoing story rather than from the end (as in Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar"), telling a story prospectively (as in Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"), simultaneously telling and enacting a story (as in Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode"), and shaping the sequence of events through narrating a story about them (as in Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" or Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality")42. One particularly complex type of poetic plotting consists in shifting the eventfulness from inside the narrative sequence or story level to the transgression of this level, from a story event to what may be termed a "discourse event," as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 107, where the frame of the sequence is abruptly re-defined—from aiming at the friend's praise for his continued friendship and patronage to the speaker's insistence on his own superiority, on account of his immortalizing poetic gift, over the friend's mortality; or in Peter Reading's multi-diegetic poem "Fiction," where the 40

41

For the application of deictic categories for a differentiation of voice and perspective in poetry, cf. Semino (1995b). Cf. Huhn (2004). These are basic possibilities of narrating in prose fiction, too, of course (cf. Genette [1980: 215ff.]), but their relative frequency seems to be different in poetry. Retrospective narration, for example, is much less common in poetry, whereas narrating from a position before the end of the story appears to be particularly frequent, indicative of the tendency of poems to functionalize the act of narration for the completion of the story.

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motivation for a particular "story" development on one diegetic level (taking someone to court) is metaleptically provided by an unrelated action on another level (slanderous remarks in writing), which constitutes a violation of expectation that has to be considered "eventful." Second, characters in poetry (especially, of course, the speaker) are identified not through name and description, as in fictional narratives, but through their perspective, their interiority, and their personal narrative. Indeed, one important function of narratives in poems is the constitution of the speaker's or narrator's subjectivity and individuality, the definition of his or her identity, by the self-attribution of a chain of events, of a "mental story" (as in Yeats's "The Second Coming" or in Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud," where the speaker identifies himself as a visionary and a poet, respectively). This tendency towards the performative presentation of character in poetry is particularly apparent in the form of the dramatized act of articulation and simultaneous narration prevalent during numerous periods (Nünning's "mimesis of narration"). The constitutive function of narration for personal identity—the phenomenon of "self-narration"—has been widely discussed (in psychology and literary criticism) for prose genres, specifically in what is called "life writing"43, but so far not yet with respect to poetry44. This narratological function may provide a new approach to the notoriously problematical relation between lyric poetry and subjectivity and allow for a more specific analysis of poems written in the first person and in the present tense. Third, narrating in poetry is characterized by a marked preference for the use of unusual tenses and moods: a tendency to employ second-person narration (as in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"), the use of the imperative mood in narration (as in Keats's "Ode on Melancholy") and negative narration, i.e. relating events which did not occur (as in Larkin's "I Remember, I Remember"). Such forms also occur in narrative fiction45, but in poetry their use seems both to be more prevalent and to occur earlier. The possibly different functions as well as their particular historical development clearly need more detailed investigation. Fourth, narrative sequences in poetry frequently lack explicit circumstantial explanations and connections which are conventionally required in 43

45

Cf, e.g., Löschnigg (2001); Bruner (1990); Eakin (1999); Kerby (1991); Polkinghorne (1988); Ochs/Capps (2001). Examples would be the Romantics and as well as, more recently, the American confessional poets (Robert Lowell, John Benyman, etc.). Cf. Fludernik (1993), (1994a), (1994b).

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novels and short stories. Not only do poems often present incidents and figures in an abstract manner and without any reference to a concrete setting (as in Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"), they can also easily dispense with making explicit, and motivating, the transition between two points in time (as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 107, "Not mine own fears ...," with its temporal gap between the first and second quatrains) or from one thematic sequence to another (as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 94, "They that have power to hurt," the abrupt shift to "summer's flower"). In prose narratives, such devices start to occur in significant number in avantgarde fiction, arguably partly as an import from the genre of lyric poetry. Fifth, the materiality and the formal structure of the poetic text (sounds, rhythm, prosody, syntax, typography, etc.) may be exploited for the additional modeling of narrative sequences, reinforcing, modifying, or counteracting the semantic plot-development (as in Herbert's "Denial," Hardy's "The Voice," or Harrison's "Them & [uz]"). In such cases, formal features specifically function as paradigmatic relations or equivalences (in addition to semes and isotopies), establishing further links among different parts of the text, thereby highlighting its narrative development (as e.g., in "Denial," where the desired event, God's response to the speaker's prayer, is prefigured on the sound level by the sudden appearance of the missing rhyme word in the final stanza). These poetic specificities demonstrate, on the one hand, that applying narratology to poetry analysis does not at all result in leveling the differences between poetry and fiction but, rather, is apt to foreground the specific features in which poems are distinct from novels—against their common background of shared basic structures. On the other hand, however, the identification of such distinctly poetic manifestations of narrativity in poems may—in a reversal of the analytical perspective—serve as a specific frame of observation for a fresh look at narrative prose fiction and the analysis of typical forms of narrativity in particular cultures, epochs, and authors.

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References Bai, Mieke 1981 "The Laughing Mice or: On Focalization," in Poetics Today 2:41-59. 1997 Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd edition (1st edition 1985) (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press). Brooks, Peter 1984 Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP). Bruner, Jerome 1990 Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP). 1991 "The Narrative Construction of Reality," Critical Inquiry 18:1-21. Burdorf, Dieter 1995 Einführung in die Gedichtanalyse (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler). Chatman, Seymour 1978 Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP). 1990 Coming to Terms: Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP). Cook, Guy 1994 Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind (Oxford: Oxford UP). Culler, Jonathan 1975 Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). 1981 "Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative," in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, 169-87 (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP). Eakin, Paul John 1999 How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP). Easthope, Antony 1983 Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen). Eco, Umberto 1984 "Isotopy," in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 189-201 (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Fludemik, Monika 1993 "Second-Person Fiction: Narrative You as Addressee and/or Protagonist," in AAA -Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 18: 217-47. 1994a "Introduction. Second-Person Narrative and Related Issues," in Style 28: 281-311. 1994b "Second-Person Narrative As a Test Case for Narratology: The Limits of Realism," in Style 28: 445^79. 1996 Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (London and New York: Routledge). 2001 "The Establishment of Internal Focalization in Odd Pronominal Contexts," in New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, edited by Willie Van Peer and Seymour Chatman, 101-113 (Albany: State University of New York Press).

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Forrest-Thomson, Veronica 1978 Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry (Manchester: Manchester UP). Genette, Gerard 1980 [1972] Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin, Foreword by Jonathan Culler (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP). Green, Keith 1995 New Essays in Deixis: Discourse, Narrative, Literature (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi). Greimas, Algirdas Julien 1966 Semantique structural, Langue et langage (Paris: Larousse). Greimas, Algirdas Julien (ed.) 1972 Essais de semiotique poetique, Langue et langage (Paris: Larousse). Greimas, Algirdas Julien / Courtes, Joseph 1979 Semiotique: Dictionnaire Raisonne de la Theorie du Langage, Langue Linguistique Communication (Paris: Hachette). Grossman, Marshall 1998 The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Poetry (Durham, NC: Duke UP). Grünzweig, Walter / Solbach, Andreas (eds.) 1999 Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext / Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context (Tübingen: Narr). Heibig, Jörg (ed.) 2001 Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger (Heidelberg: Winter). Herman, David 2002 Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Frontiers of Narrative Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Huhn, Peter 1995 Geschichte der englischen Lyrik, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Francke). 1998 "Watching the Speaker Speak: Self-Observation and Self-Intransparency in Lyric Poetry," in New Definitions of Lyric: Theory, Technology, and Culture, edited by Mark Jeffreys, 215-244 (New York: Garland). 2002 "Reading Poetry as Narrative: Towards a Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poems," in Investigations into Narrative Structures, edited by Christian Todenhagen and Wolfgang Thiele, 13-27 (Frankfurt/Main: Lang). 2004 "Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry," in Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, edited by Eva Muller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi) (forthcoming). Huhn, Peter / Schönert, Jörg (eds.) 2002 "Zur narratologischen Analyse von Lyrik," in Poetica 34.3/4: 287-305.

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Jahn, Manfred 1996 "Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological Concept," in Style 30: 241-267. Jakobson, Roman 1960 "Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 350-377 (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press). Jannidis, Fotis et al. (eds.) 1999 Rückkehr des Autors: Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs (Tübingen: Niemeyer). Jeffreys, Mark (ed.) 1998 New Definitions of Lyric: Theory, Technology, and Culture (New York: Garland). Kerby, Anthony Paul 1991 Narrative and the Se/f (Bloomington: Indiana UP). Kindt, Tom / Müller, Hans-Harald 1999 "Der 'implizite Autor': Zur Explikation und Verwendung eines umstrittenen Begriffs," in Rückkehr des Autors: Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs, edited by Fotis Jannidis et al., 273-287 (Tübingen: Niemeyer). Kinney, Clare Regan 1992 Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge UP). Lemon, Lee T. / Reis, Marion J. (trans., eds.) 1965 Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Lennard, John 1996 The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism (Oxford: Oxford UP). Loscnnigg, Martin 2001 "Theoretische Prämissen einer 'narratologischen' Geschichte des autobiographischen Diskurses," in Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger, edited by Jörg Heibig, 169-187 (Heidelberg: Winter). Lotman, Jurij M. 1977 [1970] The Structure of the Artistic Text, translated by R. Vivon (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions). Mandel, Oscar 1998 Fundamentals of the Art of Poetry (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Martin, Wallace 1986 Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP). Martinez, Marias / Scheffel, Michael 1999 Einführung in die Erzählliteratur (Munich: Beck). Meindl, Dieter 1999 "A Model of Narrative Discourse along Pronominal Lines," GRAAT (Groupes de Recherches Anglo-Americaines de Tours), 21,11-29.

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Müller, Wolfgang G. 1979 Das lyrische Ich: Erscheinungsformen gattungseigentümlicher Autor-Subjektivität in der englischen Lyrik (Heidelberg: Winter). Müller-Zettelmann, Eva 2000 Lyrik und Metalyrik: Theorie einer Gattung und ihrer Selbstbespiegelung anhand von Beispielen aus der englisch- und deutsch-sprachigen Dichtkunst (Heidelberg: Winter). 2002 "Lyrik und Narratologie," in Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, edited by Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning, 129-153 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier). Müller-Zettelman, Eva / Rubik, Margarete (eds.) 2004 Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi) (forthcoming). Nash, Cristopher (ed.) 1990 Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature (London and New York: Routledge). Nünning, Ansgar 1999 "Unreliable, Compared to What? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses," in Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext / Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, edited by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach, 53-73 (Tübingen: Narr, 1999). 2001 a "Mimesis des Erzählens: Prolegomena zu einer Wirkungsästhetik, Typologie und Funktionsgeschichte des Akts des Erzählens und der Metanarration," in Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger, edited by Jörg Heibig, 13^*7 (Heidelberg: Winter). 2001 b "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie: Definition, Typologie und Grundriss einer Funktionsgeschichte metanarrativer Erzähleräußerungen," in AAA Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 26: 125-164. Nünning, Vera / Nünning, Ansgar (eds.) 2002 Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier). Ochs, Elinor / Capps, Lisa 2001 Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP). Peer, Willie Van / Chatman, Seymour (eds.) 2001 New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press). Polkinghorne, Donald E. 1988 Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press). Rastier, Francois 1972 "Systematique des Isotopies," in Essais de semiotique poetique, edited by A. J. Greimas, Langue et langage, 80-106 (Paris: Larousse). Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 2002 Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd edition (1 st edition 1983) (London and New York: Routledge).

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Schank, Roger C. / Abelson, Robert P. 1977 Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). Schmid, Wolf 1982 "Die narrativen Ebenen 'Geschehen', 'Geschichte', 'Erzählung' und 'Präsentation der Erzählung'," in Wiener Slawischer Almanack 9: 83-110. Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.) 1960 Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press). Semino, Elena 1995a "Schema Theory and the Analysis of Text Worlds in Poetry," in Language and Literature 4.2: 79-108. 1995b "Deixis and the Dynamics of Poetic Voice," in New Essays in Deixis: Discourse, Narrative, Literature, edited by Keith Green, 145-160 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi). Spinner, Kaspar H. 1975 Zur Struktur des lyrischen Ich (Frankfurt/Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft). Todenhagen, Christian / Thiele, Wolfgang (eds.) 2002 Investigations into Narrative Structures (Frankfurt/Main: Lang). Tomashevsky, Boris 1965 [1925] "Thematics," in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated and edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 61-95 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). Turner, Mark 1996 The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford UP). Warning, Rainer 1997 "Interpretation, Analyse, Lektüre: Methodologische Erwägungen zum Umgang mit lyrischen Texten," in Lektüren romantischer Lyrik: Von den Trobadors zum Surrealismus, 9-43 (Freiburg: Rombach). Wolf, Werner 1998 "Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry," in Poetica 30: 251-289. 2002 "Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzählliteratur," in Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, edited by Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning, 23-104 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Vertrag Trier). Yeats, William Butler 1983 The Poems: A New Edition, edited by R. J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan).

HILARY P. DANNENBERG (Leipzig)

Ontological Plotting: Narrative as a Multiplicity of Temporal Dimensions 1. Introduction: The Multiple Worlds Approach to Plot Ontological plotting is the analysis of narrative fiction's coordination of the alternate possible worlds which give it depth and interest. In Dickens' Great Expectations, Pip eventually discovers who his hidden benefactor is, but it is the completely different alternate set of relationships, which seem to be real for much of the novel, that give the finally discovered constellation their narrative force. In Austen's Sense and Sensibility, the prospect of the realization of a love plot between the heroine Elinor and Edward Ferrars disintegrates when Elinor hears of his marriage to Lucy Steele, but this version of events subsequently turns out to be an ephemeral construct. In Eliot's Daniel Deronda, the heroine Gwendolen Harleth (tellingly depicted at the outset of the novel at a roulette table with its many alternate possible outcomes) frequently mentally reviews her different future alternatives in life; later, when she has finally placed her bet on marriage with Grandcourt, the unexpectedly cruel reality of that marriage gives her cause to contemplate counterfactual versions of her life from the realm of what might have been. These three examples show how alternate possible worlds, which might at first sound like something out of purely fantastic fiction or a product of the ontological dominant of postmodernist fiction1, also play a major role in the realist tradition. As this paper aims to show, their full extent and proliferation across the different genres of fiction is complex and varied. The reader devours a narrative with the desire of being able to trace a causal-linear sequence of events through fictional time. However, sophisticated narratives use the temporal orchestration of alternate possible worlds to frustrate, and thereby intensify, this desire by suggesting more 1

See McHale( 1987)

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than one possible version of events. The spice of the tale lies in the emergence of one actual story version which in the course of the narrative has to vie for supremacy over other alternatives. Two master narratives of fiction illustrate the way in which past and future fictional time are involved in this process. The detective story hinges on the retrospective revelation of the details of the crime from the past narrative world; however, the final revelation that "X murdered Z" only achieves value because it emerges as 'the story' from a variety of alternate possibilities such as "Y murdered Z," "Z killed himself or "Z faked his own death and is in fact still alive." In the love story, if boy does finally get girl, this ending only becomes interesting because the alternative ending (boy loses girl) is presented to the reader as a substantial virtual prospect in the narrative future world until very late in the discourse2. Complex novels involve the interweaving of possible versions of both past and future world; some authors, indeed, have particular penchants for the ontological complexification of one temporal zone over the other. A sensitivity to ontological plurality allows us to view all fiction and its reading as a complex interaction of worlds. By contrast, in approaches which instate one world version as the only analytical yardstick, "the vast, open, and inviting fictional universe is shrunk to the model of one single world"3. The same criticism also applies to methods of plot analysis which limit their attention to the single world version conceived of as story. An analysis of a narrative's story tells us very little about the true dynamics of plot and about the fascination of fictional worlds for the reader; this stems from the fact that narrative does not simply tell one story, but weaves a rich, ontologically multidimensional fabric of alternate possible worlds. As Marie-Laure Ryan has shown in proposing the "principle of diversification," the success or tellability of individual narratives can be attributed to the generation of complex systems of alternate possible worlds4. This paper's survey of alternate possible worlds in narrative fiction builds on Ryan's work by showing how the ability to construct, coordinate and juggle different alternate possible worlds is a key feature in the evolution of narrative fiction. The history of narrative

3 4

Todorov (1977: 42-52) distinguishes these two basic tendencies within the genre of detective fiction: the whodunnit provokes curiosity about the past; the thriller creates suspense about the future. Dolezel(1998:x). Ryan (1991: 156ff.).

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fiction can be seen to involve the proliferation of spatio-temporal multiple-world structures and techniques. A multiple-worlds approach views narrative fiction in its ontologically unresolved state before (at least in the single-world ontological hierarchy of realist texts) the finality of closure imposes a single story version on the discourse. In this intranarrative form, plot is the dynamic interaction of competing possible worlds. It is precisely this dynamic competition of possible world versions that, for the reader immersed in the narrative experience, constitutes a major aspect of the fascination of fiction. The reader's "anticipation of retrospection"* is born precisely out of the fact that whilst she is immersed in the narrative, the story has not yet crystallized, but is still in a state of ontological flux in which the ultimate story version is just one of many competing possibilities. Thus, as James Phelan observes, viewing plot from a preclosure perspective involves considering how "we experience the ending as determined by the beginning and the middle"6. An analysis of the historical development of plot shows how, with the rise of the novel, more sophisticated plots develop involving the temporal orchestration of alternate world versions: more than one version of the past or future is suggested as a possibility by the text. Furthermore, it shows how, in the overall generic proliferation of narrative fiction, alternate world plotting has branched into increasingly different subforms since the mid-nineteenth century. Fictional genres across the board, whether realist, semi-realist (fantasy and science fiction) or anti-realist (metafictional), all use alternate possible worlds, but with differing forms of ontological hierarchy. Realist texts are ultimately single-world texts: they conform to the ontological expectations of the realworld. The sophisticated realist plot involving mystery or suspense may stage a refined juggling of the virtual and the actual, but ultimately only one actual world is allowed to exist at closure: all other worlds are ontologically downgraded to virtual status, proving to be the subjective worlds of characters or ephemeral constructs resulting from the narrator's manipulation of information. However, in nonrealist texts, the strict ontological hierarchy of realism is subverted, leading to all manner of multiple-world narratives.

5

6

Brooks (1992: 23; his italics). Phelan(1989: 111).

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Possible worlds theory, with its a priori postulation of a "plurality of worlds"7, provides one major conceptual framework for an analysis of plot as the dynamic network of alternate possible worlds generated by the text8. At the centre of possible worlds theory is the notion of the relativity of the idea of a single world, or 'the world' and its replacement by the conceptualisation of a system of possible worlds in which the ontological centre is relocatable. Every possible world is real from the perspective of its inhabitants9, or—in the case of the reader—for immersed visitors whose mental focus is temporarily located within that world. Within possible worlds theory there is, however, considerable variation regarding the nature and perception of the role of boundaries between worlds. Ryan's formulation of this question focuses on the crossing of world boundaries as part of the process of readerly immersion "which pushes the reader into a new system of actuality and possibility"10. Lewis, on the other hand, sharply defines the boundaries of one world in relation to another: "there are no spatio-temporal relations at all between things that belong to different worlds. Nor does anything that happens at one world cause anything to happen at another. Nor do they overlap; they have no parts in common"11. This world-separatist approach is echoed in the context of fiction by Dolezel's claim that "we insist on a distinction between the actual and the fictional. By setting firm boundaries, we avoid confusion whenever our aesthetic desire or cognitive project invite us to transworld travel"12. Both the world-separatist and world-integrative interpretations of possible worlds theory are relevant for an analysis of the multiple worlds constructed in narrative fiction. However, the exclusively rigid setting of theoretical world boundaries runs the risk of losing sight of the dynamics of the real reading experience. Critics and philosophers set theoretical boundaries, but the average reader, imaginatively immersed in the 7 8

9 10 11 12

Lewis (1986). The use of possible worlds theory in this paper is a highly selective, applicationsoriented one developed in order to analyse specific aspects of plot. It draws its inspiration in particular from Ryan's work on narrative and plot, whilst also taking important theoretical input from the work of Dolezel, Eco, Lewis, Margolin, Pavel, Prince and Rescher. For comprehensive accounts of possible worlds theory, see for example Ryan (1991), (1992), (1995a); Dolezel (1998: 12-28); Ronen(1994). Lewis (1979: 184). Ryan (1991: 22); see also Ryan (2001). Lewis (1986: 2). Dolezel (1998: xi).

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fictional world, does not. Therefore, in order to describe the readerly experience of the multiple alternate worlds involved in narrative fiction, a stronger cognitive element is needed in order to sheds light on the mental activity of world-blending that takes place when the human mind deals with ontologically complex input13. Dolezel's call for the avoidance of "confusion" may be desirable for a textual-theoretical analysis, but, as Fauconnier and Turner have shown, confusion—in the sense of largely unconscious mental operations involving world-blending—is in fact the way the human mind makes sense of complex phenomena. This paper will explore a variety of forms of plotting the past and the future—including counterfactual alternatives—which occur throughout realist, semi-realist (notably science fiction) and downright anti-realist (metaflctional) texts. In doing so, it will integrate theoretical input from traditional narrative theory, possible worlds theory, and the psychological and cognitive research into counterfactuals. 2. Plot as the Sum of Alternate Possible Worlds Alternate possible worlds are worlds which, considered from the perspective of the actual world, are unrealised possibilities. Theoretically, such non-actual worlds cover an infinite range of possible deviations from circumstances in the actual world conceivable by the human mind14, and hence also by a reader of fiction15. However, the alternate possible worlds of narrative fiction considered here are more substantial: they are sequences of events which are actually narrated or clearly implicated in the text, and which may even appear to be real (actual) before an ontological sleight of hand reveals them to be ephemeral. Such textual constructs are thus virtual events because they have the power to suggest or simulate reality, even if they are ultimately non-actual.

13 14

Fauconnier/Turner(1998a), (2002). Rescher(1973: 168). The modern philosophical proposal that possible worlds are constructs of the human mind differs fundamentally from Leibniz's (1996 [1720]) conception of God as the omnipotent knower of all possible worlds. For a discussion of Leibniz in contrast to modem possible worlds theory, see Adams (1979).

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One of Ryan's many contributions to narrative theory is to show the major role of virtual events in narrative plots16. The central focus of her examination is the multiplicity of virtual private worlds generated in the minds of characters: "These constructs include not only the dreams, fictions, and fantasies conceived or told by characters, but any kind of representation concerning past or future states and events"17. Ryan's central tenet, that "[t]he virtual in the narrative universe exists in the thoughts of characters"18, leads to an analysis of alternate possible worlds centred on the character domain—i.e. the sum total of a character's mental constructs of events. Ryan's comprehensive and multifaceted plot theory conceives, among other things, of plot as the conflict provoked when characters attempt to turn their own virtual Wish- and Intention-Worlds into reality: "The moves of the game are the actions through which characters attempt to alter relations between worlds. [...] For a move to occur and a plot to be started, there must be some sort of conflict in the textual universe"19. Here, Ryan's action-oriented approach follows in the steps of Thomas Pavel's work on drama. However, the action-oriented concept of the move tends to background the discourse level, i.e. how these alternate worlds are actually woven into the narrative discourse. In fact, these processes are coordinated by the narrator, a figure whose key mediative role has traditionally been seen to constitute the crucial generic distinction of narrative fiction as distinct from drama20. In order, therefore, to provide a more comprehensive account of the generation of alternate worlds in fiction, it is necessary to bring the narrator more clearly into the analytical focus.

18 19 20

Bremond's (1980) distinction between events which are actualised and those which are not in the triadic structure of action represents the conceptual beginnings of this form of plot analysis. Ryan (1991: 156). In her detailed exposition of the structure of the domain or "private world" of a character, Ryan distinguishes between four major modal types: K(knowledge)-world, W(wish)-world, O(obligation)-world and I(intention)-world (ibid.: 110-123). She is here building on modal categories suggested by Todorov (1969), (1977) and Dolezel (1976b). Ryan (1991: 110). Ibid.: 119-120. Stanzel (1984).

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Focalization, Character Domains, and the Narrator's Power over the Ontological Hierarchy The heterodiegetic narrator, who is not a character in the narrative world, but a voice speaking from outside it21, occupies a supreme position of power in coordinating the virtual and actual domains. In sophisticated hetero-diegetic narratives such as those of Fielding or Austen, the narrator often exploits this power and creates bogus actual worlds which, by a narratorial sleight of hand, are ultimately revealed to be virtual constructs. Focalisation is one major technique used in sophisticated heterodiegetic narration to deceptively represent virtual events in a character domain as the actual narrative world22. The degree of focalised penetration of the character's domain is also variable. In free indirect discourse, the narrator's presence as a vehicle for mediation is still closely intertwined with the information from the character's domain (speech or thought), which allows the narrator to imply his authentication of the veracity of information, even if this impression is in fact erroneous. By contrast, in reported thought (psychonarration), the character domain is presented separately, while in the case of direct thought (ulterior monologue), the reader is completely submerged in the character domain without narratorial assistance23. The narrator can manipulate the reader's perception of the ontological status of events within a character domain by granting uncorrected focalised access to that domain, i.e. by making the reader privy to the events constructed in the character's thoughts without additional clarification of their ontological status. For example, in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), focalised access to the knowledge world of Elinor Dashwood results in the extended construction of a bogus actual sequence of events. Elinor is in love with Edward Ferrars, who unfortunately has a prior commitment to Lucy Steele. In chapter 47, Elinor receives an eyewitness account that Edward and Lucy have married; the servant 21

Genette(1980:243ff.). Focalisation here refers not only to a process by which the narrator facilitates an insight into the character's visual perception of the narrative world, as implied in Genette's (1980: 189ff.) original definition of focalisation as concerning "who sees" but as granting access to the sum total of the character's mental operations, "including] nonvisual perception, thinking, remembering, dream visions, and so on, all of which are central to focalisation" (Jahn [1996: 254]). For seminal studies of the representation of consciousness in general and specifically of free indirect discourse, see Cohn (1978) and Fludernik (1993), respectively.

