When Voices Clash: A Study in Literary Pragmatics 9783110801415, 9783110158205

Citation preview

When Voices Clash

1749

1999

ST

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 115

Editor Werner Winter

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

When Voices Clash A Study in Literary Pragmatics

by Jacob L. Mey

W DE

G

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1999

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. Richard Dadd 'The Fairy-Feller's Masterstroke' reproduced by permission of Täte Gallery / Art Resource, N. Y.

® 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 Mey, Jacob. When voices clash : a study in literary pragmatics / by Jacob L. Mey. p. cm. - (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs ; 115) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 3-11-015820-5 (cloth : alk. paper). 1. Discourse analysis, Literary. I. Title. II. Series. P302.5.M49 1998 808'.001'4-dc21 98-41964 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication-Data Mey, Jacob L.: When voices clash : a study in literary pragmatics / by Jacob L. Mey. — Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1999 (Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 115) ISBN 3-11-015820-5

© Copyright 1998 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co., D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted 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. Printing: Werner Hildebrand, Berlin. Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Richard Dadd The Fairy-Feller 's Masterstroke (1855-64)

Preface

During a lifetime spent with books and many other sorts of literary productions, some persistent questions have been sticking in my reader's craw like so many annoying chicken bones. The questions had to do with the credibility of the narrative: How could characters perform the way they did, how could they say what they said, how could the action happen the way we were told—all these questions kept coming up, right from the time when as a very young child, having finished my first real book, Tolstoy's short story Ivan the Idiot (in a Dutch translation called Iwan de Dwaas), \ asked myself how anybody could be so stupid as to say and do the things poor Ivan said and did. He just didn't make sense to one like me, admittedly not too competent a reader. (Today, I would say that this young reader had a 'voice problem'). Much later, I found that other people had been thinking along the same lines. In the mid-eighties, when I had been running the Journal of Pragmatics for a number of years, I crossed paths with a young Japanese graduate student, who thrust a manuscript into my hands on the way out of a guest lecture I had given at Osaka University. The piece was a critique of a book I had only heard of through occasional references, but which I now felt I had a kind of moral duty to read. The work reviewed was Ann Banfield's Unspeakable Sentences; the review was subsequently published in the Journal (Vol.13, 1989), and the young gentleman's name was Haruhiko Yamaguchi. For the latter, this was the flying start on a very promising career; for me, it was an introduction into the field of literary pragmatics, where I found many of the questions that had bothered me, raised, sometimes even with answers provided. However, the idea itself of "(un-)speakability' (at least the way it is defined as the core theme of Banfield's book) was not exactly my cup of tea. As it turned out, Banfield's orientation was towards a pattern of thinking that I had abandoned several decades earlier, and this made it difficult for me to accept and underwrite her strictures and conclusions. In contrast, the notion of 'speakability' as such seemed a fruitful one and the questions it implicitly threw out were the same that I had been

vi

Preface

bothered by as a child: How can a character believably say the things he or she is made to say in literary prose, also called 'fiction'? Speakability to me became a matter of credibility: the speaking voice should be assigned to a character who had the wherewithal to underwrite the explicit and implicit assumptions that were contained in the words spoken. And, since the question was raised in a medium of literary production, 'speakability' had soon to be complemented by its logical counterpart, 'readability'. In all of this, I was looking for an Ariadne's thread to guide me in and out of the labyrinth of words, and in the course of my deliberations I decided that the key question in this matter had to be ofthat which enables people to speak: the human and literary voice. Hence 1 started my writing based on the premise that each character had a voice assigned to him or her, and that this voice was the expression of a particular set of properties that were exclusive to this character and which could not with impunity be transferred to other characters, other voices. At this point of my writing, I had not yet read Bakhtin. That happened in a later phase, when I was already writing parts of what now is chapter 7, which deals with the problem of'clashing voices'. One wintry day in 1994, when I was having lunch with a friend at the University of Chicago, I happened to mention some of the things that were bothering me, among others the problem of what I had come to identify as the issue of a character's 'voice'. The friend (whose name was Paul Friedrich) asked me if 1 was familiar with Bakhtin's work. I said 1 knew of him, but that I had never read any of his stuff. So Paul took me down to the caves below the Union Theological Seminary (where they have the best academic bookstore in the Chicago area), and steered me straight to a shelf that was full of works by Bakhtin. 'There', he said, "you can begin to read'. And so I did, and found almost everything that Bakhtin had written to be of the greatest importance for my own thought. Hence, if this book owes its intellectual and readerly flavor to anyone (besides its author), it must be Bakhtin. My background in literary studies was rather patchy and dilettante-ish, as perhaps is natural for one coming from a related, and not always congenial, field: linguistics. So it was another stroke of fortune that a year later, when visiting the Amsterdam offices of North Holland Publishing Company (the publishers of the Journal of Pragmatics), \ happened upon the 1993 book by Monika Fludernik, the title of which The fiction of language and the languages of fiction just was too tantalizing for me

Preface

vii

to withstand the temptation of asking for it. I promised to do a review of the book, but unfortunately (unbeknownst to me) somebody else (Roger Fowler) had already been there; the result was that I never actually got to write the review. However, reading the book as if I were to do a review, was a useful experience, and I was greatly inspired (not to say 'edified') by the knowledge and insights that are the hallmark of Fludernik's work. She pointed me in all the directions I had not been able to orient myself towards, and following her leads, I set out to read up on the background of Banfield's and others' work, mainly the problems surrounding the notion of'speakability' itself. In the present book, I define speakability in terms that are quite different from Banfield's. 1 place my emphasis on the human conditions that make a sentence speakable, not just the linguistic constraints that are prevalent (although these of course are not neglected). I am concerned with the speakability of utterances, not sentences, and I place the question straight in the reader context of a work's credibility, defined as the ways the characters and voices match up, both with each other and with the conditions of existence that the author has laid down in the narrative universe of his/her creation. Since my initial encounter with 'speakability' had been one of frustration over not being able to countenance what was spoken by a book's characters, I developed the idea of the clashing voice, that is to say, a voice that somehow falls out of its character role and makes a mess of its replies, like a clumsy actor on stage. Again, I had to find out that somebody else had been there before me; this was when 1 came across Michael Toolan's work on narrative, in which he actually mentions the term (as a synonym to 'dialogism"; 1994: 129), but without going into further detail. All this explains a bit about the book's title and history. As to its content, and the particular approach that I follow, I never intended to write a textbook (even though I have used several drafts as class text in my graduate classes at Odense University and the Universities of Frankfurt and Campinas). The textbook-oriented reader may find the coverage in my book somewhat eclectic: certain important themes (such as irony and parody) are not treated in full, not because they are not of interest to my major concern, viz., to find out why and in what ways voices may clash, but simply because I felt I could make my point without covering all the possible subjects related to 'speakability' in a wider sense. More or less the same holds for my choice of quoted works. I did not

viii

Preface

intend to make a full survey of the world's literature in connection with my research. Rather, my encounters with literature were pretty pleasuredriven, being based on the books that came into my reading perimeter during the writing of the present work. I was not picky in my selection of material, all was grist to my mill, and if I found some good examples in Tolstoy or Mary Wesley, I didn't bother to check out James Joyce or Paul Auster (although I'm sure I could have found representative examples there as well). This makes the book a rather personal, not to say idiosyncratic kind of study, but I trust that in our day and age, this is no longer a serious drawback when marketing one's product. Being situated in the border area between two humanistic disciplines, the book will necessarily fall between two chairs, and as a result, some of the material presented in the first three chapters (Part I) may appear trivial either to linguists or to literary scholars. I felt it was necessary to include some of the more elementary stuff because of the need to underpin my reasoning in a way that would be acceptable to both camps. A further purpose was to strengthen the later arguments about 'voice' in Part II by initially identifying phenomena such as tense and reference, and assign them a role with respect to the further development of the main themes to be dealt with in the later chapters: speakability and voice management (and mis-management). These latter notions are subsequently developed in the long chapter 7, one of whose main sections (7.2) bears the book's title: 'When voices clash'. In Part I I I , I then deepen the perspectives I have sketched out and gather them into a general, dialogic framework. It is here that I owe most to Bakhtin and this thinking. The final Part IV gathers the various loose threads and weaves them into a 'text', both in the figurative and the literal sense of the word, trying to place the speakable text in a speaking society, where the 'letters' come alive in their proper, assigned contexts, and are delivered to their proper 'addressees'. Along with the main concerns of my work: to try and define the concept of "voice clash' and redefine the notion of speakability in a 'userfriendly' way, another contribution I hope to have made is to assign the reader and the text itself their proper 'voices', as a metaphoric expression of the indispensable aspects of co- and re-creativity that readers need to practice both as a privilege and an obligation. In between, I think I may have furnished some analyses of literary texts that could be of use to readers (both professional and amateurs) wishing to entertain themselves with some of my favorite authors. Here, I have paid much

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ix

attention to Tolstoy and Woolf among the classics, while from the younger crowd I have been particularly fascinated by Byatt and Mclnerney, as well as by the inimitable Mary Wesley. 1 hope to have contributed in small ways to make people better understand, and also love, these authors by providing some insight into their techniques of handling speakability and its problems. I want to end this Preface by thanking those who have been sources of encouragement, inspiration, critique, and support along the way. My biggest thanks go to my wife Inger, who started her Bakhtin period more or less at the same time that I did, but independently, and in another location than mine. Our interchanges and visits, via the email and by plane, between Evanston and Austin, were extremely fruitful, as have been our subsequent mutual cross-disciplinary influences and contacts. Another big thanks goes to Ines Signorini, who brought me to Campinas for three months, and had me lecture on items that I really wasn't prepared to teach on, and in this way gently pressured me into reading up on a number of essential texts and authors (Foucault, Bourdieu, Ranciere, to name a few). Both Ines and my other office- and corridor-mates, among them Denise Bertoli Braga and Kanavillil Rajagopalan, had me constantly over the barrel by their relentless, pertinent questioning and critical remarks, not all of which have made it into the present text. Two of my refereeing critics deserve to be mentioned here as well: they did their work ex officio, but in the process they were able to contribute greatly to the book's present shape by carefully going through my text and pointing out innumerable inconsistencies and factual errors in the process. Mike Reynolds, Sheffield, and Werner Winter, Kiel, 1 want to publicly thank you both for what is essentially an increasingly rare, unpaid, top quality service to the community of scholars (often rendered anonymously); if anything can make me believe in the vitality of our 'Republic of Scholars', it is this kind of work by people like you. My friend and long-time collaborator Mary Talbot (some time of Odense, now at Southampton) was always generous in sharing her newest work with me; her influence is visible throughout the book. Also, a thanks to my old-time commilito Hartmut Haberland, of Roskilde, whose musings on 'smooth transitons' between voices provoked a first draft of the very first pages 1 wrote, in what is now section 7.1.4. Finally, I want to thank the many people who have been exposed to

Preface parts of the book and have contributed by giving me useful feedback. First of all, this applies to my (post-) graduate seminars at Odense and Campinas, in which I tested out the work as a textbook; among the attending students, I want to single aut Lene Vejlbaek Johansen, who read the entire manuscript and suggested many useful changes. Other audiences thankfully remembererd were found at the universities of Minneapolis, East Lansing, Zaragoza, Hong Kong, München, Augsburg, Giessen, Aarhus, Thessaloniki, Frankfurt, Brasilia, Jerusalem, and places in between. I want to specially mention the colleagues and friends attending a recent intertextuality workshop in Tel Aviv, who had to sit through a chapter of the book; one of them, Gerard Steen of Tilburg University, was able to clarify an important misunderstanding in chapter 7, for which I want to express a heartfelt thanks. My own former university, Odense, gave me time off for writing, and my second academic home, Northwestern, graciously accepted me as a resident grandfather for much of the time it took to write the book—altogether a matter of nearly two years. I fondly remember Charlotte Lee and Marsh Brill, as well as their two cats (each), who opened their Evanston homes for me and gave me space in which to thrive and work. So now I say: I Liber! May your voice be heard, and not clash! Even if some of your sentences perhaps should be less than speakable, they certainly are not without a speaker, and hopefully somewhat readable as well. Austin, Texas 28 February 1998

Jacob L. Mey

Contents

Preface

v

Introduction 1

Literary pragmatics: Why and what? 1.1. "I wanted those ships' 1.2. The context as a problem 1.3. 'Don't drive like my brother (or my sister)' 1.4. Literary pragmatics: A definition

3 3 6 9 12

Part One: The sentence 2 The state 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 2.5. 2.5.1. 2.5.2. 2.5.3. 3

of the question What is the question? Banfield's 'unspeakable sentences' Ehrlich: Sentence and narrator Fludernik: A synthesis? 'Lector in fabula' The web of reading Context and cotext Contextual coercion: 'Setting up' the reader

The language question 3.1. Reference and deixis 3.1.1. Reference 3.1.2. Deixis 3.1.3. Personal pronouns 3.2. Anaphora 3.3. Tense and point of view 3.3.1. 'Anchored'vs.'non-anchored'time 3.3.2. Time, tense, and perspective 3.3.2.1. 'Viewing time' 3.3.2.2. True preterits

15 15 18 20 25 28 29 34 37 41 41 41 43 45 49 54 54 58 59 66

xii

Contents

3.3.3. 3.3.3.1. 3.3.3.2. 3.3.4.

Tense shift reconsidered The sequence of tenses 'Backshifting' and free indirect discourse Other languages, other ways

68 69 72 82

Part Two: Voice 4

Speakability and voice 4.1. What is'speakability'? 4.2. Speakable and unspeakable sentences 4.2.1. Sentence and utterance 4.2.2. To be or not to be ... a linguist? Banfield's dilemma 4.2.3. Cart and horse: Ehrlich's impasse 4.2.4. A linguistic voice? Fludernik's problem 4.3. FID and grammar 4.3.1. The saving grace of rules: 'Grammaire et Riff at err e' 4.3.2. Speakability, subject, and voice 4.3.3. Dual voice

89 89 92 92 95 96 99 103 103

5

Voice and voice management 5.1. Vocality and voice 5.2. Voice management 5.3. How are voices managed? 5.4. The'optics'ofFID 5.4.1. Voice management and vocality 5.4.2. Narrator's deceit 5.4.3. 'Voicing'and speakability 5.4.4. The object of description 5.5. Speakability and readability

112 112 112 121 126 127 128 132 136 143

6

Voice in focus 6.1. Perspective and voice 6.1.1. Focalization and localization 6.1.2. Focality and vocality 6.2. Multivocality 6.2.1. Language, meaning, and truth 6.2.2. Orchestration and dialogizing 6.2.3. Problems of person: T, 'eye', and skaz

145 145 145 148 153 154 157 161

108 108

Contents

7

Voice in transition 7. When voices change 7. .1. 'Whose voice...?' 7. .2. Announcing a voice shift 7. .3. 'Changing voices in mid-stream' 7. .4. A smooth transition? 7.2. When voices clash 7.2.1. Voice trashing: 'What are you doing to my character?' 7.2.1.1. A time warp 7.2.1.2. A trashy view 7.2.2. Voice mashing: 'Who's that character speaking?' 7.2.3. Voice crashing: 'What's that character doing in my story?' 7.2.3.1. The apostrophizing author 7.2.3.2. Authors'untimely antics 7.3. Unvoicing

xiii

172 172 172 175 180 186 189 190 190 198 202 211 211 217 224

Part Three: Perspectives 8

9

The dialogic perspective 8.1. Understanding as dialogue 8.2. Ownership and responsibility 8.3. From dialogue to discourse: Cooperation and constraint 8.4. Does the reader have a voice? 8.4.1. 'Tell me a story' 8.4.2. Implied authors and readers 8.4.3. A dialogue with death 8.4.4. The not (yet) said 8.4.5. The elusions of allusions 8.4.6. Person and voice

233 233 236 239 241 241 243 247 249 252 256

The reader perspective 9.1. Reader and text 9.1.1. Reading across space and time 9.1.2. The reader: Competent or versatile? 9.2. The implied reader revisited 9.2.1. Text work

262 262 262 267 268 268

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Contents

9.2.2. 9.2.3. 9.2.4.

Communication and alienation The subversive reader Reader awareness

10 The pragmatic perspective 10.1. The power of words: A pragmatic affair 10.1.1. The ' superaddressee' 10.1.2. A'third'voice 10.2. Reported speech: Reality or fiction? 10.3. Voice power 10.3.1. 'Your speech betrays you' 10.3.2. The narrative context 10.3.3. Changing contexts, changing users 10.4. The pragmatic turn 10.4.1. Words and things 10.4.2. Acts in context 10.4.3. The pragmatics of reading 10.4.3.1. Coherence and understanding 10.4.3.2. Reading as a pragmatic act

270 272 274 281 282 283 286 288 291 291 295 297 300 300 302 305 305 308

Part Four: The text 11 The voice of the text . 1. The pragmatics of the letter 1.1. The tyranny of letters .1.2. On writing letters .1.3. The spirit of the other .2. The dialectics of voicing .2.1. Authorship and textual control .2.2. 'Pre-set' discourse .2.3. The'Uncle Charles principle' .3. Hegemony and autonomy: A responsible voice

317 317 319 322 326 328 329 330 334 338

12 The speakable text 12.1. Dialogue, text, and sex 12.2. Linguistics and metalinguistics 12.3. Dialogue and dialectics 12.3.1. Contact and context 12.3.2. Reflection and'anchoring'

350 350 354 359 359 361

Contents

12.3.3. 12.3.3.1. 12.3.3.2. 12.3.3.3. 12.3.4.

The dialectic text A'new'voice Reconsidering speakability Power and distance Conclusion: Text, voice, and society

xv

365 366 369 371 378

Notes

387

Primary literature

409

References

415

Name index

427

Subject index

433

Introduction

Chapter 1

Literary pragmatics: Why and what? 1.1. Ί wanted those ships' Suppose somebody fired the following question at you: 'What is meant by the phrase 'susceptibility to improved capability to commit funds', and how would one be able to use it?', my hint is that you would have some difficulty finding a suitable answer. Still, the words are all English; they can be found in any college dictionary of the English language, and even if they are somewhat technical, we all know about a person's 'susceptibility' to, say, hay fever or bouts of rage, we know what a home 'improvement' loan means, and we have no problem 'committing' ourselves (or sometimes others) to duties (or institutions, as the case may be). And I suppose I don't have to tell anybody what 'funds' are. So how come the phrase as such is so opaque? The problem is that it doesn't seem to connect with anything we normally go around thinking of. In a way, this reminds one of the times when one was sweating over one's Latin translation: even after all the words had been duly looked up in the dictionary, all the cases assigned their right constructions, and all the word order problems solved, the sentence still didn't make any sense. There always seemed to be a hidden layer of meaning that was veiled by an Opaqueness' having neither to do with the words, nor their order, nor their structural relations, but with the need for a deeper understanding of the text, one that would presuppose extensive reading in a particular author or period's writings. Even so, our case of Latin translation seems incomparably more complex than the simple English phrase I quoted above: here, we have two substantives (susceptibility, capability), connected with the rest of the phrase by some very simple devices, such as the catch-all preposition to, conveying some vague sense of 'purpose, aim' and tying the substantive to another substantive (susceptibility to improved capability) or to a verb (capability to commit), a regular adjectival construction (improved capability) as well as a simple verb-object unit (commit funds)—all constructions that we have been trained to handle actively and passively in our grammar classes in grade (or 'grammar') school. There are no

4

Literary pragmatics: Why and what?

special pitfalls, and besides, we are dealing with a phrase in a language that we all know and speak as our mother- or near-native tongue. So where's the problem? Let's take a step back and consider what I did when I tried to establish the fact that we did indeed know those five words: susceptibility, capability, improved, commit, ana funds. I wanted to prove to you that you really knew what these words stood for; and the way I did this was by providing some little phrase reminding you of one of their possible uses. In other words, 1 provided a context in which the words had meaning. It is the context that gives words their proper meaning; the problem with the above quoted phrase is that it doesn't have a context most of us immediately or easily identify with. If that context had been given, we probably would have understood what the words meant right away. That words and phrases only mean something when they are placed in their proper context is a piece of old wisdom, familiar to anybody who has ever consulted a dictionary of the pocket type. That this kind of dictionaries very quickly becomes useless is because they never tell you how to use the different senses of the word you are looking for. At best, such dictionaries are useful as reminders: as to the context, you have to supply it yourself, but to do that, you have to know more of the language than is contained in a pocket dictionary. But then again, if you do, then you don't need those small dictionaries any longer—truly a hopeless conundrum, and one which makes me wonder why people go on buying pocket dictionaries. But context is more than placing the words in their proper local environment, their 'collocation', as it is often called. In the above case, even if such a type of context is provided, we still may have a problem, this time of a more profound kind. It is the entire text and its message that are problematical in a deeper respect. To see this, we have to consider the circumstances under which the above quoted words were uttered. Let me give you their full textual environment, as it appeared in the reports of a hearing by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee in 1972. In March of 1972, the then Chairman of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee (which, among other things, keeps a check on military expenditures), Senator William Proxmire (D, Wis.), was looking into the way the Navy was spending money in order to reach federal budget targets during the current fiscal year in order to avoid cutbacks for the next fiscal year. Proxmire questioned a memorandum issued by

7 wanted (hose ships'

5

Admiral Elmo Zumwalt to the Chief of Naval Materiel Command, Admiral I.C. Kidd. The memo said: Fiscal year 1972 outlay targets promulgated by ... the President's budget for fiscal year 1973 are over $400 million above the target in the earlier fiscal year 1972 budget... The memo went on to sympathize with the difficulty of achieving these targets during the remaining months of fiscal year 1972, and concluded with the warning that any shortfall in fiscal year 1972 outlay target could be translated into program loss under fiscal year 1973 outlay ceiling. The memo ended with a categorized list of suggestions for speeding up the Navy's outflow of cash. Sen. Proxmire read this list of suggestions as if the Navy were telling its officers to get rid of current excess funds in order to prevent future cutbacks. Admiral Kidd, of course, denied that any such directives had been given; however, he could not deny the existence of special review teams that were sent to Naval installations all over the country to see how the cash flow was coming along. Kidd then explained, using his 'budgetese' English to create the expression quoted at the beginning of this chapter, how ... the teams go out to look over their books with them, their contracts with them, to see in what areas there is susceptibility to improved capability to commit funds; ... Commenting on this, The New Republic's Editorial from which my example is culled (166: 17; April 22, 1972, pp. 7-8; italics mine) concludes:

6

Literary pragmatics: Why and what?

That simply muddles the message of the Zumwalt memo, which is a request for Navy materiel officers to settle contracts faster than normal with such expediencies as 'paying unadjudicated change orders', returning funds withheld on contract disputes, buying more 'unpriced purchase orders' and using 'fast-pay procedures'. This sort of directive is routine, Admiral Kidd told the committee. But the Admiral also told the committee, quite frankly, and without seemingly to realize the enormity of his disclosure: "/ Wanted Those Ships" (actually the title of the Editorial from which this case is refereed-JM)—meaning that he was prepared to settle with the Avondale shipbuilding company and award them at least $25 million against their claim of $73.5 million on five as yet undelivered ships, because he wanted them, "having just come from a fleet where we needed them badly". Without understanding the Navy's (and in particular, Admiral Kidd's) motives, as identified by our embedding the entire text (and its context) in its circumstances of utterance, one cannot understand what was being said, and why it was said in that particular opaque manner of speaking, in 'Navy Budgetese' as one could call it. But once the words' cover is blown, once they are out into the open and reveal their meanings, two things happen. One, the actual intentions behind those words become clear (a suitable paraphrase would be: 'getting some naval hardware no matter what'); and two, the 'super-intention' behind it all is unmasked: viz., to make sure that neither the Congressional watchdogs nor the general public understand the ways in which the military are realizing their hidden agenda, even at the risk of using questionable budgeting practices.1

1.2. The context as a problem The problems that we discussed in the previous paragraph have been the subject of a great deal of discussion in linguistics and literary theory. Briefly, the question has been: how much do we have to know about the context of an utterance before we can say it makes sense to us? A traditional distinction is that between the cotext (that which imme-

The context as a problem

1

diately surrounds the word or utterance in question) and the larger context, which comprises not only the larger, verbal environment in which the utterance or word occurs, but also its wider surroundings, in particular the conditions under which the utterance or word was generated in the first place. (For more on this distinction, see below, chapter 2.5.2). In the latter case, it is not enough to ask for an explanation in terms of words or utterances alone; one has to consider the 'text behind the text' or the words that society, that 'invisible partner in all our conversations' (see Mey 1985), is mumbling behind our backs, while we seemingly are speaking like 'free linguistic agents', unobserved and unmonitored. 1 have elsewhere (1985, 1993a) argued against the commonly accepted image of the language user as an autonomous agent, a kind of linguistic Robinson Crusoe, always reinventing the language wheel (either out of necessity or for the pure pleasure of it). Such a naive assumption militates against the true character of language as a social institution, and thus contradicts the basic tenet of linguistic pragmatics, according to which no language, not even the smallest utterance or single word, can be understood in isolation. It is the user and his or her conditions of production and consumption of language that in the final analysis determine the way his or her words are to be understood. That, in essence, is the basic idea behind the introduction of the context as the truly decisive factor interpreting utterances; the linguistic notions of context and cotext derive from this larger, societally based concept. (For more details and references, see Mey 1993: 181ff). The question that will busy us in the present book is: In what respect can this view of language, viz. the pragmatic view, be useful and helpful towards a better understanding of what goes on in literary text production? What is the role of the user in the processes of composing and understanding text? (Notice that I didn't say 'writing and understanding text': I do not want to exclude oral forms of text production, even though I in the present work will mainly concentrate on written text, in particular on what is commonly called 'literature', hence "written literary texts'). At first blush, and put in this general form, this may seem a strange question: given that the producer of a literary work is the author, while the reader is the consumer, how can we speak of the role of the user in the processes of composing and understanding? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to limit the role of the user, the reader (or, as the case may be, the listener or the spectator), to more or less passively consuming

8

Literary pragmatics: Why and what?

the works that are set in front of him or her, trying to understand, to the best of his/her abilities, what was meant by the writer in composing this particular piece? It is here that the notion of 'context' becomes doubly important. Not only is it essential that we realize the conditions under which the literary work was produced; as users, we must make ourselves conscious of how much, in our understanding of the literary work, is due to the capabilities and limitations of understanding brought about by the societal conditions under which we live. Far from being a passive listener, the reader is an active, creative spirit who participates in the work of making the literary work come about. This 'making' is the true meaning of the word that underlies the original notion of text creation: the Greek poiein, 'to make', from which 'poetry' has its origin. (More on this process, and on the conditions that determine it, in chapter 12). But the impact of the conditions of use doesn't stop here. Given that the literary work, in some sense or other, is characterized by the fact that something is told by someone to someone, we will have to look into the conditions that govern this telling. What makes a tale, and how can we tell (in both senses of the word)? Or, in a slightly different formulation, Who makes the tale, and how can he or she tell it? Do we think of the tale teller as one who is in supreme control of the events and happenings narrated, who musters the total gallery of actors, making them do exactly as he or she pleases, ordering them to come on stage and deliver their speech in accordance with the author's instructions, like puppets on a string? And as far as the audience goes, are they mere passive bystanders, waiting for the teller of tales to deliver the goods of the story, piecemeal or in one stunning blow, as in the 'crazy' painting by Dadd, reproduced on the cover of my book?2 Or are they (as 1 would argue) active, indeed creative, readers and listeners, who by their presence and attention remind the writer of his/her connections with the real world? The present work takes its departure in the pragmatics of text production and consumption, not in the text's literary aspects as such, and even less in the philosophical or linguistic principles that are involved in text production and consumption. I do not purport to give a complete theory of literary pragmatics in the present book; as its subtitle: Ά Study in Literary Pragmatics indicates, I will emphasize those aspects in literary theory and practice that I consider as essentially and existentially related to a pragmatic view of speakable text, that is, of text as part of a world

The context as a problem

9

of users, while less emphasis will be placed on the literary or linguistic description of textual phenomena. The user-related aspects of the speakable (or readable) literary work, as it is produced and consumed, include such phenomena as 'text', "context' (and 'co-text'), 'reference', 'deixis', 'presupposition', "point of view', 'voice', 'dialogue', the 'competent' vs. the 'versatile reader', 'poiesis', 'power, 'hegemony', and others. Some of these terms have ancient and venerable status, though primarily in disciplines outside literary theory and/or linguistics proper (such as rhetoric or political science); nevertheless, all such phenomena deserve to be integrated in a pragmatic view of literary language inasmuch as they, too, represent some aspect of user activity.

1.3. 'Don't drive like my brother (or sister)' In the section that follows, 1 will try to clarify what I have said so far by giving an example. The particular case to be discussed comes from the realm of 'reference' and deixis' (for definitions and further discussion, see chapter 3.1; cf. Mey 1993: chapter 5). It is a well-known fact that certain pronouns have different meaning depending on who says them. As Karl B hler once remarked, "everybody can say "I"' (1934: 113)—but not everybody says it in the same way and with the same meaning. The T that is spoken refers to the person that speaks it: T is always predicated on a speaker, a person who can say Ί am Γ. The same is true of a whole array of pronominal and adverbial forms: 'my', 'mine', 'you', 'yours', and so on in the personal pronouns; 'here', 'there', 'now', 'then', and others among adverbials of time and place; and so on and so forth. These forms, often called 'deictics' (see Fludernik 1993: 43),3 follow their owner around, so to speak, like faithful dogs to heel. For a speaker who is not aware of this, deictics often present puzzlements of a vexing character, as in the familiar situation where a parent teases the 'developing' speaker by playing the 'mine-yours' game: The kid picks up a toy and comments: 'Mine'. The adult teaser confirms this utterance by repeating it, and saying 'Yes, it's mine'. The young language user becomes confused: the toy is his, so why should this stupid adult pretend it's hers? So he repeats his utterance, insisting that 'It's mine'—whereupon the adult can repeat her utterance, and so on until the play turns sour for the

10 Literary pragmatics: Why and what?

child, who picks up (or throws away) the toy and runs off, angry and crying, mad at the stupid adults who don't understand anything (cf. Bühler o.e.: 110). Adults can play at this game, too. A popular radio show on U.S. National Public Radio, NPR, features the brothers Magliozzi (Tom and Ray), who do 'car talk' (also the name of their weekly show, transmitted in the Chicago listening area every Saturday morning from 9 to 10). In the course of the show, they do their best (aside from figuring out the caller's problems) to debase each other, heckle their customers in a good-natured way, and spread the light of their considerable wisdom and car-knowledge across the nation. The show invariably ends with one of the brothers, Ray, saying: "Now remember, don't drive like my brother". To which Tom replies: "Don't drive like MY brother!" (Recently, in response to popular demand, the brothers have been inspired to add the words "or sister" to their lines). Now why is this so funny? Not only because these guys are rather funny, to the point that the demeaning duo can give their audience a rough time for an entire hour, and afterwards tell them: "So you did it again: you wasted a perfectly good hour of your time listening to this stupid program". The humorous effect of their last exchange hinges on the clever use of the deictic my. The first thing to notice about it is that my is a 'shifter': it shifts allegiance according to who is using it. Thus, when I say love my jeans', the jeans are another person's than when good old Donovan, the folk singer, uses the expression. Similarly, although everybody has (at least in the metaphorical sense) a brother, 'my brother' when mentioned by me, is a different person than 'my brother' referred to by somebody else. However, this is not quite the whole story yet. When the Fourth Commandment tells us: "Honour thy father and thy mother" (Ex. 20: 12; cf. Mk. 10: 19), it is clear that in this case, too, the commandment 'follows' the person(s) addressed; but the commandment being universally valid and addressing everybody who is willing to listen, the parents to be honored are everybody's. In the same vein, the Apostle admonishes the husbands among us: "Love your wives" (Eph. 5: 25), a precept which is a special instance of the universal commandment "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself (Rom. 13: 9). In all these cases (and they could be multiplied by an order of several magnitudes), the pronoun of address or possession 'shifts': husbands are supposed to love their own wives, not their neighbors', and each of us is responsible for the neighbor that is

'Don't drive like my brother (or sister)'

11

closest to us, contrary to the belief professed by the biblical Cain, viz., that his brother's well-being was none of his business. But notice how also in this case, the talk is of brothers as 'shifters': when God speaks to Cain, he refers to Abel as 'your brother': "Where is Abel, thy brother?"; but when Cain replies, he uses 'my': "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Gew. 4: 9-10). To come back to the 'Car Talk' game, the special effect of the phrase 'Don't drive like my brother1 depends on two conditions: one, the fact that the speakers are each other's brothers; this explains the 'pseudoshifting' that takes place. 'My' brother in the first part of the interchange is not the same as 'my' brother' in the second part. But, due to the symmetrical relationship of 'brotherhood' (Ί am my brother's brother, and he is his brother's brother'), the shift can be effectuated without changing the wording, superficially speaking (this is why I call it a 'pseudo-shift'). But we still haven't accounted for the pragmatic effects of this repartee. Why is the brothers' verbal exchange so funny, and how can we explain that everybody catches on to the joke right away? The answer to these questions is intimately connected with the 'Car Talk' program's circumstances of production: the whole preceding hour has been spent by these two brothers in banter and good-natured mutual abuse of one another: brother giving brother a rough time, all in friendliness and good sport. When the one brother says to the audience: 'Now, don't drive like my brother', the understanding is that one shouldn't drive like this man, who has been proven a certified clown. The other brother, however, turns this verbal rocket around and makes it explode in the face of its originator, who thus is shown to be an even greater idiot than his brother: 'Don't drive like MY brother, that guy who you've heard me poke fun at for a whole hour!' The incremental insult is carried by the strongly stressed possessive pronoun 'MY', conveying the impression that the only way to beat my stupid driving is to emulate my brother's even more stupid car behavior. What this interchange shows is that no utterance can be explained, let alone understood, on the basis of its linguistic components alone. What we need is an understanding of the 'historical' circumstances surrounding the utterance, whatever they're counted among the facts that make up world events, or among the more humble goings-on in a family surrounding. It is this matter of understanding-in-a-user-context that will occupy us in the present book.

12

Literary pragmatics: Why and what?

1.4. Literary pragmatics: A definition To conclude this chapter, let me suggest the following as a preliminary answer to a question that properly should be asked at this point: What is literary pragmatics? Literary pragmatics studies the kind of effects that authors, as text producers, set out to obtain, using the resources of language in their efforts to establish a 'working cooperation' with their audiences, the consumers of the texts. Such efforts rely on a precise understanding of the conditions of use of those resources, when directed at a particular audience among the consumers of the literary work. These pragmatic effects cannot rely on the linguistic elements involved alone, as we will see later on (see especially chapter 4.3.1, where I mention 'Riffaterre's Principle'); what is required beyond those linguistic techniques is a thorough exploitation of all the contextual factors determining the use of those linguistic items. In the remainder of this book, I will explore this use, going beyond (behind and inside) those contextual factors and trying to explain how they work, and what makes them pragmatically effective.

Part One The sentence

Chapter 2

The state of the question 2.1. What is the question? The problem of how to understand a text is as old as text itself. In ancient India, the phoneticians and grammarians (e.g. the school around Pänini) made sure the sacred texts were transmitted correctly in every respect, and interpreted in the correct fashion; in the Classical Greek tradition, one of Aristotle's major works is called Perl hermeneias, On interpretation'. Most of these efforts at text interpretation were conceived of rather narrowly as the task of establishing an author's meaning, that which was often thought of as an 'authoritative' interpretation of the text. However, authors have an unpleasant tendency to leave us with texts that need interpretation, but which they, usually for the best of reasons, are unable to interpret for us; and so a whole industry of text interpretation has sprung up. And here, it is not enough to point to the fact that the Master has said such and such himself: the autos epha of the Pythagoreans is only the thinnest disguise for what in reality spells: 4 We don't know'.4 But it was not until fairly recently that literary critics, linguists, philosophers, and other pundits have begun to interest themselves for the flip side of the text problem, so to speak: the role of the reader in text interpretation. The reason for this greater attention to the reader and his/her problems in reading and understanding texts is not just a matter of realia, as one used to call the factual knowledge about the circumstances in which the text was produced and under which the persons depicted in the text were living. Such an interest, too, is as ancient as our civilization; it is often included in what is commonly called 'philology', in the widest sense of the term. Here, I am thinking of problems of a different sort, having to do with authors' finding new ways of creating texts, ways that to an ever increasing degree appeal to the participation of the reader in making the text come to life. In dramatic production, the question of audience participation has always been a controversial issue. The Greeks introduced the use of masks and cothurns on the theatrical scene in order to enhance the reception of the dramatic text by the audience: such devices minimize the

16

The state of the question

impact of the intermediary, the actor, who is not to be seen as a simple god or human, but rather as an (often larger-than-life) 'person' (persona). In modern theories of text interpretation and current literary criticism, the question of reader participation has become a vexing problem: how do readers pick up the interpretive cues left in the text by the authors, how do they put them to use, and to what degree are they bound by such cues? (Compare the way modern playwrights, especially in the wake of Ibsen, have been trying to control the interpretive process of their works by inserting the most elaborate stage directions, in contrast to the laconic commands 'Enter and 'Exit/Exeunt' that were the rule for hundreds of years in Western play writing). The obvious answer to the question I raised above seems to be that authors, inasmuch they are the auctores of the text, manipulate their readers by certain textual techniques, often collectively designated as 'the art of writing'—something either possessed by innate ability or to be acquired by laborious toil, in accordance with the old adage poeta nascilur, orator fit: 'one is born a poet, but one develops into a rhetor'. A more modern view does not countenance this split, unilaterally delegating the work of texting to the 'prose' side of the fence, as opposed to the inspirational endeavors of the poets: in both domains, there is work to be done, and the work is with and within the text. The language of the text is the immediately available instrument that both poets and prose workers have at their disposal for making their mark with their audiences. Hence, from times immemorial, theoreticians of all persuasions have spared no efforts defining and refining the language instrument, and telling us how it can, or should be used, by the 'wordsmith'. Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian are just a few of the venerable names that we associate with the art of the rhetor; when the talk is of the art of poetry, the works of Horace (Ars poet ica) and Boileau (L 'art poetique) come to mind, among many others. Attention to language as a tool has also arisen in another quarter, that of the linguists. The science of language, as it is often called, has historically distinguished itself from, and contraposed itself against, the traditions embodied in the schools of rhetoric and poetry, the latter being considered 'arts', not 'science' (ars, non scientia, as the Scholastic formula goes). By contrast, linguistics as a science finds its exemplary model in the 19th century physicalist tradition of investigating, hypothesizing, and testing one's hypotheses by repeatable experiments. Such a tradition is

What is the question?

17

hard to combine with the 'humanistic' approach to letters as embodied in the tradition of the literary sciences, and the result has been almost total disregard, not to say disrespect, on the part of those on the one side of the fence for those on the other. Thus, for the longest time, linguistics and literary studies simply didn't speak to one another. The few exceptions were always cases of 'personal unions', one researcher uniting in his or her own work both linguistic and literary aspects of language. The classical case is that of Roman Jakobson, who, at different times of his long life, devoted himself to literary as well as purely linguistic matters, and made his reputation in both. But even he was not able to effectively build a bridge between the two disciplines: adherents to either linguistic or literary method remained wary of Jakobson's exploits in the other realm, implying that a good linguist could not also be a consummate literary scholar, and vice versa, quite contrary to Jakobson's own view, according to which 'nothing in the way of language was alien to him' (from the famous "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics'; Sebeok I960: 377).5 Traditionally, the 'scientific' study of language use has been both message-oriented and sentence-based. In Saussure's famous picture of the two 'talking heads' (reproduced in his Cours; Saussure 1916: 32), one sees 'messages' flow from the outputting organs of one head into the receiving ones of the other; messages are ideally embodied in sentences, other utterances either being derivative or defective in relation to these (cf. Chomsky's famous definition, in one of his early works, of a language as the 'set of all and only grammatically correct sentences'; 1965:23). Jakobson, too, in the work quoted above, bases himself on this model (basically a 'sender-receiver' one, inspired by the information-technological world view which has enjoyed so much prestige from the late 'forties to our own days). Linguistic devices were thought of as either facilitating or obstructing the communicative functions having to do with imparting the message. Problems of wider perspective, such as the structuring of a text, the connections between the various elements in the text, the use of poetic and strategic devices to obtain textual effects, and the whole complex of problems that we today associate with the term of 'discourse' were either not taken up at all, or relegated to the realm of the 'extra-linguistic' (read: unscientific). For the true-blue linguist, the excursions of a celebrity like Jakobson into the poetic and literary area were at best considered youthful (or old-age) aberrations, at

18

The state of the question

worst ignored as irrelevant avocations of an otherwise respected scientist of language. For such charges to be dismissed as unsubstantiated, it would be necessary to show that linguistics indeed matters in discussions of literary problems, and that vice versa, the problems raised by literary critics and theoreticians of literature have indeed a linguistic significance. Early efforts in this direction were made in the seventies by mainly literary scholars such as Seymour Chatman (1978); the first linguist who got seriously into the game was Ann Banfield, with her epoch-making book Unspeakable sentences (1982). Here, for the first time, we meet a person who professes to be a linguist, yet devotes much of her work to the analysis of what so far had been considered to be strictly literary problems (such as 'free indirect discourse'). But Banfield, who considers herself to be "a linguist working within the Chomskyan paradigm" (1982: xi), is not able to shed the 'sentence-only' straitjacket that linguists traditionally were obliged to don; the 'Chomskyan paradigm' that she refers to, being the so-called 'Extended Standard Version' of transformational grammar, with some embellishments and adornments, such as 'root transformations' ä la Emonds (1976). Thus, it comes as no surprise that Banfield establishes, as the goal for her undertaking, "to account for 'all and only the sentences of the language'—that task everywhere reiterated by Chomsky" (1982: x). What is more surprising is that Banfield, while working within this paradigm, is able to formulate questions and suggest answers that far exceed the narrow pattern of 'sentences all and only'. In the following section, I will review some of Banfield's claims and results, as an introduction to the general problematic of the present book: the use of the linguisticliterary device called 'voice'.

2.2. Banfield's 'unspeakable sentences' Banfield places herself solidly within the transformational paradigm, in particular as it was defined in the first wave of adjustments to the revised Chomskyan model (often referred to as 'post-Aspects', from the title of Chomsky's 1965 book, and including mainly the revisions by Bresnan and Emonds, especially the latter's notion of 'structure preserving transformations'; Emonds 1976). What Banfield proposes to do is to sever the necessary connection between language and communica-

Banfield's 'unspeakablesentences'

19

tion ("the hold of the communicative intent over language guaranteed by the dominance of speech over writing", 1982: 17); such a connection had been posited (implicitly or explicitly) by a number of workers both in linguistics and in related fields (she quotes Roland Barthes as an instance of the latter; Banfield 1982: 68). Since communication naturally requires a speaker, every sentence that is spoken, according to Banfield, must have somebody uttering it. But in the Chomskyan descriptive paradigm, there is no room for an explicit reference to any speaker (or to communication, for that matter). All that matters is the syntax and how to construct a sentence such that it could be uttered by a (preferably ideal) speaker. Banfield sets out to remedy this deficit not by abandoning the syntactic paradigm, but by expanding it. She basically says: If syntax doesn't allow me to make reference to the speaker inside its formalism, then the formalism has to be changed. She does this by suggesting to introduce a new initial symbol governing the Chomskyan derivation: rather than having S (or *S-barred') as the top node of her derivation, Banfield posits an initial symbol called E (for 'expression'), under which the properly syntactic node(s) and their derivations can be gathered. Any sentence attributed to a speaker has thus to be derived from an E-node, rather than from a simple S-node; most importantly, sentences that do not have an Ε-node as their initial symbol are strictly speaking 'speakerless', and hence 'unspeakable' (the latter term, with its more provocative connotations, occurs only in Banfield's title; in the book itself, she uses the more neutral 'speakerless'). This seemingly innocuous and neutral change of a symbolic notation in actual fact changes the entire character of Banfield's paradigm, from being a strictly syntactic-based to a more semantically (and even pragmatically: see her footnote 3 on p. 68) oriented way of thinking. Banfield, however, never makes this clear, but proceeds as if she were obeying (and had to obey) the strict syntactic rules laid out in her first chapter. Thus, a (spoken) text, for Banfield, is a concatenation of Enodes and their expansions: "A TEXT is a sequence of one or more appropriately related Es." (ibid.: 59; notice her spelling "TEXT", indicating that this notion is not coterminous with what one usually calls 'text': TEXT always presupposes a speaker); there must be only one top node E in any spoken sentence. To preserve the coherence of any such E's and their expansions, it is necessary for Banfield to posit the famous principle Ι Ε / I S ' (read: One

20

The state of the question

Ε-node, one speaker'). Since speaker, or point of view, is usually associated with what often is called a 'voice', the necessary conclusion is that every sentence (having a single top-node E) can only have one 'voice'; the problem of 'dual voicedness' (as raised by, among others, Bakhtin and his school; see below, chapters 10 through 12) is simply relegated to the domain of uninteresting, pseudo-scientific problems. Below, in chapter 4.2.2, I will come back to Banfield's 'unspeakable dilemma': 'To be—or not to be—a speaker' (or, for that matter, a linguist).

2.3. Ehrlich: Sentence and narrator Banfield, in a Nietzschean tour de force, declares the narrator to be dead, or at least invisible: the speaker's voice disappears in the reflection of the narrative, just like the reflection of a living human existence is not necessary for the process of reflection to take place. On the last page of her book (1982: 274), she quotes Lacan as having said: Every living creature having vanished, the camera can still record the reflection of the mountain in the lake, or that of the Cafe de Flore crumbling into dust in total solitude. (1978: 62). This observation, for all its logical and physical correctness (one is reminded of the age-old dispute on whether colors exist even when there are no observers present), the question is not so much whether Banfield is abstractly and logically correct, but whether she makes sense in the context of our subject, narration. Imagine that all living humans on the planet suddenly were extinguished by some strange physical occurrence (such as the one described by Guido Morselli in his novel Dissipatio Hfumani] G[eneris], 1985), there would of course still be libraries full of books, just as there still would be shops full of clothing and showrooms full of cars. For such a thought experiment to make any sense, one has to have at least one human experiencer (and, by extension, a potential narrator), who can 'make a difference'. In Morselli 's book, by the way, that is exactly what happens: the chief (and only) persona is a failed, vaguely suicidal writer who wakes up to a human-less world, and ends his life in desperation, piling a bunch of cars on top of each other in the market-

Ehrlich: Sentence and narrator

21

place of his town of residence—presumably with the intent to make at least some 'difference'. The narratorless narration, as manifested by the suppressed speaker whose authority is "silenced by language", as Banfield has it (ibid.), has created much controversy. In particular, the stringent syntactic criteria or 'commandments' ("Banfield's decalogue", in Sternberg's ironic characterization; 1991: 82) that she imposes in order to make her thesis stick have generated much opposition, even among people that generally take a positive view of Banfield's attempts at redefining narration. A related criticism has to do with the fact that Banfield's linguistic apparatus is rather dated and would have to be adjusted to obtain credibility in an actual discussion with representatives of current linguistic thinking. One of these is Susan Ehrlich, who in her book Point of View (1990) tries to set Banfield on a new footing, releasing some of her strictures, while keeping the linguistically interesting elements of her theory. One of the "commandments' that obviously has to go is Banfield's insistence on having the status of the narrative determined by the status of each sentence; a typically Chomskyan-linguistics inspired demand, which at present seems to have only historical interest. As Fludernik expresses it, in a particularly well-chosen phrase, Ehrlich can be said to "surreptitiously reintroduce the narrator" and his or her "superior perspective" (Fludernik 1993: 319) into Banfield's theory. In Ehrlich's own words: It is my contention that an analysis of point of view that goes beyond the level of the sentence is necessary for determining how linguistic form contributes to the Objective' as opposed to the 'subjective' interpretation of sentences. (1990: 24) Such a "going beyond the level of the sentence' is taken to comprise both the syntactic and the semantic aspects of 'point of view', not to mention its pragmatic implications. Ehrlich discusses the interpretation of a sentence in terms of attribution of 'point of view' in the light of analyses by Fillmore (1981) as well as by Dry in even earlier work (1975, 1977; cf. also 1981). I will take up one case as a typical instance of Ehrlich's reasoning (which comes fairly close to a pragmatic standpoint): the so-called "understood dative' (Ehrlich 1990: 18-19). Expressions such as "it is terrible', 'it is frightening', "it is easy', "it is