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Thomas informs her: "I see Mr Ferrars myself, ma'am, this morning in Exeter, and his lady too, Miss Steele as was"24. Elinor, whose domain is now accessed by free indirect discourse, responds to this information with her own mental reconstruction of the details of the reported scene and her virtual projection of its continuation: "They were married, married in town, and now hastening down to her uncle's. What had Edward felt on being within four miles of Barton, on seeing her mother's servant, on hearing Lucy's message!"25. Elinor's subjective rendition of a seemingly actual sequence of events establishes the marriage as a real event in the mind of the reader. Towards the end of chapter 48, however, Elinor and the reader are surprised by Edward Ferrars' appearance and his revelation that the "Mr Ferrars" married to Lucy Steele and reported by the servant is in fact Edward's brother Robert26. The marriage of Lucy and Edward therefore seems to belong to the actual narrative world for several pages of the novel, but then evaporates when it is revealed to be a virtual construct. Whilst it cannot be said to belong to the story of Sense and Sensibility, it makes a substantial contribution to the reading experience of the novel's love plot. Temporal Orchestration: The Plotting of Multiple Versions of the Past and Future The term temporal orchestration, in contradistinction to Genette's concept of anachrony27, means that more than one version of the past or future is suggested as a possibility by the text. Genette's categories of analepsis (retrospection) and prolepsis (anticipation) do not capture the ontologically intricate network of pathways of virtual and actual time generated in the alternate possible worlds of narrative fiction. This is because Genette's model is tied down to the concept of story, and anachrony is thus conceived of as a narrative movement backwards and forwards along the single sliding scale of the past and future of the story and not, as in an ontologically pluralistic approach, as a portal to many different world versions. Genette's concept of anachrony thus treats narrative from the postclosure position where a single story version has been established, but 24 25 26 27

Austen (1969: 344). Ibid: 347. Ibid: 349-350. Genette(1980:35ff.).

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tells us very little about how a richer vista of worlds beyond that of the story is generated during the narrative28. Narrative discourse's temporal orchestration of plot can be more usefully conceived of metaphorically as a kind of time machine which not only switches between past and future worlds, but alters the reality found there. In a multiple-worlds analysis of plot, analepsis and prolepsis can thus involve a journey into the virtual past of the narrative world or the projection of a virtual future which are not part of the story at all. Austen's Sense and Sensibility also provides a good example of such anticipatory projections of future events which do not ultimately become part of the actual narrative world. Due to her erroneous belief that Edward has married Lucy Steele, at the beginning of chapter 48 Elinor constructs a scenario of their future life together, which, from the standpoint of the reader confined to Elinor's focalised domain, seems to be the projection of an actual future yet to come: She saw them in an instant in their parsonage-house; saw in Lucy, the active, contriving manager, uniting at once a desire of smart appearance, with the utmost frugality, and ashamed to be suspected of half her economical practices [...]. In Edward—she knew not what she saw, nor what she wished to see;—happy or unhappy,—nothing pleased her; she turned away her head from every sketch of him .

By contrast, the following quotation from George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) shows a different form of virtual prolepsis. This novel is particularly notable because the domain of the heroine, Gwendolen Harleth, is very future-oriented. Uncertain of how to proceed in life, Gwendolen repeatedly projects alternate futures for herself, as in the following excerpt from chapter 24, in which she envisages either becoming a governess at a bishop's family or an actress: [...] and perhaps the bishop would examine her on serious topics. Gwendolen [...] saw the life before her as an entrance into a penitentiary. Wild thoughts of running away to be an actress [...] came to her with the lure of freedom; [...] dimly she conceived herself getting amongst vulgar people who would treat her with rude

29

Genette's discussion of the "repeating analepsis"—i.e. when the narrative "retraces its own path" and "confers on the past episode a meaning that in its own time it did not yet have" (Genette 1980: 54-56)—does not deal with alternate versions of the past, but with differing interpretations of single events. He comes closest to addressing ontological multiplicity in the discussion of proleptic "false advance mentions, or snares" which form part of a "complex system of frustrated expectations, disappointed suspicions, surprises looked forward to" (ibid.: 77). Austen (1969: 347).

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familiarity—odious men, whose grins and smirks would not be seen through the strong grating of polite society .

In comparison to Elinor's projection in Sense and Sensibility, these futures have a clear virtual status at the point where they are narrated. Elinor's projected future concerning Edward and Lucy is a product of her erroneous knowledge world, whereas Gwendolen's alternative futures are the product of her general lack of knowledge concerning her future life; her repeated future projections are a major strategy in the novel for involving the reader in her dilemmas. In a similar fashion, analepsis in practice can involve the interplay of virtual and actual versions of the past world in which the past is serially remodelled. Sophisticated past world plotting involves repeated retrospective trips back into the past of the narrative world in which the ontological status of seemingly actual (but ultimately virtual) world versions is revised. Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) employs a cleverly orchestrated juggling of character relationships, in which various past-world versions involving differing patterns of kinship and character identity are constructed and then destroyed. At the beginning of the novel, Fielding's highly overt heterodiegetic narrator represents the characters' identities and relationships using brief analeptic references to create the following constellation: Pamela and Joseph Andrews are the son and daughter of Gaffar and Gamma Andrews31, while Fanny, with whom Joseph is in love, is a foundling who has been brought up at the country estate where Joseph also happens to be employed32. However, in the recognition scenes in the novel's denouement, the past world and the kinship relations of the novel are subject to multiple remodelling. First of all, a pedlar provides a new account of Fanny's origins, from which it emerges that she too is the Andrews' daughter33. Then a further round of analeptic revelations exposes this second, temporarily actual constellation as equally virtual, for it is discovered that Joseph is not the Andrews' son and Fanny's brother, but was himself a foundling left at the Andrews; his father is in fact Mr Wilson (a character earlier encountered by Joseph on his travels). In the novel's games with character relationships, Joseph and Fanny therefore go through several sets of virtual identities and origins 30 31 32 33

Eliot (1967: 315-316). Fielding (1977: 40-41). Ibid.: 65. Ibid.: 304-305.

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before their final actual identities and origin plots are bestowed on them34. In Fielding, however, as opposed to Austen and Eliot, the communication of information is accomplished through revelatory dialogue. Character domains are generally not accessed via focalisation. 3. Counterfactual Worlds The examples above describe alternate possible worlds which are virtual either because, having been believed to be actual, they are subsequently discovered to be illusory constructs (Sense and Sensibility, Joseph Andrews), or because they represent the unrealised multiple possibilities of a future period of time (Daniel Deronda). By contrast, a counter/actual world is a consciously virtual alternate version of the past world, called into existence by a thought experiment that takes the actual world and then constructs an altered model in which there is a strategic departure from its conditions. Counterfactuals have been discussed extensively in possible worlds theory35. More recently, they have stimulated interesting new work in the political, social and cognitive sciences36 which has shown how counterfactual constructions, far from merely being a theoretical zone for philosophical speculation, are fundamental to the way the human mind works. The following discussion of counterfactuals shows how this type of alternate world presents a particularly interesting opportunity to integrate a range of theoretical approaches, and illustrates how counterfactuals in narrative fiction extend across a spectrum of genres and techniques. Counterfactual historical worlds are constructed by proposing a hypothetical deviation from realworld history which often centres on what different conditions would have been necessary to produce an altered outcome in key historical events, such as Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo37. Using counterfactuals for the study of history thus involves asking "'whatmight-have-been' questions'68 from a position of hindsight in which the 34

35 36

37 38

Joseph Andrews is one example of temporal orchestration in connection with patterns of kinship as practiced in a widespread plot form which I call the coincidence plot. For further discussion, see Dannenberg (2003), (2004), (under review). See Goodman (1947); Lewis (1973); Rescher (1975). Roese/Olson (1995a); Tetlock/Belkin (1996a); Turner (1996); Fauconnier/Turner (1998b), (2002). Rescher (1975: 174); Fearon (1996: 55); Home (2001). Tetlock/Belkin (1996b: 3).

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relative ontological status of events is absolutely clear, such as for example asking what factors might have prevented the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe in 1989-90. At the other end of the scale, what I propose be designated as biographical counterfactuals represent a different type of counterfactual world. In one key form of this type, observable in narrative fiction as from the eighteenth century onwards, an autobiographical subject reworks events in his or her own life. As Roese and Olson observe from the perspective of psychological research: "Counterfactual thinking is an essential feature of consciousness. Few indeed have never pondered a lost opportunity nor regretted a foolish utterance. And [...] it is from articulations of better possible pasts that individuals may realize more desirable futures"39. Thus, when a fictional character speculates about how his or her life might have run differently, that fiction is imitating a natural human thought pattern in an endeavour to simulate an authentic human consciousness. Counterfactuals generated by the speculative activity of characters within the fictional world are only one of several counterfactual modes in narrative fiction. They can also be framed as the speculations of a heterodiegetic narrator about how a fictional event might have occurred differently. On a global level, in the narrative genre of alternate history, a historical counterfactual is used to generate a whole narrative world which the narrator (be it heterodiegetic or homodiegetic) articulates as the textual actual world and not as a hypothetical scenario. Beyond these essentially realistic forms, multiple counterfactual worlds and other related forms of alternate world construction are used in the more convoluted plots of science fiction, fantasy and postmodernist fiction. Three examples from conventional narrative fiction show how counterfactuals are generated when either a character or a narrator performs a counterfactual thought experiment. In Sidney's The Old Arcadia (ca. 1580), Philanax admonishes Duke Basilius for his tardy request for advice by describing a counterfactual world in which Basilius consults him before and not after his decision to consult the oracle at Delphos (as a result of which Basilius has received calamitous predictions about the safety of himself and his family):

39

Roese/Olson(1995b: 46-47).

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Most redoubted and beloved prince, if as well it had pleased you at your going to Delphos, as now, to have used my humble service, both I should in better season and to better purpose have spoken, and you perhaps at this time should have been, as no way more in danger, so undoubtedly much more in quietness .

In Richardson's monumental epistolary novel Clarissa (1747/8), on the other hand, Anna Howe uses a counterfactual scenario in a letter to Clarissa not to lament lost opportunities, but, in accordance with an eighteenth-century providential outlook, to argue that Clarissa ultimately had no possibility of evading Lovelace's machinations, and that they should accept the actual world as the best of all possible worlds: [...] But then, my dear, what would this have done?—Perhaps you would have given Lovelace the meeting in hopes to pacify him and prevent mischief [...]. But if you had not met him, you see that he was resolved to visit them [Clarissa's family], and well attended too: and what must have been the consequence? So that, upon the whole, we know not but matters may be best as they are, however undesirable that best is .

In chapter 48 of Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), the narrator speculates how, if Henry Crawford had acted differently in the final stages of the novel, he might have won the heart of Fanny Price, which would have led to a completely different conclusion to the novel's actual love plot, in which Fanny Price marries her cousin Edmund Bertram: Could he [Henry Crawford] have been satisfied with the conquest of one amiable woman's affections, could he have found sufficient exultation in overcoming the reluctance, in working himself into the esteem and tenderness of Fanny Price, there would have been every probability of success and felicity for him. [...] Had he done as he intended, and as he knew he ought, by going down to Everingham after his return from Portsmouth, he might have been deciding his own happy destiny42.

Like the other virtual worlds considered in this paper, counterfactual worlds occupy a temporal realm far beyond that of the actual narrative world of the story. The temporal movement used in their construction cannot be referred to using Genette's concept of analepsis, since, being consciously virtual, they do not even purport to refer to the past of the narrative world. In narrative studies, there has as yet been little acknowledgement of the fact that counterfactuals feature widely across the periods 40 41 42

Sidney (1994: 6). Richardson (1985: 516; letter 151). Austen (1966: 451).

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and genres of narrative fiction43. Gerald Prince's discussion of a larger phenomenon which he calls the "disnarrated" and which "covers all the events that do not happen though they could have and are nonetheless referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text"44, includes examples of counterfactuals articulated by narrators and characters. By contrast, Ryan's character-oriented model of the virtual admits counterfactual worlds into this category only if they are a product of the speculative activity of a character, not of a heterodiegetic narrator45. Narrative theory is thus still waiting for a comprehensive model of the counterfactual in fiction. This paper can only present some aspects of the more comprehensive investigation I have undertaken elsewhere46. The full range of the counterfactual in narrative fiction goes well beyond its most realistic form, already illustrated above—the brief speculations of characters and narrators. In the genre of alternate history, for example, the narrator invokes a historically counterfactual world as the narrative's actual world for the whole of the text. The prologue of Keith Roberts' Pavane (1966) thus contains a counterfactual exposition of sixteenthcentury history, articulated as fact and not as hypothesis. This initial scenario serves as the historical antecedent to the novel's main narrative—the depiction of a less technologically advanced twentieth-century England still dominated by the culture of Catholicism: On a warm July evening of the year 1588, in the royal palace of Greenwich, London, a woman lay dying, an assassin's bullets lodged in abdomen and chest. Her face was lined, her teeth blackened, and death lent her no dignity; but her last breath started echoes that ran out to shake a hemisphere. For the Faery Queen, Elizabeth the First, paramount ruler of England, was no more [...] .

Differences hi the form of the counterfactual also have an effect on the assertion of the narrative world's actuality. A counterfactual can perform an important authenticating function in the realist tradition, but it can also sometimes be employed in an overtly anti-realist and metafictional fash-

44 45

46 47

Helbig (1988) investigates counterfactual history in narrative fiction, largely in the context of science fiction, under the name of the "parahistorical novel." Keen (2001: 142-153) discusses manifestations of "the counterfactual imagination" as part of her study of the "romance of the archive," a genre of contemporary British fiction. Prince (1992: 30). Ryan (1991: 47-48). Stanzel (1977) and Riffaterre (1990: 32-33) briefly discuss counterfactuals in fiction under other names. Dannenberg (under review), (1998), (2000). Roberts (1995: vii).

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ion. Character-counterfactual speculations, such as those in the work of Sidney and Richardson cited above, serve to reinforce the impression that the actual narrative world is 'real' by constructing a further, contrastive less 'real' (i.e. virtual) dimension, thereby reinforcing the apparent reality of the narrative world by ontological default. Counterfactual speculations by a heterodiegetic narrator, on the other hand, can have a potentially destabilising effect on the reader's belief in the actuality of the story world if they imply that events might have been created otherwise by the author48. This effect is not automatic, however: for example, the counterfactual sketch by Austen's narrator in Mansfield Park cited above does not undermine the reality of the actual narrative world because it centres on failings in Crawford's character and actions, and thus backgrounds the manipulative, world-creating role of the narrator as author. Counterfactual events presented in alternate history, on the other hand, invite the reader to perform an interesting act of doublethink. Indeed, this genre's particularly complex ontological status well illustrates the relativity of the contrastive terms virtual and actual. The reader will consciously view this world as counterfactual if he mentally remains on the ontological level of his true spatio-temporal coordinates, which are the same as that of the author who has conceived the whole work of fiction as a counterfactual thought experiment. Alternately, if the reader immersively crosses the boundary into the narrative world during reading, he will view it, as consistently enunciated by the narrator for the entire fiction, as actual. 4. Counterfactuality, Transworld Identity and World-Blending Transworld identity is a much-debated concept in possible worlds theory. This debate concerns differing positions on the question of transworld identification, that is: to what extent is it possible to make connections between, for example, the historical Napoleon in the realworld and the Napoleon of a counterfactual world in which he won the battle of Waterloo or invaded England (examples used both in possible worlds theory and in early alternate histories). Discussing transworld identity with reference to narrative fiction itself, Lubomir Dolezel claims that 48

Cf. Prince (1992: 36): "When the disnarrated relates to a narrator's vision, it foregrounds ways of creating a world." Riffaterre (1990: 32-33) cites a passage from Trollope which has this effect.

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"[fjictional individuals are not dependent for their existence and properties on actual prototypes49. This, however, is only valid in a non-cognitive theoretical context, since the full enjoyment and effect of the reading experience of an alternate history about (for example) a counterfactual Napoleon lies in the reader's capacity to cross-reference the alternate Napoleon with his realworld original. In the philosophical possible worlds literature, different terminological systems have been proposed to deal with transworld identity conceptually. Rescher formulates his solution in a world-linking model: different "versions" of "a single individual" can be located in different worlds: Our theory leads to a position where one selfsame individual can reappear in different descriptive guises in different possible worlds. It accordingly becomes necessary to distinguish between two versions of what it is to be a "single individual" [...} .

Lewis, on the other hand, maintains his world-separatist position in observing that "'transworld' identity in the truest sense—overlap of worlds—creates a disastrous problem about the accidental intrinsic properties of the alleged common parts," advocating that "we [...] reject overlap of worlds"51. He proposes a different terminology, counterpart theory: The counterpart relation is our substitute for identity between things in different worlds [...]. Where some would say that you are in several worlds, in which you have somewhat different properties and somewhat different things happen to you, I prefer to say that you are in the actual world and no other, but you have counterparts in several other worlds .

In fact, the overlap of worlds which causes such "a disastrous problem" from a philosophical perspective lies at the heart of much recent 49

50 51 52

Dolezel (1988: 482^483). I have quoted Dolezel (1988) precisely because it states the possible worlds argument in the most radically world-separatist terms. However, in reworking these ideas, Dolezel (1998: 16) does in fact mellow the separatist stance on the ontological homogeneity of fictional entities by conceding that "persons with actual-world 'prototypes' constitute a distinct semantic class." More recently still, in dealing with boundary-crossing between historical and fictional worlds, including the counterfactual, Dolezel (1999: 264) has written that "possible-worlds semantics has no quarrel with the idea of open boundary." Nevertheless, the philosophically abstract framework of the possible-worlds approach, which is devoid of a cognitive dimension, prevents it from being able to account for how the human mind in general, as opposed to the possible-worlds philosopher, processes counterfactuals. Rescher (1975: 88). Lewis (1986: 210). Lewis (1983: 27-28).

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thinking in cultural and literary theory—from the juggling of worlds in postmodernist fiction53 through to the rise of concepts of hybridity in postcolonial studies to counter the monolithic versions of culture and identity proposed by (neo)colonial discourse54. Likewise, the overlap of worlds and the interactive dynamics of character identities across worlds creates much of the meat in complex counterfactual narratives. In order to show how this process works, Rescher's concept of versions and Lewis' concept of the counterpart can be harnessed to analyse the interaction of ontological and cognitive aspects in the representation of character in counterfactuals. Rescher's term "version" is useful to describe counterfactual entities in terms of gradations away from the actual, i.e. to conceptualise transworld identity as a range of variations of the original (actual-world) character55. The term "counterpart," on the other hand, is more apt when viewing transworld identity in a larger ontological context where worlds are demarcated as opposed to being seen as gradations of alternatives. In addition, the term "realworld original" can be used to distinguish the counterparts of fictional entities located in the realworld, in contrast to fictional entities who are counterfactually multiplied within a narrative world, but who have no original in realworld history. The following initial examples illustrate some basic variations of transworld identity and transworld identification in the counterfactual worlds of narrative fiction. In some forms of minimal counterfactual world, only plot, and not character, is at issue, because the alternate course of events depicted does not have any repercussions for the representation of the character concerned. For example, after his fairly disastrous shipwreck, the eponymous hero of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) conceives of a downward counterfactual scenario56, i.e. one in which things could have been even worse: Another reflection was of great use to me [...] and this was, to compare my present condition with what I at first expected it should be; nay, with what it would certainly have been, if the good providence of God had not wonderfully ordered the ship to be cast up nearer to the shore [...]. [...] I spent whole hours [...] in representing to my self

53 54

Cf. McHale(1987). Cf. Bhabha (1994); Young (1995). In focussing on the intertextual as opposed to the counterfactual multiplication of characters, Margolin (1996) has already proposed a comparative analysis of characters in terms of the difference between original and subsequent versions. On this distinction, see McMullen/Markman/Gavanski (1995).

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in the most lively colours how I must have acted if I had got nothing out of the ship

The alternate course of actions that Crusoe projects does not involve conceptualising a different version of himself; the text projects a counterfactual version of the plot, but not of character. Although a strict possible worlds theorist might claim that Crusoe has constructed a counterpart in a counterfactual world, this alternative Crusoe (the one who can rescue nothing from the shipwreck) is not in any way a recognizably different version of Crusoe himself. In cognitive terms, therefore, nothing in the text prevents the reader from completely identifying the hypothetical Robinson in the counterfactual scenario with his actual version in the novel. The non-theorizing reader will thus conceive of the counterfactual Robinson and his actual counterpart as the same fictional entity. By contrast, in the counterfactual plotting of events by the narrator in Austen's Mansfield Park cited further above, the creation of a different character version is actually the prerequisite of the counterfactual. In saying "[c]ould he [Henry Crawford] have been satisfied with the conquest of one amiable woman's affections, could he have found sufficient exultation in overcoming the reluctance [...] of Fanny Price [...]"58> the narrator briefly constructs an altered version of Henry Crawford, one who is less rakish and more patient. Here, therefore, the brief counterfactual plot is actually generated through an antecedent (the strategic alteration generating the counterfactual consequent*9) that is itself character-based. Here the reader cannot perform automatic transworld identification between the Henry of the actual narrative world of Mansfield Park and his counterfactual counterpart in the way she does in Robinson Crusoe. There is an explicit differentiation by the narrator which the reader too must appreciate in order to follow the resulting causal-counterfactual line of plot development, i.e. if Henry had had more self-control, he could have won Fanny's affection. Counterfactual worlds in twentieth-century fiction create a whole new range of scenarios for games with transworld identity. Science fiction and fantasy texts generate a particularly rich landscape of alternatives, precisely because generically they are located in a transitional realm between full realism and anti-realism (metafiction). Thus, they use non-realistic plots based on fantasy or fictional science to engender multiple worlds, but the principles of their characterization techniques remain realistic and differ57 58 59

Defoe (1965: 141). Austen (1966: 451). SeeRoese/Olson(1995b).

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entiated, resulting in psychologically credible multiple character versions across worlds. Some such fictions actually use fantastic plots to create "transworld journeys"60 in which counterparts from different worlds swap places or meet, thereby creating a fictional literalisation of the kind of "overlap of worlds" found so philosophically daunting by Lewis61. In John Wyndham's story "Random Quest" (1961), for example, when a scientific experiment goes wrong, the protagonist and narrator Colin Trafford finds himself transplanted into a counterfactual version of the mid-twentieth century in which he occupies the body of an alternate version of himself. One of the main themes of the story is the non-identicality of the two versions of Colin Trafford. As a result of a deviation in history somewhere in the 1920s, World War II and the consequent drive for scientific innovation has not occurred, and Trafford has become a novelist instead of a scientist. In the process, he has (in comparison to the protagonist Colin Trafford) also become not such a nice person: [This] Colin Trafford looked like me—right down to the left thumb which had got mixed up in an electric fan and never quite matched the other side—indeed, up to a point, that point somewhere in 1926-7 he was me. [...] But later on, things on our different planes must have run differently for us. Environment, or experiences, had developed different qualities in him which, I have to think, lie latent in me [...]. [...] I found the results somewhat painful, rather like continually glimpsing oneself in unexpected distorted mirrors .

Here the very spice of the story is created by the contrast of the two counterparts and the fact that Colin Trafford the narrator must suffer for his counterpart's sins because no one in the counterfactual world is aware of his different identity. The story is thus a literal enactment of the possible worlds tenet that no two fictional entities in different worlds are the same. At the same time, the fantasy plot defies the logical-theoretical world-demarcating premises of the possible worlds framework because the protagonist overcomes the spatio-temporal barrier between the actual and the counterfactual by moving from one world to another. Wyndham's story also illustrates how the non-cognitive possibleworlds approach cannot capture the full readerly processing of counterfactual plots and their transworld characters. The events of the counterfactual version of the year 1954 as reported in a newspaper's headlines

61 62

I have appropriated this term from Shea's (1989) report on possible worlds in philosophy. See Lewis (1986). Wyndham (1965: 160-161).

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make strange reading for the newly arrived Colin Trafford, who comes from the different realworld version of 1954: I turned to the middle page, and read: 'Disorders in Delhi. One of the greatest exhibitions of civil disobedience so far staged in India took place here today demanding the immediate release of Nehru from Prison. For nearly all the hours of daylight the city has been at a standstill-' Then an item in an adjoining column caught my eye: 'In answer to a question from the Opposition front bench Mr Butler, the Prime Minister, assured the House that the Government was giving serious consideration-' [...f .

The reading activity of the fictional character Colin Trafford, dislocated from his own realworld, is equatable with that of a realworld reader of counterfactual history. For the full significance of the passage to be realised, the real reader, like the fictional Trafford, must be a product of realworld twentieth-century history. In this case she is in a position to recognise names such as "Nehru" and "Butler" by accessing her realworld encyclopaedic knowledge or "common frames"64 of twentieth-century history. However, the readerly dynamics here are more complex than the automatic activation of previously stored knowledge. As Fauconnier and Turner show, the counterfactual construct does not simply involve recognition, but the creation of a unique new blend of worlds in which input is taken from a number of realworld "mental spaces." Through the clearer specification of these realworld mental spaces and their new blend in the counterfactual space, it is possible to identify more clearly the "emergent structure"—Fauconnier and Turner's designation for the structural uniqueness and causal-imaginative implications of the new counterfactual world created out of aspects of the old65. The mental processes involved in world-blending are "largely unconscious" so that "it seems easy, but it is in fact complex66." Applied to the passage cited from "Random Quest," this produces the following breakdown of the stages of the reader's mental processing of its counterfactual propositions. The realworld reader recognizes that she comes from a world in which Nehru became Prime Minister of India as a result of that country's independence in 1947, and in which Rab Butler never became leader of the British conservative party or Prime Minister in post-war Britain. Not-withstanding the fact that this information is not contained in 63 64 65 66

Ibid.: 144-145. On this concept, see Eco (1979: 21). Fauconnier/Turner (1998b: 286); see also Fauconnier/Turner (2002: 217-247). Fauconnier/Turner (1998b: 287).

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the text, only if the reader possesses this knowledge is she able to perceive the above fictional events as counterfactual deviations from actual history and enjoy the text's full counterfactual-creative scope, in which it defines itself in relation to the ontological level of extratextual, realworld history. In plot terms, however, Nehru is patently not the same version as his realworld original. He is here constructed by counterfactually blending aspects of the realworld history of India in the 1940s, notably two mental spaces: the first is Nehru's acts of civil unrest against the British prior to Indian independence, which are extended into the counterfactual space of 1954. The second realworld input space is Nehru's becoming prime minister of India as from 1947: while this fact is contradicted in the emergent counterfactual space (in which Nehru is patently not enjoying the privileges of prime minister, since he is in prison), it is precisely because of its ironic contrast with the counterfactual situation that it is a key input feature in the counterfactual construct the reader is invited to entertain in her mind. Furthermore, the emergent structure of this counterfactual world of 1954 also involves a contradistinctive commentary on the realworld 1940s Indian scenario. This is made through the implicit causal reasoning that only by virtue of World War Π did India achieve independence and Nehru thus become prime minister. Similarly, the counterfactual scenario of Rab Butler as Prime Minister in 1954 is constructed through the blending of input spaces involving a) the realworld Conservative leader and Prime Minister in 1954, Churchill, and b) the realworld Rab Butler who, despite his ambitions, never became British Prime Minister. Here the emergent structure contains the major causal inference that Churchill only became leader through the occurrence of World War II. It is highly interesting and indicative of the complexity of counterfactuals that the name Churchill does not even occur in the text. Nevertheless, alongside the failed political aspirations of the realworld Butler, the realworld premiership of Churchill is one of the most significant input spaces of this fictional counterfactual, which the realworld reader must activate in order to understand the full permutations of the counterfactual scenario of Wyndham's story. The above discussion therefore shows that a possible-worlds framework is incapable of penetrating the cognitive dynamics of counterfactuals, which involve the blending and not the separation of worlds or input spaces. For the contemporary realworld reader, the dynamics of world-blending taking place in the reading of counterfactuals may therefore be said to involve a dual process not only of trans-world

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identification (the perception that the fictional Nehru and Butler have realworld counterparts), but also simultaneous transworld differentiation: it is necessary to perceive strategic differences between the input spaces in order to appreciate the emergent structure of the counterfactual world. The reader is thus able to identify the deviant version of history as counterfactual by accessing her knowledge of realworld history and, whether she consciously realizes it or not, this counterfactual landscape is constructed in her mind with interactive reference to realworld history. By contrast, however, the reader understands the fictional figure Colin Trafford's two different versions in the realword and counterfactual years 1954 only with reference to each other across the two worlds depicted within the text, and not by integrating any further realworld mental spaces or "common frames" from outside the narrative world. Therefore, in terms of the cognitive operations necessary to read the text, we can conclude that the figures Nehru, Butler and Trafford do not have ontological homogeneity. Trafford may seem like a realworld figure on the level of the realworld Nehru. However, unlike Nehru, he has no realworld original, and thus no extratextual space from which the reader can, either identifying or differentiating, import information relating to him. Nehru, on the other hand, has an explicit counterfactual version in the text, an implicit fictional realworld counterpart in the fictional version of the realworld that Trafford comes from, and also, on an extratextual level, a flesh-and-blood (as opposed to fictional paper) realworld original. Dolezel's claim that "[a]s non-actualised possibles, all fictional entities are ontologically homogeneous"67 is thus hardly borne out by the complex manifestations of counterfactuals in narrative fiction. A different type of transworld identity constellation, an intertextual one which splices the realworld and the fully fictional, is used in Gibson and Sterling's alternate history of the nineteenth century, The Difference Engine (1990). In addition to playfully remodelled versions of realworld figures (the Prime Minister of Britain is Lord Byron), this counterfactual world also contains Sybil Gerard, a character from (the realworld nineteenth-century Prime Minister) Disraeli's novel Sybil. Sybil can also be described as having a realworld original insofar as she is imported from a prior realworld text (Sybil) into a new fictional context; she is thus not as fully fictional as Colin Trafford in Wyndham's story, who has no original outside that text. 67

Dolezel( 1988: 482^183).

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In comparison to the complicated interreferentiality of the alternate history genre, transworld identity in the metafictionally contradictory plots of experimental postmodernist fiction does not display the same degree of complexity in the creation of different character versions. This is probably one reason why the genre has not proved as interesting to the general reading public. Unlike their semi-realistic science-fiction counterparts, these anti-realist texts exaggerate plot at the expense of character. This is clearly revealed by one of the most extreme examples of the form, the ending of B.S. Johnson's short story "Broad Thoughts From a Home": Magnanimous gesture: the reader is offered a choice of endings to the piece. Group One: The Religious. [...] Group Two: The Mundane, (a) Samuel rapes Miss Deane in a state of unwonted elation, (b) Miss Deane rapes Samuel in a state of unwonted absentmindedness. (c) Robert rapes both of them in a state of unwonted aplomb (whatever that may mean). Group three: The Impossible. The next post contains an urgent recall to England for (a) Samuel (b) Robert (c) both; on account of (i) death (ii) birth (iii) love (iv) work .

In this concentrated excess of plot options, there is no room for the development of varying character versions within the different alternatives; nor is it even possible here to talk in terms of the actual vs. the counterfactual, since no clear oppositional framework can be constructed to distinguish an ontological hierarchy—a concept that will now be considered in concluding this paper. 5. Single vs. Multiple-World Texts: Ontological Hierarchies in Realist and Other Fictions The conceptual restrictions imposed by a story-oriented analysis of plot also circumscribe any consideration of ontological hierarchy—a concept which can be defined as the ultimate state of relationships between alternate possible worlds that emerges in the process of the plot's development subsequent to the ambiguities and complexities of temporal orchestration—and which varies substantially amongst realist and non-realist narrative genres. In conventional realist narrative, whatever forms of temporal orchestration may take place during the unfolding of the discourse, the final ontological hierarchy can only confer the status of actuality on one version of events. However, in many denouements, as in 68

Johnson (1973: 110).

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the example of Fielding 's Joseph Andrews discussed further above, the final actual world or authenticated story version achieves its narrative power and authoritative status precisely by triumphing over other potential versions and rising to the apex of the ontological hierarchy69. Realist texts are single-world texts insofar as they do not allow more than one world to assume the level of actuality, notwithstanding the fact that they play games with alternative versions of that narrative world. The production of ontological clarity is thus a particular feature of conventional realist texts: although Robinson Crusoe constructs counterfactual versions of reality, and Joseph Andrews constructs multiple versions of the past; no more than one version of reality is ever given concurrent actual status. By contrast, the single-world alternate history, as represented by Pavane, constitutes a borderline case in which the multipleworld form is incipient but not yet manifest in the text itself. Cognitively, this may be seen as a multiple-world text, because in order to understand it, the reader must access realworld history to grasp its counterfactual frame. Ontologically, however, it is a single-world text in a realist tradition, since the counterfactual world is the text's only actual world70. Non-realist texts, however, subvert the clear ontological hierarchies of realism by constructing permanently pluralistic multiple-world scenarios. Wyndham's "Random Quest" depicts two different world versions existing side by side, without giving either ontological superiority. Johnson's "Broad Thoughts From a Home" drives the multiplication of worlds much further: its closing section spawns multiple event fragments in which not even a trace of a coherent single strand of the actual is evident, and thus offers no differentiated ontological hierarchy at all. The multiple-world structure of Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine is different again: no single world can emerge as actual in this postmodern amalgam of worlds which uses an unusual combination of metafictional character importation and alternate history. Modernist narrative differs from conventional realist narrative in its tendency to leave various alternatives open (for example Henry James's The Turn of the Screw [1898]) instead of definitively instating one version as actual. There is one paragraph at the end of Pavane which destabilizes the novel's otherwise single-world framework by referring to realworld events like "Belsen" and "Buchenwald" in order to make the point that the technological progress of the realworld twentieth century, in contrast to the more retarded society of the counterfactual world depicted in the novel, did not necessarily serve to secure civilization's progress (Roberts 1995: 275); this late addition makes Pavane a slightly deviant single-world alternate history.

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Significant differences in ontological hierarchy also allow a definitional distinction between strict counterfactuals and other forms of alternate world plotting. A counterfactual constructs a clear binary set of events, the factual one and its hypothetical other (the coM/i/er-factual), which is viewed with hindsight as an ontologically subordinate event with clear virtual status. Conversely, possible versions of the future conceived of by a character, as seen in Eliot's Daniel Deronda further above, do not contain a single dominant factual version which contrasts with less actual ones, but simply represent a fan of as yet unrealised possibilities71. Likewise, the (for the reader often bewildering) effect of the narration of multiple contradictory versions of events practiced by postmodernist experimental narratives, like that of B.S. Johnson, consists precisely in the fact that the reassuring ontological hierarchy of realism, in which only one narrated set of events is ultimately confirmed to be actual, is radically undermined. 6. Conclusion In a multiple-world theory of narrative, the story therefore loses its exclusive position and becomes just one of the ontological levels of the plot, which is the interactive sum of the alternate possible worlds generated by the text. Seen in this way, plot becomes something much more dynamic than a chronological story sequence or its anachronic inversion by the discourse (the two approaches which characterized traditional structuralist plot analysis). The actual narrative world which, in realist narrative, ultimately emerges from the other virtual narrative strands, clearly has affinities with the concept of 'story,' but at the same time it no longer has that concept's dominant position and automatic emphasis on a single, unilinear chronology which is dechronologised by the discourse, its conceptual other. In the multiple-world approach to plot, the actual narrative world's other is not discourse but the larger, ontologically various realm of plot variations and character versions generated in the narrative's complex fabric of alternate possible worlds.

In the field of counterfactuals in political science, Weber advances the (self-confessedly "controversial") claim that it is also possible to talk of the future as counterfactual, since "most people [...] carry around with them an Official future,' a set of assumptions about what probably will be" (1996: 276,279).

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References Adams, Robert Merrihew 1979 "Theories of Actuality," in The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality, edited by Micheal J. Loux, 190-209 (Ithaca: Cornell UP). Allen, Sture (ed.) 1989 Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 65 (Berlin: de Gruyter). Austen, Jane 1966 [1814] Mansfield Park, edited with an introduction by Tony Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin). 1969 [1811] Sense and Sensibility, edited with an introduction by Tony Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Bhabha, Homi K. 1994 The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge). Bremond, Claude 1980 "The Logic of Narrative Possibilities," translated by Elaine D. Cancalon. New Literary History 11.3: 387-411. Brooks, Peter 1992 [1984] Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP). Cohn, Dorrit 1978 Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP). Cowley, Robert (ed.) 2001 [1999] What If? Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (London: Pan). Dannenberg, Hilary P. 1998 "Hypertextuality and Multiple World Construction in English and American Narrative Fiction," in Bildschirmfiktionen: Interferenzen zwischen Literatur und neuen Medien, edited by Julika Griem. ScriptOralia 106: 265-294 (Tübingen: Narr). 2000 "Divergent Plot Patterns in Narrative Fiction from Sir Philip Sidney to Peter Ackroyd," in Anglistentag 1999 Mainz: Proceedings, edited by Bernhard Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts, 415-427 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier). 2003 "The Coincidence Plot in Narrative Fiction," in Anglistentag 2002 Bayreuth: Proceedings, edited by Michael Steppat and Hans-Jörg Schmid, 509-520 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier). 2004. "A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction," in Poetics Today 25.3 (in print). Under review. Plotting Coincidence and Counterfactuality in Narrative Fiction. Defoe, Daniel 1965 [1719] Robinson Crusoe, edited with an introduction by Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

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Dickens, Charles 1965 [1861] Great Expectations, edited and with an introduction by Angus Calder (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Disraeli, Benjamin 1980 [1845] Sybil, introduced by R.A. Butler and edited by Thorn Braun (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Dolezel, Lubomir 1976a "Narrative Semantics," in PTL. A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1: 129-151. 1976b "Narrative Modalities," in Journal of Literary Semantics 5.1:5-14. 1988 "Mimesis and Possible Worlds," in Poetics Today 9.3: 475-^96. 1998 Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Parallax (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP). 1999 "Fictional and Historical Narrative," in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series, 247-273 (Columbus: Ohio State UP). Eco, Umberto 1979 The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the semiotics of texts (Bloomington: Inidiana UP). Eliot, George 1967 [1876] Daniel Deronda, edited with an introduction by Barbara Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Fauconnier, Gilles / Turner, Mark 1998a "Principles of Conceptual Integration," in Discourse and Cognition: Bridging the Gap, edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig, 269-283 (Stanford: CSLI). 1998b "Conceptual Integration in Counterfactuals," in Discourse and Cognition: Bridging the Gap, edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig, 285-296 (Stanford: CSLI). 2002 The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books). Fearon, James D. 1996 "Causes and Counterfactuals in Social Science: Exploring an Analogy between Cellular Automata and Historical Processes," in Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, 39-67 (Princeton: Princeton UP). Fielding, Henry 1977 [1742] Joseph Andrews, edited with an introduction by R.F. Brissenden (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Fludernik, Monika 1993 The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness (London and New York: Routledge). Genette, Gerard 1980 Narrative Discourse, translated by Jane E. Lewin, Foreword by Jonathan Culler (Ithaca: Cornell UP).

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Gibson, William / Sterling, Bruce 1992 [1990] The Difference Engine (London: Gollancz). Goodman, Nelson 1947 "The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals," in Journal of Philosophy 44.5: 113-128. Griem, Julika (ed.) 1998 Bildschirmfiktionen: Interferenzen zwischen Literatur und neuen Medien. ScriptOralia 106 (Tübingen: Narr). Haubrichs, Wolfgang (ed.) 1977 Erzählforschung 2: Theorien, Modelle und Methoden der Narrativik. Lili Beiheft 6 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Heibig, Jörg 1988 Der Parahistorische Roman: Ein lileraturhistorischer und gattungstypologischer Beitrag zur Allotopieforschung. Berliner Beiträge zur Anglistik l (Frankfurt: Lang). Herman, David (ed.) 1999 Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series (Columbus: Ohio State University Press). Home, Alistair 2001 [1999] "Ruler of the World: Napoleon's Missed Opportunities," in What If? Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley, 201-219 (London: Pan). Jahn, Manfred 1996 "Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological Concept," in Style 30.2: 241-267. James, Henry 1969 The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Johnson, B.S. 1973 "Broad Thoughts from a Home," in Aren 't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, 91-110 (London: Hutchinson). Keen, Suzanne 2001 Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Koenig, Jean-Pierre (ed.) 1998 Discourse and Cognition: Bridging the Gap (Stanford: CSLI). Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 1996 [1720] Monadologie, edited by Dietmar Till. Translated by Heinrich Köhler. (Frankfurt: Insel). Lewis, David 1973 Counterfactuals (Oxford: Blackwell). 1979 "Possible Worlds," in The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality, edited by Michael J. Loux, 182-189 (Ithaca: Cornell UP). 1983 Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford UP). 1986 On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell).

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Loux, Michael J. (ed.) 1979 The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP). Margolin, Uri 1996 "Characters and Their Versions," in Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology and Poetics, edited by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu and Walid Hamameh, 113-132 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). McHale, Brian 1987 Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen). McMullen, Matthew N. / Markman, Keith D. / Gavanski, Igor 1995 "Living in Neither the Best Nor Worst of All Possible Worlds: Antecedents and Consequences of Upward and Downward Counterfactual Thinking," in What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, edited by Neal J. Roese and James M. Olson, 133-167 (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). Pavel, Thomas G. 1980 "Narrative Domains," in Poetics Today 1.4: 105-114. 1985 The Poetics of Plot. The Case of English Renaissance Drama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Phelan, James 1989 Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Prince, Gerald 1992 Narrative As Theme. Studies in French Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Reitz, Bernhard / Rieuwerts, Sigrid (eds.) 2000 Anglistentag 1999 Mainz: Proceedings (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier). Rescher, Nicholas 1975 A Theory of Possibility: A Constructivistic and Conceptualistic Account of Possible Individuals and Possible Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell). Richardson, Samuel 1985 [1747-8] Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, edited with an introduction by Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Riffaterre, Michael 1990 Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP). Roberts, Keith 1995 [1966] Pavane (London: Gollancz). Roese, Neal J. / Olson, James M. (eds.) 1995a What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). Roese, Neal J. and James M. Olson 1995b "Counterfactual Thinking: A Critical Overview," in What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, edited by Neal J. Roese and James M. Olson, 1-55 (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum).

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Ryan, Marie-Laure 1991 Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana UP). 1992 "Possible Worlds in Recent Literary Theory," in Style 26A: 528-553. 1995a "Introduction: From Possible Worlds to Virtual Reality," in Style 29: 173-183. 1995b "Allegories of Immersion: Virtual Narration in Postmodern Fiction," in Style 29: 262-286. 2001 Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Parallax (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP). Shea, William R. 1989 "Transworld Journeys: Report on Session 1: Philosophy," in Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 65, edited by Sture Allen, 82-89 (Berlin: de Gruyter). Sidney, Sir Philip 1994 [ca. 1580] The Countess of Pembroke 's Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), edited with an introduction by Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford UP). Stanzel, Franz K, 1977 "Die Komplementärgeschichte: Entwurf einer leserorientierten Romantheorie," in Erzählforschung 2: Theorien, Modelle und Methoden der Narrativik, edited by Wolfgang Haubrichs. Lili Beiheft 6, 240-259 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Stanzel, Franz K. 1984 A Theory of Narrative, translated by Charlotte Goedsche (Cambridge: Cambridge UP). Steppat, Michael / Schmid, Hans-Jörg (eds.) 2003 Anglistentag 2002 Bayreuth: Proceedings (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier). Tetlock, Philip E. / Belkin, Aaron (eds.) 1996a Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton UP). Tetlock, Philip E. / Belkin, Aaron 1996b "Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives," in Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, 1-38 (Princeton: Princeton UP). Todorov, Tzvetan 1969 Grammaire du Decameron. Approaches to Semiotics 3 (The Hague: Mouton). 1977 The Poetics of Prose, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Cornell UP). Turner, Mark 1996 "Conceptual Blending and Counterfactual Argument in the Social and Behavioural Sciences," in Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, 291-295 (Princeton: Princeton UP).

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Weber, Steven 1996 "Counterfactuals, Past and Future," in Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, 268-288 (Princeton: Princeton UP). Wyndham, John 1965 [1961] "Random Quest," in Consider Her Ways and Others, 131-173 (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Young, Robert J. C. 1995 Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge).

JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA (Zaragoza)

Overhearing Narrative Narratives can be heard, or read. They can also be overheard (I will not use a corresponding term "overread" in this sense), and sometimes they are both read and overheard. A special sense of "overhearing" will have to be defined to account for such complex effects and for even more complex ones, if the need should arise, for if we grant that one can interact with oneself, is it possible, for instance, to overhear oneself? And how is it in writing? An analysis of such phenomena will require an approach through the pragmatic specificity of narrative and of the modes of address involved in it. Attention will have to be paid, too, to the specific conventions of literary communication, and of fiction, if this is to be our main focus. Literary narratives are display texts, texts meant to be preserved and reproduced literally in a variety of circumstances. They are—typically—written texts. The specificity of display texts and written texts lies in their relative "decontextualisability," which means, paradoxically, that they provide ready-made communicative contexts, carrying (or doing their best to carry) their context along, so to speak, and providing indications for their favoured contextual use. Such contextual autonomy has important consequences for the nature of the interactive textual processes involved in reading narrative. Linguistic pragmaticists have analysed the ways in which language users interact and cooperate in the production of meaning. Most typically, they have focused on conversational interaction between speakers. The following account by Jenny Thomas is representative in this sense: in producing an utterance a speaker takes account of the social, psychological and cognitive limitations of the hearer; while the hearer, in interpreting an utterance, necessarily takes account of the social constraints leading a speaker to formulate the utterance in a particular way. The process of making meaning is a joint accom-

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plishment between speaker and hearer, and that is what I mean by 'meaning in interaction' .

An account of interaction through written texts would need to emphasize that the "hearer" (reader) is not present and therefore can be taken into account only in a certain sense—as an intended, ideal or implied addressee. Interaction with this implied addressee does take place (and has in fact been described in some detail2). But the readers' "making of meaning" does not stop at this point, since unintended readers, whom I shall style "over-hearers," also respond to texts and make meaning with them. Reading narrative involves interpreting and articulating a number of complex hierarchical structures of communicative address. Some of these interactive processes may be further examined on the basis of an analogy with oral or conversational narrative. Conversational narrative often necessitates a long stretch of discourse in which one speaker relies on other speakers' willingness to give him or her the floor for an extended period of time. Furthermore, even in the case of face-to-face oral narratives, a narrative refers the speaker and hearer to a narrated world or situation beyond the immediate communicative situation. The extension, coherence and referential autonomy of narratives make possible and favour the generation of elaborate textual images of sender and addressee. Thus, images of listeners and speakers are at least potentially well defined and relevant to the communicative dynamics of narrative. The textual subjects of written narratives are built on potentialities which are already present in oral narrative, whereas the specific constraints and possibilities of written language and of literary conventions make possible the development of more complex forms3.

1 2

Thomas (1995: 208). See Hoey (2001). To this extent, I could subscribe to the claim put forth by Monika Fludernik (1996: 19) that "spontaneous forms of storytelling can be imaged as natural and prototypical since they provide a generic and typological resource for more subtly and complexly textured artefacts of creative structuration", although my analytical concerns and my understanding of many narratological concepts differ considerably from Fludernik's. One might argue, indeed, that Fludernik's "natural narratology" does not extract the full theoretical consequences of this continuity between literary narratives and everyday communicative interaction.

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In narratological analysis, a familiar model shows the way these textual images of sender and receiver inherent in any communicative process may be duplicated or multiplied en abyme: author [implied author (narrator narratee) implied reader] reader

It is perhaps worth noting that in a given narrative event, each of these "subject positions" can be occupied by one or more individuals, and that for some practical purposes the brackets may themselves be "bracketed" in order to fuse, for instance, the implied reader and the narratee into one, or the author and the implied author (this "bracketing" depends at least as much on the perspective being brought to the narrative as it does on narrative structure in se)*. Written fictional genres, and especially the novel, being literary genres which draw on an extensive tradition of previous literary performance, have shown an outstanding ability to incorporate conventions from other genres and to explore new dimensions of communicative complexity through embedding, parody and contrasting discourses. The novel was defined as a melting pot of other genres well before Bakhtin, but the Bakhtinian characterization of the novel as a dialogic and multivocal genre has given a particularly felicitous formulation to this notion5. This is all the more so in that Bakhtin's perspective brings along with it a general theory of speech and language which ties up with some of our concerns here. In Bakhtinian poetics and linguistics, the word or discourse is always addressed to an other, it is intrinsically dialogic. An utterance responds to previous utterances which are implicitly contained in its shape, and it also prepares the ground for the addressee's reaction, offering him or her a possible role to play—a notion which is Bakhtin's version of the implied reader/hearer or of Walker Gibson's "mock reader." As Gibson emphasized more than fifty years ago, actual receivers may or may not feel comfortable with the position the text has designed for them. There may be a lack of fit between the intended and the actual audience. Actually, there always exists some lack of fit, since the text's audience is multiple, divided and frequently "oppositional"6.

5 6

I expound at length my understanding of the theoretical foundations of this model in Garcia Landa (1998). Bakhtin (1981). Brian Richardson (1997).

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So we might modify the previous scheme to include "unaddressed" readers: author [implied author (narrator narratee) implied reader]-» addressed reader —> unaddressed reader

If this extra figure somewhat distorts the neat straight line of the initial scheme, introducing someone who is not supposed to be there, that is just as it should be. In analysing discourse, systemic-functional linguists differentiate "tenor" (the addressee relationship of discourse) and "mode" (or medium relationship7). In practice, issues of tenor and issues of mode intersect, as different media impose specific address requirements. For instance, one of the dimensions of mode is privateness, which is a matter of "the number of recipients intended for a particular text: the more addressees the less private"8. The diagram in the Appendix showing the medium relationship of discourse accordingly hints at some of the address relationships involved in the use of specific media. Plato lived long before the printing press became, to use a common expression, the first of the mass media, but his observations on writing already bring out the potential difference in address between speech and writing, or the multiple address inherent in written discourse. With multiple and anonymous address, the issues raised by the existence of unintended and unwanted addressees become more prominent: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You'd think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse rolls about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn't know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father's support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support .

Unintended addressees are here both unwelcome and inevitably present. Plato's conception is, of course, a strongly intentionalist one. According to him, the author's intention is crucial to communication, 8 9

See the definitions in Leech/Deucher/Hoogenraad (1984: 9, 133). Roger Bell (1991: 84-96). Plato (2001: 82).

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and it is insufficiently explicit in written texts. In his view, we cannot interact with the text (hence, his choice to write dialogues—texts which explicitly contain their own built-in interaction). Modern theorists argue, perhaps with greater justice, that readers do interact with texts (Hoey maintains a weak version of this claim) and that no text ever tells its reader—even the same reader—the same thing twice10). One necessary consequence of the written medium, therefore, is that a text has to face the possibility of meeting unintended addressees. In most literature, as in several other kinds of public writing and display texts, there is usually not one single addressee or a number of specifically intended addressees. Even in a genre such as the poetic epistle, addressed by the author to a specific addressee (e.g. a particular friend or a patron), the address mode is public insofar as the text is written as literature, as potentially readable by a wider public—and written according to a number of conventions applying to literary texts. More generally, one could say that if the text is written and public, anybody can be considered to be its addressee insofar as it is written and public. This condition is of course too general when put in those terms. For one thing, a public text may well use private communication, whether real or fictional, as a motivating device even when its real addressee is the general public. Therefore, both the actual and the motivating or fictionalised interaction have to be described in order to provide an adequate account of the text's tenor (to use a term from systemic functional linguistics). For instance, in Andre Gide's L'Immoraliste (1902), the author's text (a novel addressed to the general reading public) takes the form of a private letter addressed by the extradiegetic narrator to his brother, a letter which in turn contains an account of the autobiographical oral narrative in which the novel's protagonist, Michel, addresses three friends, one of whom is the extradiegetic narrator, the author of the letter. The intradiegetic oral account and the extradiegetic epistolary narrative count as non-fiction for the characters, but of course in the global economy of the work, they are fictional devices subordinated to Gide's narrative, the novel L'Immoraliste. An account of a text's mode of address must describe such boxing levels because individual differences in the way they are structured and in the way interaction and address are managed are always significant. 10

For this stronger claim, see the essays on rereading in Galef (1998).

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Fictional narratees, then, must be taken into account, as they are used to orchestrate and orientate the reception of the narrative. But most crucially for our purposes here, a text projects the image of an overall intended addressee or implied reader. As I shall soon be arguing, the figure of the implied reader is structurally related to the "ratified interactant" in an oral encounter. But there may well be at this level too a structural split in address: a text which is public, insofar it is published and marketed, may still restrict ratified address linguistically or ideologically, using the implied reader as a filter. Even when this reader image is not explicit and clear cut, there are always elements which allow us, to some extent, to define an intended audience, as well as an unintended one. For instance, a text, however brief, is written in a given language, and this provides a minimal definition of the linguistic competence of its intended addressee which is already significant. Peritextual elements such as cover illustrations and design, titles, blurbs, etc., also signal favoured addressees through a number of historically changing conventions. Thus, a continuum of address protocols, ranging from text-internal to text-external (such as advertising, distribution networks or classifications in bookstores), help ensure that a book should not address "those who have no business with it." To return to the modulation of address at the level of ideology: most texts will be analysable in ideological terms as presupposing a certain world-view, a constructed view of reality, a set of ethical or political priorities, group allegiances, etc. The most significant materials for the construction of the implied receiver, as of the implied author, are those available through critical ideological analysis. While literary authors or writers of narrative fiction rarely address a predetermined set of individuals, they do try to establish a communicative interaction with an implied audience with whom they share (or may not share) a number of ideological assumptions and values. As this is an interpretive issue, the image of the implied author and of the implied reader will be a function, too, of the critical approach we adopt to analyse the text. A given critical approach can dig out ideological presuppositions which are quite irrelevant from the point of view (and for the purposes) of an alternative critical project. It can also dig out ideological presuppositions which are quite "irrelevant" to the text's implied authorial stance. It is in this sense that I will be arguing that a text's ideology may be "overheard" by a reader or critic who does not accept the text's implied receiver position.