22

The state of the question

clear', and so on, are normally understood as being predicated on a speaking voice: the voice of the Ί' 6 for whom things are terrible, easy, clear, etc Actually, what I'm saying when I utter: 'It's terrible', is that something is experienced by me as being terrible; it's 'terrible for me' (hence the somewhat inappropriate expression 'understood dative', when there is no overt reference to an 'understanding' speaker in the form of what classical grammar calls a dativus ethicus). Conversely, when we encounter such an expression, even -without the pronominal "dative', we may assume that the utterance represents the thoughts of some speaker, and that it is spoken from his or her point of view. Here is an example from a contemporary novel: She [Trina]'d never liked Corinna Makepeace, and the fact that she was a retail broker did nothing to improve her opinion. Retail was chickenshit. Cold-calling rubes. You might as well sell Amway door to door. (Jay Mclnerney, Brightness Falls, New York: Vintage, 1993: 151.) Even if in the above example, there is no 'dative' to indicate the person who thinks that retail is 'chickenshit', it is clear that the voice is Trina's, just as the characterization of retail broker activities as 'cold calling rubes' (meaning: trying to sell bonds to stupid prospective clients over the telephone) is hers. However, the case may not be as simple as that. Consider the notorious case of 'It is evident'. Already early in life, I was warned by my physics teacher in High School that whenever an author would preface a claim or a conclusion by words such as the above, it was time to put one's linguistic alarm systems on maximum alert. When authors tell us that something is evident, clear, understood (often with an 'by now' added for greater persuasive force, as in 'It should by now be clear, understood, evident,...'), we, the readers, have every reason to believe that somebody is trying to pull the proverbial wool over our eyes. What may be evident for the author need not at all be evident for the reader; by using this kind of linguistic tricks, authors imply a false inclusivity, with the aim of bamboozling the innocent reader. The interpretive mechanisms underlying this use of 'faked inclusivity' are by no means bound up, however, with the presence or absence of strictly linguistic (syntactic or semantic) evidence. For this reason, a

Ehrlich: Sentence and narrator

23

correct determination of the point from which a particular utterance originates, and hence of its proper 'voice', transcends not only the syntactic, but also the semantic framework of interpretation. As Ehrlich correctly remarks, ... there is a large set of sentences in texts characterized by RST [represented speech or thought] whose interpretation as RST cannot be explained by semantic content and/or syntactic factors. (1990: 19)7 What is decisive in each of these cases is the total context in which the sentences are uttered. This is especially true, of course, for languages which lack the necessary syntactical devices that the standard interpretation of'voice origin' builds on. Consider the following data from Japanese: [A person hurriedly comes into the office one morning and greets a colleague, whose house was threatened by a fire in the neighborhood during the night]. Yuube-wa taihen-deshila-ne. Kinjo-de kaji-ga atta-ga soo-desu-ne. ('You must have had a terrible night. I hear there was a fire in your neighborhood.') (Mizutani & Mizutani 1986: 185) Taken by itself, the Japanese adjective laihen(-na) means 'terrible, difficult'; it is universally used (as in the ubiquitous taihen-desu) to impart the speakers understanding of the difficulty of a situation, the precarious status of a project, the impossibility of a request or proposal, and so on. Customarily, the speaker (if he is male) will accompany the words taihen-desu by an audible sucking-in of the breath through the teeth; the sound level of this 'hiss' (or 'swallowing one's saliva', as one of my Japanese friends picturesquely calls it)8 indicates the degree of real or perceived difficulty. In most cases, when one hears this expression used in connection with a request, a proposal, or the like, chances are that it will be better to look for other possibilities; pragmatically, its use towards one's interlocutor implicates as much as 'Sorry, you'll have to take your problems elsewhere—I can't help you'. However, speaking of

24

The state of the question

an 'understood dative' here makes little sense (if only because Japanese has no datives); even so, we still attribute the expression to the speaker, as a manifestation of what he (or she) experiences as a difficulty of a considerable degree. In the example at hand, the expression taihen-desu (here in the past tense: deshitd) is used not so much to convey a difficulty on the part of the speaker as to manifest an emotional sharing with the hearer in a tough situation. It is as if the speaker, adopting the hearer's viewpoint, makes the latters voice his own, identifying with the situation of extreme hardship that the hearer has been through (the house on the other side of the road was on fire, the hearer's family has not been able to sleep all night, they feared for their belongings, maybe even their lives, and so on). The speaker extends his expression of compassion to include an anticipated utterance of the addressee: taihen-deshita 'it was a terrible situation' (with the 'confirming', all-purpose particle -ne tacked on for good measure). Moreover, the speaker does this on the basis of the context in which the encounter takes place: in the company's office, the morning after the fire, with the addressee reporting for work late, in a presumably pretty disheveled and red-eyed state. Without this context and its pragmatic implications, the utterance taihen-deshita-ne would make no sense; similarly, authors writing 'It is by now clear', 'It should be evident', and so on, have a weak case as long as they cannot provide a context for their utterances that will be compelling also for their readership— something which, in most cases, they are unable to do. From the above, we may conclude, with Ehrlich, that Banfield's restrictions on the interpretive mechanisms of 'voice' are mostly unfounded; in particular, the obligatory sentence framework seems unwieldy, and unnecessarily limiting. As Fludernik remarks, in her review of Ehrlich's proposals (which encompass many more cases than the one discussed above, as we will see later on), ''Ehrlich indeed comes very close to acknowledging the interpretation^ nature of free indirect discourse" (1993: 170); in my terms, the "nature [of this] interpretation" [emphasis in the original] spe\\s pragmatic.

Fludernik: A synthesis?

25

2.4. Fludernik: A synthesis? In her 1993 book, The fictions of language and the languages of fiction, Monika Fludernik bases herself "squarely between a linguistic and a literary analysis of narrative prose" (1993: 12); however, in doing so, she acknowledges a "decisive linguistic emphasis" (ibid.'. 13).9 Fludernik's point of departure is supposed to be a "return to basics" (ibid.: 12). The question, however, is what kind of basics are truly 'basic', in the sense that they are foundational for a comprehensive approach to the mysteries of fictional language? Here, Fludernik encounters a double problem: on the linguistic side, she struggles to get out from under the Chomskyan paradigm (rather unsuccessfully, I think, yet without prejudice to her literary results); on the literary side, her main antagonist and critical point de repere is (as it was for Ehrlich) the work of Ann Banfield, especially the latter's 1982 book. The return to 'basics' thus acquires a double pregnancy: on the one hand, it symbolizes a returning to, while necessary distancing oneself from, one's scientific predecessors and spiritual parents: Father Chomsky and Mother Banfield. But by the same token, the 'basics' that Fludernik talks about acquire an unmotivated bias towards formalisms and descriptive devices a la Chomsky; also, Fludernik retains, despite all protestations to the contrary, a certain respect for the sentence as the "basic' unit of linguistic and literary description. Other kinds of'basics' (including other ways of looking at linguistic phenomena) don't stand much of a chance in this intellectual climate. Fludernik's disclaimer that she only wants to borrow some terminology from the Chomskyan tradition, "for designating some specific syntactic features" (ibid.: 13), is therefore somewhat disingenuous: first, one cannot just borrow some features from a theory, and use them ad libitum for one's own purposes; second, it isn't at all clear that the chief merits of Fludernik's work are in any way due to her practicing the linguistic 'basics' she invokes in the beginning of her book. The true value of Fludernik's analyses lies in her relentless pursuit of quite another kind of'basics', viz., the traditions of literary analysis. Here, she probes deeply, both intensionally (as to substance) and extensionally (with regard to tradition), as 1 will show below. As to the relationship between the 'purely' linguistic and the 'purely' literary, this is an interesting question, and it deserves to be discussed

26

The state of the question

here, however briefly. After all, "the fictions of language are produced by the language of fiction", to generalize a particularly felicitous expression of Fludernik's (cf. 1993: 392; paraphrase and emphasis mine). That is to say, whatever literary, and particularly narrative, effects we want to elicit in our texts ('the fiction of language') must be based on some linguistic reality ('the language of fiction'). But that does not necessarily connote the rigid, biconditional pattern of thinking along the lines of the Chomskyan 'all and only' (as adapted by Banfield to the case of literary production), by which the literary interpretation of a text should be exhaustively (and necessarily) describable in terms of linguistic artifacts. Such a thesis, as we will see below (section 2.5), flies in the face of the textual, and especially contextual, realities. Contrary to this puritanic view of literary interpretation, I would posit that, while linguistic elements function as important guidelines in the analysis of literary works, they are never the only ones. Neither is it the case that, in the absence of those linguistic guidelines, we are not able, or allowed, to rely on our literary interpretive techniques. For a linguist like Banfield, there is no discussion: every bit of literary interpretation has to be tested against the linguistic evidence in order to be valid and acceptable. Fludernik, however, takes a much more cautious stance, and points out, with Riffaterre, that linguistic elements are 'polyvalent': their interpretation is never a matter of linguistics alone, since one and the same element can fulfill a variety of functions, depending on the context. (Fludernik 1993: 349; see further below, chapter 4.3.1). More often than not, however, the application of this Riffaterreinspired 'principle of polyvalence' has to be reinforced by applying another principle, that of linguistic Over-determination': the forms of the language guide us towards an interpretation in multiple, often overlapping ways: case forms are repeated throughout the nominal phrase, number assignments are copied in the nouns and the verbs, and so on. Whereas some languages operate with intricate, often multi-layered systems of generic attribution (whether sex-related or not), other languages seem to do quite well without any such obligatory mention of the (natural or other gender) of its referents.10 Here is an example: In English, a woman who is expecting a baby may say "I'm expecting", or "I'm pregnant", or "I'm having a baby", and so on. It is understood, from what we know about the human way of procreation, that the person uttering these words is necessarily a female: there is strictly no need for the language to intervene and Over-determine' the gender of

Fludernik: A synthesis?

27

the speaker also linguistically. Now consider the following excerpt from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (Anna is talking to Vronskij, who, so far without success, has tried to make Anna tell him what is the matter with her: she looks distraught and evidently has her mind on something else): — Radi boga! —povtoril on, vzjav ee ruku. — Skazat"? — Da, da, da...

— Ja beremenna,— skazala ona ticho. ('— For heaven's sake! — he said again, and took her hand. — Shall I tell you? — Yes, yes, yes... — I'm expecting,— she said softly'). (L. N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina II: xxii, 1962: 210; my translation). Here, the linguistic 'pointer', the ending -a on the adjective beremenn-, indicates the presence of a female speaker, in the same way that a female Russian speaker would say Ja rada Ί am happy', compared to a Russian male saying Ja rad, both speakers expressing the same state of mind. Linguistic pointers of this kind are useful, when they are available; but they are not a necessary condition for a correct interpretation of the text. As a matter of fact, many languages do not have this distinction; English men and women may say they're 'happy', without having to worry about gender, as their French and Russian brothers and sisters must. And, to come back to the original example, we don't need language to tell us that only women can get pregnant." Linguistic structures point the way towards interpretation of the text, but their influence is not univocally decisive—cf. my mention of Riffaterre's notion of "polyvalence' earlier in this section.

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The state of the question

When the linguistic component of a text is not unconditionally required for the purposes of interpretation, it follows that it sometimes can be omitted without prejudice. This omission can be 'typologically' justified, that is, a particular type of language can choose not to offer a particular option (such as gender, number, case) in its morphological menu; or certain syntactic options may be absent from the palette of the choices available to the producers of text. But also on a case-to-case basis, the individual author can make choices in order to obtain special effects. The following sections will discuss how this text interpretation is not just a matter of seduction of the part of the author, but depends to a high degree on a consenting, cooperative reader.

2.5. 'Lector in fabula' Traditionally, the role of the reader in text processing is considered to be a passive one as far as text production goes; the appropriate activity of the reader is consumption. The reader consumes what the author produces, more or less like the guest in a restaurant eats what the cook or waiter puts before him. One could even argue that this is necessarily so because of the temporal and spatial distance between the producer and the consumer, and of the ensuing separation between the respective processes in which they are engaged: production and consumption of texts. One could, furthermore, point to the fact that we still consume texts whose authors have been dead for centuries, indeed millennia, and that texts are read in locations that are thousands of miles distant from the places where they were produced. And lest anybody should think that this is just an effect of the 'globalization' inherent in present-day culture, let him or her read an ancient author like Horace, who proudly registered the fact that he was read all over the known world, the wings of his poems having carried him to the outer reaches of Russia, the Don and the Black Sea, to Spain and the watershed of the Rhone (Od. II.xx); similarly, his colleague Martial uttered some wry comments on his verse being read in Britain without his purse registering any changes (Carm. XI.iii.5). So how, one could ask, does the reader of these works have any active influence on the process of poetic creation? Surely that process must be thought of as eminently and primarily the domain of

'Lector infabula'

29

the author's inventiveness and genius? To counter this point, I want to introduce the concept of the 'all-andever-present reader', the primordial lector infabula, to borrow the felicitous expression that Umberto Eco has chosen as the title of one of his major essays (Eco 1983). By this, I mean that the reader is 'present at the creation' of the poetic work: he or she is always already there, not only in the sense of being the ultimate addressee of the poet's endeavors (the 'reader' in the strict sense), but also as the future co-producer, as a participant in the creative activity, a co-creator of the work. Just as there are no gods without worshippers, the author is nothing except for and in his or her readers. And just as the worshippers, in a sense, create the divinity they adore (Boissier 1923: 78), the reader creates the writer; in a true sense of the words, 'the child is the father of the man' (Tennyson).12 In the following sections, I will examine the workings of this "activation', and discuss some of the linguistic processes that contribute to its efficacy.

2.5.1. The web of reading A discussion of the role of the reader has to start out from the question how authors introduce the reader into their texts, or in other words, how to place the lector infabula. Apart from the (nowadays experienced as somewhat antiquated) technique of 'apostrophe' (of the type "Gentle Reader"; for examples, see below, chapter 7.2.3.1),13 the reader can be said to be implicitly invoked in constructions of the kind called 'dativus affectivus' or 'ethicus' in the classical grammar books. An example from Classical Greek is a command utterance like me moi kataxe ton alabastron, lit/ don't break the bottle for me', i.e. 'don't break that bottle now' (where 'that' functions as a 'reminder deictic' to use Gundel's term; Gundel et al. 1993); compare Czech To je vom chytrak, lit. "That is for you a clever one' or 'He sure is a whiz kid' (modified after Prucha 1983: 28). (Cf. also the discussion above, in section 2.3, of the so-called 'understood datives'; see chapter 3.1 on 'reference' of this kind). Such appeals to the reader, asking him or her to enter the universe of the text, are also found in direct address constructions of the type "as you will understand', 'if you know what 1 mean', and so on, to which correspond indirect expressions like 'the reader will know', or 'from

30

The state of the question

this, one may see', etc. As expected, Classical Greek uses a dative construction for this 'indirect apostrophe' of the 'understood reader', as in Epidamnos esti polis en dexiai espleonti es ton lonion kolpon 'Epidamnos is a city lying on [your] right hand when [you] enter the Ionian Gulf (Thucydides, Hist. I.xxiv.l). Such constructions are somewhat akin to the implicit 'empathy', presupposed by Kuno for Japanese (cf. section 2.3, above, and see Ehrlich 1990: 5ff). Once the reader has been persuaded to enter the textual universe, it is all-important for the author to keep him or her there. Just as there is no more dismal failure for a rhetor than to talk his audience to sleep, so there is no worse sin for a writer than to lose his or her readers in the process of narration. Below, in chapter 3, I will discuss some of the linguistic devices that writers have at their disposal to keep their readers ensnared in their fictional web, to guide them along the carefully crafted 'garden paths' (Mey 1992), provided by morphology, syntax, and semantics. Here, I will look at the question from a more general point of view. This general point of view has two subordinate points: that of "reader creativity' and that of'reader obstinacy'. By the first, I understand a general condition on the readership, viz., the obligation to cooperate in the creation of the fictional universe. This aspect of "reader captivation' will be dealt with extensively in chapters 8 and 9: it is the most salient aspect of what may be called, with a catchall term, 'reader cooperation' or 'participation' (cf. Mey 1994a). The second sub-point concerns the ways in which readers, once trapped, have their ties into the story web continually reinforced. Apart from the specifics of this reinforcement, which will be dealt with in the next chapter, there seems to be a 'principle of inertia' at work that prevents readers from switching allegiance, once they have decided upon some particular syntactic or semantic interpretation of a stretch of text, or have determined some particular reference of lexical and other items that occur in the text. As an instance, compare the fact that readers generally tend to assign —ceteris parihus, of course—the same syntactic subject to consecutive sentences, abiding by a principle which some have called 'syntactic inertia', but which I would rather give the name of'syntactic' (or, as the case may be, 'semantic') 'perseverance'. Here is an example due to Broadbent (1973), discussed by Myung-Hee Kim: "The feedpipe lubricates the chain, and it should be adjusted to leave a gap of half an inch between itself and the sprocket." (Kim 1996: 7)

'Lector infabula'

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Technically speaking, the 'reference' (for this, see the next chapter) of 'it' could just as well be 'the feedpipe' as 'the chain'. However, a 'competent' reader (cf. chapter 9.1) will be expected to automatically assign the reference to the former noun ('the feedpipe'), even though the noun 'chain' is the candidate that is closest in the word string. The reader makes this assignment in order to preserve 'subject continuity': 'the feedpipe' functions as the subject in the original sentence, hence it is preserved as such in the conjoined sentence, even before the reference is univocally decided by the subsequent 'itself. In effect, this expectation is borne out by experiment: "Broadbent found that most people preferred 'the feedpipe' to 'the chain' as the antecedent of Mt'." (Kim ibid.}. In the above example, the vicinity of the 'continued subject' is undoubtedly a potential factor in reference assignment (which is why some people do prefer to take 'the chain' as the referent of 'it'). But vicinity by itself does not decide the outcome of the reference assignment; had that been the case, we would have expected 'the chain' to be everybody's preferred candidate in the above experiment. The question just how far removed a referring expression can be in a text before one is unable to 'automatically' assign its reference correctly, has occupied the minds of grammarians for many decades—without any definitive solution having been reached. As the above example shows, other factors than the immediately obvious "close vicinity' or 'last occurring potential candidate' must be brought into play. Consider the following episode, taken from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, in which Levin greets his friend Oblonskij visiting him in the countryside, while he hopes to extract some information about the latters sister-in-law Kitty, the girl who had jilted him a couple of months earlier. "Uznaju verno, vysla //, /'// kogda vyxodit zamuz^ —podumal on. ("'I'm going to know for sure whether she [Kitty] has married, or when she is going to" — he figured.') (L. N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina II: xiv, 1962: 179; my translation). The referent of on, v he\ is immediately recognizable (in accordance with Kim's remark, quoted above) as 'Levin', since the latter occurs as

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The state of the question

the subject of the previous sentence. In contrast, 'Kitty' has not figured in the book for quite some time (to be exact, for nearly two chapters and almost 10 pages). Still, we are not in doubt as to whom Levin is thinking of in this passage, in which he implicitly invokes a feminine subject of vysla, namely a not-expressed ona, 'she'. In cases where the assignment of the correct reference could cause problems, an author can resort to what sometimes has been called 'tracking' (a term originally proposed by Du Bois (1980)). By this I mean that the dubious referent is put back on the 'track' so to speak, by the insertion of a copy of the original referent noun in the text. Here is an example: Kiti ne zamuzem i hol 'na, hol 'na ot ljubvi k celoveku, kotoryj prenebreg eju. Eto oskorblenie kak bud'to padalo na nego. Vronskij prenebreg eju, a ona prenebregla im, Levinym. Sledovatel 'no, Vronskij imel pravo prezirat' Levina, i potomu by I ego vrag. ('Kitty not married and sick, love-sick for a man who had rejected her. This affront fell upon him, as it were. Vronskij had rejected her, and she had rejected him, Levin. Consequently, Vronskij had the right to despise Levin, and therefore was his enemy.') (L. N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina II: xvii, 1962: 190; my translation). Whereas the first occurrence of 'him' is easily understood as referring back to Levin (whose 'quoted' thoughts we are hearing, in a way,14 and who has been the subject of the preceding paragraph), the second 'him' could be misunderstood, and therefore the author takes no chances, but inserts a 'tracking' noun. 'Tracking' thus (re-)establishes the identity of a referent, and allows the reader to maintain that identity throughout the discourse; this is why Du Bois also (as does Kärkkäinen, in a recent (1995) article, where she refers to Du Bois' work) talks of 'discourse referential ity'. Notions such as "tracking" and the earlier mentioned 'subject continuity' may be subsumed under a more general pragmatic principle, sometimes formulated as: 'Don't rock the boat'. Once a particular interpretation of a text, or of one of its parts, has been introduced and established, we do everything we can to avoid having to revise our 'mind-set' and look for another interpretation. It is as if certain elements

'Lector in fab ula'

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of the context, once activated and brought to the fore at a certain point in the text, have a tendency of staying in view until further notice. Phenomena like these have been discussed by various authors under different names; one of the most evocative ones is that of (interpretive or cognitive) Obstination' (see Fludernik 1993: 285, 451). 15 By this is meant that readers tend to see things in wholes, to interpret events as belonging to, or occurring in, certain frames. The latter notion has turned out to be a fertile one in various environments, most recently in attempts at a computer simulation of the human mind. One should be careful, however, not to draw any premature conclusions about the mind's workings on the basis of this and other (admittedly fruitful) connections, and certainly not rush to position the human mind in any direct, one-to-one correspondence with some promising-looking computerized model (as Fludernik seems to imply in the closing chapter of her book; 1993: 457). The idea that certain contextual activations tend to perpetuate themselves either by 'structural (e.g. syntactic) inertia' or as a result of interpretive Obstinacy' is useful in explaining phenomena such as the above; one does not necessarily have to appeal to some computerized vision of human mental activity in order to derive its full benefits. Fludernik uses the terms 'interpretive' and 'cognitive' almost interchangeably when she talks about Obstination'; yet, it is useful to keep a certain distance also here. In the first case, we talk about the way in which the elements of the language take matters in their own hands, so to speak: the interpretation is wholly guided by phenomena such as the distribution of tense (Ehrlich 1990: 58ff.),16 or the 'continuation' of a noun in a particular function ('tracking', in Du Bois' terminology), or the interplay of referential expressions such as T (Jakobson's 'shifters'; see chapter 3.1 for more details). In the second case, we are dealing with the subtler phenomena of human consciousness, and the question to raise here is: What is the role of the human mind in all of this, and how do humans let themselves be guided by the obvious manifestations of textual coherence that can be found on the linguistic level? The straightforward answer (which of course does not take care of all the questions) is that the human reader identifies with the persons in the narrative, by placing him- or herself on a particular person's point of view, and staying there until told otherwise. As Fludernik expresses it, "Subjective elements have to be aligned to a consciousness, the most obvious candidates being the last con-

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The state of the question

sciousness introduced—on the basis of cognitive obstination" (1993: 451; my italics). The consciousness introduced here is a contextual consciousness: it is the current, activated context that makes the existence of those 'subjective elements' possible, and, by extension, also the reader's identification with a particular character's consciousness. Interpretive and cognitive persistence are not to be separated as two entirely different activities, however: the interpretation that the context offers us is transmitted to, and translated into, the level of cognitive awareness, where it resides until new, putatively interpretive elements surface in the narrative, forcing the reader to rethink his or her current alliance to the character and its point of view. The next sections will explore these contextual effects and conditions in some more detail.

2.5.2. Context and cotext To understand an utterance, one must know the circumstances surrounding its being uttered. In isolation, not many utterances make sense, or if they do seem to make sense, they may make the wrong sense. An utterance is not just an instantiation of an abstract linguistic system (like the 'sentence' in much of contemporary linguistic thinking); an utterance is always somebody's utterance, just like a point of view is always somebody's point of view. When we say: 'But you have to see this statement in its proper context', we actually mean two things: one, the context of what was said is important for its interpretation, and two, I want you to accept my definition of what this context is. The latter aspect, 'whose context' we are speaking in, will be considered further below, in chapter 10.3 (see also my 1985 book, whose very title, Whose language? alludes to this problem of 'defining the context'). For now, let's take some time to consider the former aspect. In a recent movie, A Little Twist of Fate (being a free adaptation of George Eliot's novel Silas Marner), the final courtroom scene, where the natural parents dispute the adoptive father's claim to the girl he considers to be his daughter, contains a scene in which the parents' lawyer cross-examines one of the adoptive father's friends. The theme of the interrogation is the influence the man has had on this waif, whom he had rescued and protected from neglect and abandonment ever since

'Lector infabula'

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she was two years old. In particular, he had taken care of her education, making sure she was reading 'good books'. The lawyer then elicits a statement from the witness as to the quality of the literature the girl had been reading. The witness answers that in her opinion, the girl was way beyond her age in reading; in fact, she preferred adult books to children's literature. Whereupon the counsel, pouncing on this opportunity, states to the court: "I want it put on record that the defendant made this young girl read adult books"—the latter sentence being said with an ostensive smirch. At this, the witness breaks down crying, and says: 'Oh, I always mess things up". Actually, however, the witness was not at fault here: what the lawyer did, was to quote her out of context, or rather, to invoke a new, damaging context for the expression 'adult books', in which it came to mean not 'books in advance of the girl's age', or 'literature fit for adults', but the more common ('context-free') understanding of'adult' as 'forbidden for children because of low moral level and general salacious nature', as in 'adult movies', 'adult comics, 'adult shows", and so on. In this example, the term 'context' should be understood as comprising the totality of the environment in which words are spoken; in this case, the total environment of the girl whose future was to be decided, including the man who had stood her in loco parentis, the institution of the court in which the deliberations about the girl's future are taking place, the speaker's motive for using this particular expression, and so on and so forth. The context, in this widest possible sense, represents the cultural, political, and economic conditions of the people whose actions and words we are trying to describe or capture in the smaller contexts of language, culture, painting, music, etc. and whose actions we are trying to understand and evaluate. Just as unfair as it would be to remove a person from the environment in which he or she has carved out a niche for living, for the sole purpose of gaping or describing, not to speak of putting them to work as cheap labor power (as the new colonial powers used to do with the first known 'savages' from the New World), just as inappropriate is it for a language user to take another person's words out of their natural environment and reproduce them out of their context, or even worse: place them in a context in which they don't belong, by origin and by intention, and let them work contrary to the best interests of their owner.

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The state of the question

Yet this is exactly what is happening in the film scene I just described. The smart lawyer seizes upon an isolated expression 'adult books', which—if set in the 'right' context—may evoke a number of adverse associations in connection with a minor's reading, and thus influence the decision of the court as regards who should be the future caretaker of this child. The maxim 'Children shouldn't read adult books' is valid only if 'adult' is placed in its proper context. But that context was not the one in which the original words were used by the witness: she merely wanted to stress the fact that the defendant's adopted daughter had received a good education, enabling her to read books ahead of her age, and thus obtain, one could say, a 'head start' on her later education. We see how the wider context is of the greatest importance in determining an utterance's true meaning—which is not necessarily the same as describing it correctly in grammatical terms. For the latter purpose, we need only a narrower context, often termed 'co-text', understood as the strictly language-defined environment in which the expression occurs that I want to interpret. For example, to give a grammatical description of the utterance: She is reading adult books, we need to draw upon the fact that the English verb to read is a transitive verb, taking a direct complement, in the present case books; that reading is a progressive form ofthat same verb (that not all verbs have a progressive form could perhaps be noted in a parenthesis); that adult is an adjective which, when combined with a substantive such as books, gives us a syntactic construct called a 'noun phrase', and so on and so forth. To write up an explanation in such terms, we need only the immediate cotext of the individual words and morphemes that occur in the sentence She is reading adult books. If, in addition to the above, we want to determine the meaning of the individual words and morphemes occurring in this sentence, we may appeal to lexical descriptions and paraphrases of the individual words, to phraseology, as dealt with elsewhere in the grammar and the lexicon, and to the sentences occurring immediately before and after the utterance in question. For example, in order to determine who she represents in this context, we have to appeal to earlier occurrences of the girl's name, so that we will know which pronouns 'refer to' this person, as we will see in more detail below, in chapter 3.1.1. Here, an appeal is made

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to a context of occurrence that limits itself to the strictly linguistic elements of our interaction; it is for this restricted context that the term cotext has been coined (See Mey 1993: 181 for more detail).

2.5.3. Contextual coercion: 'Setting up' the reader We have seen in the preceding how the context 'sets up' the language users. This applies, of course, also to the users in their capacity of text producers and consumers. In particular, the reader is 'set up' by the text; he or she is manipulated into a position from which there is no other way out than by obediently following the text's instructions, by letting the text move us along the primrose path of reading, 'tying our hands to the pages', as it were. And indeed, our language uses precisely this metaphorical wording for the phenomenon in question: we call a good story 'a captivating account', we talk about readers being 'spellbound' by a novel; and even the trite expression Ί was fascinated' recalls etymologically the notion of'binding', 'tying up'. 1 7 Usually, when linguists have to explain the meaning of the word 'context', they draw our attention to the fact that the Latin word textus means 'something woven', and hence 'a text'. A "context' is, by the same token, that which surrounds a particular piece of this 'fabric', its extension, so to speak, in place and time. To a certain extent, this explanation is correct; still, it would be wrong to conceive of the context as merely an extension of the text, without taking into account that the text, in order to be a true text, has to be read by a reader. The reader is an active part of the context; and the context presupposes a reader in order to be a true context. But what does a reader do in and with (or even to) the context? As we have seen above (chapter 1.2), the context is not just what has been said so far; the context is also 'that which is not yet spoken', to use an expression coined by Bakhtin (Morson & Emerson 1990: 137). On a very simple reading, this 'not yet spoken' could be taken to mean that more is coming up in the text; this something more is going to explain a current, momentary uncertainty about the text, an information we need to have in order to fully grasp the meaning of the words that are being 'spoken' here and now. But this 'future context', in the strict sense, has not been spoken yet; even so, insofar as it contains a clue to their interpretation, it preempts the actually spoken words and

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The state of the question

imposes an interpretation on them. Here is an example from Virginia Woolf. [Sitting at an outdoors cafe in Versailles, and speaking of her friend, the English painter Cruttendon, Jinny Carslake tells Jacob Flanders:] 'Sometimes I could kill myself. Sometimes he lies in bed all day long—just lies there ... I don't want you right at the table'; she waved her hands. Swollen iridescent pigeons were waddling at their feet. (Virginia Woolf, Jacob 's Room, Harvest ed. p. 129) In this piece of text, the expression: "I don't want you right at the table" is not directed at Jacob (whom Jinny has been talking to in this context so far), but at the pigeons that (as pigeons do) were trying to pick up a free lunch at the patrons' expense. But this we get to know only if we read on. When Jinny "wave[s] her hand", we know that this gesture does not address Jacob; the final clue is provided by her direct apostrophe of the miserable birds, telling them that they are unwanted guests at the table. We can extend the above observation so as to define the context as the reader's active dialoguing with the text—a dialogue in which participate, along with the present reader, all those who have read the text previously, as well as its future readership. As Morson & Emerson remark, "the potential of great works is realized by an act of creative understanding from an alien perspective reflecting experiences the author never knew..." (1990: 309). The context is a proactive notion, not just a condition of, or a reaction to, the current circumstances of writing or reading. As such, the context is also a creative factor in the production of text, that is, of further contexts. As Maynard perspicuously comments (1995: 31), the context is a "tool for the creation and manipulation of contexts, thereby creating new meanings." This aspect, combined with the creative action of the reader in consuming the text, explains how the context is operative in 'setting up' the reader even to the point of 'coercion', as 1 have called it in the title of this section. Readers do not just get their cues from the context; in taking those cues, they actively construct them into the pattern of what they are reading. Their expecta-

'Lector infabula'

39

tions construct the following context in a special way; in fact, they create that context along with the author. Only to the extent that a reader can be a 'piece of the action' can he or she gain full understanding of the text. A text that does not 'do' anything to us, that 'leaves us cold' is also a text that we never will be able to co-create, whose context we will not be able to join creatively and pro-actively. (1 will revert to this role of the reader more fully in chapter 9, below). This further means also that in order to read properly, we must read ahead (contrary to the age-old advice of not turning the page before we have properly perused the entire contents of what has been said so far). We all know that Anna is going to throw herself in front of the train at the end of Tolstoy's novel; but we don't read Anna Karenina to glean that piece of information. In fact, many novels start out with telling us how the story ends; what is important, is not the ending, but how the persons got there—and those persons include the reader. The reader is thus faced with a peculiar, dialectic situation: on the one hand, it is the text that contains the clue to the further development of the plot; on the other hand, the reader must put that text to work in order to let the plot happen. In this sense, any text is a theatrical text, a piece of comedy or drama: even the most static epic text must be reenacted dramatically in order to come to life as a text by fulfilling its 'contextual coercion'. It follows from the above that we cannot simply assign context a simple 'function' in the creation of the text, or even, as Jakobson does (in his famous communication model; 1960: 353f), consider context as one among the six communicative factors, regardless of its particular role in the production and consumption of text, in particular of a narrative. Context does not just fulfill certain communicative functions (such as "'denotative', 'cognitive', or simply REFERENTIAL", in Jakobson's terms; ibid.), neither does it only cover 'some' aspect of text production and consumption. The context, in its widest sense, simply is the ensemble of conditions under which text production and consumption (including the production and consumption of narratives) takes place. I will come back to this question in one of the final sections of my book (chapter 12.3.1).

Chapter 3

The language question 3.1. Reference and deixis 3.1.1. Reference Reference is the process by which we refer to something or somebody. If I want to tell a story about something that happened to me in a certain town, it is useful for me to be able to tell my readers or listeners where that town is and what it's like, what it is called, what kind of people live there, etc. etc. But if it is the case, as it often happens, that my audience is familiar with all this information and only needs to be reminded of where to look for it, what 1 do is to give them a reference. That is to say: I refer to this place by a name or by some other 're-minding' device, making it possible for my listeners or readers to access their minds, and retrieve exactly this item from their memories. When I have mentioned the name, people nod their heads and say or think: 'Now we know what you're talking about, just go on'. Reference is an age-old problem in philosophy and linguistics. Philosophers have been concerned with how to establish the correct reference to a person or an object; linguists have concentrated more on the ways one can establish reference. 1 am not going into any details here, but let me, as an example, refer to one of the most famous cases of reference cited in the literature: Sir Walter Scott, whom we can refer to, among other things, by his name: 'Sir Walter', or by any of the following attributes: 'the author of Ivanhoe', 'the author of the Waverley Novels', "the man to whom the church-like monument on Princes Street in Edinburgh is dedicated', 'the probably most popular English author in the first half of the 19th century', and so on and so forth. For the philosophers, such expressions are all equivalent: they denote (as the technical expression has it) the same Object' in the world, the writer Walter Scott. However, the effect on the reader, the consumer of the text in which the referring expression occurs, may vary widely, depending (among other things) on the techniques of a skillful writer who knows how to exploit the circumstances of reference. Here is an example from Virginia Woolf.

42

The language question

Mrs. Flanders had left her sewing on the table. There were the large reels of white cotton and her steel spectacles; her brown wool wound round an old postcard. ... There was a hurricane at sea. Archer [Jacob's brother, Mrs. Flanders' oldest boy] could not sleep. Mrs. Flanders stooped over him. 'Think of the fairies,' said Betty Flanders. 'Think of the lovely, lovely birds settling down on their nests. ... Now turn and shut your eyes,' she murmured, 'and shut your eyes.'

'What's all that water rushing in?' murmured Archer. 'It's only the bath water running away,' said Mrs. Flanders. (Jacob 's Room, Harvest ed., 1960, p. 12) In the above passage, we are not a moment in doubt that the person referred to as "Mrs. Flanders" is the same person as "Betty Flanders", Archer's mother: for this, we don't even have to know that her birth name actually is Elizabeth (as we are only told on p. 15 of the book). But what effect does the author obtain by referring to the same person in such different ways as the formal "Mrs. Flanders" and the intimate "Betty Flanders"? And, more importantly, whom is she doing this for? The answer is that Virginia Woolf is not only telling us a story: she is making us believe the story and especially, she wants us to get to know the characters she is creating. The Mrs. Flanders who is sewing may be the same, referentially speaking, as the Betty Flanders who is telling good-night stories; still, they aren't quite the same when looked at from a reader's point of view. They are in fact two personae, we could say: one is Mrs. Flanders who is serious, goes about her business as a mother and a housewife (as exemplified in her sewing), the other is the playful girl Betty Flanders, who maybe once told stories to her brothers and sisters, and now tells them to her own children. Referring to such a person by her first name conjures up exactly that image—the reader is in familiar territory, because we all have had these experiences, and associate them with the atmosphere of the family, where first names, not official titles, are used.

Reference and deixis

43

3.7.2. Deixis One can refer to people or things in many ways, as we have seen: by titles ('Mrs. Flanders'), by proper names ('Betty Flanders'), by descriptions ('Archer's, Jacob's mother'), and so on. A special way of referring is that called deixis: based on the Greek word for 'to show' (deiknumi Ί point to, I show'), 'deixis' means the process of'showing' by means of language, 'pointing' at objects and persons by means of special words called 'deictics', as I briefly mentioned above, in chapter 1. Deictics are pointers, words that function like pointing fingers: small wonder, then, that the canonical pointing finger is called the 'index', a term formed from the same root as 'deixis', hence: the 'pointer'. Characteristic pointers are certain pronouns and adverbs (of time and place). 'This' points to a person or object close by the speaker; 'that' to one farther away, or Over there' (the latter term itself a pointer, of the same kind as 'that'). 'This' and 'that', 'here' and 'there*, 'now' and 'then* are all pointers to phenomena that are respectively close by and farther away, 'proximal' and 'distal', to use more technical terms. All these expressions take their 'point of departure', place their fixed origin, in the speaker: 'this' is close to the speaker, 'that' is away from him or her (and therefore, closer to a potential addressee or bystander). For example, after having referred to, and spoken about, a certain person in various ways, such as "Mrs. Flanders", "Poor Betty Flanders", "Dear Betty", "She's very attractive still", and so on, an author can say: Elizabeth Flanders, of whom this and much more than this had been said and would be said, was of course, a widow in her prime. (Virginia Woolf, Jacob 's Room, Harvest ed., 1960, p. 15) Similarly, Mrs. Flanders' deceased husband Seabrooke, according to the inscription on his tombstone, was "a merchant of this city" (ibid. 16), that is to say, the city in which the graveyard is located where the reader reads the inscription. However, when we are referring to something away from us, we use a 'distal' pointer: 'That's an orchid leaf, Johnny'

or

44

The language question

'Who is that?' said Mrs. Flanders, shading her eyes. 'That old man in the road?' said Archer, looking below. (Jacob'sRoom, Harvested., 1960, p. 19-20) Similarly, expressions such as 'today' and 'tomorrow' indicate points of time that are some speaker's; even if I use them in connection with another person's 'today' or 'tomorrow', I do it from my own point of view, as in Today's Jacob's birthday. that is, the day that is referred to as speaker's today, is at the same time characterized by being somebody else's birthday. Similarly, in the following two lines from an old 'sixties song: I got a letter from LBJ He said this is your lucky day It's time to put your khaki trousers on • ··?

(Tom Paxton) it is Lyndon B. Johnson ("LBJ") who, in 'speaking' through "a letter", defines "this [day]" as the addressee's "lucky day"—and does 'this' ironically, because he's sending 'that' person to fight in Viet Nam, as we are told in the sequel. Generally, the proximal reference is close to the speaker, who is at the 'deictic center' of the discourse (cf. Bühler's notion of origo, the point where the coordinates of the deictic field intersect; 1934: 102), while the distal reference is to a point that is further removed, seen from the perspective of the speaker (and in some cases, closer to the addressee). As Fludernik remarks, "[d]eictic expressions (including their syntactic equivalents) — insofar as they are shifters or indicative of a SELF'S point of view — are intrinsically 'subjective' ... ; now and today most clearly refer to a SELF's referential deictic centre." (1993: 431) Speakers, as participants in a dialogue, can say 'today' and 'now' about the current day and time, about that which is happening right now, in

Reference and deixis

45

the context of the dialogue; to speak about more remote events, they use 'yesterday' and 'then'. If non-participants in the dialogue ('speaking out of context') want to refer to a particular place or time, including the current ones, a circumlocution has to be used: 'the day before', 'at that time'.' 8 The next section will concentrate on a particular kind of such 'subjective', deictic expressions, the so-called 'personal' pronouns.

3.1.3. Personal pronouns A particular class of referring expressions are the so-called personal pronouns: T, 'you', 'we' and their associated adjectival forms: 'my', 'your', Our. Usually, we distinguish these pronouns by their person (first, second) and number (singular, plural). Some languages distinguish further: the Semitic languages have a difference in gender (masculine vs. feminine) in the second person as well as in the third (e.g. Hebrew 'atta 'you' (masc. sg.) vs. 'att 'you' (fern, sg.); Brockelmann 1906: 98). As to number, Classical Greek (and other Older' IndoEuropean languages, such as Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Old Church Slavonic, etc.) make a distinction between a 'plural for two*, called the 'dual', and a 'normal' plural (e.g. Homer, Iliad XVI: 99: noin d'ekduimen olethron '[I pray] for both of us to escape death'). 19 In addition to the regular 'first' and 'second' person pronouns, most languages operate with a 'third person', often a deictic form belonging to a more general category of the so-called 'demonstratives' (as is the case in Latin and Classical Greek); as such, they do not participate in the game of person 'shifting'; their shifting is restricted to a local perspective, as we have seen in chapter 1.2. The personal pronouns serve first of all to determine a perspective, a point of view. For the first persons, it is the speaker's (or that of the speaking 'voice' in the narration), for the second person, it is that of the person who is spoken to, the 'addressee' (of the direct speech or of the current narrative 'voice'). The T in particular refers to the Origin' of the narrative coordinates, the center of the 'deictic field' (German Zeigfeld, an expression coined by Bühler 1934: 78ff., 149ff.): it is the pivot around which the narration turns, either implicitly or explicitly (the latter being the case in texts where the T is the main narrating instance).

46

The language question

Personal pronouns are important in establishing the current point of view, and as such are extremely sensitive to changes in that perspective. Here is an example: Dans le musee: Amidst the rocks and trees of Cezanne's Provence, this French girl was shaped like something dreamed by Brancusi, Russell thought, a piece that would be called Sex Moving Through Space, this notion provoking a nagging inner voice acquired via the Times op-ed and the higher media, progressive girlfriends and old New England schools: You shouldn 't entertain such thoughts, being ostensibly enlightened, liberal, and married besides. Treating women like objects, making low similes out of High Art. Two violations. Still, it happened. Even here in the Museum of Modern Art, where a not-so-very-jeuneßlle in blue jeans was standing in front of Cezanne's The Bather whispering to her friend in the artist's native tongue—even when we should be admiring Le Chateau Noir, usually one of our favorite paintings. (Jay Mclnerney, Brightness Falls, New York: Vintage, 1993. p. 61. (italics original)) One is struck by the occurrence of the personal pronouns we and our in the last sentence of the quoted excerpt, which happens to be the second paragraph of a new chapter, in which there has been no trace so far of any suitable plural referents. What these pronouns do is to remind the reader of the fact that Russell (whose married status is one of the reasons for his being "nagged") has his wife in tow, and thus is not free to indulge in fantasies like the above, let alone put his actions where his thoughts are. As we will see later on, in chapter 7.2, this technique in addition offers new voices a chance to jump into the dialogue, where they potentially 'clash' with those already present. In our case, the voice that is Russell's, suddenly "sprouts' another, accompanying voice: that of his 'progressive girlfriends' and their allies (ultimately including his wife), a voice implicitly contained in the narrative's "we" and "our", but also insidiously introduced through the explicit, 'nagging' voices earlier in the text. A language's personal pronouns are among the prime instances determining the 'point of view' of a narrative. The importance of this func-

Reference and deixis

47

tion has not always been realized in the same way by writers in different historic periods; in classical times, even autobiographies were often written in the third person (as in the case of Caesar's De hello gallico and his other war-related De bello-type lucubrations—presumably not all by Caesar himself); the first-person narrative is a relatively new invention. Second person narratives are rare; one famous case is Oriana Fallaci's biographical novel Un Uomo (Ά Man'), in which she throughout the book apostrophizes her murdered lover Alekos, whose story she tells, so to speak, by narrating his life to himself, through the words she unexpectedly puts—not in the biographee's, but in her own mouth. (See the excerpt in chapter 6.2.3). Deictic devices thus form a framework in which a narrative can be set; they provide, so to speak, the necessary backbone for our understanding of the narrative. Yet, it is important to realize, as Wortham has remarked (1996: 344), that deictics only provide a "minimal framework", either for direct interaction or for the purposes of narration. For the impact of deixis goes far beyond the mere securing of reference: the reference that is established in deixis is always a reference to somebody's personal point of view. For example, when people tell us that we must see things 'in perspective', what they (usually) mean is for us to see things in their perspective. The 'we' of a narrative expresses more than just a first person: it connotates the positive traits that we associate with 'people like us'. Similarly, 'you' or 'they' always implicitly carry the meaning: 'people such as you', or 'people like them'; such a reference (as opposed to the use of'we') is not usually too positively loaded. We may generalize this observation by postulating that in the normal case, the deictic center is the speaker's and that, therefore, the deictics that indicate closeness to this center (the 'proximal' ones) are the default option for any speaker. If a speaker chooses to refer to objects and persons by 'distal' deixis, there must be a reason for it: normally, such objects and persons are located further away from the deictic center. However, one can also look at this choice from another angle, that of 'markedness'. The proximal deictics, being the default, carry less markedness (in the sense originally defined by Trubetzkoy and later refined by Jakobson) than the distal ones; which again means that the latter, being 'marked", may be used to express some additional quality or flavor, one that is not inherent in the deictic function as such. These superimposed values can again be either positive or negative: which means that distal deictics may express a mental distancing that

48

The language question

can be paraphrased as 'admiration', 'awe', and so on, or, conversely, as 'derision', 'contempt', and the like. In English, we find both uses, cf.: Chicago, Chicago That wonderful town (Duke Ellington)

and That scumbag? I wouldn't go near him, if I were you. (From a conversation between two coeds, overheard at Norris Center Cafeteria, Northwestern University, Spring 1995). The same is seen to happen in Russian, where Vot ona idet 'There she goes' is said without any negative feelings, whereas Von ona idet 'There she goes' "is more appropriate if the speaker wishes to suggest a dislike of the indicated person". (Grenoble & Riley 1996: 19).20 However, the cake can be cut other ways as well: the closeness that is inherent in proximity to the speaker confers on the proximal deictics a quality of 'familiarity', 'intimacy', and so on; this is exemplarily the case for 'reminder deixis' (Gundel et al. 1993), as when Bessie Smith croons: Gimme that old time religion ..., or whenever a person starting out on a story, tries to capture the audience's attention by suggesting that the topic of his narration, being

Reference and deixis

49

'close to the speaker's heart', as it were, might interest the listeners, too: I was walking up to the store and there is this black guy trying to sell me Streetwise [the biweekly newspaper produced by the homeless in Chicago]... (remark overheard at the Institute for the Learning Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, III., Fall 1994), where the beginning of a hopefully interesting story is announced by the narrators use of the proximal deictic 'this'.

3.2. Anaphora While deixis first of all deals with reference to objects and persons outside the text, the function of anaphora is to keep the relationships between objects and persons within the text straight and unambiguous, within the limits of the narrative, and in accordance with its purpose. Here's an example: [Mrs. Ablomsky, a middle-class New York woman, is speaking about her deceased husband Leon:] 'He was a good husband, a good provider. He'd just bought me a new pair of gloves at Macy's, I'd put them on in the store. We used to go to Gimbels before it... before it closed. ... Leon was very upset when they closed Gimbels, he took it hard.' (Jay Mclnerney, Brightness Falls. New York: Vintage, 1993. p. 103-104.) In this extract, the first two occurrences of the anaphoric "he" refer to the earlier mentioned husband, who is the same as the person Mrs. Ablomsky non-anaphorically calls "Leon", using his first name; "them" anaphorizes the pair of gloves that "he" had just bought for her at Macy's ("'the store"). Another store, "Gimbels", is referred to anaphorically by "it" (twice), while, finally, another "it" refers anaphorically to the event described by the phrase "when they closed Gimbels".