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While written works can be misunderstood on the one hand and analysed on the other, or both analysed and misunderstood, they are not as helpless as Plato thought. They can at least try to defend themselves without an appeal to the author-father. (It should be emphasized that the implied author doesn't qualify as Plato's author-father, as it is constructed on the basis of the text. I take it that only the real author's additional discursive interventions, whether in speech or in writing, should qualify as "the father's protection.") As we have seen, a text may fictionalise, represent or dramatise the lack of fit between intended and actual reception, making a virtue of necessity. So, actual lack of ideological fit may give rise to fictionalised and narrativised lack of fit in the form of unreliable narrators, unresponsive narratees, and so on. These act as so many buffers between the text's complex ideological stance and the reader's projected (and actual) response. Inaugural moments in fiction are especially interesting in this respect. For instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in two parts. The second part dramatises the reading public's response to the first part, with Don Quixote meeting several readers of his earlier adventures who are forced to correct their earlier impressions of Don Quixote when they meet him in the flesh. Here, of course, the author-father (or adoptive father, as he styles himself in the prologue) can be said to have stepped in to protect his child, his "hijo del entendimiento"u, as well as his own reputation, a protection specifically aimed at countering the unwelcome "misreading" which gave rise to the apocryphal Second Part of Don Quixote published by Avellaneda in 1614 (see esp. Don Quixote, second part, chapter LIX). Another author to use unintended audiences to great effect is Samuel Richardson, as I shall be arguing in a moment. In order to deal further with the question of intended versus actual receivers in narrative, we might adapt some of the terms devised by Erving Goffman for interaction analysis. These terms focus on conversation and other forms of face-to-face interaction, but they also shed light on written fiction: for one thing, written fiction absorbs and extends the conventions of narrative conversational interaction. Goffman's analysis decentres and dissolves the intuitive notions of the simple speaker-hearer model of linguistic interaction. In his model of communicative interaction, there is a whole gamut of participation Cervantes (1966: 37).

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statuses for the hearer, just as there are different formats of speech production which are insufficiently described by the term "speaker." First, hearers. Hearers may be official or unofficial, direct addressees or mere hearers: "among official hearers one must distinguish the addressed recipient from 'unaddressed' ones"12. Then, too, the presence of receivers or readers may or may not be known to the speaker. Allan Bell also provides a useful model of audience roles much along the lines of Goffman's interactional analysis: Not all audience members are equally important. We can distinguish and rank their roles according to whether or not they are known, ratified or addressed by the speaker. We can picture them as occupying concentric circles, each one more distant from the speaker [...]. The main character in the audience is the second person, the addressee, who is known, ratified and addressed. Among the other, third persons who may be present, the auditors are known and ratified interlocutors within the group. Third parties whom the speaker knows to be there, but who are not ratified as part of the group, are overhearers. And other parties whose presence the speaker does not even know about are eavesdroppers .

These are relatively clear-cut positions. But actual interaction may become far more complex, involving ritualised versions of these positions. For Goffman, there is a crucial difference between socially ritualised and actual communicative processes. The process of auditing what a speaker says and following the gist of his remarks—hearing in the communication-system sense—is from the start to be distinguished from the social slot in which this activity usually occurs, namely, official status as a ratified participant in the encounter. For plainly, we might not be listening when indeed we have a ratified social place in the talk, and this in spite of normative expectations on the part of the speaker. Correspondingly, it i s evident that when we are not an official participant in the encounter, we might still be following the talk closely, in one of two socially different ways: either we have purposely engineered this, resulting in 'eavesdropping', or the opportunity has unintentionally and inadvertently come about, as in Overhearing'. In brief, a ratified participant may not be listening, and someone listening may not be a ratified participant .

The gap between the ritually symbolised position and actual practice is known and exploited by language users in a process of symbolic reappropriation. Through speech, we modulate role positions which acknowledge the actually perceived interactional process of communi12 13 14

Goffman (1981: 133). Allan Bell (1997: 246). Goffman (1981: 131-132).

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cation. At the same time, the officially sanctioned communicative positions are upheld and distinguished from these interactively appropriated roles. Such is the case, for instance, when we choose not to hear what we should not hear, as Goffman explains in a parenthesis (parentheses, incidentally, we can let pass or choose to listen to): (Much of the etiquette of bystanders can be generated from the basic understanding that they should act so as to maximally encourage the fiction that they aren't present; in brief, that the assumptions of the conversational paradigm are being realized.) .

Nevertheless, this "acting as if they were not present" may leave traces in the actual discourse being produced. Goffman examines a variety of complex forms of communicative interaction, such as overhearing, collusion or innuendo16. Some of these may be compared to equivalent structures in literary communication. We may argue, for example, that "eavesdropping" in a sense extended to written communication is essential to Samuel Richardson's fiction, which establishes a gap between the fictionally intended and the actually intended receiver. Many of the refinements in narrative subtlety we find in Clarissa (1747/48) are generated out of the structural lack of fit resulting from the use of the epistolary convention: to begin with, the implied reader is never the narratee here (Richardson's fiction thus adopts from the start a greater level of address complexity than Defoe's). The reader intrudes on the characters' private correspondence, but any qualms that might be felt at this intrusion are defused by the implicit contract with the implied author: the reader responds to the characters' interaction in the morally satisfactory way which is often absent from the fictional interaction itself, and Clarissa finds her ideal interlocutor in the implied reader, who, paradoxically enough, is an eavesdropper she cannot address directly. Fictional unreliability is another related phenomenon which might be explained from the perspective of interaction analysis. A fictional unreliable voice is not necessarily associated with eavesdropping or overhearing. But it may achieve some of its effects on the basis of interactive situations structurally derived from collusion or innuendo (e.g. Wayne Booth's account of the solidarity between the implied author and readers at the expense of an unreliable narrator). Fictional 15 16

Ibid.: 132. Ibid.: 134.

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discourse may proceed, for example, along lines of multidimensional communication: narratees may be characterized as the narrator's consonant addressees while the implied author and the implied readers are cast as engaging in collusive sideplay17. The narrative situation in Adam Thorpe's story "Improvements: 1712" (chapter 3 of Ulverton [1992]) affords a fine example: a stolid and obsessive husbandsman, the narrator, takes smug-sounding notes (for his own benefit) about the improvements in his farm and his dealings with his wife and servant girl, while the implied reader, not addressed by the unscrupulous narrator, weighs nonetheless his shortcomings on the balance provided by the author. Note that Wayne Booth himself, to whom we owe the classic description of unreliable narrative, uses face-to-face interaction and postural proxemics as an image to describe this narrative mode: "The author and reader are secretly in collusion, behind the speaker's back, agreeing upon the standard by which he is found wanting"18. Here, we should read of course "implied author" and "implied reader" for "author" and "reader"—and "implied back" in lieu of "back." There is, then, a continuum of interactional modes linking face-toface communication and the more complex literary works. The terms used by the theorists (such as Booth) are as good a clue as any other to the common root of these communicative phenomena. As a further example, let us consider John Stuart Mill's definition of poetry as a genre which is overheard, a genre which places us in a peculiar auditing position vis-ä-vis the speaker. For Mill, poetry is different in this respect from eloquence, or rhetoric. Here, Mill elaborates on Shelley's definition of the poet as a solitary singer: Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener [. . .]. All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy .

18 19

On byplay, crossplay, sideplay, whether collusive or not, on innuendo and ambivalent states between ratified and non-ratified interaction, see Goffman (1981: 133ff.) before you read this: otherwise you are not a ratified addressee of this paper. As can be seen, Goffman's concepts offer an interesting alternative and complement for the analysis of what is sometimes described in Bakhtinian terms as textual polyphony. Booth (1987: 304). Mill (1971: 539-540).

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This is because poetry must be directed towards itself, not to any extrinsic aim: "when the act of utterance is not itself the end, but a means to an end, [...] then it ceases to be poetry, and becomes eloquence"20. Of course, poetry is not to be confused, Mill argues, with a real soliloquy: it is only an as if. A similar generic difference (actually a more complex one: poetry / oratory / narrative / description) is to be found in all arts, according to Mill. An interactive mode, the soliloquy, can be "keyed"21 to add a transformed layer of interaction to the actual communicative encounter taking place. In Mill's definition, the difference between the socially ritualised communicative processes and the actual ones, a difference theorised at length in Goffman's Frame Analysis, can be clearly grasped. A typical lyrical poem (if there is such a thing—but take Keats's "Why Did I Laugh Tonight?" as a convenient example) presents itself to its intended addressees as an instance of socially ritualised overhearing, but in principle it is not actually overheard, even though it may end up being overheard as well by an unintended hearer or reader. Where does the distinctiveness of narrative lie, as far as these interactional matters are concerned? Interactional modes can be retransformed and used as convenient reference frames to articulate more complex representations of communicative behaviour, that is, representations of communicative behaviour which rely on the existence of the transformed interactional layers carried along and communicated by such behaviour (together with what is at issue in any given encounter: over and above the story it tells, a narrative communicates its narrative mode). The conventions of narrative fiction make possible the formation of complex semiotic structures that reuse or absorb more basic communicative strategies or that then contribute to more complex derivative structures. Narrative structure provides a framework on which complex layers of address and interaction are built up. Conversational narrative, due to its extensive floor space, is a speech mode especially given to side reactions on the part of the audience: it takes up the floor for a significant stretch of time, and this favours the appearance of subordinate communication (e.g. open or collusive byplay or sideplay between listeners). This subordinate communication is 20 21

Ibid.: 540. Goffinan's term (1986).

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tolerated in face-to-face interaction by speakers who in this way provide amends for their inordinate appropriation of floorspace. Oral narrative is thus a site in which unofficial interaction is favoured, negotiated and symbolically appropriated. Fictionalised oral narratives may use this subordinate communication as a motivating device. Take for instance Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" (1915), most of which consists of Granser's intradiegetic narrative to his grandchildren, who have reverted to a primitive tribal life-style and mentality after a world catastrophe. Granser's actual narratees are not in fact his ideal addressees (a mismatch from which the overhearing reader benefits), and they often lose the thread of his nostalgic narrative. This narrative situation gives rise to much sideplay and subordinate interaction between these narratees. The subordinate interaction is used by the author to show additional consequences of the disaster which is told by Granser. "Red is red, ain't it?" Hare-Lip grumbled. "Then what's the good of gettin' cocky and calling it scarlet?" "Granser, what for do you always say so much what nobody knows?" he asked. "Scarlet ain't anything, but red is red, Why don't you say red, then?"

Additional instances of negotiation with unofficial interaction may be pointed out in the realm of written narrative proper, at the level of communication between authors and readers. Dissonant reception, the gap between the actual reader and the implied reader, places the actual reader in the position of an eavesdropper on a discourse which is addressed to the implied reader. The communicative context, including presupposition and shared knowledge, is "seen from the outside" when we overhear. Overhearing thus acts as an embedding of contexts. More specifically (for the purposes of narrative analysis), its exploitation in narrative art amounts to the establishment of a complex interpretive relationship between contexts. Literary narratives often develop the conventions of art by making explicit the unofficial response to previous narratives on the part of their readers. Don Quixote is again a case in point. The gap between romance and everyday life experience gave rise to frequent mismatches between the response intended by the authors of romances and the response of many actual readers who, instead of feeling addressed by the text, must

22

London (1997: 491).

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have found themselves overhearing a discourse intended for others23. This kind of mismatch in response was a natural subject for conversation, jokes, debate and criticism before it could feed back on narrative practice and give rise to an unconventional hero, Don Quixote, who embodied this gap between the ideal and the real. Ironically, Don Quixote is a reader himself (both an ideal reader, from the supposed viewpoint of the satirized romance writers, and a misreader for the author Cervantes). Don Quixote is therefore an incarnation of the implied reader of the romances Cervantes rejects, the author's projection of an abject alter ego "hyding" inside him—in the author's outgrown past, since Cervantes must have responded to those romances as a naive reader and then as an ironic overhearer before he did so as a writer. Can readers and critics be described, in any given instance, as explicit or as implicit addressees, or again as ratified unaddressed hearers—or as overhearers? Bearing in mind that these concepts were originally developed for the analysis of conversation, we must not expect to establish one-to-one correlations with written narratives; even so, useful analogies and divergences may crop up as we analyse specific cases of communicative interaction. I have been arguing that the implied reader might in principle be conceived as an official or ratified addressee in narrative interaction. Still, an apparent overlap or mismatch arises here, as noted before: (1) Institutionally, any actual reader would seem to be a ratified addressee insofar as she or he participates as part of the readership in the institution of the literary marketplace. One would have to specify, nonetheless, whether the works have been written with the literary marketplace in mind, and which kind of marketplace (and of readership). Here a narratological approach to a given work would have to be complemented with studies of actual receptions of the work. In any case, to the extent that "ratification" in address means ratification for communicative interactants, it would have to be redefined to refer primarily to the actual interaction between present-day audiences who use the literary texts (that is, who interact through them) and, secondarily, to the text's built-in interaction between implied authors and implied

We would need to address at this point in greater detail the issue of publication, circulation and intended audience of specific narratives—a task beyond the limits of this paper. Still, one may suggest that Maurice Couturier's (1995) study of author figures in print communication would tie in nicely with this approach.

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addressees. Both the actual interaction and the built-in one are well worth studying24. (2) Nonetheless, an additional level of ratification is established through the text's ideological stance: insofar as we actual readers identify with the implied reader, we are ratified as addressees, while other responses to the text tend to place us in the position of mere auditors, overhearers, or even eavesdroppers. Note that this process of ratification takes place to begin with in our self interaction as we read, although it is also an issue in communicative interaction with other readers—in written criticism, for instance. I use here the concept of self interaction, and more generally the notion that meanings emerge through an interactive process, in the sense defined by Herbert Blumer as "symbolic interactionism"25. For Blumer, the meaning of an object is not in the object itself, nor is it a psychical accretion brought to the object by the interpreter. Instead, meaning arises "in the process of interaction between people"26. The first step in the interpretive process involves a person's communication with him- or herself: In being aware of another, in interpreting and judging his action and in identifying him in a given way, one is making indications to oneself. Indeed, it seems that only by virtue of making an indication to oneself can one take account of something as distinguished from merely responding to that thing .

The processes noted here by Blumer refer to any kind of social interaction. I would like to point out their significance for a theory of reading which avoids the pitfalls of both objectivism and subjectivism in interpretation. Symbolic interactionism would seem to provide a convenient theoretical grounding for the study of reader response. Textual interaction, although it may seem "deferred" or "delayed,"

25 26 27

And they should be distinguished from a third type of interaction which is described thus by Hoey (2001: 131): "text is the site of an interaction between writer and reader. The Question-Answer and Claim-Denial/Affirmation patterns seem to point to a further form of textual interaction, that between the author and someone other than the reader." This kind of interaction has been sufficiently theorized by Bakthin's notion of dialogism (e.g. Bakhtin 1980: 180). I want to emphasize here another dialogic dimension which appears when the actual reader is neither the intended addressee nor the previous speaker being answered through what Bakhtin terms a "hidden polemic." Blumer (1986: 4,62). Ibid.: 4. Ibid.: 111.

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does share with general human interaction the participants' mutual awareness, mutual identification, and the reciprocal interpretation of mental representations and intentions28. Of course, the deferral involved in writing brings along with it a number of specific modalities of interaction. Narratologists have often addressed some of these, such as the aforementioned creation of textual roles and personae. I want to emphasize at this point the way in which these protocols of textual interaction involve a measure of roleplaying in which the readers' involvement in the text necessitates some detachment from their own immediate concerns and ideological priorities: paradoxically, involvement in the text may require a split of attitudes in the reader which is also a prerequisite for detachment. In assuming the implied reading position, the reader assumes it as an implied reader, not as a reader. This self-allotment of roles requires a self-interactive process of the kind alluded to by Blumer. A detachment from oneself in reading is presupposed in the very notion of implied reader. There is always, then, some degree of reader-exclusion (even in any one reader's experience), and some forms of reading actually thrive on their distance from the authorially sanctioned position. It could be argued, for instance, that readers who drastically recontextualise the text away from its original intended use (e.g. New Historicist critics) are acting as eaves-droppers, or overhearers29. This is simply an extension of a more general principle of communication which Jenny Thomas formulates thus (in its application to conversational interaction): "context cannot be seen only as a 'given', as something imposed from the outside. The participants, by their use of language, also contribute to making and changing their context"30. Eavesdropping critics are participants, too, even if they have gatecrashed into the textual party. H. Porter Abbott has drawn a useful distinction between "intentional" and "symptomatic" modes of interpretation31. In the "intentional" mode, as I see it, the reader or critic accepts the communicative 28

30 31

Cf. ibid.: 109. Of course I am not claiming that authors are aware of all their possible readers, etc. Mutual awareness takes place through medium-specific protocols. As a matter of fact, the difference between overhearers and eavesdroppers fades somewhat in the case of written literary communication. Thomas (1995: 194). Abbott (2002: 95ff.).

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appeal of the text and, so to speak, plays the game the text invites him or her to play. The critic accepts the rules of textual interaction as laid down by the author and can therefore claim to be the author's addressee, the one who receives the work the way it was intended to be received. A "symptomatic" critic (e.g. a psychoanalytic critic) does otherwise. Symptomatic critics have their own communicative agenda, which makes them analyse the text behind the author's back (to reuse a phrase) as an object which can be dissected for the benefit of an audience32. Symptomatic critics still have to "listen" to the communicative interaction between the author and the intended addressee, but without sharing the position of the intended addressee—acting, in effect, as overhearers of the textual communication, and engaging meanwhile, of course, in another textual-communicative process, an interactive process with other critics or an audience of their own. This is a process to which the symptomatic critic's communication with the author is subordinated. I am perhaps emphasizing the differences, and there is no doubt much middle ground between the ideal poles of intentional and symptomatic criticism—but they do seem to exist as the outer extremes of a gamut. This distinction overlaps with what I sometimes call "friendly" versus "unfriendly" criticism (or critical criticism) as well as with Paul Ricoeur's notion of a hermeneutics of the restoration of meaning versus a hermeneutics of suspicion33. At their most characteristic, then, "unfriendly," "symptomatic" or "resisting" critics are by definition overhearers34. A special brand of overhearers, though, as they choose to place themselves in that position, beyond the role of addressee solicited by the text. Overhearing can place us in the position of overstanding, not just wwi/erstanding35. This means that significant literary criticism on a work is not usually written from the stance of the implied reader of a work. Symptomatic criticism is left, then, in a curious position as far as interactive address is concerned: by definition, no work addresses its symptomatic critics, who

33

35

For instance, Judith Fetterley's "resisting reader" is distanced from the text by a political agenda—feminist resistance to patriarchal ideology. The notion of resisting reading, minus the term itself, is already sketched out in Walker Gibson's 1950 article. Ricoeur (1970: 32); see also Garcia Landa (2004). Although of course not all overhearers are resisting readers! I use here Booth's term (1979: 242).

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are therefore professional intruders on other people's communicative interaction. Hence, in part, no doubt, the proverbial antipathy between "strong" writers and "strong" critics, to use Harold Bloom's terms. But these are all very tentative guidelines, as any text may modulate its address in a variety of ways. For instance, we should keep in mind the possible germination of the structural subject positions mentioned above (p. 195)—texts with two or more authors instead of one, two or more narrators, narratees, etc. There has been some emphasis recently on texts with a double implied address. Roger Sell notes that there may actually be more than one implied reader. Sometimes in children's literature, for instance, the appeal to an implied child listener can be perhaps overheard, so to speak, by an implied adult reader (Wall [1991]). Love poems, similarly, may be addressed, not only to the loved one but [...] to another readership as well, especially when they are published or otherwise circulated .

Another example: a novel may be dismissed by a reviewer as being written with academic critics in mind, while pretending to address the general reader (this was one reviewer's contention concerning Marilyn French's The Women's Room). Or again, one particular work may devote much rhetorical energy to disavow what has been called its "antireaders"37: Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is one such text—a work in which the narrator, a fictional editor and the author in propria persona try to ward off possible misinterpretations. Other works will sidestep the issue of antireaders or use more indirect methods. So, analysis of the exceptions to the rule that no text anticipates its symptomatic critics would no doubt provide interesting case studies of multilevel address. Utterances convey presuppositions about the speaker and the hearer. The nature of those authorial projections, however, is not a given. These presuppositions are effectively present in the sender and inferred by the receiver, but the full significance of these phenomena emerges only retrospectively, through interpretive work or critical analysis involving a linguistic formulation which is both explicit and selective. Thus, characterising the implied authorial attitude or the implied reader of a text is a complex hermeneutic process. The mode of address of a text may not be as neatly set out as it appears in many a narratological scheme. Narratological schemes are the result of an interpretive process which, in representing the mode of address, also re-

37

Sell (2000: 171). See also Sell (2002: 8); Nikolajeva (2002: 131). Brian Richardson (1997: 46).

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constructs it, bringing up for examination certain elements or bracketing others as irrelevant for the analytic purpose at hand (that is, for the communicative interaction the analyst is currently engaged in). Part of my contention, then, is that narratology has often disregarded the analyst's intervention on the text. Such disregard may be justifiable in many given cases for specific analytic projects, but both the analyst's role and the sense in which it may be bracketed should have a place in an overall theory of narrative communication. It is not enough to identify a narrative's explicit addressee and its intended addressee: the analyst's own position as overhearer has to be accounted for. As we retroactively bring to light38 the implicit formal and ideological structures of the text through rereading and analysis, our own structural position vis-ä-vis the ideological parameters of the text being analysed (and of the current interactive process) is also further defined: we construct our (communicated) selves through reading and interpretation as more or less resistant to or more or less consonant with the other textual subjects we interact with. Critics, most particularly those with a critical or even an unfriendly bent, are overhearers who report, interpret, reshape and reformulate what they have heard, and what they have overheard.

38

Or, perhaps, "as we retroactively give birth to." The implications of this retroactive birth of the interpreted object are often neglected. Here Jonathan Culler's analysis of narrative retroaction (2001) is apposite too—only it should be applied, as well, to the narrative process consisting in the analysis and interpretation of texts.

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Appendix Medium relationship of discourse Discourse Writing

Conversation

Monologue

Speaking of what is written

Recitation or audible reading

As if not written/recorded

(As if) heard

Played Machine- Silent read reading

Acknowledging writing/recordin

(As if) overheard

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Notes on the diagram: a) The diagram is derived from a more schematic one in Roger Bell (1991). Only the most relevant possibilities have been represented. b) The difference between one category and the next may be fuzzy (e.g. reading with glances at an outline, etc.). c) If human behaviour, generally speaking, is in a way "scripted" by culture, the borderline between what is spontaneous and what is scripted has to be specified with respect to the purposes of the analysis. d) Specific speech situations or technologies (e.g. face-to-face conversation, telephone conversations, e-mail) may introduce additional constraints and possibilities. See, for instance, the analysis of radio talk in Goffman (1981). e) Contrary to what the schematic presentation might suggest, these medium modalities do not exclude each other, rather, they may coexist in any given instance as one medium is represented through another: e.g. writing may be read aloud and become speech, and speech represented in writing may likewise be read aloud, but these phenomena are semiotically distinct from speech unmediated by writing. f) An example already used in the text may help clarify the relevance of this diagram to narrative analysis. In Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague," the medium of discourse is writing: even though this story may be recorded or listened to, it contains references to reading which, besides any additional historical or stylistic considerations, mark the text as a written one. But this written discourse engages in intermediality the moment it attempts to represent spoken discourse within writing: Granser's intradiegetic narrative is a form of (direct) speech, represented in the medium of writing. It is (fictional) spontaneous speech (while London's narrative, being intended as literature and filtered through the editorial protocols, is not spontaneous). But Granser's narrative is scripted (even inside the fiction) to the extent that it is, presumably, a re-enactment of a tale which has been told by Granser a number of times before. Intermediality leaves its mark, though, as the narrative voice is clearly a construction, and only conventionally does it partake of the stylistic properties of oral narrative. This artificiality, in turn, is partly acknowledged, partly motivated, through reflexive commentary: the "cultured" quality of Granser's narrative is explicitly attributed within the tale to his past experience as a lecturer, and in any case the extradiegetic narrator acknowledges that the characters' speech has been "translated" in order to make it accessible to the

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reader (London 1997: 492). Granser's address shows likewise several medium-related disjunctions. On the one hand, he strives to address an audience as the sole speaker, but his narratees often invade his floor space, with the narrative becoming a conversation (1997: 499). On the other hand, this address in prcesentia to the narratees is simultaneously an address in absentia, breaking the narrative frame, to the implied reader, an overhearer whose values and intellect are much closer to Granser's implicit narratee than the values and intellect of the actual narratees he has to make do with. Therefore, his narratees (but not the story's implied reader) are unable to fully understand many of the concepts Granser presupposes (1997: 494), and much of his narrative goes right over their heads—for the benefit of the story's implied reader.

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References Abbott, H. Porter 2002 The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge UP). Adams, Hazard (ed.) 1971 Critical Theory since Plato (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press). Bell, Allan 1997 "Language Style as Audience Design," in Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook, edited by Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski, 240-250 (Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's). Bell, Roger 1991 Translation and Translating: Theory and Practice (Harlow: Longman). B lumer, Herbert 1986 [1969] Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press). Booth, Wayne 1979 Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Booth, Wayne 1983 The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd edition (1st edition 1961) (Harmondsworth: Penguin BooksPeregrine Books). Cervantes, Miguel de 1966 [1605, 1615]. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, edited by Rufo Mendizabal. 3"1 edition (Madrid: Fax). Coupland, Nikolas / Jaworski, Adam (eds.) 1997 Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook. (Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's). Couturier, Maurice 1995 La Figure de l'auteur. Collection Poetique (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Culler, Jonathan 2001 [1980] "Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative," in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. 2nd edition (Γ1 edition 1981), 188-208 (London and New York: Routledge). Fludernik, Monika 1996 Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (London and New York: Routledge). Galef, David (ed.) 1998 Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading (Detroit: Wayne State UP). Garcia Landa, Jose Angel 1998 Accion, relate, discurso: Estructura de la ficcion narrativa (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca).