50

The language question

In addition to fulfilling these pedestrian functions of bookkeeping, anaphora offers us a choice of making our language less tedious, less repetitive, and more attractive. To the extent that the use of anaphora is facultative, it represents an option, designed to help us improve our style. This is not to say that even in those optional cases, we can choose to use or neglect anaphora whenever we feel like it. If an anaphoric expression is expected, or normally would be possible, there must be a good reason to omit its use. Here is an example: [Washington Lee, a black publisher, is receiving a phone call from Donald Parker, a black activist and lawyer] He [Parker] and Washington had a nodding acquaintance and though he didn't make a point of saying so in front of his white friends, Washington occasionally admired the lawyers guerrilla media theatrics. (Jay Mclnerney, Brightness Falls. New York: Vintage, 1993. p. 104-105.) Notice, in the third line of the quote, the occurrence of the expression "Washington" rather than "he" (using 'forward anaphora', also called 'cataphora', since the anaphorizing expression comes before its referee)21. Similarly, when the text has "the lawyer's", using a nonanaphoric expression to refer back to Parker, one is tempted to ask: could the author not have used an anaphoric expression here, such as 'his'? Technically, the answer is: Yes, of course he could have; but there are at least two valid excuses for not choosing the technicalanaphoric ('pronominal') option: one is a certain abundance of 'he's' and 'his's' in this particular segment of text; the other is the desire to establish the caller's identity as a lawyer by giving him his professional title. Hence, in this case the lacking anaphors are fully justified from a narrative point of view and do not carry any stylistic stigma. In other cases, the anaphoric process is pre-empted without any immediately obvious reason, and the reader will want to know why the author did not employ normal procedure. The reader's expectations are thwarted, and (in literature as in life) there normally is a penalty on failed expectations, unless an explanation for the failure can be offered. Such an explanation is mostly implicit in the context, and will not

Anaphora

51

necessarily have to be formulated by the author; in fact, the 'versatile reader' (see below, chapter 9.1.2) will automatically adjust his or her expectations to the implicit choices being offered and infer, from the absence of anaphora, that some special effect has been intended by the author. For instance, in legal language one prefers to not anaphorize certain elements of the text that have (or are thought to have) a high legal relevance; cf. a common text to be found on the back of motel and hotel doors in the U.S.: The management shall not be responsible for any objects of value belonging to the guests unless said objects have been deposited in a safe deposit designated for such purpose by said management... (Campus Hotel, Holmes Student Center, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, III.) Here, the expressions "said objects'", "such purpose'", "said management" could all have been replaced by some anaphoric expression, e.g. 'these objects', 'that purpose', 'the management". The motivation for avoiding this kind of wording in legal texts and instead using the 'said's', 'suchV, and other horrors of 'legalese', may be the wish to preclude any possible doubt as to what or who is meant, even at the expense of normal, stylistic conventions. Similarly, in legal documents such as statements of terms and conditions governing the use of credit cards and in other financial agreements, one often encounters suspended anaphora, usually introduced by a parenthesis after the first occurrence of the non-anaphorized term. As examples, take the following texts, taken from various credit card agreement proposals commonly used in the U.S.: NationsBank of Austin, Texas (hereafter: 'the bank"), in issuing this credit card (hereafter: 'the card')... By signing this application, I authorize Citibank (South Dakota), N.A. ('you")... When anaphora is not observed in cases where it would have been possible, we start looking for an explanation. If somebody utters:

52

7776- language question

Peter was chasing Peter's dog rather than Peter was chasing his dog, I assume the reason for this is that the speaker wants to emphasize that the dog Peter was chasing in the first example was not Peter's own dog, but some other owner's. The anaphoric "his" of the second example leads us to believe that the dog we're talking about is Peter's, not somebody else's.22 In cases like these, we automatically take the point of view of the 'actor' in the narrated text (here: Peter) and proceed as if the rest of the world were organized around him. If we want to change this point of view, we need to use special techniques, such as omitting the use of an expected or possible anaphoric expression. Conversely, when we do indeed omit such an anaphora, the result may be an adjustment of the deictic center, with a concomitant change in point of view—which may not always have been intended, as in the following: All three types of agents are designed to help a user navigate through an information space and either find or construct response to fit the user 's needs. (Hammond et al. 1994: 332; italics mine) The normal, competent reader will stop up on encountering the second, italicized occurrence of 'the user'. My own first reaction was to look around in the text and see if perhaps some other 'users' were visible on the narrative horizon;23 only in the next instance, I realized that the authors of the quoted text must have chosen to drop the expected anaphoric reference consciously, either on the same grounds as do the legal texts quoted above (to avoid possible misunderstanding), or because they simply don't want to abide (for whatever reason) by the narrative conventions governing the use of pronouns in reference. (One possible reason could be the authors* desire to avoid 'sexist' pronouns like 'his' or 'her', and in this way guarantee the 'politically correct' style of the article). In either case, the result of such a choice may be confusing, to say the least, as one can see from the following text, found on the back cover of

Anaphora

53

the Norwegian translation of a story by a once popular, now almost forgotten, early twentieth-century British writer: En ung lord kjerer sig fast paa grund av sin hang til at opleve eventyr. Han finder del til slut bedst at forsvinde for altid. Som en sidste galskab faar han en ung mand som ligner ham til mot sin vilje at spille sin rolle, og denne falske lord oplever nu de mest spaendende ting, indtil han ender med at gifte sig med sin egen frue. ("A young nobleman gets into trouble because of his [3d sg. reflexive] penchant for adventure. In the end, he [3d sg. non-reflexive] chooses to disappear for ever. As a final prank, he [3d sg. nonreflexive] gets a young man who resembles him [3d sg. reflexive] to agree to—against his [3d sg. reflexive] wish—play his [3d sg. reflexive] role. This false lord now goes through the most exciting experiences until he [3d sg. non-reflexive] ends up marrying his [3d sg. reflexive] own wife/) (H. De Vere Stacpoole, Hvem er hvem? Kristiania [Oslo]: Aschehoug, 1919. [Norwegian translation of Stacpoole 1913; retranslation into English mine, italics and grammatical explanations added]. The 64,000 dollar question here is, of course: Whom did the false lord marry in the end: his 'own' wife (from 'real' life), or his wife from the 'pretend life' as His Lordship? Even though the Norwegian text has a tremendous advantage over its English counterpart in possessing a set of 'reflexive' third pronouns (sig (personal), sin (possessive), used to refer to the sentence's subject), and thus makes it easier to keep track of the different anaphoras, the answer to our question is a difficult one, even for a 'competent reader' (see chapter 9,1.2 below)—unless of course he or she can get hold of the entire (con-)text.

3.3. Tense and point of view In a certain sense, the problems involved in verbal temporal reference are similar to those we considered above, section 3.1, when we discussed deixis in nouns. In English, as in a number of other languages, most verb forms are marked temporally by a morphological device called

54

The language question

verbal tense: cf. English I order (present tense) compared to I ordered, I have ordered (past tense or preterit; perfect tense); Latin iubeo Ί order' (present) vs. iubebam, iussi (imperfect, perfect): Ί (have) ordered'; Russian ja velju Ί order' vs./a velel, velela Ί (masc./fem.) (have) ordered'.24 The problems that I am alluding to here are those of knowing what point of time this verbal time reference (or 'grammatical tense') is referring to (just as the problem with nominal temporal or spatial deictics was to know what point or object in time or space they were predicated on). The reason that this is important for us to know is, as before, that the different voices heard in the text often are recognizable, and can be distinguished from one another, only by reference to their temporal 'position', as this is indicated by the tense of the verbal expressions used. In the following, I will look at some of the techniques that are available for this 'positioning'.

3.3.1. Ά nchored' vs. 'non-anchored' time Referring to earlier work by Smith (e.g. 1980) and Reichenbach (1947), Ehrlich (1990: 60f.) raises the question of how time is managed in utterances, and establishes the following distinctions: First, we have the time at which the utterance is spoken: this is 'speech time* (ST). Then, there is the time at which the event that is spoken about, took place: this is called 'event time' (ET). And finally, we have the time that is indicated by the temporal indicators of the utterance (that is to say, both verbal tense morphemes and adverbs of time). This is the 'temporal perspective' mentioned by Smith (see footnote 23, above); it is called 'reference time' (RT). Consider the following example (due to Ehrlich 1990: 61) John had already completed his paper last week. Here, "the RT is last week, the ET is an unspecified time prior to last week, and the ST occurs after both RT and ET" (Ehrlich, ibid.). It is in the interplay between ST and RT (against the backdrop of ET) that we find the most interesting potential for 'voice management', as I call it (see chapter 5, below). As an illustration, consider the following

Tense and point of view

55

case. On Sunday, October 22, 1995, the announcer on 'NDR 3' (the Third Program of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hanover, now 'Radio 3') announced an upcoming piece of music by using the words Es erklang das Menuett aus der Symphonie in C-dur, Köchel-Verzeichnis 590. ('We heard the minuet from the Symphony in C Major, K. 590'). Normally, the use of a phrase such as Es erklang (lit.: 'it sounded out, played out') would imply that the piece of music just had been performed; in English, one could simply say: 'That was the minuet from the Symphony in C Major [by W. A. Mozart]', or something like that. The interesting circumstance of this announcement, however, was that we had not yet heard Mozart's minuet, but that it was played for us, following the speaker's Es erklang. Naturally, one asks oneself: Why didn't the announcer instead say, e.g. Es erklingt, of which the English normal equivalent would be 'We hear ..." or 'Next, we'll listen to ...', or (a bit more informally) "Coming up: ...'? The reason for this apparent anomaly is to be found in the placement of this announcer's temporal point of view. He said Es erklang in the production context of this particular radio transmission: a taped recording of an earlier concert given by the NDR Symphony Orchestra. In that concert, the orchestra played an encore (the Mozart minuet) following its regular performance, which had taken place in Hanover in January of 1995, and which was announced throughout the radio transmission by the words: Sie hören einen Mitschnitt eines öffentlichen Konzertes des NDR-Radio-Symphonie-Orchesters am 25. Januar 1995 im Großen Sendesaal des Funkhauses Hannover ('You are listening to a recording of a public concert by the NDR Symphony Orchestra in the Big Hall of the Hanover Radio Building on January 25, 1995'). The applause after the piece officially concluding the 'live' concert apparently had been so convincing that the conductor decided to give an encore, which was announced on the radio by the words: Als Zugabe spielte das Orchester ein Werk von Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Es erklang das Menuett ... ('As an encore, the orchestra played a work by Mozart. We heard the minuet ...'). In this announcement, the speaker places himself in 'event time', in which the minuet already had been played by the orchestra. In 'announcing time', that is, the speaker's ST, the event had not yet taken place, hence should properly have been announced in the present or future tense (but certainly not in the past): Es erklingt, or 'we'll listen to'.

56

The language question

Normally, when we announce, or hear something announced in ST, we expect the event time to be temporally and tense-wise later; however, in cases like the present one, where the point of view of the speaker is 'carried back', so to speak, in that he identifies with the events as they happened in the past, ET can be placed tense-wise before ST. The event is the same, but it is looked at from two different points of view, and hence commands two different uses of verbal tense. The following excerpt from a radio announcement on RTHK ('Radio Television Hong Kong') serves as another illustration of the same phenomenon: After the eight o'clock news, we'll hear the symphonic poem Nan Shan Ip by the composer Anson Wu, at the request of Mrs. Lu Fo. ('Good Morning on Four' RTHK, Fourth Program, 19 March 1995). Taken by itself, this utterance does not seem to present any particular problems of interpretation as to its various 'times': the ET is fixed to some time after the eight o'clock news (presumably directly following it, as we may infer from our familiarity with radio announcements of this kind), while the RT is in the future, more precisely the near future, in accordance with conventional interpretation. As to the speech time, one would expect this to be some time prior to the eight o'clock news, since a phrase such as "after the eight o'clock news" conventionally is uttered in direct speech as an indication of an upcoming event. What makes this announcement interesting is its actual 'speech time': it was uttered at 8:10 am, hence after, not before the eight o'clock news, and immediately prior to the playing of Ms. Wu's piece of music, called 'Foliage of the Southern Mountains'. The irregularity lies in the fact that the speaker was using an event, the eight o'clock news, which already had taken place, as an 'anchor point' ('RT') for a future event, the playing of Nan Shan Ip. Thus, either the 'anchoring' was wrong, or the speech event did not take place at the time of 'uttering': the regular, expected ST was not the 'real' ST. In the first case, the announcement might have been read by somebody who forgot to 'adjust' the time (he might have been reading from a manuscript or notes that somebody else had prepared). More likely, however, the announcement had been pre-recorded some time prior to

Tense and point of view

57

reading time, and the program host, sitting in his study while preparing a 'canned' broadcast, could have been imagining a speech time at which it would have been proper to say "after the eight o'clock news", without thinking ahead and realizing that his tape could get to be played at a time when current programming had established a different temporal reference. The above case shows how utterances may be 'anchored' (to borrow Smith and Ehrlich's metaphor) to their time of speaking, either by an absolute indication of time ('after the eight o'clock news", 'at 8:10 am") or by some deictic expression of the 'shifter' kind that we have discussed earlier (section 3.1; see also Mey 1993: 95-99): "today", 'next month', and the like, where the point of utterance depends on the speaker's orientation in time. When utterances do not contain an 'anchoring' element, that is, their deictics are not somehow "oriented to ST" (Ehrlich 1990: 63), their reference time is unclear; alternatively, as in the case above, we may indeed have an 'anchor, but one which turns out to be positioned wrongly in reference to speech time. In either case, the temporal reference point becomes confused. How can we expect to hear a piece of music "after the eight o'clock news" (i.e. anchored to an upcoming event with regard to ST), when this event has already happened at the time the announcement is made: at 8:10 am, viz., after the newscaster has repeated the headlines to conclude his presentation of the news? In such cases, we assume that there either is some irregularity (as in our case), or that reference time is determined in other ways. As a rule, we will try to establish the utterance's temporal reference by anchoring it to some other utterance in the context, borrowing (or 'sharing', as Ehrlich (1990: 63) calls it, following Smith 1981), that utterance's RT, as in the following example: We forgot we had to go back to school, they said. We forgot the General Strike, and of course the next day it rained. (Mary Wesley, A sensible life. Penguin 1991, p. 112.) Here, the unanchored or 'flexible" temporal expression "the next day" is understood by reference to the picnic on the beach that had taken place the day before. The 'shared' event to which the utterance's temporal reference thus is anchored and which is the object of recollection for the

58

The language question

story's participants, is distinct from the 'event' of reminiscing, which takes place at a much later time of their lives, and which represents the proper RT of the story itself.

3.3.2. Time, tense, and perspective As the discussion in the previous section has shown, the concepts of "reference time' vs. 'event' and 'speech time' do not always and harmoniously coincide with the available linguistic devices for marking time (including verb forms proper as well as time adverbials). The problem is most pronounced in the case of RT: on the one hand, reference time does not have a 'canonical* or unique representation in the world of tense; on the other hand, in many languages tense is subject to seemingly mechanical manipulation by the rules of the grammar, as in the well-known phenomenon of consecutio temporum, or 'sequence of tenses', by which a particular tense in a subordinate phrase is assigned on account of a tense occurring in the main clause. (For discussion and examples, see section 3.3.3.1, below). On the descriptive ('meta-')level, the problem of assigning the correct RT to an utterance is aggravated by the fact that most available interpretations of the temporal relations in a text are oriented to a semanticallyinspired notion of'reference'. In this conceptual framework, temporal reference (as in 'RT') is understood as a narrowly semantic counterpart to local deictic reference, with emphasis placed on the Objective' coordinates of the utterance, "the spatiotemporal zero-point of the speaker' (Lyons 1977: 638), rather than on the temporal fabric of the discourse as a whole. Narrative discourse, in this conceptual framework, is thought of as a patchwork pieced together from individual situations, each with their own temporal and other characteristics, rather than as an integrated interpretation of the situations that are part of the narrative, and by which the subordinate pieces of text receive their interpretation in the discourse as a whole. In Smith's words, "the relations between situations [as based on their spatio-temporal references] constitute the dynamics of narrative, or narrative time" (1994: 97; my addition). Consequently, reference time is defined here in relation to the individual situations occurring in the narration, rather than to the totality of discourse, as it specifies and determines the individual viewpoints dominating those

Tense and point of view

59

situations. In the same way, Levinson sees the utterance's "central time' (and, we may add, place) as "that at which the speaker produces the utterance" (1983: 63; my italics). On a 'holistic' reading of the notion of narrative time, however, the question of reference becomes subordinated to the point of view of the entire narrative. From this perspective, it is not the most important, or most interesting, task for text users to establish what Smith calls "the temporal intervals at which situations are located" (1994: 143); it is the other aspect that she notes as 'basic' that takes precedence, viz., the 'temporal perspective', as provided by the context: "[I]n a discourse", Smith says, "previous times and situations provide the context for interpretation. Context is essential for interpreting expressions of time" (ibid.}. And on this point, I am in complete agreement with the author. What I have said so far can be summarized as follows. In a text, the various points of view that we attribute to the text's personae (including the 'narrative instance', see below, chapter 6.2.3) represent the 'time locations' from which the individual 'voices' of the text are heard. Establishing those 'listening points' enables us to distinguish between the various voices in the text and their points of view, while keeping the overall textual perspective together; in doing so, we manage to avoid the confusion that otherwise would arise in a vocal 'free for all'. Conversely, if (for some reason or other) those points of view and their 'tense locations' cannot be integrated, the text's voices may begin to mingle indiscriminately; in the resulting textual tohuwabohu, only the strictest of creative constraints will be able to prevent an overall, cacophonous pele-mele, as I will argue explicitly below, in chapter 7.

3.3.2.1. 'Viewing time' In the holistic understanding of the relationship between 'time' and 'tense' that I have outlined above, a way of interpreting the notion of 'time' in texts emerges which is different from the usual Reichenbachian, logico-semantically inspired notion of'reference time'. I call this aspect of textual time 'viewing time' ('VT'), defined as the point of time at which a 'viewer' contemplates the events referred to or described. (Alternatively, one could call it 'viewer time', if one wants to emphasize the pragmatically oriented, user-directed aspect of the process; there is no real distinction between the two expressions). The im-

60

The language question

portance of viewing time for our understanding of textual time will be illustrated on the basis of the following, long excerpt from a contemporary British novel, Mary Wesley's Λ sensible life. [Flora, the main character of the story, is saying good-bye to her parents and her summer friends Felix, Cosmo, and Blanco, who are returning to England after having spent the holidays in the Hotel Marjolaine on the coast of Brittany. Flora is ten years old at 'event time', but the narrator lets us 'flash forward' from the events described to Flora's sentiments and thoughts in Old age', when she is reminiscing about those same events.] When in old age she constantly forgot people's names, things which had happened a week before, titles of books, the ephemera of living, Flora would brilliantly remember standing on the quay at Dinard in the driving rain, watching the launches pull away.

Flora had followed the travellers to the quay and watched them board the vedettes. ... Perhaps her parents had said a perfunctory good-bye? Flora could not remember. There had once been a terrible accident with an overloaded launch, a lot of people drowned: she did not want this to happen today. Neither Cosmo nor Blanco had waved to her; why should they? She had kept out of sight, not wishing them to see the tears coursing down her face. In age she recollected the sensation of hot tears mixing with cold rain. She remembered that perfectly. And she remembered the grief; it had been tempered by a despairing rage, a passion which shook her whole body as she stood in the rain. When the vedettes were lost to sight, disappearing in the sheeting rain, she had turned and run through the wet streets to the beach, across the sands, up the hill ... to the tram/train which ... was letting off loud shrieks and whistles as it began to move. She had scrambled on board breathless, crippled by a stitch, gasping as she sought to elude her unbearable loss, her shocked realisation that she loved,

Tense and point of view

61

was in love with Felix, Cosmo and Blanco all at once, equally. In old age Flora would smile, remembering the child who believed that love was for one person, for ever, for Happy Ever After. The conductor ... had nearly caught her; she had no money. She moved ahead of him along the train. Since the carriages had no sides it was possible to swing out clinging to a rail as the conductor did, and back into the next carriage; then when you reached the carriage behind the engine, to drop off, let the train go by (it never went faster than five or six miles an hour) and rejoin it behind the conductor. Flora had watched bold boys do this but, afraid of getting crushed, had never attempted the prank herself. That day, emboldened by grief and despair, she had carried out the risky manoeuvre to the amusement of fellow passengers and the irritation of the conductor. I wish 1 still had that agility, she would think in age.... The tide had erased yesterday's footprints, smoothed flat the battlemented castles, filled in the moats. The stream from the valley reached across the sand with watery fingers to where the waves cracked onto the beach with a smack and a hiss as the tide turned to come in. She walked the long distance towards the water and, as she walked, tried to bring back the feel of Felix' warm hand when they had walked up the street, the taste of Blanco's blood when she bit him, and Cosmo's smile when he bought her an ice in St Malo; but memory was evasive and cold. She crouched by the water's edge and wrote in the sand, spelling out the names with her forefinger: Felix, Cosmo, Blanco. When I am seventeen, she had thought, I could marry Felix. He will be twentyseven when I am seventeen. I could marry Blanco or Cosmo; they will be twenty-two. But the sea rushed in, smoothing away the names, filling her shoes with frothy, sandy water. She had stood up and screamed into the wind, Ί shall, I shall, I shall.' ... Clambering up the dune she found the remnants of the picnic bonfire, a circle of black bits, made cold by the rain. She had crouched by the charred embers for a long time so absorbed in her grief that she did not notice the dog Tonton come and join her, nudge her with his nose be-

62

The language question

fore departing, puzzled, back over the cliff. In age she would not remember him that day nor how she found her way back to the Marjolaine; there was a gap in memory; she would suppose she got back in the tram. (Mary Wesley, A sensible life. Penguin 1991, pp. 113-116.) In this extract, notice first how the author manages to distinguish between event times as remembered by Flora in old age, and 'true' event time, i.e. either the time frame of (the first part of) Wesley's story: the summer of 1926, or the actual time of Flora, the protagonist of the story, retrospecting "in age". For the first type of event time, the author mainly uses the pluperfect (or 'past preterit'): "Flora had followed the travellers to the quay ...", "She had kept out of sight ...", "she had turned and run through the wet streets ...", "She had scrambled on board ...", "she had thought, I could marry Felix.", "She had stood up and screamed into the wind, ...", "She had crouched by the charred embers,...". In contrast, happenings in 'true event time' are narrated in the imperfect. There are two types of this 'true' past time: first, we have the narrative's own event time, as in: "She walked ... towards the water and, as she walked, tried to bring back the feel of Felix' warm hand ...; but memory was evasive and cold.", "She crouched by the water's edge and wrote in the sand, ...", "Clambering up the dune she found the remnants of the picnic bonfire, ..."; and so on. Then, there are the happenings occurring much later, when Flora has reached old age and is described as reminiscing: "... in old age she constantly forgot people's names,", "In age she recollected the sensation of hot tears mixing with cold rain. She remembered that perfectly.", "And she remembered the grief;", "there was a gap in memory;", and so on. The contrast in narrative force between this latter, imperfect (preterit) tense and the pluperfect (past preterit) in the earlier quotations is particularly marked in the sequel to the second Old age' event, as quoted above: In age she recollected the sensation of hot tears mixing with cold rain. She remembered that perfectly.

Tense and point of view

63

And she remembered the grief; it had been tempered by a despairing rage, a passion which shook her whole body as she stood in the rain. The first paragraph of this extract describes how, in old age, Flora still remembers not only the grief she felt in 1926, when standing on the quay in Dinard, but also the physical sensation she experienced then and there: "hot tears mixing with cold rain". This recollecting perspective is continued in the first clause of the next paragraph, which still is in the imperfect: "she remembered the grief; however, the content of this remembrance, her rage and passion, are described reminiscences, and they take the pluperfect: " it [the grief] had been tempered by a despairing rage,...". I conclude that, in order to properly understand this interplay of tenses with regard to 'lived' vs. 'described' events, we cannot rely on either 'event time' (certain of the events, though taking place at the same time, the summer of 1926, are nevertheless described using different tenses: imperfect vs. pluperfect), nor on 'reference time', since the excerpt quoted above, taken as whole, is subordinated to the same overall time frame: viz. that of Flora's reminiscences "in age". What we are dealing with is, in Fludernik's terms, a shift from the temporal to the perspectival (1993: 185), the perspective being that of the viewer, "viewing time', VT. In this connection, mainly two considerations are of importance. First of all, note the fact that the entire passage quoted earlier is set in a future time with respect to the 'story line'. It is, as it were, an excursus into things to come, a prelude on the continuation of the story, a 'sneak preview' of Flora's later exploits. As such, the quoted passage contrasts with the paragraph immediately preceding the retrospective narration: here, the parting of Flora and her friends is described in 'regular', narrative fashion, i.e. respecting the story's natural progression in time: Flora, watching the vedette chug out in the driving rain towards St Malo, wept for Cosmo and Blanco leaving on the boat, for Felix who had already gone in his car, for the terrible discovery that she was in love with three people at the same time. (Mary Wesley, Λ sensible life. Penguin 1991, pp. 113.)

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The language question

In this passage, we are told about things that happened on the quay, as seen from the perspective of the narrator: "Flora, watching the vedette ... wept", "she [Flora] was in love". The pluperfect form in "Felix ... had already gone in his car" demarcates a point of time that is anterior to the events described, and thus fits naturally in with this historical perspective. In the next paragraph, however, as in the entire rest of the chapter (i.e., the four pages excerpted above), the perspective shifts. We are no longer considering Flora as the object of the description: the heroine herself enters the scene, looking back upon her past from the perspective of old age—a perspective that, with respect to the time line of the book, has not (yet) been achieved through 'natural' narrative progression. The shift in grammatical tense from imperfect to pluperfect thus forcefully accents the shift in perspective: from the narrator's to Flora's, the viewer's. As a result of this shift, we are hearing Flora's voice, rather than the narrator's, in the subsequent pages (the long excerpt quoted above); the shift in narrative perspective is accompanied (not to say: triggered) by a shift in "voice' (see chapter 7.1). This shift establishes the passages in question as representing Flora's internal dialogue, as we will see in the following sections. Second, such 'futuristic' passages also have another, specific temporal framing, which characterizes them linguistically, setting them off from the surroundings, text- and tense-wise. Consider the following extract from a later episode in the same story by Mary Wesley: [At Marseilles, Flora is picked off the P&O steamer which was supposed to carry her to India, by one of her three childhood loves, Hubert (earlier in the book called 'Blanco')]. Walking beside Hubert, Flora did not ask where they were going. At the station Hubert retrieved his bag and led her to a waiting bus. Looking at the station clock, Flora noted the time. 'The ship will have sailed," she said. 'They will be gone.' Hubert said, 'Yes.' In old age they would wonder whether they had really heard the blast of the ship's siren above the noise of the Marseilles traffic and exchanged a smile as they boarded the bus. The smile, yes, but the siren?

Tense and point of view

65

(Mary Wesley, Λ sensible life. Penguin 1991, p. 249.) The future point of time at which Flora and Hubert will look back to this event at Marseilles (identified as 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany) is indicated by the verb form would. The same happens in the earlier quoted long passage: "In old age ... Flora would .... remember ..." (p. 113), "In old age Flora would smile, ..." (p. 114), "... she [Flora] would think in age." (p. 115), "In age she would not remember him that day ...; she would suppose she got back in the tram." (p. 116). All these conditionals indicate that the event recounted, while seen from the perspective of the remembering person's present, is going to happen at some time in the future. But the reminiscer(s) could not, naturally, have known this at the time of the event; hence they cannot, strictly speaking, reminisce back to this event—which is why we need a conditional. The conditional thus 'indexes' another view, another voice: viz., that of the omniscient narrator (see chapter 6) who tells us, the readers, not only that such and such happened at the time of the narrated event, but moreover, that repercussions of these turbulent happenings are to reappear years later, rippling the surface of the characters' peaceful, retrospective musings. The events themselves (Flora's naive assumptions about love, Flora's getting back to Dinard, the blow of the siren in Marseilles, and so on) belong in the past, but are not narrated as happenings in story time; we cannot even be certain that they actually did happen, and neither are always the characters ("the smile yes, but the siren?"; ibid: p. 249). This shift in viewer perspective is analogous to that established earlier in the case of the pluperfect, where the point of view was shifted from the time of the story into some future time from which those events were examined as remembrances, the viewer in this case being the character (Flora) who is busy retrospecting and reminiscing. The difference is that the shift indicated by the conditional forms is one in the perspective of the narrator, not of the character. In both cases, the tense shifts are "linked to an imagined deictic center" (Fludernik's term; 1993: 197), established by reference to the subjectivity of the viewer. (On these cases as instances of *backshifting', see section 3.3.3.2, below). I conclude that in these particular narratives, we have to do with time indications which are neither ΈΤ" nor 'RT* (and, a fortiori, not 'ST'). This is the time perspective I have suggested to call 'viewing time', or

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The language question

'VT'. VT is characterized by reference to a character's perspective; furthermore, this character may be one of the dramatis personae or the narrative instance itself (see chapter 6.1). VT is, therefore, not an absolute perspective: it depends on the way the character looks at things, and on how the narrator describes a character's way of contemplating and experiencing the surrounding world. The shift in tenses that we have been observing above (as well as the more mechanical type of tense shift as one can observe in the 'sequence of tenses' in certain languages, first of all Latin, as we will see in the next section) cannot be explained by reference to absolute, abstract time, but only by reference to the person who is viewing the events related in the story: 'viewing time' is a viewer perspective.25

3.3.2.2. True preterits We have to consider two further aspects of tense use as demonstrated in the above text, the first of which seems to militate against some of the views expressed above with regard to the contrast preterit-past preterit (imperfect-pluperfect). Consider the following extract from the passage quoted above: Flora had followed the travellers to the quay and watched them board the vedettes. ... Perhaps her parents had said a perfunctory good-bye? Flora could not remember. There had once been a terrible accident with an overloaded launch, a lot of people drowned: she did not want this to happen today. Here, the first occurrence of the pluperfect ('had + V-ed') sets the VT as Flora's in old age, with the heroine 'flashing' back to the lachrymose parting scene on the Dinard quay. But the second and third occurrences of this form are different. These pluperfects are 'in the story line', so to speak: they indicate a true anterior past, in relation to story (or 'event'), not to 'viewing time' (ET rather than VT). The cinching clue is in the last clause: "she [Flora] did not want this to happen today". Reference time is here 'anchored' to the deictic "today", so that we get a completely regular sequence of tenses reflecting a normal sequence of events: the overloaded launch's capsizing had occurred some time in the past, "a lot of people drowned" on that occasion. Hence, "today"

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(that is, the time of the event described) goes along with the imperfect tenses "did" and "could" (which, incidentally, are 'backshifted* in the regular fashion of 'free indirect discourse'; see the next section and in particular chapter 5.4, below). Thus, we have to distinguish these occurrences of the past preterit from the use of the same tense in VT.26 Here is another instance (this and the following examples are all culled from the lengthy passage quoted above, section 3.3.2.1, from Mary Wesley's novel, A sensible life): The tide had erased yesterday's footprints, smoothed flat the battlemented castles, filled in the moats. The stream from the valley reached across the sand with watery fingers to where the waves cracked onto the beach with a smack and a hiss as the tide turned to come in. Here, the 'had erased' in the first sentence marks a point of time prior to the events told in the storyline, and is thus a regular use of the past preterit. The above occurrences contrast with cases where we expect to encounter a 'reminiscing', VT-defined pluperfect, but in vain. Consider: The conductor ... had nearly caught her; she had no money. She moved ahead of him along the train. Since the carriages had no sides it was possible to swing out clinging to a rail as the conductor did, and back into the next carriage; then when you reached the carriage behind the engine, to drop off, let the train go by (it never went faster than five or six miles an hour) and rejoin it behind the conductor. Flora had watched bold boys do this but, afraid of getting crushed, had never attempted the prank herself. That day, emboldened by grief and despair, she had carried out the risky manoeuvre to the amusement of fellow passengers and the irritation of the conductor. In this passage, we encounter 'true preterits', describing events which had taken place prior to the current ET: "Flora had watched bold boys do this ...". In contrast, there are the 'reminiscence' past preterits, which set the overall temporal framework as VT: "The conductor... had nearly caught her; ...", "That day ... she had carried out the risky manoeuvre ...". But in addition to all these, there are also some simple preterits

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The language question

('had'; not 'had + V-ed', as in "she [Flora] had no money. She moved ahead of him along the train."). The question is now how to deal with these; in particular, we must ask ourselves why these forms remain 'unshifted', that is, why they occur in the simple, rather than the past preterit, even though they continue the perspective of the viewer, Flora. My guess is that we are looking at what Fludernik has called "'lazy' past tense", i.e. a past tense occurring "only in contexts that do not result in ambiguity because anteriority can be recuperated from the semantics of the situation" (1993: 181). One might say that in cases like these, the pluperfect would indeed have been an option, but that (perhaps for aesthetic reasons) it is dispreferred, since it creditably would add a certain bulk to the narrative. On another understanding, one could interpret these imperfect forms as belonging to the narrative itself, as I suggested earlier: they move the story ahead, rather than dwelling on a particular aspect of the narration. Compare also cases like: ... when they had walked up the street, the taste of Blanco's blood when she bit him, and Cosmo's smile when he bought her an ice in St Malo;... where the imperfect tenses theoretically could have been aligned with the ('true') pluperfect ("had walked'): 'had bit him', 'had bought her an ice' would have been possible here, but would perhaps appear unnecessarily cumbersome.

3.3.3. Tense shift reconsidered In narration, the temporal value of the morphological category of tense depends on the contextual contrasts between its members. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to cases of tense change, whether they are of the 'automatic' kind, or are realized in a more independent, semantically and pragmatically significant manner. Many authors (such as Green 1989) remain singularly silent on the subject of tense, especially its pragmatic impact through shifting; in the following, I will rely mainly on recent work by Fludernik (1993), as well as on the classical studies by Weinrich (1971) and Hinrichs (1986; the latter work is not discussed by Fludernik).

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3.3.3.1. The sequence of tenses Classical grammar identifies a syntactic phenomenon traditionally known as consecutio temporwn. The term is usually translated as the 'sequence of tenses', and covers the fact that in certain dependent clauses, the tense of the verb depends on that of the verb of the main clause. Thus, e.g., in Latin a dependent clause initiated by the particle ut ('in order to, for to', also called ut finale, i.e. 'purpose-wf") may take two, and only two tenses in its verb: the present after a main clause whose verb is in the present (or future), the imperfect after a main clause whose verb is in any past tense (imperfect, perfect, pluperfect). Here are a couple of examples: [One of Caesar's veterans, a centurion from the XlVth Legion, has been captured off the coast of Africa, near the present-day Tunisian city of Sousse (Hadrumetum in classical times; later also named Hadramaut) with some of his men, in late December 47 or early January 46 B.C. (Old Republic Style).27 The Pompeian forces take the captives to their commander-in-chief, the ex-consul Q. Metellus Scipio (nicknamed Pius), who offers them indemnity and money, if they will leave Caesar's service and join his (Scipio's) forces. The centurion speaks:] Egone contra Caesarem imperatorem meum, ... eiusque exercitum, pro cttius dignitate victoriaque amplius XXXVI annos depugnavi, adversus armatusque consistam? Neque ego istudfacturus sum et te magnopere ut de negotio desistas adhortor. ('Should I rise up and take arms against Caesar, my commander-inchief, and his army, for whose dignity and victory I have battled for more than 36 years? Such a thing I will not only not take into consideration myself, but I admonish you forcefully to relinquish your venture.') (C. lulius Caesar, De hello africo, XLV. A. G. Way, ed., p. 214; my translation).

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The language question

In this passage, the centurion (who subsequently, as thanks for the advice, has his head cut off by Scipio's men), uses the form adhortor Ί admonish, encourage' (the present 1st person singular indicative of the Latin verb adhortari). Since the main clause has its verb in the present, the consecutio temporum, or 'sequence of tenses', requires that the subordinate clause's verb form be likewise in the present. The clause [ut de negotio] desistas fulfills this requirement: the verb form represents the present second person singular conjunctive (also called 'subjunctive') of desistere 'to stop [doing], desist'. Consider now the next example, taken from another work in the Caesarian tradition, if not outright attributed (as per the manuscripts) to Caesar himself or to his 'ghost writer' Aulus Hirtius, (presumed author of the eighth book of the former's Gallic War): [Caesar is introduced as talking to young Ptolemy, king of Egypt, who, after having waged war on his sister, Cleopatra, is now trying to take advantage of the recent assassination of Caesar's arch rival, Pompey, and throw the Romans out of Egypt. The conversation takes place in Alexandria, in late October or early November of the year 48 B.C. (Old Republic Style)]. Itaque regem cohortatus ut consuleret regno paterno, parceret praeclarissimae patriae, ... civis suos primum ad sanitatem revocaret, deinde comervaret, fidem populo Romano sibique praestaret, ('So he [Caesar] admonished the king to care for the kingdom left to him by his father, to protect the interests of his most illustrious country, ... to bring back his subjects, first to reason and subsequently to safety, to maintain loyalty to the people of Rome and himself [Caesar],...') (C. lulius Caesar, De hello alexandrino, XXIV. A. G. Way, ed., p. 26; my translation). Here, Caesar uses the verb cohortari (a near-synonym of the above quoted adhortari} 'to (strongly) admonish, to try to persuade'; however, this time the verb in the main clause is in a past tense: the third person singular perfect indicative cohortatus [est] (the copula est is frequently

Tense and point of view

11

omitted in narrative style). This perfect tense demands, by the rules of the 'sequence of tenses', an imperfect tense in subordinate clauses of a certain type (such as those governed by the 'purpose-w/', ut finale.) Hence, we are not astonished to find the forms consuleret, parceret, revocaret, conservaret, praestaret, representing the third person singular imperfect conjunctives of their corresponding verbs. Sequence-of-tense rules similar to those of Latin, albeit not always as strictly enforced, are found in other languages as well, first of all those belonging to the Romance group. Also in English, we normally expect some tense adjustments to happen in cases such as: Retells me he is i l l , compared to: He told me he was ill. As Declerck (1990) puts it, tense sequencing is the normal, 'unmarked' case; a breach in the sequence of tense rule serves to highlight the fact that something unexpected is afoot, as in He told me he is ill, where the inference is that (since the speaker expressly uses a present where we would expect a preterit form) the state of illness is thought of as being 'present', that is, as continuing into the actual time of utterance; in other words, the person speaking is still ill at the moment of speaking. According to Fludernik, "the tense shift ... is the unmarked pattern"; she calls this use of tense 'relative', as opposed to an 'absolute' use, which is what happens when a 'deictic reorientation' takes place, overriding the sequencing rules in order to "signal current relevancy" (1993: 180). Also here, it is the viewer perspective that is decisive for a correct interpretation of the utterance.

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3.3.3.2. 'Backshifting' and free indirect discourse The changes in tense described above have been linked to the influence of some type of overarching 'speech act' of'saying' or 'reporting'. In an utterance preceded by an expression such as 'He said (that)...' (often called a 'parenthetical'), 'he' represents a 'reporter' relaying information about certain states of affairs or happenings; the parenthetical 'he said' embodies a speech act of reporting. Similarly in the Latin quotations above, the speech acts of admonishing are executed as 'verbs of saying', verba dicendi, as the Latin school grammars called it. In many languages, such main clause 'verbs of saying' (whether or not used parenthetically) can be said to embody, or 'capture' as their complement, some utterance. Thanks to this process, they exert a certain influence on the latter's grammatical shape, such that the captured utterance, called 'indirect discourse' (oratio obliqua in classical grammar, as opposed to oratio recta, 'direct discourse') is obligatorily subjected to certain morphological changes: tense and/or mood in the verb, case in the noun.28 In English, this phenomenon is called 'backshifting'; the following two sentences can serve as examples (Toolan 1994: 130): John said to her Ί am tired'. John said to her that he was tired. According to many authors (including Banfield 1982), the shift serves to express the absence of 'subjectivity' in reporting. In contrast to the former sentence (which expresses the fact of John's tiredness as seen from John's viewpoint, by quoting his very words), the latter, when uttered in the proper context, is validated from the objective viewpoint of someone reporting: 'John said that...'. In this case, the tense alignment in the complement clause ('backshifting' from the present into the preterit: "'that he was tired'") expresses the same 'viewer perspective' as that of the main clause, viz., that of the reporter's. Here, the tenses of both the main clause verb and the subordinate clause verb express the same "viewing time' (in the sense defined above, section 3.3.2.1), in this case the VT of the reporter. In contrast, the 'unshifted* tense in the captured clause of the first example (Ί am tired') is more appropriate for expressing a subjective VT, that is, a viewing time that is associated with the speaker him- or herself.

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This shifting of tenses and moods for the purpose of operating a shift in viewer perspective is not restricted to complement clauses, but may be extended to other cases as well. The most illustrious instance is that of'backshifting' in so-called 'free indirect discourse'. Free indirect discourse (for short, 'FID'; see further chapter 5) is considered 'free', since it appears without any obligatory parenthetical: it is both 'stand alone' and indirect discourse, the viewpoint of the speaker being represented as //it were reported (hence it participates in the objective trustworthiness of the reporting instance, whether visible or not), yet at the same time, because it shows no overt ties to any reporting speech act (no parentheticals are involved), it comes on as a direct expression of the subjective perspective of the narrative character's 'speech or thought'. 29 In the same vein, Fludernik has related this independent character of FID to "the evocation of subjectivity in the narrative by means of grammatical ... indicators" (1993: 363). Thus, we can encounter a story that on the surface appears as a simple narrative with parentheticals omitted, but which in reality represents the perspective of the reported-on character. In this way, our example sentence above 'He was tired' (with the parenthetical 'John said' chopped off) becomes an expression of John's feeling tired, as seen from his own perspective: the reporter gently withdraws into the wings, as it were, and lets the character speak. Compare also the following standard example, this time borrowed from Bal (1985: 141): Elizabeth said: Ί refuse to go on living like this.' She [Elizabeth] would not go on living like this. In the first sentence, we are dealing with a verbatim report of what Elizabeth said, in direct discourse. The narrator's voice is merely the reporting instance: "Elizabeth said: ...'" In the second sentence, the reporter has disappeared, but traces of the reporting are still discernible; the way Elizabeth expresses herself in indirect discourse has the appearance of reported speech: "[Elizabeth said that] she [Elizabeth] would not go on living like this"; but the reporting instance has dropped out of the narration, so to speak.30 Thanks to this technique, we are able to induce an intriguing 'double take': while safeguarding the objectivity of the report by eliminating the reporter's subjectivity, we manage at the same time to highlight the subjectivity of the character's expression

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The language question

(as manifested in the typical subjective deictic element 'this') m free indirect discourse: "She [Elizabeth] would not go on living like this". The essential advantage of this technique is embodied in the word 'free': freed from the constraints of the narrative voice, the discourse possesses a greater susceptibility to its other voices, the characters'. A character may speak Off the record', that is, not in its official capacity of character; since its utterances are not really spoken in this case (Banfield even calls them 'unspeakable'), they are all the more effective in a narrative context. The invisible authority of the 'lost narrator' lingers on as an independent representation of the character's speech or thought, freed from its official ties, so to speak, in the muted voice of free indirect discourse.31 One of the prime techniques for obtaining this effect is the change in tense and mood called 'backshifting'. In the following extract, Jane Austen takes us by the hand, leading us from the point of view of the narrator to that of the character, by subtly changing the tenses and hence, almost imperceptibly, the viewer perspective: [Catherine, the novel's heroine, has quite unexpectedly been told that her presence at the Abbey is no longer desired, the General, Henry's father, having shown a sudden and inexplicable change of attitude towards his guest]. ... when [Catherine] thought of Henry, so near, yet so unconscious, her grief and agitation were excessive. The day which she had spent at that place had been one of the happiest of her life. It was there, it was on that day, that the General had made use of such expressions with regard to Henry and herself, had so spoken and so looked as to give her the most positive conviction of his actually wishing their marriage. Yes, only ten days ago had he elated her by his pointed regard — had he even confused her by his too significant reference! And now — what had she done or what had she omitted to do, to merit such a change? (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Chawton ed. pp. 190-191). In this passage, the narrator starts out telling us something about Catherine's thoughts and state of mind. This part of the narrative is in the simple preterit: '[she] thought of Henry', 'her grief and agitation

Tense and point of view

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were excessive'. Subsequently, the tense shifts to the 'reminiscing past preterit', as I have called it in section 3.3.2.1: "The day which she had spent...", "the General had made use of such expressions ...", and so on. This tense shift is at the same time a shift in perspective: we see the events that have happened through the eyes of Catherine who is thinking back, and whose thoughts are represented in FID. Catherine's reflections culminate in an anguished query to herself: "what had she done or what had she omitted to do, to merit such a change?" Registering the shifts between straight narration and free indirect (or direct) discourse is regularly (as in this case) left to the reader's perceptiveness with regard to such (often instantaneous) changes of perspective. However, in certain cases the narrative instance seems obliged to reaffirm itself, making it clear which of the voices is having the floor of narration. Compare the following extract from Mrs. Dalloway: [Clarissa, on coming home, is musing about life and love] But this question of love (she thought, putting her coat away), this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had that not, after all, been love? She sat on the floor—that was her first impression of Sally—she sat on the floor with her arms round her knees, smoking a cigarette. Where could it have been? The Mannings [sic]? The KinlochJones's? (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Harvest ed. p. 32). In this passage, the parenthetical (or 'inquif, as it is often called) 32 'she thought' defines the surrounding text's viewpoint as centered in Clarissa Dalloway's perspective. This perspective continues for as long as it is not expressly preempted; hence the next paragraph's 'She sat ...' is still a representation of Clarissa's thoughts. Clarissa is thinking back to the first time she saw Sally Seton, so it is the latter, not Clarissa, who is the subject of'sat'. Theoretically, however, there is the possibility of a perspective shift here (continuing the narration and picking up from Clarissa's "she thought"), as if it were Clarissa who, for some reason or other, suddenly would find herself sitting on the floor. To block this possibility, the narrative instance is mobilized, making it clear to us that

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The language question

it is Clarissa's impression of Sally that we are faced with. The inserted phrase "that was her first impression of Sally" thus continues Clarissa's inner monologue and makes us stay within her perspective (as is also borne out by the subsequent questions that Clarissa directs at herself: "Where could it have been? The Mannings[']? The Kinloch-Jones's?"). As we have seen time and again, the mere fact of a morphologically determined opposition (backshifted vs. non-backshifted tense) is never by itself a sufficient condition for a particular reading, in keeping with Michel Riffaterre's 'principle of polyvalence' (1959: 409; see further chapter 4.3.1), introduced in the previous chapter, by which a given morphological distinction can be used for a number of different purposes, or for no purpose at all (Fludernik 1993: 349). Reading always presupposes, in addition to the purely linguistic devices, the presence of 'pragmatic markers', attributable to the ways the readers experience a particular passage (cf. Yamaguchi 1989: 584; more on this in chapter 8). In addition to the more or less 'automatic' and predictable tense shifts, other more sophisticated tense shifting techniques are often used in connection with FID, such as those from the present to the so-called 'conditional' or 'past future' (e.g. 'will' to 'would', 'can' to 'could', and so on). We have already observed a case of this shift in the Bal example cited above ("She [Elizabeth] would not go on living like this"). Another instance occurs in the just quoted passage from Virginia Woolf, where Mrs. Dalloway asks herself: "Where could it have been?"; here, the simple 'can' of direct discourse ('Where can it have been?') is 'backshifted' to 'could', a form serving multiple purposes (as do the forms of other 'defective' English modals, such as 'will', 'must', and so on): in addition to the shift due to FID, this 'could' also expresses Clarissa's doubtful remembrances. I will come back to this in a moment. Here is another example from Virginia Woolf: [Minta, Mrs. Ramsay's 'tomboy daughter', has gotten engaged to Paul; on the occasion, her younger sister Prue has been having a burst of positive feelings about their mother.] 'That's my mother.' thought Prue. ... That's the thing itself, she felt; if there were only one person like that in the whole world; her mother. ... And thinking what a chance it was for Minta and Paul and Lily to see her, and feeling what an extraordinary stroke of fortune it was for her, to have her, and how she would never grow

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up and never leave home, she said, like a child, 'We thought of going down to the beach to watch the waves.' (Virginia Woolf, To the lighthouse. Harvest ed., p. 116). From George Eliot, Fludernik (1993: 191) cites the following case: [Lydgate has decided to stay on in Middlemarch, no matter what.] [Lydgate] ... was setting his mind on remaining in Middlemarch in spite of the worst that could be done against him. He would not retreat before calumny, as if he submitted to it. He would face it to the utmost. (George Eliot, Middlemarch. Penguin ed., p. 796). In all these examples, the "would" represents the thoughts of the speaker in the 'future', but being expressed in FID, they get 'backshifted' to a conditional form (or the 'past future'). Similar examples could be given for other modals, such as 'must', 'could', and so on. One may ask (with Jahn 1992: 353) whether generally speaking, the term 'backshifting' is not too restricted. As the above examples show, there exist, apart from the classical 'backward shift' in which a present tense changes to a preterit, other more complicated changes, involving not only simple tenses, such as the preterit, but also the past preterit (pluperfect). Modal changes are found as well, as we have seen in the preceding cases of shifted 'would', 'must', 'could', with their accompanying changes in the modalities of the represented speech or thought: doubt, wish, eagerness, determination, and so on. To be distinguished from the above occurrences are cases in which a form such as 'would' serves to shift the perspective into the future, by a kind of'forward shifting'. In adddition to a purely temporal shift, such a shifting 'forward' can have the effect of placing the subject of the 'shifted' verb more centrally into the narrative, as one perpetrating an action or experiencing an emotion. Hence, it may be preferable to use a term like 'tense (or mood) adjustment' rather than 'back-' or 'forward shifting', to avoid giving the impression that we have to do with a purely mechanical process (as was the case in the Latin consecutio temporum discussed earlier); a process, moreover, that has to happen in one direction (back or forward) only. 33

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The language question

In addition to the cases of 'backshifting' that were discussed above, we do indeed find many instances of 'forward shifting' in which the perspective or a character is given a 'future twist', so to speak, along with a certain modality, as the following examples will show. [Richard Dalloway is about to leave for a 'Committee' meeting ("'Armenians,' he said; or perhaps it was 'Albanians.'")] He returned with a pillow and a quilt. "An hour's complete rest after luncheon," he said. And he went. How like him! He would go on saying 'An hour's complete rest after luncheon' to the end of time, because a doctor had ordered it once. (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Harvest ed. p. 120). In this case, the future perspective is contained in Mrs. Dalloway's represented thought (it is she who ruminates about a future in which Richard will forever be saying the same things, performing the same actions). It is not just Richard who will keep on saying these words, it is Richard as perceived and evaluated by Clarissa in a shifted, future, modal perspective: Richard perfunctorily perpetuating a habit, a silly customary saying. While these general cases of tense and mood shifting fit neatly into the framework outlined above, there are other cases where the shifted perspective may be the narrator's rather than a character's. As instances, compare the earlier discussed cases of 'narrative shift' (above, section 3.3.1) where a character is described as reliving her past. Consider again the following examples (the full excerpts have been given earlier): [Flora is reminiscing back to her young days in France] In old age ... Flora would .... remember ... In old age Flora would smile,... ... she [Flora] would think in age.