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"Hindsight, Intertextuality, and Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov's Christmas" in Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 5: 267-94 (New York: AMS Press). Gibson, Walker 1980 [1950] "Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers," in Reader Response Criticism, edited by Jane P. Tompkins, 1-6 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins). Gide, Andre 1972 [1902] L 'Immoraliste (Paris: Gallimard / Mercure de France). Goffman, Erving 1981 Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). 1986 [1974] Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern UP). Hartwell, David G. (ed.) 1997 The Science Fiction Century (New York: Tor Books). Hoey, Michael 2001 Textual Interaction: An Introduction to Written Discourse Analysis (London and New York: Routledge). Leech, Geoffrey / Deuchar, Margaret / Hoogenraad, Robert 1984 [1982] English Grammar for Today: A New Introduction. Revised edition (Houndmills: Macmillan / The English Association). Leitch, Vincent B. (ed.) 2001 The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory (New York: Norton). London, Jack 1997 [1915] "The Scarlet Plague," in The Science Fiction Century, edited by David G. Hartwell, 486-517 (New York: Tor Books). Mill, John Stuart 1971 [1833] "What Is Poetry?" in Critical Theory since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams, 537-543 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Nikolajeva, Maria 2002 "Growing up: The Dilemma of Children's Literature," in Children 's Literature as Communication., edited by Roger Sell, 111-136 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Plato 2001 [c. 370 BC] Phaedrus, translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 81-85 (New York: Norton). Richardson, Brian 1997 "The Other Reader's Response: On Multiple, Divided, and Oppositional Audiences," in Criticism 39.1: 31-54. Richardson, Samuel 1985 [1747/48] Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, edited with an introduction and notes by Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Ricoeur, Paul 1970 Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, translated by Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale UP).

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Sell, Roger 2000 Literature as Communication: The Foundations of Mediating Criticism. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Sell, Roger (ed.) 2002 "Introduction," in Children's Literature as Communication, 1-26 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Thomas, Jenny 1995 Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics (London: Longman). Thorpe, Adam 1992 "Improvements: 1712," chapter 3 of Ulverton (London: Seeker and Warburg). Tompkins, Jane P. (ed.) 1980 Reader Response Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins). Wall, Barbara 1991 The Narrator's Voice: The Dilemma of Children's Literature (Houndmills: Macmillan).

MICHAEL TOOLAN (Birmingham)

Graded Expectations: On the Textual and Structural Shaping of Readers' Narrative Experience Expressed in the broadest terms, my interest is in better understanding those textual conditions which cause readers reliably and reportedly to experience a narrative as having a particular kind of movement or accumulated effect (giving rise, in the reader, to 'answering' feelings of suspense, or secrecy, and so on). To risk an analogy, the narrative text moves us forward (and away from where we were previously) rather as a deep river current carries a raft and its passengers in the direction which that current ordains; to some extent, the passengers can foresee where they are being taken to, or at least that they are being so taken; but if the river is new to you, knowing is subordinate to experiencing, and foreknowledge of what is to come is strictly limited. The writer is not the river, they are the creator of the river, which they have designed to combine this eddy here with that chase there, leading across such and such changing terrain, to a haven or landing-point of sorts, where navigation ceases, where you 'arrive'1. The sense of "moving on" that I am concerned with is not merely the sense of localized, intradiegetic movement to a new setting in place or time (in the ways that Professor Fludernik is studying so interestingly with respect to the historical changes in narration2). Rather, the focus is on trying to understand what are more complex perceived moves or changes, where readers attest that the narrative has surprised them by disclosing a subsequent unforeseen but foreseeable event or outcome; or where readers report powerful effects of suspense, where reporting which among a closed set of foreseeable outcomes transpires is noticeably and provocatively delayed; or where readers affirm that a

2

I am most grateful to John Pier for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. See Fludernik (2003).

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narrative strikes them as palpably reticent or uncooperative in not reporting a particular imaginable situation or piece of information. Any of these conditions gives rise to impressions of narrative secrets or gaps, involving a specific kind of posited non-disclosure: the reader posits that there is something crucial that could and even should have been told to us, but has not been3. We have been excluded, kept out of the loop; we may feel that it is as if the narrator distrusts us. In having contracted to read or hear the narrative, we have entered into a degree of teller-addressee partnership, indeed we have created it; but upon encounter of the narrative secret or gap we may feel invited, by the tenor of the narration, to recast ourselves as a partner kept at arm's length, a speculating outsider. On all these issues, and particularly on what he sees as the 'triad' of key reflexes of narrativity (suspense, curiosity, and surprise), Meir Sternberg has written at length, and brilliantly4; but where he expounds from the hermeneutic end of narratology, my interest is text-linguistic, broadly conceived: I wish to better understand what it is in the language of the text, or the texture of a narrative's language, that guides readers to experience, at length, reactions of surprise, suspense, secrecy, mystery, and so on. All of the above, everything to do not merely with readers' construals of effects of suspense and surprise and secrets, but also with readers' continuous speculations about what will happen next, what the protagonists will do next, what will be reported next, can be related to the idea of expectation. Hence the word expectation in my title. More specifically, I am interested in exploring whether different kinds and degrees of expectation can be identified, for which in my title I have used the coverall term graded. But my studies are still at quite an early and speculative stage, so strictly speaking my title should read "Graded Expectations?". That is to say, are there systematically different ways of composing a narrative such that subtle degrees of varying expectation, as to what will happen to whom and when (etc.) arise in the course of the reading experience? Expectation of various kinds has of course been much discussed within and beyond narrative studies. To cite a couple of brief instances, there is Jerome Burner's remark that "texts evoke expectancies though

3 4

See Prince (1988). E.g. Sternberg (1978), (2001).

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they may not fulfil them" 5 , and there is Jean Mandler's characterization of the story schema as a "set of expectations about the way in which stories proceed"6. It has certainly been a fundamental theme in the English Language studies conducted at my present academic home, the University of Birmingham. It has been crucial to the discourse analytical categories and hierarchy proposed twenty-five years ago by John Sinclair and Malcolm Coulthard in their study, Towards an Analysis of Discourse. In studies of discourse progressions, expectation is often broken down in Birmingham studies into its backward- and forward-looking parts, retrospection and (using the same term that Sternberg espouses) prospection. And reader- or participantexpectation remains fundamental to much Birmingham-influenced work, including that of David Brazil and Eugene Winter, Malcolm Coulthard, Michael Hoey, and, in the field of sentential grammar, Gill Francis and Susan Hunston. As Sinclair has remarked, attention to prospection is crucial to an adequate model of any genre of discourse, including narrative discourse: The more that attention has been focussed on the prospective qualities of discourse the more accurate and powerful the description has become.

But every genre brings its own challenges when it comes to proposing analyses and generalizations, and one of the distinguishing characteristics of fictions such as short stories is that none of the exemplars is strictly a sample, representative or otherwise. A story text is not incomplete, not context-dependent or context-embedded, and not to be regarded as a sample, in anything like the way that the sequences of classroom discourse analysed thirty years ago by Sinclair and Coulthard can and even must be so regarded. Part of the authority of the Sinclair and Coulthard analysis of teacher-pupil IRF exchanges rests on our being confident that we could have visited certain classrooms in the West Midlands in the 1970's and witnessed real teachers and pupils tacitly interacting according to the grammar of acts and moves that these linguists identified Nothing parallel applies to Alice Munro's story, entitled "The Love of a Good Woman": we cannot go to a town called Walley (in where? Northern Ontario?), and look for a couple called Rupert and Enid Quinn. We cannot even read more 5 6 7

Bruner (1997: 63). Mandler (1984: 18). Sinclair (1994: 15).

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about them in other Munro stories—as one can with other authors. This is so foundational a point that I think we sometimes neglect its consequences, one such being that, whatever the relation of a Munro story's events and character may be to real people in the late twentieth century in Canada and elsewhere, that relation is not a sampling relation. Most directly relevant to my own approach have been studies by Hoey and Coulthard. I will mention Coulthard's work briefly before turning to Hoey's. Narrative expectations are explored by Coulthard with regard to forensic linguistic issues, such as how a genuinely culpable participant in a crime is likely to structure and phrase a statement to the police, and how such narratives may differ from those accounts submitted in evidence in court where there are grounds for suspecting a false confession, or alteration of the statement. In the latter cases, in short, certain kinds of normal narrative expectation are not fulfilled in the usual way, and other kinds of detail and specification (beyond or flying the face of expectation) somewhat surprisingly are. Opening Hoey's invaluable 2001 book Textual Interaction almost at random, for example, I find a chapter section titled "Signals from writer to reader: moment-by-moment guidance." That is very much what I am concerned with: identifying, if possible, the material or the conditions, in literary narratives, that warrant a reader taking it or them as signals of how the telling will likely go forward (and in being so taken, enabling the reader to project a probable or expected progression or completion in relation to which the actual encountered progression can come and be responded to as a surprise or shock, or suspenseful, or an evasion, or clichedly predictable, and so on). Hoey has focused in his own work chiefly on expository or non-narrative texts, rather than narrative ones. The expectation-guiding signalling in an academic or argumentative text is complex, but somewhat constrained: for reasons partly to do with genre and register, the core signalling system is more delimited and recognizable. In the case of narrative texts, by contrast, matters are more confusing. As Hoey notes, underpinning many simpler narratives is the iterative question "What happened next?" or "What did s/he or they do next?"8; and for children this must make such stories comparatively easy to read and to write. On the other hand, when one comes to adult narratives, and particularly Hoey (2001: 25).

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sophisticated literary ones, "readers' ability to predict just how the text will proceed is considerably diminished, by comparison with orderly non-narrative texts"9. In the case of non-narrative texts, for example, Hoey was able to take a reasonably long popular science article about dormice (73 sentences); presenting just two of the early sentences of the article to a pair of informants, he found that both informants were able to formulate, on the basis of the content of the two given sentences, a wide array of the questions that they (correctly) predicted or expected the remainder of the article to address. In other words, the informants independently predicted something between two-thirds and three-quarters of the text's implicit concerns (the questions it seeks to answer) on the basis of just two early sentences. But Hoey's selection of the two particular text sentences that he used as primes seems to have been made chiefly on an intuitive basis: whether they could have been identified by some systematic or principled means (based perhaps on item-frequency and salience) is unclear, and whether they amount to part or the whole of some sort of textual "nucleus" is also an open question. But the example suggests that a kind of "sampling" resource is available as an aid to the reader of the informative article and perhaps other kinds of non-narrative texts besides: on the basis of a small relevant sample, much of the larger whole can be projected and becomes expected. Nothing quite like this applies in the case of narrative texts. Other resources facilitating predictability and expectability are available, however. These include narratives' recourse to an Abstract—though these are not common in literary fiction—or "preview" statements; and intertextual echoes and allusions, and other signals of genre, which encourage the reader to treat the present unfolding narrative as comparable in some respects (and possibly in diametrical contrast in some respects) to other alluded to texts. In addition, at least in the case of expository texts, Hoey suggests that language-learners can attend first to the more crucial parts of a text if they use cohesion (especially coreference, occurrence of tokens from closed sets, and lexical repetitions) as a guide: key sentences are those with the most cohesive ties to the lexis of the title or opening. The difficult and interesting question is not whether readers experience surprise, evasion, predictability, etc., but pinpointing the condi9

Ibid.: 43.

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tions, generalizable beyond a case-by-case annotation, conducive to those conditions. Are the conditions specifiable in formal terms at all? Take the following narrative report: I just saw a man leap from the top of the Eiffel Tower and ...

Many will report effects of incompleteness here, suspense even. But what are the key ingredients creating such incompleteness and suspense? Does an utterance final and alone, regardless of what precedes, project incompleteness relative to any turn of talk even in the case of a customer's order in a cafe: /'// have a cafe grand and a baguette and he'll have a Fanta and...? Let us take away the and then, from the cited sentence: I just saw a man leap from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Is there still incompleteness and suspense? For quite a lot of readers, I would submit, yes, some suspenseful incompleteness remains. But it seems to be rooted in our world knowledge that the Eiffel Tower is very tall, and that a leap from the top of it without a parachute would be fatal, so that a life-and-death schema is likely to be brought to mind. Compare: I just saw Zubin Mehta leap from the top of the conductor's podium.

The latter hardly triggers strong expectations of a significant textual sequel as the Eiffel Tower sentence does. In that earlier sentence, it is important too that the protagonist is characterized merely as an unknown "man"—and not, say, as a skydiver or parachutist or renowned escape artist. Nor are the previous remarks anything like the whole story: it helps that leap/leaped is ambiguous between a perfective and an imperfective interpretation, that the teller projects themselves as eyewitness (/ saw), and that immediacy is emphasized (/ just saw). So a complex set of ingredients can be seen to combine so as to prompt reader reactions of suspense/incompleteness in even so brief and simple an example. Again by way of stating some preliminaries, I will now mention, in summary and schematic form, what I take to be the key narrative determinants giving rise to reader experiences of suspense, surprise, secrecy, and gaps. Stories by Alice Munro and others are used for exemplification. That all these narrative effects are closely bound up with different kinds of developing and shifting reader expectation, in the course of reading, is widely agreed. Here I propose a more constrained

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specification of the distinct kinds of conditions which give rise to these different effects, drawing in part on legal discussions of the tort principle of foreseeability (narrative surprise, for example, being based in a foreseeable and significant plot development that was not foreseen by the reader, whose "unforeseeing" itself becomes a palpable effect for that reader). I also draw on Hoey's proposals concerning the matrix organization of texts. Ultimately, the aim is to explore the extent to which a structural account or understanding is possible of such narrative mainstays as suspense, surprise, secrets, and gaps. One of the reasons why the legal criterion of foreseeability is (in my view) relevant to narratology, may relate to the fact that it is bound up with causation, and occupies a middle ground between incidents that are intended and caused, at one extreme, and those that are neither intended nor foreseeable, at the other extreme. The latter are often called accidents, often with an modifier emphasizing the overwhelming contingency and arbitrariness of the occurrence: pure accident, sheer accident, tragic accident. Now tortious foreseeability very much concerns accidents, unintended damage or loss, but accidents where the agent cannot avoid all responsibility. All of this bears on narrative and narratology since principles or situations of foreseeability are the means by which we interpret "one thing leading to another," the core narrative inferencing process. My interest in these issues emerged out of a prior interest in plotbased suspense and surprise and in how both these may interact with various kinds of narrative secret, in the making of literary narratives. I have elsewhere proposed that plot-based suspense is created where the reader experiences the narrative as palpably at a clear Barthesian "fork," with just two or three clearly foreseeable outcomes as necessary sequel, and where the disclosure of just which completion obtains in the present narrative is noticeably delayed, beyond its earliest reasonable report10. Thus, in plot-based suspense, foreseeable eventsequence, bearing on some critical rather than trivial matter, interacts with duration or pace of telling. I suggested that by contrast narrative surprise arises where the narrative has approached and may be presumed to be passing an unproblematic "milestone," where a stereotypical or schematic next event or scene is strongly predicted, but where the expected "nonforking" and "automatic" progression does 10

Toolan (2001: 99-103).

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not go through as predicted, and instead something relevant and related happens, imaginable in the circumstances if we had operated with full foresight or imagination. The foreseeable but unforeseen development pulls us up short, causing us to reassess much of the narrative whose shape we thought we already understood. To summarize, the essence of narrative surprise is that a reader experiences a new development as unforeseen but, upon reflection, foreseeable. Thus, not every kind of arguably "surprising event" amounts to a narrative surprise in this sense: a traffic accident involving a story participant is, typically, a calamity and something of a surprise, but it is not foreseeable on a long view, reaching back to the beginning of the narrative. So I would not characterize it or classify it as a narrative surprise. To say that an event is, on analytical reflection, foreseeable is also to say that it "fits" the larger structure of narrative conditions and developments in the entire story: it is not a detached addendum, but a fact or outcome that can be fully integrated (often belatedly) with everything else, filling a gap we had not even noticed was there. To revert to (English) legal terms, in face of a strong narrative surprise, the reader is caught by what was unforeseen but foreseeable, and we hold ourselves "liable." We pay at least the cost of rethinking responsibilities and obligations in the projected world we have become familiar with (a world which in key respects may be instructively like our own everyday one). Surprises, when they come, are most effective when they are felt to be in no way absurd or inexplicable, but reasonable and possible. To experience a really effective narrative surprise is to be caught up in an activity of self-teaching, of reflexive critique, and this is part of what makes them so valuable. They do not entail simply a revision, by the reader, of their grasp of the narrative; with a little jolt of correction, they also compel the reader to examine and find lacking their own understanding. These surprises are finally not about information-failure on the part of the narrator; instead they display to us a moment or a space where our understanding (of facts and events integrated with motives, psychology, and latent forces) has failed. In all of the foregoing, I have put things at what I see as their most general, and I should immediately acknowledge that matters are considerably more complex and varied when actual literary narratives are contemplated. Terms like expectation, prospection, and foreseeability are related and overlapping rather than synonymous (it is interesting to

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consider, for example, why the legal standard in tort is not "would the reasonable person have expected that this mishap could transpire?"). Inter alia, foreseeability seems to allude to the state of mind of the individual at a defined moment before onset of the mishap, while expectation seems to denote the changing and developing state of mind of the reader; expectation is transitive. So what kinds of things do shape our progressive expectations as to what will happen next, what will be told next (frequently different things, of course), what will happen later, and what will be told later? These questions probe a part of what Jonathan Culler called literary competence, and must entail a number of things". As Hoey suggests, when discussing an informed reader's reactions to the opening of Borges's "Death and the Compass," two factors often help: some texts begin with material that contains "preview statements that function as signals to the reader about the nature of the text to come"12, and many texts make use of intertextuality. With many more formulaic stories, and stories that play off the formulaic (as Borges's does), these factors can help. But the preview and intertextual 'prompts' themselves are rooted in something quite fundamental, which seems to be an awareness of the typical use, typical significance and provenance of some of the words and phrases being employed. One aspect of this is our recognition of the familiar, the collocationally-familiar or routine. None of this amounts to saying that reading is simply a process of matching new text with remembered text, the dejä lu; only that one's proficiency with the language in general, and one's familiarity with literary narratives, serves as an enabling background to the development of an interpretive path or line through any currently-processed text. But I do want to emphasize the creativity, the in-the-presentness, of such reading. Predominantly, readers' construal of narrative text, generating expectations and the grounds for experiences of suspense, surprise, and troubling silences, is rooted in the wordings, the propositions, the presuppositions and reasonable inferences, and the sequencings of all these, that are met, absorbed, and passed beyond, in the activity of reading. With that as a core assumption, I have presented the opening of Munro's story (labelled by me, for convenience, a Preface—to dis-

" Culler (1975: 113-130). Hoey (2001: 43).

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tinguish it from the following long story section, which Munro heads "I. Jutland") to graduate students. For the last couple of decades, there has been a museum in Walley, dedicated to preserving photos and butter churns and horse harnesses and an old dentist's chair and a cumbersome apple peeler and such curiosities as the pretty little porcelain-andglass insulators that were used on telegraph poles. Also there is a red box, which has the letters "D. M. Willens, Optometrist," printed on it, and a note beside it, saying, "This box of optometrist's instruments though not very old has considerable local significance, since it belonged to Mr. D. M. Willens, who drowned in the Peregrine River, 1951. It escaped the catastrophe and was found, presumably by the anonymous donor, who dispatched it to be a feature of our collection." The ophthalmoscope could make you think of a snowman. The top part, that is—the part that's fastened onto the hollow handle. A large disk, with a smaller disk on top. In the large disk a hole to look through, as the various lenses are moved. The handle is heavy because the batteries are still inside. If you took the batteries out and put in the rod that is provided, with a disk on either end, you could plug in an electric cord. But it might have been necessary to use the instrument in places where there wasn't any electricity. The retinoscope looks more complicated. Underneath the round forehead clamp is something like an elf s head, with a round flat face and a pointed metal cap. This is tilted at a forty-five-degree angle to a slim column, and out of the top of the column a tiny light is supposed to shine. The flat face is made of glass and is a dark sort of mirror. Everything is black, but that is only paint. In some places where the optometrist's hand must have rubbed most often, the paint has disappeared and you can see a patch of shiny silver metal.

And I have appended to that Preface, for the students to address, questions such as the following: On the basis of what you have read so far, how do you imagine this story might continue? What do you expect to happen next, or at least later? What do you expect you might get told about, or told more about, in the subsequent text? Are there any words or sentences in the text so far that you feel are especially important in creating your expectations about the story's continuation? If so, please underline or highlight them.

I will turn to the students' responses shortly. But what questions does the Munro passage make askable, or, more to the point, relevantly askable? You might say that every proposition in a text, and many of

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the existential particulars that those propositions contain, can prompt one or more of the standard array of Who, What, When, Where, Why, How questions: For the last couple of decades....last since when? Which decades? There has been a museum in Walley... what kind of museum? What or where i s Walley?

And so on. In addition you might focus on every verbal process where the full complement of participants (or arguments) is absent, and ponder the identity of the missing ones: Dedicated to preserving photos and butter churns... Who dedicates the museum to this task?

In short, one can argue that every substantive, every qualifier, and every predicate used in the composition of a narrative carries with it a licence for the teller to say more, and for the reader to find more, on or related to that description in subsequent discourse. And that covers only the Said; another large set of possible and expectable continuations concerns the Unsaid, the background, the inferable, that we project on the basis of the Said. Viewed from this perspective, the topic is cognitively and narratologically impossible. A more fruitful way to proceed analytically, I believe, is to ponder the ways that narratives promote or inflect just some selected words, propositions, referents from among the innumerable licensed sequels. And do so in ways that ordinarily cause readers to judge the continuation to lie in the fertile ground, the land of Interest, between the barren rocks of unjustified irrelevance and unjustified surprise (plot-unrelated absurdity). Closely related to Interest in this sense is Tellability, but here I am chiefly thinking about Interest in literary fictional narratives, whose requirements differ from those in, e.g. conversational narratives. In 'interesting' continuations, the reader gets what they had expected to some degree: certainly not what they fully expected—because the fully expected narrative continuation is, in effect, the story that your reader knows before they read it or hear it from you; but certainly not fully unexpected either—the nearest that coherent narratives come to this is in surprise, where only on reflection, after the fact, does the reader realize there had been some depressed and overlooked level of expectation, and that they might and perhaps ought to have had some inkling of the marked outcome.

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In their responses, students noted that they particularly expected the subsequent story to explain the 'catastrophe', of how Mr Willens came to be drowned in 1951, some twenty years or more previously. One or two linked the instruments' escaping the catastrophe with the idea at the end of paragraph 3 that Mr Willens made rural home visits to places without electricity, and began to sketch a scenario in which he took his instruments on a home visit, but somehow became separated from them so that he drowned in the river but his equipment did not. They also assumed that the equipment must have some bearing on subsequently reported events, to justify the long dwelling upon them here. One or two students also wondered why the instruments had become museum pieces, unless they were in some sense relics of a remote way of doing things, a now-distant way of life. But then that optometrist technology was not archaic or historically interesting back in 1951, so something seems to need further explaining—including why it is said to be only presumed, and not a matter of established fact, who found the instruments and who sent them to the museum. After all, if a dentist or general practitioner died suddenly, one wouldn't normally send the tools of their trade off to the local museum for display. Despite the seemingly factual/descriptive tone, students found the optometry instruments hard to visualize, and they also wondered whether one was expected to try. Although several colloquial moments in the description were commented upon, one sentence in particular was cited: "Everything is black, but that is only paint." Together with the following sentence, this made some readers think about surface veneers concealing a substance or depth of a different kind, and how appearances can differ from underlying reality. What happens when a reader, in the course of a reading of the full story, reads a passage such as the prefatory section of "The Love of a Good Woman"? Part of what a reader does, I believe, is as follows. Rather than memorizing every word, readers—most readers—read for the sense, keeping only a vague memory of a small selection of the lexis and phrasing—here, perhaps opthalmoscope, Willens, dro\vned, twenty years ago, museum, agricultural brie a brae, snowman, rods, boxes, black paint, metal underneath—these items being recalled during the interpreting of later sections on a 'need to invoke' basis, to flesh out a summary of the plot, characterization, and, perhaps, the tone. And mention of plot brings us to a second part of what readers evidently do in the course of reading, which is to construct a summa-

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rized or schematic account of the nature of the people involved, what happened and what happened next and what finally happened, and of the circumstances in which these things happened, and the point of it all, what is to be made of it (Action, Resolution, Orientation/ Characterization, and Evaluation). This admittedly vague picture seems to me close to my own experience of reading and close also to what is logically and pragmatically required in the act of reading (to enable us (i) to bring our reading of the story to a suitable close—after how long, two hours perhaps?—and thereby enable us to turn our attention to other texts and other concerns, and (ii) to do the former without a sense that we have removed from our thoughts everything we savoured or experienced in the course of that act of reading). In all the above we use summarising and map-making abilities. When we embark on a selective account, to ourselves, of the most important words, scenes, events, in that opening passage, the demands of narrativity (that a story should report a significant change of state) prompt us particularly to attend to significant events. And as Labov like others long ago noted, as an event of human significance, nothing beats death or danger of death. On the above bases, then, arguably the most significant event in the prefatory passage in "The Love of a Good Woman" is the following: D. M. Willens [, who] drowned in the Peregrine River

Otherwise, we largely have reported states (there is a museum, there are the following optometrist's instruments in that museum, the instruments include an x, which has features a, b and c, etc). All very neutrally reported, at least until the final, more evaluative paragraph: (Everything is black, but that is only paint..., etc.).

What are our scripts, mental models or Schemas, our graded expectations, confronted by a D. M. Willens drowning in the Peregrine River? What words, phrases, even full sentences, does this event or episode licence and make expectable, or likely, or relevant, at some point in the remainder of the story-text? One of the words that 'Willens drowned in the Peregrine River'

licences or predicts is -water (others, I would suggest, include death, accident, swim, current, suicide, plus phrases like out of his depth, overpowered, weak(ened), unconscious, and so on).