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In age she would not remember him [the dog Tonton] that day ...; she would suppose she got back in the tram. (Mary Wesley, A sensible life. Penguin 1991, pp. 113-116). In order to make the special character of these shifts clearer, let's contrast the above passages with an extract from a distinguished colleague of Mary Wesley's, the celebrated Jane Austen:34 [The happenings described here follow the ignominious expulsion of the heroine, Catherine, from Northanger Abbey that was referred to in the previously quoted extract from the book ofthat title.] [Catherine] travelled on for about eleven hours without accident or alarm, and between six and seven o'clock in the evening found herself entering Fullerton. A heroine returning, at the close of her career, to her native village, in all the triumph of recovered reputation, and all the dignity of a countess, ... is an event on which the pen of the contriver may well delight to dwell; it gives credit to every conclusion, and the author must share in the glory she so liberally bestows. But my affair is widely different: I bring back my heroine to her home in solitude and disgrace; and no sweet elation of spirits can lead me into minuteness. A heroine in a hack post-chaise is such a blow upon sentiment as no attempt at grandeur or pathos can withstand. Swiftly, therefore, shall her post-boy drive through the village, amid the gaze of Sunday groups; and speedy shall be her descent from it. (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Chawton ed. pp. 190-191). In this excerpt, we hear the voice of the author speaking to us in the first person singular ("my affair is ...", "I bring back...", "can lead me ..."). Here, Austen is taking us into her literary workshop, so to speak, explaining to us how she uses various techniques of narration, measuring the intended novelistic effects in relation to the means employed. Contrary to our expectations, there is to be no grande sortie for Catherine (even though we, as readers, continue to hope against hope, and of course will not be disappointed in the end, as we all know).

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The language question

The way the author does this is by using a shifted tense, a future, when she is referring to Catherine: "Swiftly shall her post-boy drive ...", "speedy shall be her descent from it [the earlier mentioned 'hack postchaise']". The shifted tense represents the perspective of the author entering the story as an 'invading character', like an auctor in fabula (see chapter 7.2.3.1); it tells us what the author intends to do with the character, not how the character sees these happenings. Catherine is not consulted in, or made privy to, the author's deliberations; as a character, she is temporarily abandoned and her story is suspended, so to speak. If this is an acceptable interpretation of the tense shift in the above extract, then I will make a similar suggestion with regard to Mary Wesley's use of 'would' in the earlier quoted extracts. Neither these forms can strictly be said to only represent a character's thought or an author's desire to move the narrative ahead: they express also a narrator's reflections on things to come. Moreover, these shifts are not happening univocally in one direction: while in the storyline, they may be future, they are 'backshifted', tense-wise ("Flora would ..."; but: "Catherine shall ...'*). The question is whose perspective these shifts are intended to represent. If we agree that in both cases, we are dealing with 'narrator intrusion', the most plausible explanation of the above shifts is that they represent the thoughts of the author as the intrusive narrative instance, a kind of 'narratorial FID'. Rather than telling us up front (as Jane Austen does) that this is what the author has decided ("Catherine shall ..."), Mary Wesley veils her narrative intrusion by pretending she is not really saying anything; she is dropping a narrative hint in what actually is a faked indirect discourse ("Flora would ..."). The muted voice of FID allows the narrator to remain unheard and unseen, yet exercise so much narrative authority that she can smuggle in bits and pieces of 'real' discourse without bringing about all too sudden changes in perspective; in this way, Flora's voice is not only projected into the future, but made audible in 'reported direct discourse', a kind of'first person FID': [Flora remembers how she evaded the conductor on the tram/train by moving from carriage to carriage ahead of him]. I wish I still had that agility, she [Flora] would think in age. (Mary Wesley, A sensible life, p. 115).

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In Wesley's ecriture, this smooth blending-in effect of direct discourse is achieved thanks to her personal intervention through a skillful use of 'authorial FID'. Contrast now Wesley's text with the following excerpt from another contemporary novel, in which a not so careful author spurns the use of any such sophisticated techniques, when introducing a character's direct discourse into the narration: [The heroine (the Ί character' of the story) is living with her father in a cabin somewhere on the beach in Southern California. Suddenly one day, he brings home a woman friend, Linda, to share their accommodations.] We had met her at one of those dreary Sunday brunch pool parties which were so much part of the Los Angeles scene. My father had latched on to her at once, as being the only woman in the place worth talking to. I like her as well. She has a vulgar sense of humour, a deep plummy voice and a surprising ability to laugh at herself. My father is attractive to women, but he has always handled his liaisons with an admirable discretion. I knew that he had embarked on an affair with Linda, but I had hardly expected that he would bring her back to Reef Point with him. (Rosamunde Pilcher, The end of summer. New York: Dell. 1989. pp. 47-48). In the above passage, the narratorial T suddenly shifts from the past preterit to the present: Ί like her as well. She has a vulgar sense of humour, ...' and so on. The curious thing about this shift is not just that it is the only one of its kind in the whole novel (everything else in the story being told in a narrative past, i.e. the imperfect and the pluperfect tenses), but that it comes totally unannounced and out of the blue. From a narrative perspective, in the case of a story that is told in 'history time', this makes little sense; the clash in tenses almost results in a 'voice clash' (see chapter 7.2), such that we are momentarily in doubt who is doing the talking here, and how this person (the T) can say, at story telling time, when everything is seen from the perspective

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The language question

of a narrative past, that she likes this woman, that she has a 'plummy voice' and all that. Introducing a present perspective that is not buttressed by any narrative introductory techniques (such as used by Jane Austen and Mary Wesley) will result in trouble and confuse the readership, rather than demonstrate authorial strength and perform a succesful audience 'seduction' (Mey 1994a).

3.3.4. Other languages, other ways At the end of section 3.1.2, 1 quoted Fludernik on the 'subjectivity' of certain "[djeictic expressions (including their syntactic equivalents)" (1993: 431). The present section will probe a little deeper into the question of those syntactic (and other) 'equivalents', and in particular, how some of those 'equivalents' operate in the context of narrative in other languages. In the preceding pages, I have mainly talked about tense as it occurs in English as instrumental in directing and manipulating free indirect discourse. This has perhaps created the false impression that English is the only language worth looking at in this connection, and that furthermore, tense is the only instrument that languages have at their disposal for the voice managing that is so essential an ingredient of manipulating the narrative device of FID. Since different languages have different morphological and syntactic structures, we may expect to see different uses of different linguistic techniques for obtaining the same aims. Some languages (such as German, or most languages of the Romance family) have a grammatical structure that is much more complicated than that of English; in particular, they offer a whole gamut of morphologically distinct features, whereas English only has a few. What English does with the aid of its rather limited tense system, other languages achieve by choosing from an array of different morphological and syntactic devices. (See, e.g., the German example of 'anchored time' provided earlier, in section 3.3).35 Here, the categories of modality (often realized in the grammar as an opposition between an indicative and subjunctive mood) and of aspect (usually appearing as a contrast between a perfective and an imperfective form of the verb) are of special interest. In German, the subjunctive plays a decisive role in the assignment of events to 'viewing time' and hence in determining the perspective of

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origin of a particular utterance. And not only that: its use allows us, according to many authors, to distinguish between what a character actually says, and what he or she merely thinks: thus, a difference may be established between represented thought (which uses the preterit) and represented speech (which is expressed in the subjunctive; cf. Fludernik 1993:96,209). Consider the following text by the modern German author Peter Weiss: [The I-person is for the first time allowed into the family circle of Edna, the girl he has been going out with, and is confronted with her formidable father, a typical upper-class Swedish academic. The professors 'voice' is heard:] Er [Ednas Vater] sagte dann, daß er nun versuchen wollte, mich als Mitglied der Familie anzusehen, es müsse aber darauf hingewiesen werden, daß dies notgedrungenerweise geschehe, und daß er nach wie vor die Art, in der ich seine Tochter verführt und mich in ihre Kreise eingedrängt habe, verurteile. ('He [Edna's father] then said that he now would try to consider me as a member of the family; however, it had to be emphasized that this happened under duress, and that this would not stop him from condemning the way in which I had seduced his daughter and invaded their circles.') (Peter Weiss, Fluchtpunkt ['Vanishing Suhrkamp, 1962, p. 166-167; my translation)

Point'].

Frankfurt:

Although this entire passage is set in free indirect discourse (announced and prefaced by the parenthetical er sagte 'he said'), there is a marked difference in the way the professor's discourse is represented. What he says is in the subjunctive (first of all, in the main clauses es müsse 'it had to be ...', and er ...verurteile 'he ... condemned', but also in the dependent clause with its subjunctive ich ... habe [eingedrängt, verführt] had [invaded, seduced]'), while what the professor has 'in mind' (by thinking it, or by exercising some other mental activity, such as 'willing') is in the indicative: er ... wollte 'he would'. Had Edna's father said er ... wolle 'he would' (in the subjunctive), the force of his

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The language question

statement would have been altogether different: he would merely have been "quoting himself, so to speak, and his 'willing' would not have transcended a vague, non-binding velleity. The reporting in that case would have been strictly on the professor's words, not on his thoughts or wishes. Many other linguistic techniques (syntactic as well as morphological) for representing free indirect discourse are being used by authors (cf. above, section 3.1; see Fludernik 1993, chapter 3, for an exhaustive presentation). However, my aim in the present chapter has not been to give a complete account of FID techniques, but rather to highlight some of the more salient aspects that are of importance for the proper assignment of the various narrative voices. In the following chapters, I will discuss the pragmatic role of these devices as our guides through the labyrinth of narration, and show how they help us discern the various voices that come bouncing off its walls.

Part Two Voice

Chapter 4 Speakability and voice 4.1. What is 'speakability'? Banfield, in her classic work on free indirect discourse, seen from a linguistic point of view (1982), has introduced the notion of an 'unspeakable sentence.' Even though she does not offer any formal definition of this concept in her book, the tenor of her argument is clear: an unspeakable sentence is one which cannot be spoken; that is to say, there does not exist any speaking subject that is able to utter the sentence. Conversely, if a sentence is indeed spoken, there must be a speaking subject. However, what is usually understood by the notion of 'subjectless sentence' (e.g. Banfield's "subjectless imperatives"; 1982: 168), is not necessarily 'speakerless'. True, imperatives are construed without overt grammatical subject; traditionally, they are said to have an implicit ('deep') subject: 'you', the addressed person (Postal 1964; see also Levinson 1983: 25, Mey 1993a: 273). In this case, the uttering subject is different from the 'deep' subject said to be implicitly present; however, even Banfield herself (o.e.: 113) is critical of this argument, which basically confuses the notions of'grammatical' and 'speaking' subject. In a more sophisticated framework, one could ask what kinds of subjects have to be present for what kinds of sentences to be uttered. Here, Banfield appeals to the well-known fact that certain languages impose restrictions of use by subjects on certain verbs, e.g. those expressing 'inner states' (such as 'sadness', 'hunger', 'desire', 'feeling', 'intention', and so on). Thus, in Japanese, a sentence such as Sanmi Jesu ('It's/I'm cold') is taken as necessarily and exclusively expressing the speaking subject's feeling; it is thus equivalent to Walashi wa samni desu (Ί am/think it's cold').

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Speakability and voice

The presence of a first person subject (either expressed as watashi T, or not expressed morphologically) is a necessary condition for such a sentence to be properly spoken, to be 'speakable'. An instance of an 'unspeakable' sentence (in the sense that it has no subject—here, because the explicitly assigned subject is the wrong one) would be, e.g., *Kodomo-tachi samui desu ('The children are/think it's cold'; kodomo 'child', tachi is used to denote the plural). The children's state of mind (or, for that matter, the state of their bodies) is not open to inspection by anybody but themselves; hence, some other speaker cannot say this sentence about them. The only subjects that can legally utter such a sentence are the children themselves, using the first person plural (either expressed as watashitachi 'we', or left out, as it is done in the first example). When referring to another person's state of mind or body, Japanese speakers must use a circumlocution: 'he/she says/they say that...', or employ a cicrumlocutory verb expressing the state of mind of a speaker, as in: Kodomo-tachi-ga samugatte-imasu ('The children are/think it's cold'; -gatte from -gam 'think, want'). Similarly, only a 'speaking Γ (to use Karl Buhler's expression; 1934: 103) can say: (Watashi-wa) mizu-ga hoshii desu (Ί want [a glass of] water'). If I tell somebody that another person, some third party to the conversation, wants some water, I have to use a circumlocution (e.g. the 'reporting' verb -gam, mentioned above): Kodomo-tachi-wa mizu-o hoshigatte-imasu

Wlwtis ' speakability"^

91

(The children want some water, I believe/think/assume/notice'; example adapted from Mizutani & Mizutani 1986: 175). Banfield's discussion of cases like these is based on an article by Kuroda (1973); she uses the Japanese examples to argue her postulate about sentences that cannot be attributed to any speaker, hence are 'unspeakable'. However, no matter how correct her observations about the incompatibility of a 'speaking Γ and the state of mind of a 'non-Γ as expressed by the speaker, the notion of 'unspeakability' itself is by no means an uncomplicated one. The first problem with Banfield's notion of an 'unspeakable sentence' is that 'speakability' is never properly defined, but only negatively described. Banfield does not inquire into what makes sentences speakable; the origins of speakability are neither discussed nor defined in her book.36 Second, and perhaps more seriously, 'unspeakable' sentences are predicated on strict linguistic terms, and thus have exclusively to do with what Banfield calls the ... withdrawal of the author as a voice in the text and the resultant creation of the autonomous text. All this comes down to the fact that subjectivity or the expressive function of language emerges free of communication and confronts its author in the form of a sentence free of all subjectivity. (1982: 10) What Banfield is trying to do here is to separate the text as a linguistic concept from the text's communicative function; in fact, narrative, as she says, has to be freed from the communicative paradigm's impositions, by defining "communication ... in rigorous linguistic terms" (ibid.} and replacing the constraints of communication by the rigors of linguistics. In my opinion, this replacement is not a profitable trade-in for either communication or linguistics; besides, as I noted above, it confuses the notions of communicating and grammatical subject. The problem goes deeper than a mere terminological disagreement or a matter of boundary definition. The core of the problem lies precisely in Banfield's undefined notion of (un)speakability. What is speakable, and what not, in the most general sense of the word? The next section will deal with this question.

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4.2. Speakable and unspeakable sentences In order to find out what (kind of) sentences are 'unspeakable' (in the sense of Banfield), it behooves us first to reflect on the question: What is a speakable sentence? Speakability cannot be defined in the abstract. If speakability is to be equated with 'having a possible speaker' (or 'speaking subject'), the question must be raised: What allows the speaker to produce a sentence, that is, to assume subject responsibility for the sentence in question, when uttered1? The moment we introduce the notion of a speaking subject, we also realize that the sentence belonging to that subject no longer is an abstract construct (as are the sentences figuring as examples in linguistics textbooks and linguistic articles), but a concrete utterance, belonging to a real subject, a person in some world—whether of fiction or of reality. Let's consider this point in some detail.

4.2.1. Sentence and utterance Traditionally, linguists have focused on the sentence as their unit of analysis. A text, for them, is composed of sentences (organized into paragraphs, chapters, and books; thus, e.g., Hjelmslev 1943); the sentences themselves can be decomposed into words and smaller meaningful units, such as the morphemes of structuralist linguistics; and finally, these meaningful units are decomposed, on another 'level of articulation'37 into essentially meaningless phonemes and their constituents. In this hierarchy, one searches in vain for something called an 'utterance'. In current linguistic thought (ever since Saussure), the uttering of a sentence belongs elsewhere in the domain of language studies: viz., in that oft parole, as Saussure called it. Parole, according to Saussure, is opposed to langue, the terms correspond roughly to what we call 'usage' (or 'language use') and 'system' (Of language'). What linguists should be interested in is the language system, that is, the grammar describing the (correct) sentences of the language; the business of studying language in use, or utterances, is best left to other, more application-oriented workers.

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Without venturing too far into the theoretical underbrush of linguistics (with its attendant dangers of overhanging tree structures and other menacing constructs), I want to draw attention to the fact that the supremacy of the sentence by no means has been recognized by all linguists. In particular, the Russian school of linguistic thinking, as embodied in the names of Voloshinov and Bakhtin (and pre-figured in such historical giants as Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Aleksandr A. Potebnja), has been a forceful defendant of alternative ways of considering the sentence. Due to the historic and geographic isolation of the protagonists of these traditions, their ideas caught on in the West only rather late in our century, if they did at all; even in our days, many Western linguists seem unwilling to discuss language on other than their own, restrictive premises. Morson and Emerson, in their comprehensive overview of Bakhtin and his school (which includes /. a. Voloshinov), remark that One of Bakhtin's many objections to the Saussurean division of language into langue (the system) and parole (the individual speech act) is that this model leads to a fundamental misconception of the utterance. In particular, it endorses a traditional view that the utterance is an instantiation of the linguistic system, which in turn implies that utterances are mechanical accumulations composed of units of language (words, sentences, etc.). Bakhtin objects that although utterances do typically contain words and sentences, those sorts of entities do not exhaust the utterance's defining features. An utterance is also constituted by elements that are, from the point of view of traditional and Saussurean linguistics, extralinguistic. (1990: 125; last emphasis mine). What this means is that, in principle, any sentence is unspeakable as long as it isn't spoken; it is the speaking person who makes the sentence into an utterance. Any (un)speakability that I want to assign to a sentence can only be predicated on the sentence's potential to be (or not to be) an utterance in some context; a speakable sentence is precisely one that can be uttered, by some speaker, under certain circumstances. Those circumstances are not just Out there', waiting to be discovered by the linguistic analyst: they form our very conditions of speaking; and, being prior to any kind of speaking, they are in a well-defined, Kantian

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sense, transcendental. For the linguists, however, the circumstances of speaking are not given in terms of utterer's 'speaking conditions', but exclusively in terms of what they, as linguists, can think of as contexts that are possible, hence necessarily couched in the abstractions of linguistic speculation. Because o£4his, the sentence as a unit of description is as indispensable, as an analytical unit, for the linguist as it is uninteresting, as a unit of use, for the speaker. Hence the inherent dichotomy between the linguist as a describer of language and the linguist as a language user, hence, too, the linguist's everlasting and dangerous dilemma of getting caught in an analytic Scylla of 'made-up' sentences or cast upon an intractable Charybdis of'real-life' utterances. What linguists do, on such occasions, is to 'introduce a suitable context', as it is called. Bakhtin, who is not afraid of calling a spade a spade (or maybe better, a 'word' a word), denounces this activity as a "smuggling in" of elements that "do not follow from a purely linguistic analysis" of the sentence (1994b: 123). In another context, Bakhtin remarks that A great many linguists and linguistic schools (in the area of syntax) are held captive by this confusion, and what they study as a sentence is in essence a kind of hybrid of the sentence (unit of language) and the utterance (unit of speech communication). (1994a: 75, originally written in 1952-1953; emphasis original). Strengthening Bakhtin's reference to syntax by changing its status from a restriction to a condition, I would maintain that most linguists, as a rule, disregard any evidence of a contextual nature that is not in some way subordinate, or can be subordinated, to what they have defined as correct linguistic methodology. For those workers, the linguistic embodiment of the 'principle of accountability' reads: 'If it ain't linguistic, it ain't right.' Before I go on to a more detailed examination of the linguists' claims and their possible relevance to a theory of narration, here is how Morson and Emerson sum up all of the above: ... linguists sometimes choose sentences as examples and then, without taking account of their assumptions, imagine particular simple situations in which those sentences are utterances. (1990: 126)

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4.2.2. To be or not to be ... a linguist? Ban field's dilemma Saying that so-called linguistic evidence should not be given primary or unique attention in discussions of'speakability', does of course not imply that such evidence should be rejected, or that it should not play a role at all. Inasmuch as narration and its various techniques are based chiefly on the use of language as a medium for communication, it is pretty obvious that the communicative and narrative techniques employed by users should be 'visible' in the language used for the purposes of communication and narration. In other words, it is and remains important to discover linguistic evidence for the claims that are made about narrative technique, about how narration proceeds, and how it is structured, in particular with regard to what I call the 'management of voice' (see below, chapter 5). The plea I am making in this book, and particularly in the present chapter, is that such evidence should be found in the narrative text itself, not in the mind of the linguist constructing an example to fit what he or she claims to be a particular linguistic manifestation of a narrative technique. Manifestations of this kind are sometimes subsumed under the label of 'root transformations' (thus by Banfield 1982 and by her followers and (some time) adversaries, such as Ehrlich 1990). The theory that is invoked here stems from an early work by Joseph Emonds (1972), whose dissertation was written in what is usually referred to as the 'Extended Standard Version' of Chomskyan transformational-generative grammar. I will not go into the details of this theory (especially since the debates on this particular linguistic manifestation of narrative technique have failed to ignite a durable discussion), but instead focus on some of the underlying assumptions that have governed the debates. One of these assumptions is that a particular narratological problem (such as that of assigning the proper reference to a personal pronoun in a running piece of text) can only be solved adequately by pointing to linguistic evidence for one or the other solution. In a sense, this claim strikes one as rather commonsensical, even to the point of banality: Without contextual evidence of some kind, how can we decide anything at all about what a text is supposed to mean? However, the assumption can also be (and is usually) strengthened and be given a more aggressive form: it is the linguistic evidence that uniquely determines the meaning of the sentence; meaning is, in the

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minds of many transformational grammarians, 'derivable1 from some kind of deep syntactic structure. It is the syntactic engine that drives the interpretation; the syntactic horse pulls the semantic (or pragmatic) cart. My point here is that (to remain in the metaphor) the syntactic horse (whatever its version or pedigree) in reality is put behind the interpretive cart which it is supposed to draw. To clarify this point, I invite my readers to consider the way one of Banfield's 'followers' (in a rather loose sense of the word) handles the problem.