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In order to talk about Munro's recent long story, "The Love of a Good Woman," it is necessary to briefly rehearse its plot. It comprises four sections (1, 2 and 4 are long, 3 is short) and a brief preliminary passage, here called a Preface. The preface describes in some detail a set of optometry instruments that have been on display in the town museum for twenty years or so, having belonged to an optometrist, Mr Willens, who drowned in 1951 in a local river. Section 1 describes in great detail the 'expedition' of three boys in their early teens to that same river, the day after Mr Willens has drowned. The boys go to the river with the intention of taking a 'polarbear' dip in the icy waters. But the swim is pre-empted when they find Mr Willens's body, in his car, submerged in the water; the boys return to town, and eventually report their find, but before this, various characters around town, including the boys' three families (especially their mothers) are lengthily and vividly portrayed—on their way to the police station to report their news (a trip subsequently abandoned), they even talk to Mrs Willens who is in her garden and gives them forsythia for their mothers. Section 1 closes with the authorities confirming Willens' death by drowning, presumed to be a tragic accident. Section 2 takes us to the farmhouse of Jeanette and Rupert Quinn and their two children, where Jeanette is dying of glomerulonephritis and being nursed by Enid, from whose point of view the entire section is told. Enid is single and lives with her mother, and has devoted herself to home-nursing in often dire conditions; in the present case, she is clearly fond of both Rupert, once her contemporary at school, and the children, but she finds Jeanette more bitter and resentful than is sometimes understandably the case in the terminally ill. Enid herself seems to be undergoing a kind of psychological crisis—perhaps related to growing intimations that love and marriage and family may elude her—involving outlandish and sexually explicit dreams. The shorter Section 3 presents, heterodiegetically but very much from Jeanette's viewpoint and, we assume, in her language, an account of Mr Willens's habitual sexual assaults on Jeanette during his home visits to her, Rupert's breaking in on one such occasion and violent assault on Willens causing his death, and the Quinns' joint conspiring to conceal the killing and to pass the death off as an accidental drowning. Despite inconsistencies in the telling at first Jeanette implies that Willens was only in the habit of inappropriate touching, but at the end of the section she implies that his visits culminated in full intercourse. In the long final section, Jeanette dies and

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Enid, strongly attracted to the possibility of making a new life for herself with Rupert and the children, devises an elaborate scheme involving an excursion in a rowingboat, by means of which she will be able to confront Rupert with his part in the secret crime in a setting where he can engineer her accidental death by drowning if he so chooses; or, as one alternative and with her support, go to the authorities, face whatever punishment is meted out, but clear his conscience of the demeaning secret. That, at least, is Enid's plan; but as she embarks upon it she begins to have second thoughts, and reflecting also that Jeanette herself may have told some lies, Enid thinks how "collaborating in a silence" or a secret can bring benefits and "keep the world habitable." The story ends before we discover whether Enid actually confronts Rupert or not. Is Munro's "The Love of a Good Woman" a well-formed story? Graduate students with whom I have analysed this story were critical of Munro's craft, feeling that she had been misleading, or had misjudged matters, in dwelling so long on the three boys in the opening section, only to drop them, as it were, when the story line turned to Mrs Quinn, Edith, and Rupert Quinn. In these extended short stories, there are several points where "what happens next" (in the plot or in the presented discourse) is only limitedly foreseeable, or defies prediction. There is a structured looseness, or discursiveness, an occupying of a field or domain rather than a travelling along a single trajectory, which makes these contemporary long stories less narratively unified, determined, or teleologically constrained, than either the short story or the fullsized novel. And this, despite Tobias Wolff saying, in an interview, that by contrast with the novel, where "digression and a little relaxation of the grip" are allowed, in the best short stories "everything has to be pulling weight." He adds: "Short stories are very demanding in their way. You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels. They don't have clear endings; they don't tell you everything; they work much more through implication"13. How best, most "visibly," can one display the distinct pathway taken by a particular telling, through or from among the potential pathways that a set of involved characters and a set of interrelated ac13

Smith (1996).

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tions or events might give rise to? How does one operationalize something like the perception that a particular story structure has a "structured looseness"? One option that is attractive to narratologists and discourse analysts is to get help from the matrix analyses which have been proposed by Hoey14. These are a procedure for stripping texts down to one form of skeletal discourse structure. A Hoey-type matrix highlights certain structural elements of oral and newspaper narratives, and other kinds of text besides (fables, crime stories, and commodity advertisements). Matrix analysis derives (a) a matrix (an arbitrary twoparameter summary, based on participants and chronology), and (b) a way of representing the actual pathway a particular text has taken (among the numerous possible pathways). Incidentally, while the "vertical" axis of the matrix for a narrative charts chronological progression, what is reported as happening next, and then next, each successive "next" phase or row of cells may be tacitly linked to the preceding row by an implicit question other than the "then what happened?" one (which is the implicit link between rows in the matrix of a canonical narrative text). Thus, the implicit question linked to textually-subsequent answers in, for example, advertisements for toothpaste may be something like "What is the problem with that?", or "What was (or may be) done about that?" Once a matrix has been prepared, a pathway can be noted, that charts the actual text's progress through this matrix—the chosen pathway from among the innumerable possible ways (innumerable, since there is no absolute proscription against multiple repetitions of a particular "cell"). In principle, many routes are possible. Among other things, we should note that it is perfectly possible for there to be "empty cells" in a text's matrix (and perhaps this is particularly the case with narrative text matrices). If a matrix "tracks" three protagonists, A, B and C, and we are told nothing of what C is doing at a particular point where A and B are interacting, then a fillable cell remains unfilled. "If the narrator neglects to tell us what a character was doing, either through ignorance or because s/he does not know, then the analyst can only follow suit"15. In the matrix representation, where events are mapped against characters, this would appear as a character column with a series of filled cells initially, but thereafter a "tailing off," to 14 15

Hoey (2001: 93-118). Ibid.: 103.

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silence, in lower cells in the column, with little or no subsequent resumption. And if other characters (and their events) enter a story partway through, new columns have to be added, whose cells are filled only from some point partway through the story. Now that phenomenon applies even to the simplest stories, such as newspaper crime reports where the witnessing neighbour's experience is belatedly told; but in such cases, the focus on the initial agonist remains in place, implicitly or expressly. Narrative gaps and secrets, then, are "empty cells" in a Hoey matrix. On the other hand, a narrative secret or scandal can take shape in the mind of the reader on the basis of narrative and represented thought scraps and fragments, so that by the end of the story the reader is inclined to "go back" through the matrix pathway and "fill" or "inscribe" one or two cells that no character or narrator has been able or willing to disclose. This process is most effectively enacted in Munro's story "Open Secrets" where, by the close, the reader suspects as strongly as the character Maureen does that Theo Slater is responsible for the disappearance of young Heather Bell; but that public exposure and punishment is impossible in this, as in so many cases. If narrative secrets and surprises are partially foreseeable but unforeseen facts, events or episodes, then they perhaps fit into the tacit Question and Answer dynamic of the narrative structure in a rather special way. Surprises and secrets are answers that are derivable when the multiple possible answers to a series of previous questions (often prompted by segments of text which appear to be carrying merely local detail or seemingly secondary, inconsequential material) suddenly come together, are "forced upon" the reader (in the case of narrative surprise) or surreptitiously or with effort can be brought together, the reader is "nudged towards" linking them (in the case of secrets). Multiple, unrelated, contingent and mutually insignificant and non-interacting possible answers, sequences or trajectories suddenly and powerfully coalesce in a single "answer." If those multiple answers were mapped onto each other, the "answer" that turns out to be the narrative surprise would be one of them (if not the only one). That is to say, scattered textual indices give rise to "fields" of possible answers. One textual observation gives rise to multiple narrational implications, another reported incident may have innumerable narrative consequences; but when these fields of implication are mapped onto each other, a relatively small "space" is pro-

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jected, within which further events or facts, including those that are surprises to the reader, can emerge. Taken simply, each of the covertly significant textual clues or indices prompts a range of "answers" or sequels (the crucial one of which is not disclosed until the surprise or secret emerges—in a thoroughgoing narrative secret it is never conclusively disclosed). It is not so much that the range "narrows down" in the course of the story/text (for surely all these possible sequels are not computed and held in active memory by the reader) as it is that a disclosed surprise "highlights" or promotes one series or set rather than all the possible alternatives. If, in simple narratives and non-narrative expository prose, it is possible for the attentive reader to "project" (via questions arising) on the basis of a small key sample of text, much of a text's broad development, it follows that these same texts are highly amenable to summarizing. Conversely, a text whose full form cannot be guessed on the basis of a local sample is perhaps also the kind of text that resists inclusive or convergent summarizing. If a matrix were prepared for the entirety of "The Love of a Good Woman," it would have to have vertical columns for at least each of the five main protagonists or actants (Enid, Willens, Rupert, Jeanette, the three boys), and the horizontal ordering of events would run from those the analyst deemed the earliest significant ones (Enid in early childhood seeing her father sucking on the "ice cream cones" on a female patient's chest; or, in high school, Enid engaging in a subsexual teasing of Rupert) to the latest reported ones (the latest 'event' is the presence of Mr Willens's instruments, for an indeterminate number of years—perhaps twenty—in the Walley museum). This latter fact means that the narration begins with the final—and narrative present—state, this to be followed in sections 1 to 4 by reversion to the crucial chain of events in Spring 1951. The narrative present of the Preface is, perhaps, the mid 1960's, but it is a present that we do not return to in the entire remainder of the story (a device Munro is fond of). So we know that the suspense at the close of the telling (the end of section 4) must have been resolved, and we know that the narrator is in a position to have disclosed what happened. But they haven't, and so we don't know. This also means that the final row in a matrix for the story could be annotated in the following rather uninformative way:

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Enid Unknown, possibly married to Rupert

Willens Rupert Dead for Unknown, many years possibly married to Enid

Jeanette Dead for many years

three boys Grown up, some moved away

It is not the matrix itself that is of interest, but the clear tracking it facilitates of the 'pathway' through the matrix of cells taken by the actual telling: here, the Willens cell as we have seen is first told or activated (as is common with major cells, it is returned to) early in the narrative, in the preface, that for the boys is covered or told late in Section I, that for Jeanette is told early in the final Section, those for Enid and Rupert remain untold. The matrix will also highlight how crucial cells in some of the earliest rows, concerning Willens's sexual assault on Jeanette, his death, and the Quinns' concealment of the true circumstances, are told analeptically, are reached late on the narrative pathway, all the events of Section 3 occurring prior to those of Section 2; and within the telling of events in Section 3, the pathway is not a simple linear progression, as Jeanette belatedly tells of Willens's full sexual assaults on her after she has told of his final assault on her, characterizing it as improper touching. However the pathway of telling is represented (Hoey has some suggestions for alternative equivalent displays), it can be very effective in showing recurrently 'visited' cells, unvisited or unfilled cells, and so on—the core of the event-telling in a narrative. It is not equipped, however, to attend adequately to voice or focalisation. With contemporary stories like "The Love of a Good Woman," a Hoey-type matrix will have many vertical columns (character trajectories) and many of these will contain unfilled cells; in this way, the matrix representation is a very direct visual representation of the "looseness" of structure of such stories, to be contrasted with, for example, the newspaper hard news story in which a restricted set of characters have a limited set of incidents told and retold. In the latter, most cells are filled, and the actual narrational pathway adopted usually constitutes a temporal and/or spatial "orbiting" or "zigzagging" around the key social-order-disrupting event. In the former (again, I must emphasize, in the traditionally "tight" and "economical" genre of the short story—admittedly the long short story—rather than the more

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relaxed format of the novel), many cells remain empty, and the actual narrational pathway is often neither straightforwardly temporal, nor is it a patterned or predictable departure from the progression by way of spatial or temporal contiguity (including spatial or temporal return, where the next told event is linked to the previously told one by being spatially or temporally before or behind or alongside it). Clearly the foregoing remarks are little more than "notes towards" an understanding of narrative prospection. In the longer run, it may be that interesting congruences may emerge between my text-linguistic suggestions and the rich theoretical account of narrative configuration and the roles in it of abduction and the encyclopaedia proposed in this volume by John Pier. Certainly we are both interested in how utterly open semiosis is productively constrained, given shape, by various (non-sinister!) regimes of reading. I should also say I am disinclined to use the term Graded in any future article-title, for it is much too suggestive of steady (even evaluated) increments. Even if one succeeds in pinpointing techniques or conversions by which, for example, an interesting progression can modulate into a suspenseful one, these are likely to be text- and context-specific matters of kind and degree, rather than axioms that are non-specific and scalar. I am also keenly aware that invoking the simplifying structural model entailed in matrices means that insufficient attention is paid to the precise and detailed wording of the narrative text, even though ultimately one wants to explain how that textual particularity draws us to expect further actions or reactions from one mentioned participant—and actions that are "in character"—and few or none from another, and so on. Elsewhere, I have begun to explore further these matters of textual phrasing and its influence on expectation in two ways16: using corpus analytic tools to help track 'keywords' from one section to the next of stories such as Munro's; attempting to use a variant of the matrix procedure on small passages of fiction so as to explain better how, faced by some textual passages, readers are guided by the presentation to treat some segments as inaugurating significant narrative threads, others the reverse. For example, in the Munro preface, matrix-based analysis may help to show why we derive narrative expectations chiefly from paragraphs two and five, and set aside paragraphs one, three and four, as of only passing significance. Inter alia, the matrix should help explain how, for in16

Toolan (2003).

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stance, placing the entire preface at the end of the narrative would be narratively intolerable, or how reordering the preface so that the latter half of the first paragraph occurred at the close would be equally odd. Other factors in need of further treatment in the reliable projection of narrative progression include the reader's perception of repetition (of all kinds), match and departure from match, and episodicity. But perhaps most crucial of all is for proposals in this area to be formulated in ways that can be made open to confirmation (or disconfirmation) by studies of reader response.

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References Bamberg, Michael G.W. (ed.) 1997 Oral Versions of Personal Experience: Three Decades of Narrative Analysis. Special issue of Journal of Narrative and Life History (Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). Bruner, Jerome 1997 "Labov and Waletzky, thirty years on," in Oral Versions of Personal Experience: Three Decades of Narrative Analysis, edited by Michael G. W. Bamberg. Special issue of Journal of Narrative and Life History, 61-68 (Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). Coulthard, Malcolm (ed.) 1994 Advances in Written Text Analysis (London and New York: Routledge). Culler, Jonathan 1975 Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP). Fludemik, Monika. 2003 "The Diachronization of Narratology," in Narrative 11.3: 331-348. Hoey, Michael 2001 Textual Interaction (Oxford: Oxford UP). Joseph, John 2001 "Linguistic Creativity," in Redefining Linguistics, edited by H. Davis and T.J. Taylor, 121-150 (London and New York: Routledge). Munro, Alice 2000 "The Love of a Good Woman," in The Love of a Good Woman: Stories, 3-78 (London: Vintage). Mandler, Jean 1984 Stories, Scripts, and Scenes: Aspects of Schema Theory (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates). Prince, Gerald 1988 "The Disnarrated," in Style 22.1: 1-8. Sinclair, John 1994 'Trust the text," in Advances in Written Text Analysis, edited by Malcolm Coulthard, 12-25 (London: Routledge). Sinclair, John / Coulthard, Malcolm 1975 Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English used by Teachers and Pupils. (Oxford: Oxford UP). Smit, Joan 1996 "Spelunking into the Unknown". The Salon interview with Tobias Wolff. http://www.salon.com/dec96/interview2961216.html Sternberg, Meir 1978 Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP). 2001 "How Narrativity Makes a Difference," in Narrative 9.2: 115-122.

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Toolan, Michael 2001 Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. 2nd edition (1st edition 1988). (London and New York: Routledge). 2003 "Finding a bridge between corpus linguistics and the reader's processing of literature, the author's making of literature." Plenary paper given at FINSSE (The Second Finnish Conference of English Studies).

JOHN PIER (Paris, Tours)

Narrative Configurations From the time of Vladimir Propp's morphology of the Russian folktale, which identified the thirty-one functions that form the "structure" of the tale, through the more formalized narrative grammars and logics of structuralist narrate logy in the 1960s and beyond, theories of story structure have by and large reasoned on the basis of stories with a single line of action. Roughly speaking, one or more actants are the passive or active agents of events whose elements are causally and temporally ordered, resulting in the passage through a disequilibrium from one state of affairs to another. In further elaborations, researchers have charted out the ways in which narrative sequences are combined through concatenation, embedding, interlacing, etc. to form larger units. It has also been argued, from transformational, text linguistic, semiotic and cognitive points of view, among others, that such structures underlie textual manifestations as various as mere anecdotes and fully-developed novels'. In practice, however, the analysis of narratives on the basis of underlying formalizable structures has not always lived up to expectations, particularly in works where details may remain recalcitrant to formalization. This is not to say that methods of this type are inapplicable, however, for even in Vladimir Nabokov's extremely complex Lolita (1955), it is possible to identify formal story structures both for the larger framework of the novel (this could be summarized as Humbert Humbert's psychological deterioration brought about as the result of his erotic encounter with the nymphet Lolita, but from another perspective as how sexual obsessions with a minor can lead to imprisonment for homicide) and for its intermediate macrostructures as well as a multitude of local sequences. But such structures are inherently abstractive and reductive, aimed at forming "an autonomous layer of I wish to thank Peter Vernon for his careful reading of this text and his valuable suggestions.

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meaning," as Claude Bremond put it, "endowed with a structure that can be isolated from the whole of the message: the narrative [recit]"2. It may be possible to extract from Nabokov's resonantly allusive work such "an autonomous layer of meaning" with its corresponding logic of actions, but this is only one dimension of the novel that seems all but overwhelmed by other layers of meaning. Lolita, as Nabokov's work generally, has benefited from a considerable amount of literary detective work for tracking down sources, allusions, etc., and a serious reading of the novel can hardly bypass these contributions, even though they often suffer from the shortcomings encountered by source studies. More recent research reflects intertextual approaches3, shedding light on the textual functions of these sometimes troublesome features, and it is along these lines that the present study will proceed. On the basis of an idea put forth by Umberto Eco that stories are the actualization by the (model) reader of preovercoded narrative functions or intertextual frames4,1 shall argue that Lolita, through its allusiveness, is a particularly rich example of configuration of intertextual frames (or topoi). In this novel, numerous intertextual frames of varying scope and distinctness are enlisted, but three in particular appear to play a prominent role: the bereaved lover (activated by Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" [1849]); the Doppelgänger (activated by Poe's tale "William Wilson" [1845]); the triangle (activated by Merimee's novella "Carmen" [1845]). These intertextual frames are concurrent with one another, and even though they do overlap at certain points, they cannot, either structurally or thematically, be meaningfully subsumed under an overarching model of the type described above. Nor can it be said that the narratives that trigger these intertextual frames are simply "retold" in the novel, since the allusive nature of Nabokov's writing seems to forestall any closure of this kind. Before turning to these aspects of Lolita, it will be useful to clarify narrative configuration, a notion that brings together configuration and frames, on the one hand and, on the other, Eco's theory of abductions and how intertextuality involves abductive reasoning. The idea underBremond (1964: 4; my translation). See in particular Couturier (1993: 63-107) and Tammi (1999); for usefiil predecessors to the present approach, see Ben-Porat (1976); Perri (1978); Amossy (1980); Schmid (1983); Hebel (1991). Eco (1979: 35).

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lying narrative configuration is that stories, through the structuring of narrative functions and frames, both possess a configuration and result from an act of configuration, that intertextuality is a condition of narrativity. 1. Configuration and Frames In its narrative context, configuration was first put forth by Louis O. Mink. According to Mink, configuration is one of three distinct modes of comprehension, that is, "an individual act of seeing-things-together [...] by which elements of knowledge are converted into understanding"3. These modes include: (1) the theoretical or hypotheticodeductive mode of science; (2) the categorial mode of formal complexes and conceptual frameworks that allow us to determine what kind of thing an object is in relation to its category, as in systematic philosophy; (3) the configurational mode, characteristic of stories, which embraces "elements in a single and concrete complex of relationships"6. The latter type functions such that in the configurational comprehension of a story which one has followed, the end is connected with the promise of the beginning as well as the beginning with the promise of the end, and the necessity of the backward references cancels out, so to speak, the contingency of the forward references. To comprehend temporal succession means to think of it in both directions at once [...] .

The crucial distinction here is that between following a story by predicting or anticipating what will happen next, '"pulled along' by interest, sympathy and curiosity"8, and having followed that same story, an act that connects events together retrospectively. Thus, for example, when Little Red Riding Hood (in Perrault's version of the tale) meets a wolf in the forest while going to her grandmother's, a number of conjectures can be made as to what will happen next; the possibilities are narrowed down once it is learned that the wolf runs quickly down one path to the grandmother's while the girl strolls leisurely down another, but with the outcome of the tale, the necessity of these two itineraries becomes apparent. 5 6 7 8

Mink Ibid.: Ibid.: Ibid.:

(1969: 553). 551. 554. 546.

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Paul Ricoeur adopted Mink's configuration, but with closer attention to the constraints of narrative form, characterizing configuration as an operation which, in narrative texts, produces "emplotment" (mise en intrigue) comprising a threefold mediating function: (1) mediation between events or incidents and the story as an intelligible whole; (2) mediation between heterogeneous elements (agents, goals, means, etc.) and story, corresponding in effect to the passage from the paradigmatic to the syntagmatic or, in another sense, from system to "arrangement" (agencemeni); (3) mediation as a "synthesis of the heterogeneous," the resolution through different types of temporal features of the physical discordance of linear successions of "nows" and the temporal concordance of human experience (a plural unity of past, present and future). Emplotment thus encompasses both a chronological or episodic dimension, causing the reader or listener to ask "and then?" (cf. Mink's "forward references"), and a nonchronological or configurational dimension, a properly configurational act of comprehension or "taking-together" (prendre-ensemble) (associated by Ricoeur with the Kantian mode of reflective judgment) that transforms events into a meaningful whole, providing them with a "point" or "theme" and a sense of closure (a synthetic effect, rather than "backward references")9. This configurational act is not part of time-bound phenomena per se or of the signs that represent them, but functions as a condition of their intelligibility "by confronting and combining both sequence and pattern in various ways," thus enabling a reader or listener to organize events into a totality10. Unlike narratologists who seek to formalize underlying narrative structures, Mink and Ricoeur focus on the comprehension of stories as an act of configuration. The argument, particularly in Ricoeur's case, rests on a complex phenomenology of time (not the concern of the present article), but it also seems to be restricted to stories with a single line of action, as in the story of Little Red Riding Hood considered above. But what about the following example? ... The wolf asked her where she was going. "I'm going to see my grandmother and take her cakes my mother is sending her." "Well I want to go, too!" Two roads diverged in the wood. "Which shall I take?," wondered the wolf. One was grassy and

9 10

Ricceur (1983: 102-106). Ricoeur (1980: 1979); cf. Ryan (1991: 264).

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wanted wear. After some hesitation, he told the girl to take it, thinking surely she would pick flowers and run after butterflies along the way. Little did he know that this would make all the difference, etc.

It is possible to read this passage (of my own invention) simply as part of a variant of the tale, a particular version of the fabula common to all stories about Little Red Riding Hood. However, many readers will notice a twist to this version: it contains three lines (slightly adapted) from Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" (1916). Although the wolf intends to eat the little girl up, he is not the cunning ravisher we know from the traditional tale, but takes on something of the indecisiveness of the persona of the Frost poem, an impression which is intensified in this passage by the use of free indirect speech. In the poem, the persona is ambivalent about his choice of the grassy and unworn road, half wishing he had taken the other road, but looking back on things he seems not dissatisfied; by contrast, the wolf has miscalculated by sending the girl down that pleasant way, as the road he takes turns out to be encumbered with obstacles that spoil his plans, giving the phrase "make all the difference," introduced here proleptically, a sense of regret and disappointment (on the part of the wolf) that is foreign to the poem. This example, a fusion of two texts, calls for a type of configuration not taken into consideration by Mink or Ricoeur. While the hybrid version of the tale does possess "a single and concrete complex of relationships," these relationships can be grasped only imperfectly if the presence of the Frost poem in the story remains unaccounted for. Confronted with this version of the tale, Ricoeur's appropriation of the configurational act seems to enter into a poetics of closure which is less adapted to such cases of a plurality of texts than what Eco calls the "poetics of openness," characterized by works offering interpretative freedom, but only within the range of interpretations foreseen by the work itself: "Every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings"11. Narrative configuration, as it functions in the invented example or in works such as Loliia, thus requires an approach more closely grounded both in textual and in intertextual properties than the theories elaborated by the two philosophers. From a textual point of view, it " Eco (1979: 63).

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is possible to identify the configurational dimension with semantic macrostructures, each having a theme, so that cognitive processing takes place through operations of inference, thus relating these macrostructures to situations of discourse and pragmatic considerations12. An extension of such global textual patterns (although without reference to configurational acts) has been carried out by researchers working in text linguistics, the cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence in the form of frames (commonsense knowledge about concepts such as birthday parties), Schemas (ordered sequences linked by time, proximity and causality), plans (global patterns of events and states leading to an intended goal) and scripts (pre-established routines resorted to in particular situations)13. These criteria have also been adopted by a number of narratologists. David Herman, for one, speaks of "experiential repertoires" that include static or schematic frames (states and situations) as opposed to dynamic scripts, the latter defined in the narrow sense as "stereotyped sequences of actions that form a crucial part of human beings' knowledge of the world" and in a broader sense as "the links between prestored, dynamic representations bound up with everyday life." When integrated into narratives, scripts define the narrativehood of stories, whereas the way narratives are oriented toward stereotyped sequences and actions characterizes the degree of narrativity a narrative possesses14. Conceived of in terms of frames and scripts, narrative sequences thus reflect cognitive processes, clarifying the insights gained from earlier formalized and schematic narrative models by adapting them to human cognition15. For present purposes, frames will be viewed not in cognitive terms, but rather in accordance with what Eco calls "encyclopedia": a semiotic postulate or a regulative hypothesis, that is, the text-oriented world knowledge or cultural competence that makes semantic interpretation possible by taking account of contextual and circumstantial factors. It is on this basis that the encyclopedia, unlike "dictionary," allows us to amalgamate two or more frames so as to disambiguate a sequence such as the following: 12

14

Adam (1999 [1984]: 16-20). Cf. Schank/Abelson (1977); for a useful summary, see Beaugrande/Dressler (1981 90-91). Herman (2002: 89f.; quotation 382 n. 2); cf. Jahn (1999: 174). Jahn (1997) is among the first to call for a "cognitive narratology."

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John was sleeping when he was suddenly awakened. Someone was tearing up the pillow .

The criteria necessary for one to infer that John is sleeping on this particular pillow cannot be derived from a dictionary, which contains purely categorial information, or from a hierarchically structured tree for analysis of the sememes /to sleep/ or /pillow/: to interpret this sequence, an encyclopedic representation is required including not only a componential analysis of its sememes, but also a semantics into which pragmatic features are incorporated17. It is on this basis that a fundamental principle of Eco's textual semiotics emerges: structurally speaking, a frame is identical to a sememe, and a sememe is "an inchoative text," just as a text can be regarded as "an expanded sememe" 18 . At this point, a critical distinction must be drawn. Common frames are those frames that inform encyclopedic knowledge employed in the activities of everyday life (the standard sequences of actions involved in dining at a restaurant, taking a bath, etc.), while intertextual frames are topoi, including narrative schemes, actualized through signs ("texts" in a broad sense) whose reading cannot be dissociated from other texts and thus from a plurality of frames19. For this reason, intertextual competence is inherent in the encyclopedia20. In its first sense, we can say that the configuration of intertextual frames is a "seeing-things-together" that pertains not so much to nar16

18 19

Eco (1986: 76). Dictionary and encyclopedia were first studied by Eco (1976: 48-150) as a "theory of codes" and have since undergone a number of modifications. While his latest work approaches the subject from a "contractual" theory of meaning, the basic idea remains that "supporters of a dictionary representation maintain that such representations [the categorical organization of compositional semantics] take account of relations within the language, leaving aside elements of knowledge of the world, while knowledge in an encyclopedic format presupposes extralinguistic knowledge" (Eco 1999: 226). Eco (1979: 21, 175). Cf. ibid.: 21. An "intertextual encyclopedia" is put into play when texts are quoted from other texts and knowledge of these quoted texts is presupposed (Eco 1990: 89); this point applies equally well with a writer such as Borges, who reminds us that such texts need not exist empirically. While theories of intertextuality have developed in widely divergent ways, Julia Kristeva's (1969: 146) statement that "all texts are constructed as a mosaic of texts, all texts are the absorption and transformation of another text" (my translation) has lost none of its allure.

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rative "in a single and concrete complex of relationships" or to emplotment, which mediates between chronologically ordered elements for the comprehension of a meaningful whole, as it does to the actualizing or configuring of multiple frames in a narrative. At this level, the configuration of intertextual frames corresponds to a principle of composition—the parts, we might say, that do not add up to the whole: taken together, the intertextual frames of the bereaved lover, the Doppelgänger and the triangle along with their actualizations in Lolita correspond to either less than or more than such synthesizing themes as the protagonist's psychological deterioration or the consequences of sexual obsessions. 2. Abduction Now, it is evident that the processing of intertextual frames requires greater powers of discernment and more extensive recourse to relevant elements of the encyclopedia, explicit and implicit, than do common frames. To gain a better understanding of the mechanisms involved, it will be helpful to refer back to our experimental version of Little Red Riding Hood and briefly consider it in terms of Eco's system of abductions, itself derived from Peirce's inferential conception of the sign and the logical operations of deduction, abduction' (hypothesis) and induction21. "Overcoded abductions" occur (semi-)automatically when, in a given context of utterance and co-text, reasoning goes from general laws to particular cases in such a way that the conclusion of a hypothesis is taken more or less for granted. As already pointed out, a sememe is "an inchoative text" and a text an "expanded sememe." On this basis, once a topic has been identified in a text, it is "deduced" as a matter of course that this topic will apply to the whole text, notwithstanding subsequent adjustments. It is in this sense that stories can be said to actualize pre-overcoded narrative functions, corresponding in effect to the passage from type to token. Thus, the words "Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood ..." initiate what for most people is a ready-made sequence of actions possessing a specific actantial strucThis summary is drawn essentially from Eco (1983); for a fuller exposition, see Pier (2003). A useful summary of Peircean abduction can be found in Eco (1994: 157-160).

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ture, theme, generic properties and, according to historical, sociological and psychological conditions, a particular point or reason for being related. Now, when no reliable predictable rule is at hand, it is necessary to seek out a plausible alternative. This is what takes place in "undercoded abductions" (abduction in a sense close to Peirce's), characterized by a movement from inference to a probable rule. The process of identifying a topic or a theme takes place in this way, but undercoded abductions also occur in an "inferential walk" outside the text, the purpose of which is to select an appropriate previously actualized frame, as in verisimilitude, for instance. It is important to note that a fabula is constructed through circulation between the ready-made elements of overcoded abductions and the plausible alternatives adopted through the process of undercoded abduction22. A reader of Perrault's version of Little Red Riding Hood will note not only that the girl takes the long path and the wolf the short path, but also that this choice results from a ploy by the wolf: "I'll go by this road and you'll go by that road—we'll see who gets there first." Is this race a child's game? In the end, no, and as the result proves, confirmed by the morality, the unwary girl has been taken in by the duplicitous wolf with fatal conesquences: "the gentlest wolves are the most dangerous of all." Grimm's version, by contrast, does not include a race, but rather the girl's promise to her mother to go straight to her grandmother's. Is this a true promise? No. However, eaten and then saved and after the wolf has been duly punished, the repentant girl vows never again to violate her mother's interdictions. Both tales are woven out of sequences of events that activate overcoded and undercoded abductions. Moreover, each includes a crucial frame—in one version a game, in the other a promise—whose own respective system of rules is at least provisionally entertained in the The back-and-forth movement between the two types of abduction results in a process akin to what Jonathan Culler (1975: 137) calls "naturalization" through which "the strange or deviant is brought within a discursive order and thus made to seem natural"; the concept has since been reformulated by Monika Fludemik (1996: 313) as "narrativization": "the recognition of a text as narrative [which] characterizes a process of interpretation by means of which texts come to be perceived as narratives." Related to this jockeying between the assumed and the unpredictable is Michael Toolan's work on plot-based surprise and suspense; see his contribution to the present volume and Toolan (2001: 99-103).

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reading process. The fact that the tales include these frames—frames constituting social phenomena in their own right independently of the tales themselves—supports the idea that the actualization of stories comes about through the assembly of frames and that this necessarily takes place intertextually. What if, in proceeding through undercoded abduction, no suitable tried and tested alternative can be found to explain a problematic textual detail? In this case, like a detective attempting to solve a crime by hypothesizing other facts (puzzle solving) or a scientist hypothesizing a general law to explain new facts (surmising), it will be necessary to invent a rule. Eco calls this sort of conjecturing "creative abduction," since no pre-existing and firmly established rules and explanations can be relied on, but only "fair guesses" nourished by previous experience. Creative abductions clearly involve greater abductive effort than overcoded or undercoded abductions and thus set in motion a more elaborate procedure for the inductive testing of hypotheses, dubbed "meta-abductions" by Eco: is "the possible universe (or state of things) outlined in the creative abduction [...] the same as the 'real' universe?"23. From this perspective, lower-order abductions are the most "natural," the ones that fit in most readily to the world of experience, while creative abductions, by seeking to accommodate the unknown or to explain the unaccounted for, may go so far as to bring about a paradigm shift. Unlike deduction, abduction and induction in logic, no sharp line can be drawn between Eco's four types of abduction, particularly in actual communicative situations, but it does seem that overcoded abductions and undercoded abductions, which predominate in everyday communication and in the construction of fabula, are more stable than creative abductions and meta-abductions, which come into play in zones of conjecture, uncertainty and risk and are also prominent in aesthetic phenomena. A case in point is the hybrid version of Little Red Riding Hood, where the four types of abduction can be observed. Overcoded and undercoded abductions cover the story known by all, but those readers who are not familiar with Frost's poem are unlikely to grasp the significance for the tale of the three lines extracted from that poem. For those who have a hunch that something about the tale is awry, however, a number of questions will arise. Some (e.g. why does the wolf hesitate 23

Eco (1986: 42).

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about which road to take?) will set off a search for plausible explanations (undercoded abductions) while others (e.g. what is the explanation for free indirect discourse in this fairy tale?) will involve the hypothesizing of creative abductions. The answers to such questions can be narrowed down through meta-abductive reasoning by determining that the problematic lines are from Frost's poem and that a new web of meanings results from the fusion between the tale and the poem. This example, even though artificial, does nonetheless provide some indication of: (1) how irregularities or anomalies in an otherwise familiar text are perceived; (2) how intrusive elements prompt further scrutiny; and (3) how the search for explaining these features might proceed. Together, these three moves constitute the stages of creative abduction and meta-abduction involved in the perception of intertextuality. In Eco's writings, abduction has been studied in works by Voltaire, Conan Doyle and Borges24, but this is largely for the purpose of illustrating how abductive reasoning functions; and while the four types of abduction form part of Eco's theory of textual communication, brilliantly employed in his analysis of a story by Allais25, they are not applied to texts exhibiting the sort of allusive intertextuality we are concerned with here. Actually, the kind of meta-abductive reasoning involved can be found in Michael Riffaterre's theory of intertextuality in poetry, despite the fact that this author does not refer to his method in these terms. It is also true that Riffaterre's method is geared almost exclusively toward poetry with a particular focus on words or phrases that guarantee the unity of a poem, so that it cannot be transposed onto texts with pre-dominantly narrative functions, texts whose formal unity, when it exists, may not gravitate around a word or a phrase. In spite of these limitations and various other reservations, however, consideration of three aspects of Riffaterre's theory does shed light on the points borne out above. The first point is the triggering of intertextual reading: Intertextual connection takes place when the reader's attention is triggered by [...] intratextual anomalies—obscure wordings, phrasings that the context alone will not suffice to explain—in short, ungrammaticalities [...] which are traces left by the absent intertext, signs of an incompleteness to be completed elsewhere.

24 25

Eco (1983), (1994: 152-162). Eco (1979: 200-266).

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These, in turn, are enough to set in train an intertextual reading, even if the intertext is not yet known or has been lost with the tradition it reflected .

The specificity and object of Riffaterre's concerns notwithstanding, the term "traces" appears to me preferable, not only because the ungrammaticalities of free indirect speech, for example, are not necessarily bound up with intertexts, but also because the linguistic competence required for the detection of ungrammaticalities is by no means restricted to poetry and because linguistic competence is not coextensive with narrative competence (this is the case of visual narratives, for instance). Traces bring with them "the presupposition of an intertext" 27 so that, when adequately analyzed, they prove to be variants of a same structural matrix. In this case, intertextuality is "obligatory" as opposed to "aleatory"28, the latter typified by quotations, allusions and "merely superficial similarities of wording or topic" that cannot be regarded as variants of a same structure29. Structural decoding is described as abduction in Peirce's sense, specified as the reader's "working his way back to the structures that generate the text"30. However, it can be objected that, from a meta-abductive perspective, a structure is not a given, so that should there prove to be no common generating structure between, say, "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Road Not Taken," the process of intertextual reading initiated by the unmarked quotation in our hybrid example would not thereby be dissipated. On this basis, then, narrative configurations allow a signifying potential to aleatory intertextuality that Riffaterre seems to deny31. Secondly, Riffaterre distinguishes between two levels of reading: (1) heuristic reading (linearly from beginning to end, focused on the meaning of words, phrases and sentences and the referential dimension 26 27 28 29 30

Riffaterre (1980a: 627). Riffaterre (1980b: 18; my translation). Ibid.: 5. Riffaterre (1980a: 627). Riffaterre (1978: 168 n. 13). A similar observation can be made regarding Gerard Genette's intertextuality, which includes quotation, plagiarism and allusion: "a relation of co-presence between two or more texts, in other words, eidetically and usually, [...] the effective presence of one text in another" (1982: 8; my translation). In this system, intertextuality is the lowest of five degrees of abstraction, implication and globalizing nature (globalite) defining "transtextuality." The effects of the co-presence of texts may well be diffuse, spreading beyond the immediate context.

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of language, but during which ungrammaticalities are encountered); (2) retroactive or hermeneutic reading (the stage of revising backwards, setting up equivalences in a structural decoding aimed at uncovering the matrix)32. This dual or, rather, two-stage reading can be likened to what Eco calls "a naive [reading] and a critical reading, the latter being the interpretation of the former"33, which relates directly to the two types of Model Reader: the "semantic reader" and the "semiotic or critical reader"34. For present purposes, it will be appropriate to reformulate Riffaterre's two readings as follows: Heuristic (or naive) reading engages lower-order abductions to the extent that, for example, "Once upon a time ..." triggers the assumption that the remainder of the text will be a fairy tale including all the conventional generic features. To such an overcoded abduction must be added undercoded abductions as when, in hindsight, it is realized that the wolfs challenge to a race is not a game or that Red Riding Hood nearly dies because she breaks a promise. Undercoded abductions are further elicited by intertextual traces, the portions of "The Road Not Taken" introduced into "Little Red Riding Hood," for example, initiating a movement backward and forward between the two texts. Semiotic (or critical) reading, which involves higher-order abductions and, like heuristic reading, also incorporates Mink's forward references and backward references, occurs most prominently with the attempt to account for the intertextual and to somehow accommodate any heterogeneous elements. Quotations (explicit or not), borrowings, allusions and the like invite both an inferential walk (undercoded abductions) and conjectures (creative abductions), but they also call for the "testing" procedures of meta-abductions .

Thirdly, Riffaterre associates these two levels of reading with two semantic systems: (1) "meaning when words signify through their oneto-one relationship with non-verbal reality"; (2) "significance when 32

Riffaterre (1978: 5-6). Eco (1979: 205; cf. 45-55). 34 Eco (1994: 92). The meta-abductive character of Riffaterre's retroactive reading appears clearly with the processing of dual signs (two texts existing simultaneously, as in puns): (1) in such cases, a sign refers to a paradigm that must be recognized; (2) if the paradigm is not recognized, it is necessary to refer back to the clue; (3) the correction backwards "creates the ghost or parallel text wherein the dual sign's second (or syntactically unacceptable) semantic allegiance can be vindicated; [...] the ghost text may embody itself in potential but ready-made stereotypes within the range of any reader's linguistic competence" (Riffaterre [1978: 91]). Note that in Ricoeur's system, there is no real equivalent to retroactive or "critical" reading, since comprehension culminates with a synthesis of sequence and pattern into a totality. 33

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the same words signify through their relationship with structural invariants"36. In fact, significance breaks down into two interrelated semiotic concepts. First, it is not a sum total of meanings, but "a new segmentation of the text"37, "a bouncing from reference to reference that keeps on pushing the meaning over to a text not present in the linearity"38; in this sense, signifycance pertains to semiosis, the action of the sign resulting from the relations between representamen, object and interpretant. In its second sense, significance is defined as "what the poem is really about: it arises through retroactive reading when the discovery is made that representation (or mimesis) actually points to a content that would demand a different representation in non-literary language"39. This "different representation," also described as being "neither in the text nor in the intertext, but midway between them, in the interpretant"40, corresponds to the interpretant in a sense close to Eco's comment that "the interpretant [is] another representation which is referred to as the same Object'"41, be it in another sign system (translations, synonyms), the same sign system (periphrasis, expansion), indexical pointing or connotation42. There is a clear parallel between Riffaterre's "meaning" and Eco's "dictionary," on the one hand, and between "significance" and "encyclopedia," on the other, although this parallel should not be exaggerated: meaning, for example, is to be taken in a denotative sense, while dictionary pertains to the categorial information contained in sememes. More important for intertextual reading, however, is the fact that although both signifcance and encyclopedia include the principles of interpretant and semiosis, encyclopedia is a broader notion in that it comprises a network of interpretants structured by the constraints of a universe of discourse in the process of unlimited semiosis, the potentially infinite chain of interpretants, each with an antecedent sign and a consequent sign43. As such, encyclopedia, a regulating semiotic princi36

Riffaterre (1980a: 625-626). Riffaterre (1985: 43). 38 Riffaterre (1978: 12). 39 Ibid.: 167 n. 3. 4Π Riffaterre (1980b: 14-15; my translation). 41 Eco (1976: 68). 42 Riffaterre (1978: 182 n. 2). "[A]n encyclopedia-like representation assumes that the representation of the content takes place only by means of interpretants, in a process of unlimited semiosis" (Eco 1986: 68). 37

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pie, is too general to be operative in actual texts, and for this reason it is preferable, when speaking of narrative configurations, to adopt significance in a sense not unlike Riffaterre's: an interpretant produced by the intersection of two or more texts, but which is contained in neither of those texts per se. Example: the sense of regret and disappointment resulting from the fusion of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Road Not Taken." The configuration of intertextual frames in its first sense, as seen above, is a "seeing-things-together," the actualizing or configuring of multiple frames in a narrative. In its second sense, the configuration of intertextual frames corresponds to significance, resulting from a series of abductive operations and the processing of intertextual traces through a heuristic reading and a semiotic reading. In the following discussion of Lolita, we shall see how configuration in the first sense emerges largely from the convergences and divergences of the intertextual frames of the bereaved lover, the Doppelgänger and the triangle, while configuration in the second sense results from other forms of overcoding. 3. Intertextual framing A full demonstration of these two aspects of configuration in Lolita would extend well beyond the possibilities of this article, and I shall thus follow up on only a few of the lines of reflection set out above. Among the three intertextual frames (or topoi) singled out, the most prominent is that of the bereaved lover. As with the other frames, however, the works through which this frame is activated are not faithfully reproduced, but tend to drift off in apparently unrelated ways, intertwining and merging with other features of the novel, and yet diverging from any fixed pattern to form still other coincidental and multifaceted designs. While "Annabel Lee" comes closer perhaps than any other work to qualifying as the "hypertext" of Lolita", its effects are scat44

Though bound to its antecedent text by a relation of "hypertextuality," the novel does not fit neatly into either of the main two modes of this relation. Through a process of diegetic transposition, the poem undergoes a "serious" (as opposed to a "ludic" or "satirical") transformation in Humbert's account (11-13); at the same time, the novel must be regarded as an "allographic epilogue," i.e. a subtype of imitation, as it is the continuation of the protagonist's story in his postbereavement phase, but by another author (Genette 1982: 23Iff). This typological ambiguity

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tered throughout the novel, intersecting with numerous other works to such a degree that any centralizing text, however useful it may prove to be for guiding the reader through various portions of the novel, can be entertained only provisionally. Given the theoretical framework outlined in the present article, it seems most appropriate to proceed by examining how manifestations of lower-order abductions—the three intertextual frames, but also two critical mises en abyme and certain generic features that also serve to overcode the novel—are absorbed into and transformed by higher-order abductions. 3.1. Seeing-things-together Numerous indices can be identified creating an explicit link between Lolita and "Annabel Lee": not only the Annabel Leigh of Humbert's youth on the Riviera which sets the stage for the protagonist's encounter twenty-three years later with Lolita ("the 'gratification' of a lifetime urge, and release from the 'subconscious' obsession of an incomplete childhood romance with the initial little Miss Lee"45), but also through evocations such as calling out her name as for a stray child ("Lo.Lee.Ta." [9]) and the telescoping of Dolores Haze's name into Annabel Lee ("Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta" [167]) as well as nearly verbatim recontextualized borrowings from the poem ("my darling—my darling—my life and my bride" [167; cf. "Annabel Lee," 1. 39]; "the search [accompanied by Lolita] for a Kingdom by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera" [167]), etc. More generally, the elements of the bereaved lover, as extrapolated informally from the poem (poet's memory of a childhood love in a fairytale-like past, coveted by heavenly forces; cruelly separated from the beloved by death, his soul cannot be severed from hers, and he continues to commune with his bride even in her tomb), appear at various moments in the novel and serve as an important source of overcoding.

45

serves to underscore the dynamics of configuration in Lolita. From another perspective, the intricate relations between text and paratext contribute to the "intratextual" complexity of Pale Fire (cf. Pier 1992). Nabokov (1991 [1955]: 166-167). Further references to Lolita will be given in the text by page number. These references also bear on the relevant annotations by Appel, to which I am sincerely indebted (as well as to Appel [1967a], [1967b], [1968] and Proffer [1968]), although I have found it necessary to complement some of these findings with investigations of my own.

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Despite such points of convergence, the works diverge noticeably on other details. For example, Lolita dies not as a child from catching a chill (Annabel Lee) or from typhus (Annabel Leigh), but as a married seventeen-year-old during childbirth, having "died" for Humbert after being kidnapped by Claire Quilty three years earlier (4). No less importantly, elements extraneous to the frame of the bereaved lover also enter the picture, as when it is mentioned that "powdered Mrs. Leigh" (Annabel's mother) was "born Vanessa van Ness" (12). This resonant name is not a mere phonetic curiosity, for just as other onomastic features in Nabokov's writing generally, it reverberates in various parts of the novel and even in other works by the author, while it also evokes works by other writers. Firstly, it echoes names such as "John Ray, Jr.," the moralizing author of the Foreword and editor of Humbert's memoir whose historical counterpart, a seventeenth-century naturalist known for his system of classification of insects, announces some of Nabokov's work as a lepidopterist. In his typical way, Nabokov disclaims any authorial connection with this marginal but multiform figure, stating in "On a Book Entitled Lolita" (appended to the 1958 edition) that "After doing my impersonation of suave John Ray, the character in Lolita who pens the Foreword, any comments coming straight from me may strike one—may strike me, in fact—as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book" (311). But Vanessa van Ness is further evocative of Humbert Humbert46, himself a descendant of William Wilson, and, by way of the French ombre ombre (shade, shadow, darkness) of John Shade, author of the poem "Pale Fire," and of other "shadow" characters—notably, "Vivian Darkbloom," anagram for Vladimir Nabokov, but also the author of "My Cue," a yet-to-be published biography referred to in the Foreword (4), and the mistress of the playwright Claire Quilty, Humbert's double; unspecified at this point, the subject of this biography becomes clear much later when Lolita, during her last meeting with Humbert, declares "I would sooner go back to Cue" (279): "Cue" is Quilty's nickname, and he does in fact provide many "cues" to his identity which fail to be deciphered by Humbert until this late moment in the novel. Vivian Darkbloom also appears elsewhere in the Nabokov corpus, being the author of "Notes to Ada" (appended to Ada) and the alphabetical descendant of 46

Which, in turn, "doubles" John Ray, Jr., initialed J.R., Jr.

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"Vivian Calmbrood," the alleged author of an uncompleted Russian play by Nabokov, all of which attests Couturier's claim of Nabokov's "tyranny" as an author47 and Appel's suggestion that Lolita is a "puppet show"48. In yet another sense, Vanessa van Ness refers back, in a roundabout way, to Jonathan Swift's "Cadenus and Vanessa" (1713)49. In a commentary on a portion of Shade's "Pale Fire" ("My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest /My Admirable butterfly" [1. 271 f.]), Kinbote quotes from Swift's poem ("When, lo! Vanessa in her bloom / Advanced, like Atalanta's star" [1. 307f.]). Through concatenation of the quotes, "Dark-bloom" is invoked once again, but Kinbote also explicitly points out "the inevitable allusion to Fanhomrigh, .Esther"50: in fact, this is Hester Vanhomrigh, a passionate admirer of Swift who died at an early age and a rival of Esther Johnson, herself Swift's child lover and the Stella whose literary existence is consecrated by The Journal of Stella (1710/13). In Swift's poem, Venus deceives Pallas into endowing the nymph Vanessa with manly attributes, rendering her undesirable for both sexes (cf. 11. 441-444), and the nympholeptic Humbert's intense dislike for Annabel's mother, Vanessa, is to some degree motivated by her partial onomastic identity with Swift's Vanessa. As for Stella, she forms part of a long lineage of poets' child lovers including Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura (cf. 19), but also Poe's Virginia and Humbert's fictitious Lolita ("Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's" [107]). The dominant connection remains Poe, however, as both he and Humbert are bereaved lovers, the latter going so far at one point as to register at The Enchanted Hunters hotel as "Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter" (118). And finally, although it was not written and published until after Lolita, Nabokov's Pale Fire, in a "coincidence" typical of this author, opens up yet another perspective on Vanessa van Ness. The quote from Swift contains the words "Vanessa Atalanta," the scientific name for the Red Admirable51, a member of the Nymphalidce family of butterflies, and it is not by chance that Vanessa Leigh, like butterflies, is 47 48 49 50 51

Couturier (1993). Appel (1967b). Swift (1984: 334-356). Nabokov (1973: 138). "[L]ater degraded to The Red Admiral" (ibid.).

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"powdered." From this detail, it can be inferred that, figuratively (and notwithstanding the Classical allusions), Mrs. Leigh is the mature form of a "nymph" (from the Greek, numphÄ: bride)—that is, the larva (or pupa) of an insect at an incomplete stage of metamorphosis. This subtle analogy points toward an important structural metaphor which, it can be reasonably surmised, is borne out by numerous textual details: just as the "nymphet" Lolita undergoes metamorphosis (as a character and as an intertextual construct), so the novel Lolita results from a series of metamorphoses, suggesting an isomorphic relation between character and novel. The intrusion of "Vanessa van Ness" into the overcoding frame of the bereaved lover illustrates our theoretical reflections on narrative configurations to the extent that a "na'ive" reading is forced to give way to a "critical" reading in order to account for new and, apparently, refractory elements. Through creative and meta-abductive reasoning, it is possible to determine how the processing of these parasitical words brings about a "seeing-things-together" that both accommodates them to their immediate context, adjoining new meanings and significances, and radiates outwards, linking these details up with other portions of the novel and contributing to its extraordinary compositional complexity. Poe, of course, is the author most visible in Lolita, and the presence of "Annabel Lee" early on tends to project the Poe corpus onto other parts of the work. These expectations, however, are frequently deflected. At one crucial point, Humbert says to Lolita: "'Now hop-hophop, Lenore, or you'll get soaked.' (A storm of sobs was filling my chest.)" (207). Is this the Lenore of "The Raven" (1849), the somewhat older counterpart of Annabel Lee, or possibly that of "Lenore" (1849)? Here again, an easily overlooked clue requires a critical second look, for "hop-hop-hop, Lenore," as Nabokov himself explained in his commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin", is drawn from a popular and widely-translated ballad by the Romantic poet Gottfried August Bürger entitled "Lenore" (1773)53: "Und hurre, hurre, hopp hopp hopp!" (1. 149). This line appears as the ghostly figure of the dead Wilhelm urges his beloved Lenore to join him on horseback in order to carry her away to her deathly bridal bed—a bereavement 52 53

Pushkin (1975: III, 152-154). Bürger (1987: 178-182).

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which all but inverts that of the bereaved lover in the Poe corpus. Once identified, Burger's poem sets off a process of undercoded abduction, shedding light on other details such as the "storm of sobs" filling Humbert's chest (Sturm und Drang), Lolita's "Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight" (207), and in particular her request, as she rides a bike, to go away: "Leave at once. Go for a long trip again. But this time we'll go where 7 want, won't we?" (207). This trip, which has no equivalent in Poe's version of the bereaved lover but is central to the Bürger poem, announces the long car journey through America that will end when Lolita is checked into Elphinstone Hospital with an "ague" (240), although it is not in her hospital bed that she dies (as she would if Bürger were more closely adhered to), but " i n childbed" three years later (4). This departure from both Poe's and Burger's versions of the bereaved lover suggests that Lolita's itinerary follows a logic of its own. Or does it? Humbert drives the feverish Lolita to the hospital "[w]ith a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit," and it is from this hospital that the girl will be kipnapped several days later by Quilty: "While I was not looking, my child was taken away from me!" (240). This is a critical moment in the novel, not only because the pair will be separated for the first time in two years, to meet again briefly only once (three years later), but also because with the unveiled reference to Goethe's "Erlkönig" (1782)54, a new factor is introduced into the web of circumstances. Goethe's poem relates how a father carries his son home by horseback during a stormy night, but that on arrival the son who, unlike the father, hears the voice of the king of the elves, has died of a chill55. Thus contextualized, the kidnapping of Lolita by the "heterosexual" Quilty represents an important departure from the frame of the bereaved lover, for with the appearance of this third protagonist, Humbert's rival, one of the consequences is that a transition to the frame of the triangle as well as to that of the Doppelgänger, both amply foreshadowed in earlier parts of the novel, is now locked into place. A fully-developed study of the novel would investigate this transformation in closer detail than we can afford here, but for present purposes I wish only to draw a few conclusions. While it is true, from the 54

Goethe (1984: 154-155). See Meyer (1988: 26-31 and 215-217) for valuable comments on the repercussions of the Bürger and the Goethe poems in Pushkin's work.

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perspective of source study, that "the context of the work quoted (misquoted, or parodied) has no direct relevance for the characters or situations in Lolita"56, it is the very "irrelevance" of certain textual details that triggers a process by which these anomalies are resolved into what has been noted as one of the dominant features of Nabokov's writing generally: designs, congruencies, coincidences57. The choice of terms notwithstanding, the operations at issue here are strikingly similar to those of the various degrees of abductive reasoning that result in narrative configurations. 3.2. Significance With emphasis on the frame of the bereaved lover, we have seen that one of the principal functions of the three intertextual frames is to overcode the narrative, that the intrusiveness of certain allusions has a significant impact on how these frames are actualized and also that these frames tend to intersect at certain critical points. Frames, however, are but one kind of overcoding that occurs in Lolita, the other types most relevant for present purposes being the mise en abyme and genre. One key mise en abyme appears early on in the form of three entries drawn by Humbert while in his prison cell from Who 's Who in the Limelight: the actor Roland Pym (cf. Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym); Claire Quilty; Dolores Quine (Lolita is the Spanish diminutive of Dolores) (31-32). Thus, although the bereaved lover dominates in the first part of the novel, the triangle discreetly enters the picture at this point, setting the pattern for Humbert, Quilty, Lolita in the primary diegesis. The members of the Who 's Who trio, however, do not belong to a common diegesis, and as they are bound together by no "story," the relations between them remain largely unspecified. This potential and somewhat formal triangle, assembled by Humbert for reasons that can be construed through the use of Mink's forward and backward references, is marked by the fact that the obscure and elusive Quilty, whose identity is known by Humbert at the time he writes his memoir, but in the chronology of events is discovered by him only at the time of his last meeting with Lolita58, participates in both triangles. A more 56 57

Proffer (1968: 19). Tammi (1985: 19). "[S]he emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago" (271-272).

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straightforward overcoding would appear to be provided by Jose, Lucas, Carmen59 and, less explicitly, by Onegin, Lensky, Tatiana60, for Humbert makes a connection between Lolita and Carmen on more than one occasion, and the situation of the jealous lover forms an obvious link between "Carmen" and Lolita. Here again, however, the actualization of frames is belied by textual detail, setting into motion the inferential walks and conjectures of higher-order abductions. Lolita, generally associated with Annabel Lee up to the time she is whisked away by Quilty, at which point she is assimilated partly with Poe's and partly with Burger's Lenore, but also with the boy carried off to his death by the Erlkönig, has by this time already begun to metamorphose into Carmen-Zemfira. But will Lolita share the same fate as the two gypsy girls? This expectation, resulting from an undercoded abduction drawing on knowledge from the "encyclopedia," is thwarted, for in fact it is Quilty that Humbert will kill, the latter "doubled" by the playwright-abductor nearly from the time he first meets Lolita. It turns out, then, that the "deception" which drives Jose to kill Carmen or Aleko to kill Zemfira takes on a wholly different form in Nabokov's novel, the reader having been misled by a false inference and forced to entertain either another alternative (to be confirmed or not) or, more radically, a conjecture: e.g. the deception of the reader. Whatever the conclusion, a progressive reconfiguring of the text and of the overcoding intertextual frames is brought about, not so much at the level of local detail (as is the case with the "seeing-things-together" examined in the previous section), as it is over a wider stretch of discourse. Another important mise en abyme that also tends to suffuse with various elements of the diegesis but, unlike the triangle fashioned by Humbert out of extracts from the Who 's Who biographies, coincides with none of the three intertextual frames that inform the novel, results from the summary of a vaguely Symbolist play authored by Quilty: The Enchanted Hunters (200-202). Briefly stated, it is the story of Diana61, the enchantress of seven hunters (cf. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves"), one of whom is a Young Poet (Quilty). Now, both 59

See Proffer (1968: 45-53), which also comments on the Aleko, gypsy lover, Zemfira triangle in Pushkin's poem "The Gypsies" (1827), a work well known by Merimee; cf. Tammi (1999: 54-55). See Meyer (1988: 16ff.) for structural parallels between Lolita and Eugene Onegin. In classical mythology, goddess of the hunt and of chastity.

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the play and its mise en abyme intersect with other aspects of the novel in a number of ways. Firstly, the play, erroneously but appropriately misnamed at one point The Hunted Enchanters (196), mirrors The Enchanted Hunters hotel where Humbert had earlier been "enchanted" by Lolita (117ff.), and it seems more than coincidental that Lolita should be cast in the role of Diana for a school performance of the play or that, several days after a rehearsal in the presence of the author, she should leave town precipitously with Humbert for a car journey across America—a journey which, we have already seen, also reflects Burger's "Lenore" and Goethe's "Erlkönig." The play further ties up with the theatrical context of the earlier mise en abyme: Quilty, for instance, is noted for The Little Nymph, which "traveled 14,000 miles and played 280 performances on the road [...]" (31)—a foreshadowing of Lolita's road trip with Humbert in impressive detail; he is also the author of The Lady Who Loved Lightning, written in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom—an anagram (as already noted) for Vladimir Nabokov and yet another example of how, in Lolita., the Doppelgänger is resolved through authorial control into multiple series of verbal doublings and mirrorings, rather than the traditional psychoanalytical theme. The two mises en abyme, one coinciding with one of the principal intertextual frames of the novel, the other not, cast their effects both forward and backward, and they thus contribute to the setting up of textual patterns that can be ascertained only through a critical or semiotic reading. It is these and other forms of mirroring that best illustrate the process of semiosis in Lolita. Verbal exuberance in the novel takes on many dimensions other as well, but it is all neatly summarized by Humbert himself when, imprisoned for murdering Quilty, he declares in his memoir: "Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!" (32). This "play with words," occurring in forms reminiscent of certain techniques developed by Lewis Carroll and James Joyce, reaches one of its high points with the "cryptogrammic paper chase" (250) that takes place during the car journey across America when Quilty, a "fiend" in hot pursuit of the couple, registers at nearby hotels under a dazzling variety of "insulting pseudonyms for my [Humbert's] special benefit" (248). Many parts of the novel and indeed the entire work could be construed as a cryptogrammic paper chase, but it is also interesting, from the perspective of the interpretant, to see how Humbert, who fails to identify the author of the "derisive hints" (248) when inspecting the hotel registers until

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three years later when he is informed by Lolita (just before the murder), both misinterprets the "clues" and provides hints, wittingly or not, for connecting them with other parts of the text. To take but one example, in which somewhat divergent inferences are triggered in the reader and in the memoirist, Quilty registers at Chestnut Lodge under the name "Ted Hunter, Cane, NH" (251). Being the same lodge at which the couple is registered, Quilty, it seems, profits from certain liberties during Humbert's visit to the barbershop. It will further be noticed that this pseudonym is an anagram for the Enchanted Hunter (Quilty is the author of the play in which he is figuratively also the seventh hunter) as well as for the Hunted Enchanter (implying that Quilty is "hunted" by Diana/Lolita), while at the same time it is an oblique (and for Humbert offensive) reference to The Enchanted Hunters hotel. No less important is the fact that the anagram contains the name "Cane," for indeed Humbert, who claims after the kidnapping of Lolita to be "free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother" (247), will later play the role of "Abel." Of relatively unspecified semantic content, then, the proper names and place names that appear in the cryptogrammic paper chase are not overcoded in the same way that, say, the frame of the bereaved lover is, and for this reason it is through the conjecturing of creative abductions that these names are transformed into interpretants within a textually-determined web of antecedent and consequent signs, thus generating meanings that cannot be inferred in a heuristic reading. We have seen, starting with Eco's suggestion that stories are the actualization by the (model) reader of pre-overcoded narrative functions or intertextual frames, how actualization takes place through the configuration of multiple frames into a complex of relationships and that at the same time this configuration results from higher-order abductions in the processing of intertextual traces. Another important factor in textual overcoding which contributes to narrative configuration is genre. In the case of Lolita, numerous features and details tend to connect the work with the fairy tale, and in fact some of the principal characteristics of this genre have already been encountered in the present commentary: metamorphosis, to the extent that both character and text are multiform, perpetually transformed by the inflections of allusive detail; deception, not only in the actions of the characters, but also through the introduction of the frame of the triangle and the false leads to which Humbert and the reader are prey; enchantment, by dint

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of various "bewitchments" and evocations of enchanted or enchanting characters, Lolita herself being a "nymphet." This is not to say, however, that these elements add up to make Lolita a fairy tale, for even though Nabokov was known to say that "Great novels are above all great fairy tales"62, it is clear that, not unlike the Carrollian Wonderland, it ventures into areas that stretch the specificities of this genre to the extreme, if not beyond. In the traditional fairy tale, metamorphosis, deception and enchantment act as themes, but in light of the present analysis, it would be inaccurate to conclude that Lolita is a story based on these themes63. To the extent that the novel can be regarded as a fairy tale, it elicits the overcoded abductions associated with "Once upon a time...". But how can these generic expectations be reconciled with the overcoding provided by the intertextual frames of the bereaved lover, the Doppelgänger and the triangle (none of which qualify as fairy tales), not to speak of the innumerable intertextual traces the work is bristling with? Here lies the crux of the problem of narrative configuration, for the attempt to reconcile these various incommensurate elements with one another takes place, as we have seen, through abductive reasoning, rather than through the postulating of a unifying structure. This is true in particular of the processing of intertextual traces, which allows us to determine the relevance of the Bürger and the Goethe poems, for instance, or of the abductions making it possible to establish links between the principal intertextual frames. This being the case, metamorphosis, deception and enchantment no longer function as they do in fairy tales but, thanks to the rearticulation resulting from the intersections peculiar to Lolita, are displaced toward meanings which are not the direct expression of pre-determined themes or of the "story" told by the novel, but lie between their preovercoded acceptances and their intertextually-detennined actualizations. Narrative configurations underscore the necessary circulation between theory and textual detail, however untidy, bewildering or vexing this exchange might sometimes be. Rather than an abstractive or reductive set of procedures for determining the core structure of a given 62

As reported by Appel in Nabokov (1991: 347). It is thus with a mixture of approbation and serious reservation that I read: "The simplicity of Lolita's 'story', such at it is—'plot', in the conventional sense, may be paraphrased in three sentences—and the themes of deception, enchantment, and metamorphosis are akin to the fairy tale" (Appel in ibid.: 346).

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narrative, much less the formal characteristics of all narratives or of particular classes of narratives, narrative configurations result from the interpretive acts elicited by the textual signs of individual narratives—the abductive reasoning which allows both for actualizing intertextual frames and for determining the relevance and functions of intertextual traces. It is of course perilous to draw broad conclusions from a partial examination of a single work64, but nonetheless it does seem that narrative configurations, whose theorization stems from a reflection on textual semiotics and intertextuality, offers a compelling set of criteria for a narratological analysis capable of bridging the gap between theory and the workings of individual narratives. Indeed, where the broad spectrum of narratological theories that have been flourishing in recent years ranges from the older "text-centered" to the newer "context-oriented" approaches and from an "overtheorized" to an "undertheorized" pole65, it would appear that narrative configurations share some of the concerns focused on by either end of these two axes. And while narrative configurations do not constitute a theory of interpretation, they do come within the purview of a "heuristic" conception of narratology for the discovery and description of textual features relevant for the understanding of narratives66. This article began with a presentation of Mink's distinction between three ways that knowledge is transformed into understanding: the theoretical or hypothetico-deductive mode of science; the categorial mode of systematic philosophy; the configurational mode of storytelling. Narrative configurations, as our analysis of Lolita has shown, come about through the abductive processing of intertextual frames and traces and thus open the way to an intertextual narratology.

64 65

Even though this has been a recurrent practice since the time of Aristotle's Poetics. See Nünning (2003). See Kindt/Muller (2003) for a discussion of narratology as a "heuristic tool."

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References Adam, Jean-Michel 1999 Le Recit. 2nd edition (1st edition 1984). Que sais-je? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Amossy, Ruth 1980 Lesjeux de allusion litteraire dans Un beau tenebreux de Julien Gracq. Langages (Neuchätel: La Baconniere). Appel, Alfred, Jr. 1967a "Loliia: The Springboard of Parody," in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8: 205-241. 1967b "Nabokov's Puppet Show," in New Republic, CLV1 (Jan. 14): 27-30; (Jan. 21): 25-32. 1968 "The Art of Nabokov's Artifice," in Denver Quarterly III: 25-37. Beaugrande, Robert de / Dressler, Wolfgang 1981. Introduction to Text Linguistics. Longman Linguistics Library (London and New York: Longman). Ben-Porat, Ziva 1976 "The Poetics of Literary Allusion," in PTL. A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1: 105-128. Bremond, Claude 1966 "La logique des possibles narratifs," in Communications 8: 60-76. Bürger, Gottfried August 1987 [1773] "Lenore," in Sämtliche Werke, edited by Günter and Hiltrud Häntzschel, 178-182 (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hauser). Couturier, Maurice 1993 Nabokov, ou la tyrannic de l'auteur. Coll. Poetique (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Culler, Jonathan 1975 Structuralist Poetics. Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP). Eco, Umberto 1976 A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana UP). 1979 The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana UP). 1983 "Horns, Hooves, Insteps: Some Hypotheses on Three Types of Abduction," in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, edited by Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, 198-220 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP). 1984 Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana UP). 1994 The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP). 1999 Kant and the Platypus. Essays on Language and Cognition, translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwan (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Inc.).

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Eco, Umberto / Sebeok, Thomas A. (eds.) 1983 The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP). Fludernik, Monika 1996 Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (London and New York: Routledge). Frost, Robert 1946 [1916] "The Road Not Taken," in The Poems of Robert Frost, With an Introductory Essay "The Constant Symbol" by the Author, 117 (New York: Random House). Genette, Gerard 1982 Palimpsestes. La litterature au second degre. Coll. Poetique (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 1984 [1782] "Der Erlkönig," in Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, edited by Erich Trunz, 14 vols., I: 154-155 (Munich: H. C. Beck). Hebel, Udo J. 1991 'Towards a Descriptive Poetics of Allusion," in Intertextuality, edited by Heinrich F. Plett. Research in Text Theory / Untersuchungen zur Texttheorie 15: 136-164 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Herman, David (ed.) 1999 Narrate logics: New perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series (Columbus: Ohio State UP). Herman, David 2002 Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Frontiers of Narrative (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska). Jahn, Manfred 1997 "Frames, Preferences, and Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology," in Poetics Today 18.4: 441-468. 1999 '"Speak, Friend, and Enter': Garden Paths, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Narratology," in Narr otologies: New perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series, 167-194 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska). Kindt, Tom F. / Müller, Hans-Harald 2003 "Narrative Theory and/or/as Theory of Interpretation," in What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, Narratologia 1: 205-209 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Kindt, Tom F. / Müller, Hans-Harald (eds.) 2003 What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Narratologia 1 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Kristeva, Julia 1969 Semeiotike. Recherches pour une semanalyse. Essais. Coll. 'Tel Quel" (Paris: Editions du Seuil).

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Merimee, Prosper 1987 [1845] "Carmen," in Nouvelles, edited with a commentary by Michel Crouzet, Lettres francaises, 2 vols., II: 157-207 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale). Meyer, Priscilla 1988 Find What the Sailor has Hidden. Validimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan UP). Mink, Louis O. 1968 "Philosophical Analysis and Historical Understanding," in The Review of Metaphysics XXX, 4: 667-698. Nabokov, Vladimir 1969 Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York: McGraw-Hill). 1973 [1962] Pale Fire (Harmondsworth: Penguin). 1991 [1955] The Annotated Lolita. Edited, with preface, introduction and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr., 2nd edition (1st edition 1970) (London: Penguin). Nunning, Ansgar 2003 "Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term," in What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, Narratologia 1: 239-275 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Perri, Carmela 1978 "On Alluding," in Poetics 7: 289-307. Pier, John 1992 "Between Text and Paratext: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire" in Style 26: 12-32. 2003 "On the Semiotic Parameters of Narrative: A Critique of Story and Discourse," in What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, Narratologia 1: 73-97 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Plett, Heinrich F. 1991 Inlertextuality. Research in Text Theory / Untersuchungen zur Texttheorie 15 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Poe, Edgar Allan 1978 Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press). Proffer, Carl R. 1968 Keys to Lolita (Bloomington and London: Indiana UP). Pushkin, Aleksandr 1975 Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse. Translated from the Russian, with a commentary by Vladimir Nabokov in 4 volumes. Revised edition ( 1 edition 1965). Bollingen Series LXXII (Princeton: Princeton UP). Ricoeur, Paul 1980 "Narrative Time," in Critical Inquiry 7: 169-190. 1983 Temps et recit. Vol. 1. L'ordre philosophique (Paris: Editions du Seuil).

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Riffaterre, Michael 1978 Semiotics of Poetry. Advances in Semiotics (Bloomington: Inidiana UP). 1980a "Syllepsis," in Critical Inquiry 6: 625-638. 1980b "La trace de l'intertexte," in La Pensee 215: 4-18. 1985 'The Interpretant in Literary Semiotics," in The American Journal of Semiotics 3: 41-55. Ryan, Marie-Laure 1991 Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP). Schank, Roger C. / Abelson, Robert P. 1977 Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding. An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). Schmid, Wolf 1983 "Sinnpotentiale der diegetischen Allusion. Aleksandr Puskins Posthalternovelle und ihre Prätexte," in Dialog der Texte. Hamburger Kolloquium zur Inlertextalität, edited by Wolf Schmid and Wolf-Dieter Stempel. Special issue of Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 11: 140-187. Schmid, Wolf/ Stempel, Wolf-Dieter (eds.) 1983 Dialog der Texte. Hamburger Kolloquium zur Intertextalität. Special issue of Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 11. Swift, Jonathan 1984 [1713] "Cadenus and Vanessa," in Jonathan Swift, edited by Angus Ross and David Wooley, The Oxford Authors (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP). Tammi, Pekka 1985 Problems of Nabokov's Poetics. A Narratological Analysis. Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian Toimituksia Annales Academiae Scientiarium Fennias, Series B, 231 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia). 1999 Russian Subtexts in Nabokov's Fiction. Fours Essays. Tempere Studies in Literature and Textuality (Tempere: Tempere UP). Toolan, Michael 2001 Narrative. A critical linguistic introduction, 2nd edition ( 1 edition 1988). The Interface Series (London and New York: Routledge).

Name Index Abbott, H. Porter 205 Adam, Jean-Michel 244 Alter, Robert 17 Appel, Alfred, Jr. 254,256,263 Assmann, Aleida 48 Austen, Jane 83, 107, 117, 120—124, 126, 128, 134, 159, 165, 166, 167, 169, 171, 173, 176 Austin, John L. 89 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 193, 200,204 Bal, Mieke 60, 85, 87, 117—120, 135 Balzac, Honore de 95 Banfield, Ann 89 Barthes, Roland 126, 129 Bataille, Georges 117, 120, 126—129, 130, 131, 133, 134—135 Behn, Aphra 17,28,41 Bell, Allan 198 Bell, Roger 194 Bennett, Arnold 96 Benveniste, Emile 63—64, 66, 76, 88, 104 Berryman, John 152 Blumer, Herbert 204—205 Bonheim, Helmut 14—15,18 Booth, Wayne C. 12, 17, 22, 27, 28, 41, 43, 59—60, 62, 116, 199, 206 Bouveresse, Jacques 90 Boyd, William 17 Bremond, Claude 164, 240 Bronte, Charlotte 31 Brooks, Peter 146, 161,

Browning, Robert 150 Bruner, Jerome 143,146,152,216 Bürger, Gottfried August 258, 260—61,263 Byatt, Antonia S. 30—31, 33 Carlisle, Janice 43 Carreter, Fernando Lazaro 63 Cervantes, Miguel de 197,203 Chambers, Ross 116 Chatman, Seymour 17—18, 139, 149 Chaucer, Geoffrey 12 Cohn, Dorrit98—99, 101, 121, 128, 165 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 150—51 Collins, Wilkie 26,32,33 Congreve, William 12, 28 Coseriu, Eugenio 60,63, 64 Coulthard, Malcolm 217—218 Courtes, Joseph 145 Couturier, Maurice 203, 240, 256 Crane, Stephen 71 Culioli, Antoine 88, 92, 110 Culler, Jonathan 143, 208,223 Cutter, Martha J. 14 Defoe, Daniel 17, 25, 41, 102, 175, 176,199 Deloney, Thomas 40, 50 Dickens, Charles 13, 25, 67, 94, 97, 103,159 Disraeli, Benjamin 180 Dolezel, Lubomir 160, 162—164, 173, 174, 180 Donne, John 150—151 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 83, 95

270

Name Index

Eco, Umberto 162, 178, 240—41, 243—246,248—249, 251—252,253,262 Eliot, George 22, 34, 43—45, 167, 168,169,183 Eliot, T.S. 151 Fauconnier, Gilles 163,169,178 Faulkner, William 73, 75, 84, 100, 108 Fielding, Henry 12, 22—24, 27, 28, 31—32, 41, 44—45, 95, 165, 168, 169, 182 Flaubert, Gustave 83,95,102,109 Fludernik, Monika 11, 13, 14, 17—18, 19, 30, 33, 50, 73, 75, 76, 139,149, 152, 165, 192, 215, 247 Fowles, John 23, 26, 55 Frayn, Michael 13 Frost, Robert 243, 249 Füger, Wilhelm 24,41,43, 48 Genette, Gerard 5, 14, 15, 18, 24, 65, 84—87, 89, 90, 104, 105, 108, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124, 125, 139, 149, 151, 165, 166, 167,171,250,254 Gibson, Andrew 13,116 Gibson, Walker 193, 206 Gide, Andre 195 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 258, 261, 263 Goetsch, Paul 34 Goffman, Erving 197, 198, 199, 200,201,210 Graves, Robert 151 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 145 Griem, Julika 34 Hamburger, Kate 65—66

Hammett, Dashiell 85, 102, 109 Hardy, Thomas 69,153 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 74 Heibig, Jörg 172 Hemingway, Ernest 85,106 Hempfer, Klaus W. 19 Herbert, George 150, 153 Herman, David 13, 115, 116, 143,244 Hoey, Michael 192, 195, 217—219, 221, 223, 230, 233 Huhn, Peter 5, 6, 11, 49, 140, 147,151 Hutcheon, Linda 15,17

106,

139, 204, 231, 142,

Iser, Wolfgang 71 Ishiguro, Kazuo 17, 27, 33,47 Jahn, Manfred 59,149,165,244 James, Henry 46, 76—79, 83—84, 98,100,106,109,182 Johnson, B. S. 23, 29, 46, 47, 55, 181—183 Kearns, Michael 13 Keats, John 152, 201 Keen, Suzanne 172 Kindt, Tom 147—148, 264 Kristeva, Julia 245 Lanser, Susan Sniader 20, 32, 123 Larkin, Philip 150,152 Lawrence, D.H. 75 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 163 Lewis, David 162, 174—175, 169, 177 Lintvelt, Jaap 85—86,119 Löffler, Arno 16 London, Jack 202,210,211

Name Index

Lotman, Jury M. 146 Lowell, Robert 152 Lubbock, Percy 46, 84,98 Mandler, Jean 217 Margolin, Uri 175,162 Martinez, Matias 13, 139 Marvell, Andrew 143,150,151 McGrath, Patrick 32,40 Merimee, Prosper 97, 103, 240, 260 Meyer, Priscilla 258—260 Mill, John Stuart 200—201 Mink, Louis O. 241—243, 251, 260, 264 Müller, Hans-Harald 264 Müller-Zettelmann, Eva 140—41, 142 Munro, Alice 217, 218, 220, 223, 224,228,229,231—232,234 Murdoch, Iris 107 Nabokov, Vladimir 23, 207, 239, 240, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260,261,263 Netzel, Rebecca 64 Newton, Adam Zachary 116 Norris, Frank 68—69 Nünning, Ansgar 5, 7, 11, 13—14, 17, 19, 26, 39, 42—46, 59, 60, 61, 140, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 264, 265 Nünning, Vera 17,29,46,140 Oates, Joyce Carol 75 Pavel, Thomas 162,164 Phelan, James 116,161 Pier, John 6, 59, 104, 215, 234, 246, 254 Plato 194, 197 Poe, Edgar Allan 39, 67—68, 240, 256— 260

271

Poser, Michael von 28 Pouillon, Jean 84 Prince, Gerald 13—15, 17—19, 39-41,45,162,172,173,216 Proffer, Carl R. 254,259,260 Proust, Marcel 96,97, 98, 107 Pushkin, Aleksandr 258, 260 Rabatel, Alain 85 Rabinowitz, Peter J. 116 Rastier, Francois 145 Reading, Peter 151 Rescher, Nicholas 162, 163, 169, 174—175 Richardson, Brian 76,193, 207 Richardson, Samuel 23, 33, 171, 173,197, 199 Ricceur, Paul 206, 242—243, 251 Riffaterre, Michael 172, 173, 249—253 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 115, 139, 149 Rivara, Rene 5,90,95,97,101,104 Roberts, Keith 172,182 Ryan, Marie-Laure 160, 162, 164, 172,242 Salinger, J.D. 13,33 Sarraute, Nathalie 84,100 Scheffel, Michael 13, 14, 16, 19, 21, 139 Schindel, Robert 71 Schmid, Wolf 150,240 Schönen, Jörg 11,49,140 Searle,JohnR.65,89,91 Self, Will 31 Sell, Roger 207 Semino, Elena 143 Shakespeare, William 69,151,153 Shea, William R. 177

272

Name Index

Shelley, Percy Bysshe 150,151, 200 Shen, Dan 73 Sidney, Sir Philip 170,172 Simonin, Jenny 104 Sinclair, John 217 Smith, Stevie 26,27, 31, 33,46 Sommer, Roy 39 Stanzel, Franz K. 23, 65, 70, 72, 73, 164,172 Sternberg, Meir 216, 217 Sterne, Laurence 24, 26, 27, 28, 31, 41,42,43,44 Stevenson, Robert Louis 107 Suleiman, Susan Rubin 117, 120, 126,127,133 Swift, Jonathan 28, 256, 257 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 143,151 Thackeray, William Makepeace 22, 34,45,70,71,95 Thoreau, Henry David 65 Thorpe, Adam 12, 13, 25, 26, 33, 200 Todorov, Tzvetan 84, 85,160,164 Tomashevsky, Boris 139

Toolan, Michael J. 5, 6, 60, 87, 108, 221,234,247 Trollope, Anthony 22, 24, 29, 32, 34,44,45,173 Turner, Mark 139, 143, 163, 169, 178 Vitoux, Pierre 85 Wall, Kathleen 61 Warhol, Robyn R. 34, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 134 Weber, Steven 183 Weinrich, Harald 63 Wolf, Werner 11, 16, 17, 19, 21, 25, 29,30,42,43,44,46, 139, 141, 142,146 Woolf, Virginia 84,100,106,108 Wordsworth, William 143, 151, 152,153 Wyndham, John 177,179,180,182 Yeats, William Butler 141, 144, 145,146,148, 150, 152