4.2.3. Cart and horse: Ehrlich 's impasse Consider the following interpretive dilemma. (Ehrlich (1990: 48ff) ... Lily thought, How childlike, how absurd she [Mrs. Ramsay] was, sitting up there with all her beauty opened again in her, talking about the skins of vegetables. [There was something frightening about her.] She was irresistible. Always she got her own way in the end, Lily thought. (Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Harvester ed., p. 101. Sentence in brackets omitted by Ehrlich). On the basis of this piece of text, Ehrlich constructs two possible continuations of the story, one acceptable, the other not acceptable in terms of pragmatic suitability. Compare: Always she got her own way in the end, Lily thought. Even Lily succumbed to her. with Always she got her own way in the end, Lily thought. Even she managed to control Lily. Given that both continuations 'mean' the same, and express the same thought (which also was the main theme of the preceding passage, viz., Mrs. Ramsay's domineering, even "frightening" influence, exerted un-

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consciously but effectively), both constructions can be said to 'make sense'. Yet only the first continuation is felt as normal, while the second is odd, says Ehrlich: there is a "lack of cohesion or pragmatic inappropriateness" (ibid. 49). She then proceeds to mount an impressive machinery of syntactic constructs, based mainly on ideas originally due to the Israeli syntactician Tanya Reinhart (e.g. 1980), in order to explain this pragmatic inappropriateness. Ehrlich concludes that the cohesion that results from referential linking [the process that is responsible for the correct assignment of reference in continuing text; JM] is one means by which an RST [represented speech and thought', Banfield's term for what I call 'free indirect discourse', FID; JM] is sustained over sentences, and in particular, over sentences that do not themselves contain syntactic markers of RST. (ibid.. 50; italics mine). Applying this conclusion to the quoted passage from To the Lighthouse, we notice that indeed the "assignment of reference" (as reflected in what I call the 'utterer's voice') remains the same throughout the excerpt; another way of saying this is Ehrlich's "an RST is sustained over sentences". But this does not necessarily imply that such a 'sustainment', or (in Ehrlich's terms) the text's cohesion, is strictly due to syntactic determinants, on the contrary: the latter are only the visible signs that a cohesion in fact is present. Indirectly, Ehrlich admits this when she says that free indirect discourse can be sustained over longer passages even without the help of syntactic 'crutches' (which is how I read the part of the quote that I have italicized above). What is wrong with the assumption that the syntactic features mainly, or even solely, "account for these differing interpretations" (Ehrlich ibid.. 51) is not only that there is something missing in the 'accounting', but more basically, the implied belief in syntax as initially (and perhaps even fundamentally) responsible for a phenomenon such as 'cohesion'. That the latter indeed is Ehrlich's deeper understanding of the case at hand is beyond doubt, when we consider her subsequent discussion of syntactic referential linking. By explicitly distancing herself from Banfield and the latter's adherents, Ehrlich implicitly must appeal to the kind of thinking that I have advocated as the only solid foundation of text analysis, viz., one that stresses the importance of the proper context for a

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pragmatically correct understanding of the narration (not only as far as its contents are concerned, but also as to its syntactic construction). As evidence, consider what Ehrlich says following the passage from which the preceding quote was taken: As syntactic features alone are not adequate in accounting for these differing interpretations, it seems necessary to examine these sentences in relation to the context in which they occur in order to explain their interpretation, (ibid. 51; italics mine) But if context is indeed that important, what is all this syntactic machinery doing in the interpretive process?, one might ask. In the above case, for instance, a much simpler way of explaining Ehrlich's "sustained RST" would be to appeal to the fact that deixis is intimately connected with the 'voice' of the narrative, and that as long as that 'voice' is not deprived of its floor, we naturally (by force of Obstination', as Weinrich calls it; 1985: 14; more on this below, chapter 7.1.3) will continue our referential linking in accordance with the point of view that is consistent with that particular voice. In our example, the voice is Lily's, and the deictic reference that she has established, is to Mrs. Ramsay. In that context, a 'she...' in near-initial position of the next sentence will naturally lead us to the assumption of a continued referential linking to Mrs. Ramsay— nothing unexpected here. By contrast, the 'even' preceding the 'she' leads us to expect the unexpected, hence it is pragmatically out of place, since such expectations don't match up with what characterizes this constructed narrative, viz., sustained referential linking, or reference by 'default', as I have called it above, in chapter 3.1.3. I have been careful to avoid giving the impression that 'cohesion' in discourse (or 'coherence', as I would call it, since I prefer to reserve the term 'cohesion' for the purely morphological and syntactic aspects of the phenomenon; see Mey 1993a: 195) is established by techniques such as referential linking. The links that occur in a text are the result of the process of discourse organization, whose roots extend outside syntax (and even outside semantics). Discourse is organized by utterers in context; that context comprises not only the words uttered and their linkage, but also, and mainly, the way these words express the subjects' feelings and thoughts, as these are made possible in the subjects' actual living conditions. When Ehrlich argues "that the cohesion that results from refe-

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rential linking is one means by which an RST [represented speech and thought] interpretation is sustained over sentences, ..." (ibid. 50), she seems to imply that cohesion is caused by linking: "[cohesion] results from referential linking" (ibid). But this is putting the cause where the effect should have been; as I said, Ehrlich's cart is before her horse. I suggested above that Ehrlich implicitly acknowledges this impasse of syntax. What she does is, first of all, to hedge her hypothesis by saying that referential linking is just "one means by which an RST interpretation is sustained over sentences"; in other words, there might be others. But then she reminds us that there are cases in which RST is not expressed syntactically, and that we have a potential confusion between the voice of the FID ('RST') and the "objective viewpoint of a narrator" (this particular confusion belongs to the class of phenomena I have dubbed 'voice clashes'; more on these in chapter 7.2). And she concludes: As syntactic features alone are not adequate in accounting for these differing interpretations, it seems necessary to examine these sentences in relation to the context in which they occur in order to explain their interpretation, (ibid.. 51) I simply couldn't agree more. 'Context' is the theme that I struck at the very beginning of this section, where I drew attention to the fact that sentences, in order to become utterances, have to have a context. Such a context, it now becomes apparent even to those who dote on linguistic methods as the only procurers of 'hard' evidence in discourse analysis, is not to be defined as merely syntactic or semantic; context is the place where pragmatic considerations enter the picture. It follows that only pragmatics is able to explain the phenomenon of 'RST' to everybody's satisfaction.

4.2.4. A linguistic voice? Fludernik's problem Above, I said that a sentence, in order to be speakable, must have a speaker, an 'uttering subject'—who may or may not be identical with the syntactic subject of the spoken sentence. Roughly, we can say that in direct discourse, the 'speaking Γ is the subject of the uttered sentence, but that as soon as the spoken sentence gets reported by another speaker

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(overtly present or hidden, as in most narration), another voice, that of the narrator, creeps in. Consider the following case: "/ am hungry^. This may be a rendering of an utterance by a person called John; we have an instance of 'direct discourse', spoken by John, who is both subject of the sentence "I am hungry" and its 'uttering subject'. But consider now the case where somebody else tells us that John is hungry, as in: "John said: 7am hungry'". Here, we are facing an instance of reported, or quoted, 'direct discourse': some reporting instance (represented by the double quotation marks) is telling us that John said am hungry'. The subject both of the reporting sentence 'John said' and of the reported sentence am hungry' is 'John'; in addition, we are aware of the 'voice' of the reporting instance, who is not the subject of either sentence, but who is ultimately responsible for the reporting/quoting. This is the narrator's voice, the (physically inaudible) voice telling us thai 'John said ...'. The reported discourse is represented in an indirect way, either with the help of a conjunction (such as the English 'that'), or by special syntactic constructions (such as the accitsativm cum inßnitivo in Latin; for illustrations, see footnote 28). Other languages have other techniques, e.g. that of adding a special 'quotative' suffix to the reported uttterance (such as the West Greenlandic -gaacj) or joining a 'reportive' suffix to the reporting verb form (such as Turkish -mis, for "narrative past"; Lewis 1953: 91). An English example is: John said (that) he was hungry7. (Or: He was hungry, John said). A Latin accusativus cum inßnitivo construction: Fama fin t Themistoclem venenum sumpsisse. ('Rumor had it that Themistocles had taken poison').

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(E. Schreiner, Latinsk grammatik. Oslo, Cappelen 1950, p. J22). We call this way of narrating 'indirect discourse' (Latin: oratio obliqua). As a rule, also here the voice of the narrator is 'inaudible'—which is not the same as saying that the narrator isn't there. As we will see later, a number of the disturbances that can be grouped under the heading of 'clashing voices' are due precisely to the fact that the unseen narrator suddenly does a 'spy-hop' out of the narrative waters and wants to have a piece of the action, as in the following: She [Frederica] was put out—not disappointed but made uneasy—by the images of the Maries in the church. It is an uncompromising fortress-like church ... (A.S. Byatt, Still Life, Collier/Macmillan, 1986, p. 87) Here, the narrative is disrupted by the sudden appearance on the scene of the narrator acting like a tourist guide, and telling us something that she/he thinks we should know about the church ("It is an uncompromising fortress-like church..."). This observation of ecclesiastical architecture is alien to the story, in that it does not form part of the narrative world in which Frederica and her friends move about. To further accentuate the 'alien-ness' (see chapter 12) of the 'guide's comment' and its reporting voice, the information is proffered using the 'gnomic' present tense; a stark contrast to what happens a few lines down, where the images of the two "Maries" are described in the narrative past, reintegrating, as it were, the factual description of the surroundings in Frederica's story: The sacred images of the two Maries leaned awkwardly from a plinth on a balustrade. Both had sweet, round, pink-cheeked china-doll faces;... (A.S. Byatt, Still Life, p. 87) Indirect discourse may take the form of a (direct or indirect) question, the latter in English often introduced by a conjunction such as 'if or 'whether'. Other languages may either use conjunctions fulfilling the same functions, or particles suffixed to some part of the phrase or

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sentence. In the following excerpt, various forms of reported discourse occur in parallel: Had she got swimming things? Wilkie said. She shifted her string bag in her rigid lap. 'Come on in,' said Wilkie. (A.S. Byait, Still Life, p. 81) Here, the reported indirect discourse (in the form of a question: "Had she got swimming things9") and the reported direct discourse ("Come on in") stand naturally side by side, the two 'reporter phrases' containing the 'verb of saying' only differing in the (perhaps stylistically motivated) ordering of their elements: "Wilkie said" vs. "said Wilkie". (Notice also Byatt's discriminating use of quotation marks in the above excerpt). From a strictly grammatical viewpoint, the transition from direct through (reported) indirect to free indirect discourse (FID) is not overly dramatic; in many instances (such as the examples above), it suffices to drop, or slightly alter, the 'reporter phrases', with the concomitant incidental changes in syntactic structure and/or lexical selection. Thus, a direct question such as [Wilkie asked:] "Have you got swimming things?" may become. "Wilkie asked (if) she had got swimming things" (a reported indirect question), or (as in the extract above) "Had she got swimming things? Wilkie said."—where the neutral reporting verb 'said' preludes on the 'free' character of the modified indirect question as not being strictly dependent on the actual wording of the question asked. This independence, then, is fully realized in some free indirect question that Frederica could be supposed to have asked herself at this juncture: "Had she got swimming things?". Many authors, among these Fludemik (1993), have raised doubts as to whether it is at all possible to characterize FID in strictly grammatical terms; as we have seen above, this is precisely Banfield's problem. In contrast, Fludemik's own stance is that we should not reject, or underrate, linguistic evidence in narrative matters, even though we may be critical of a linguistic 'all-or-none' approach ä la Banfield. Fludemik's problem is to do, rather, with the inattention that many literary critics and scholars of literature (among them even notable ones, like the expressly mentioned and quoted Henry Louis ('Skip') Gates, Jr.; Fludemik 1993: 81-82) seem to be willing to condone and practice when it comes to the

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formal characterization of FID and related matters. I will revert to these problems in the next section (see also below, chapter 5.4).

4.3. FID and grammar Actually, the only authority who consistently and staunchly has defended the feasibility of defining FID on 'grammatical' (understood as: generative-transformational) grounds is Ann Banfield; cf. the following quotation: The phenomenon presented in these passages is the exclusively literary style known as Ίε style indirect \\bre and which I call 'represented speech and thought'. It has only in the last few years [Banfield is writing in 1982] been recognized as a specifically grammatical phenomenon in Anglo-American criticism. (This is why it has no well-established English name). (1982: 68; last italics mine) I will disregard the more doubtful historical and terminological postulates that this quote hides (whether or not the critics, "Anglo-American" or others, have recognized FID as a "specifically grammatical phenomenon" neither logically nor historically implies that one couldn't have a "wellestablished name" for it; besides, what's wrong with the term FID?). More interesting is Banfield's underlying presumption that FID should, and in fact only can, be properly treated and defined as a "specifically grammatical phenomenon". The following sections will be devoted to this important question.

4.3.1. The saving grace of rules: 'Grammaire et Riffaterre' To start off the discussion, let me raise a more general issue: What, if any, is the function of grammatical (mostly morphological and syntactic) devices in explaining the phenomena of discourse9 First off, let me note that even among the critics who favor a linguisticsbased approach to problems of FID, there are those who seem to be less than convinced that grammatical evidence as such can serve as a possible, or even unique, Jefiniens of any discourse phenomena, especially in a

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historical perspective. Thus Fludemik, in her comprehensive and up-todate studies of FID, remarks that, as far as earlier stages of English are concerned, there is no clear way of deciding, on morphological grounds, whether or not FID existed in fifteenth-century English prose (Fludernik 1993:98). Fludemik's point here is made expressly in relation to Banfield's (1982) claim that FID does not exist in earlier forms of English, simply because there is no grammatical evidence for such a phenomenon. Banfield maintains that historically speaking, FID is a strictly literary invention, originating in the 18th century.38 Fludernik (1993: 93) attributes the absence of such evidence to what she calls the Oral character' of FID, combined with the fact that English authors ofthat period didn't know how to determine orality other than by way of intonation and the like—which naturally is hard to represent in written form. Commenting on the various ways in which different languages represent FID (see also above, chapter 3.3.4), Fludernik notes in particular the case of Russian, where tense shifts in connection with the 'concordance of tenses' (Ehrlich 1990: 7), also known from Latin as comecitlio lemporum (discussed above in chapter 3.3.3, and one of the prime symptoms of FID in that language), do not seem to hold as strictly as they do elsewhere. As a result of this lack of stringency, one of major diacritic symptoms of FID seems to be (at least partially) excluded as evidence in Russian.39 The historical and cross-language evidence with regard to the universality of FID is thus inconclusive, and cannot shed light on the question of whether FID is at all strictly definable in grammatical terms. Although the issue itself thus remains moot, Fludernik (faithful to her scientific ancestors Chomsky and Banfield), proclaims her adherence (at least in principle) to linguistic evidence as the only admissible criterion. At the same time, she has her reservations about what has been termed the "linguistic fallacy", viz. the erroneous notion that narrative prose should be totally and necessarily describable in purely linguistic terms. Roland Posner, to whom we owe the above term (1982: 126), warns us against the unwarranted belief that the essence of poetic language can be completely comprehended by purely linguistic rules. (ibid.\ thus quoted approvingly by Fludernik 1993: 339).

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Generally speaking, linguistic rules are neither sufficient nor necessary for the explanation of literary phenomena. The first part of this statement is indirectly confirmed by Fludernik's reference to Riffaterre's (1960, 1961) 'principle of polyvalence', which states that "a given linguistic characteristic ..., can be employed for a variety of presumed purposes, as well as for none at all" (Fludernik 1993: 349). Riffaterre's principle (which "needs to be insisted on most emphatically"; Fludernik ibid.) implies that, e.g., a shift in tense never is a necessary condition for establishing the presence of FID, but also, that such a shift sometimes may be a sufficient condition, depending on the circumstances of the text and its consumers. The grammar needs to be supplemented, but not supplanted, by other means of expression; this is what Riffaterre's principle is all about: Grammaire et Riffaterre, as our section title has it. What we are talking about here, of course, is the pragmatics of text interpretation, often understood as the 'subsumption' of the text under its conditions for production and understanding. This view is shared by Fludernik in the sequel of the above-cited passage, where she characterizes the most promising progress towards a theory of text understanding as that made "in the area of pragmatic ... script notions, situational implicature, textual relevance and macro-textual structure." (1993: 339340) Indeed, the issue of FID (and for that matter, the entire question of reported speech and thought—the two are not always coterminous) is a pragmatic matter, even though, as we will see, there are certain grammatical indices which point the way toward an interpretation of the phenomena. This is also the viewpoint defended by Haberland in the earlier quoted article (1986: 228, see footnote 38); I wholeheartedly concur in his conclusions. In the following, I will discuss one example of just such a pragmatic 'subsumption' (even though I wish to distance myself from the idea that the subsuming, necessarily and exclusively, must take place under the aegis of what traditionally is called a linguistic approach). Consider the following passages from a contemporary literary text, in which we find no formal clues as to where direct narrative stops, and FID begins:

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'Well...' she said. 'Well...'he said. 'Marcus—' He looked at her directly, gently, helplessly. Something in him was different. She identified it; it was a concern for herself, useless enough, helpless enough, born of fear. (A.S. Byatt, Siill Life, Collier/Macmillan, 1986, p. 81) In this excerpt, "she" is Winifred, Marcus' mother, talking to her son. The initial dialogue between the two is straightforward enough: reported direct discourse. It is followed by a description of Marcus' action of looking at his mother. But how about the next sentence, "Something in him was different"? This could be read as a sharing of some knowledge that the Omniscient narrator' has of the person Marcus. However, the next sentence shows that this is not the case: it is Winifred whose voice utters, in FID, that something in Marcus is different, and it is only Winifred "herself who is able to "identify] it" as what it really is: "a concern for herself,... born of fear". Similarly, we are not in doubt that "she" in the following passage from Virginia Woolf refers to the girl Clara Durrani, who is secretly in love with Jacob Flanders, but otherwise leads a bored, frustrated society life: Ought she not to be grateful? Ought she not to be happy? Especially since her mother looked so well, and enjoyed so much talking to Sir Edgar about Morocco, Venezuela, or some such place. (Jacob 's Room, Harvest ed., p. 166) especially as the utterance preceding the above excerpt already had been identified as Clara's: And Clara would hand the pretty china teacups, and smile at the compliment—that no one in London made tea so well as she did. "We get it at Brocklebank's," she said, "in Cursitor Street."

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The question here is not only how to determine the identity of the "she" as to its deictic reference. In the terms of our discussion in chapter 3.3.3.2, the 'deictic center'40 here is unambiguously Clara; there is not much to be unsure about. More interesting is the fact that Clara's discourse changes from the earlier reported direct ("We get it ...") to free indirect ("Ought she not ..."): the voice of the speaking subject remains the same, but the voice of the reporter vanishes, so to speak, into the woodwork of Mrs. Durrani's parlor cabinets. Clara's voice in "Ought she not..." is liberated from the obligatory reporting by some agent telling us that "she said": hence, we're hearing her discourse as indirect and 'free'. Most importantly, there is no formal device warning us that this change is about to happen: the introduction of the free indirect discourse's voice is executed pragmatically, on an entirely different level than that of syntax or morphology. This is not to say that we cannot, in certain cases, need some support from explicit linguistic devices; the techniques are well-known, and have been discussed in great detail in the literature (cf. most recently, Fludernik's comprehensive exposition of the problem of FID in her 1993 book). For the purpose of the present study, it suffices to note the use (or non-use) of these techniques whenever they occur (or don't) in connection with our main interest: the different voices of the text and their interaction. Here is another example, taken from the same text by Virginia Woolf: ..., as Mrs. Durrant discussed with Sir Edgar the policy of Sir Edward Grey, Clara only wondered why the cabinet looked dusty, and Jacob had never come. Oh, here was Mrs. Cowley Johnson ... (Jacob 's Room, Harvest ed., p. 166). The little exclamatory interjection Oh' shows us that the discourse here is being taken over by Clara, whose voice in the preceding context had been reported only, in the form of her indirect questions "[Clara wondered] why the cabinet looked dusty, and Jacob had never come". Remaining in indirect discourse, the exclamatory utterance: "Oh, here was Mrs. Cowley Johnson ..." is attributed to Clara, whose voice now appears in free indirect mode, rather than being reported indirectly, as was the case in the earlier passage. The transition to FID from reported

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discourse, or 'psycho-narration', as some call it (since the reporting is done on the mental state of the character: "Clara ... wondered"; see Fludernik 1993: 77) is eased by the insertion of "Oh", an element that usually is associated with direct discourse, whether reported or not; the shift in tense (the preterit "was", as opposed to Clara's earlier present tense: "We get it at Brocklebank's") guides us in the same direction.41

4.3.2. Speakabilily, subject, and voice. In Banfield's terms, in order to be speakable, a sentence must have a subject. In the context of the present work, I prefer to say that an utterance, in order to be possible, must have a speaking voice. This is also what Bakhtin tells us, in his usual, succinct fashion: "there are no voiceless words that belong to no one" (1994b: 12). Speakability and voice are closely related; an utterance that has no voice is not an utterance, but just a collection of words strung together (amazingly enough, this characterization is precisely what has been adopted as the description of a sentence in much of contemporary linguistics).42 Vice versa, a voice cannot be heard unless some utterer is present; even the Voice crying in the wilderness' (Is. 40: 3; Lk. 3: 4) must have some utterer. Problems arise when the voice we hear is not the voice we expect to hear, or when there are two or more voices competing for uttering privileges. In the worst of cases, the voices 'clash' (on this, see chapter 7.2); in less severe cases, the voices intrude upon one another, one voice mingling with, and sometimes 'rubbing off" on, or tainting, the other voice(s).431 will deal with the special cases in later chapters; here, it will be useful to have a look at the general issue of 'multi-voicedness' as manifested in the problem of 'dual voice'.

4.3.3. Dual voice In a very broad sense, one can say that all utterances are possessed of a 'dual voicedness': every utterance is part of a dialogic process, by which the utterer addresses an addressee, and by which the utterance becomes part of the addressee's world as much as of the addresser's. On this line

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of thinking, the utterance is as much the addressee's responsibility as it is the utterer's. As Morson and Emerson put it, ... utterances ... belong to their speakers (or writers) only in the least interesting, purely physiological sense; but as meaningful communication, they always belong to (at least) two people, the speaker and his or her listener. (1990: 129) This 'inter-individual' character of utterances is what Bakhtin has called their 'dialogic' aspect, or their 'addressivity', which is how Morson and Emerson translate the Bakhtinian term obrascennost' (1990: 131; Bakhtin 1994a: 98-99).44 When speaking, I address—but at the same time, I am myself addressed. My speech presupposes the presence of another, a dialogue partner, whose response is essential and constitutive for my addressing, and whose reception is the voice responding to mine: 'abyss calling upon abyss' (Ps. 42: 7). This dialogization, or 'doublevoicing', as Bakhtin also terms it (1994b: 106ff), underlies all our linguistic productions, whether they are consciously thought of as 'dialogues' (in the everyday sense of 'conversation', direct or reported), or are created as narration (as in a novel, a play, and so on). This 'internal dialogicity', as I will call it (with a take-off on Morson & Emerson's characteristic of the Bakhtinian view on language as essentially 'dialogic'; 1990: 130-133; see Bakhtin I994a: 92-93), is what makes narration possible, and stories acceptable to the readers. What is narrated is not just the story, a more or less organized jumble of facts: it is the anticipated story, a text which is 'not yet spoken' but whose narrative expression is pre-figured, anticipated, whether we are familiar with the text's contents (as in the case of traditional, oral poetry: Homer, or the Nordic sagas), or we are not (as in most modern poetry and fiction). In either case, the author/narrator must strike a pact with the readership, engage in a process of 'dialogization', in order to be able to tell the story; conversely, the audience must be 'captured' and be kept 'captive', in order for the story to hit home. As I have called it elsewhere, the readership must be 'seduced' to participate in the narrative or poetic dialogue (Mey 1994a: 162); if this seduction fails, the readers will refuse to read on, because they simply cannot follow. It is this fundamental, internal dialogicity (which has been described by different names, such as 'dialogue', 'context', 'implied reader' and so on) which constitutes the 'carrying wave' of the special 'transmission' that is

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called narration. But as in the case of radio transmission, the carrying waves can be modulated differently. In broadcasting technology, one distinguishes between modulation on the radio waves' amplitude ('AM') and modulation on their frequency ('FM'); in narrative technique, the voices of the narrative discourse can likewise be distinguished along several dimensions. Thus, we should differentiate between the Bakthinian, basic dialogicity underlying every discourse, and the more or less Overt' dialogizing which takes place between the various voices of the text (not necessary limited to two or three, and specifically including the author's individual voice as that of a potential narrative persona). In a sense, every discourse is reported discourse, as Bakhtin has remarked. This not only reflects the basic dimension of dialogue, it constitutes the foundation of the whole narrative enterprise. Furthermore, it is this basic duality which prepares us for the correct reception of a text. The 'dual voice hypothesis', as originally propounded by Bakhtin, can be made to include this fundamental duality as the pragmatic presupposition for the reader's understanding of a text. In a successful narrative situation, the reader's point of view jibes with the author/narrator's. As a result, the narrative blend of voices forms a dialogic concentus: the reader's and the author/narrator's voices sound in harmony with the voices of the characters, in unison or counterpoint. When readers in this way are seduced by, surrender to, an author, they invest him or her with a certain 'narratorial dignity', attributing to the author such near-divine properties as omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. The authorial instance thus becomes the narrative authority, the original dens dea ex liiteris. And to the extent that this interpretation of the dual voice hypothesis captures the "readers' experience" (Fludernik 1993: 350), it may be said to constitute the pragmatic foundation of the reading process itself

But what about the problems that we, as readers, encounter with 'dual voicedness' of texts? Generally, such problems have their origin in interfering levels of modulation, whenever we are presented with potential or actual conflicting voices. The different kinds of 'voice clashes' will be the subject of special treatment later on (see chapter 7.2); for now, I want to concentrate on the general problem of how voices are 'managed'; this will be the subject of the next chapter. A further interesting question is to

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what extent the reader him- or herself can be said to have a 'voice'; this issue will be dealt with in chapter 8.

Chapter 5

Voice and voice management 5.1. Vocality and voice By vocality, I understand the fact that in a narrative, each piece of text (quoted utterances, descriptive prose, or other) has a definite voice, that is to say, a way of speaking that can be attributed to one or the other of the agents involved in the narrative process. In the normal case, each agent speaks with a single voice, his or her own; cases of 'doublevoicedness' (such as exemplarily encountered in irony or doubleentendre} will be discussed below, in section 5.4. Taking the simile of 'speaking with one's tongue in cheek' as the physical correlate of an utterer's '(double-)tonguedness' or a text's '(multi)-vocality' (see chapter 6.2), one could say that, in arranging the different vocal parts, as they are acted out by different people and instances on different levels of the narration, it is of the utmost importance not only to keep one's own tongue straight in one's mouth, but also to make the other speakers "watch their tongues" (to quote a famous expression of Horace's; Od. III.i.2). That means that the interplay (or 'polyphony') of the different instances at work in the narration must not lead to confusion, even though at the surface, the individual voices may intermingle and even get jumbled in the process of delivering their messages. I will refer to this process of controlling vocality as 'voice management'; the next section will look somewhat closer into the ways this management may happen. (On the dialectics of vocality, see also chapter 12.3.3).

5.2. Voice management A very simple technique of voice management is the alternation of voices such as we know it from 'normal', two-party conversation. Here, the adjacency of the conversational turns, the so-called "(first and second) pair parts' as defined in conversation analysis ('CA'; (see Mey 1993: 243-244 for particulars) guarantees the proper management of the individual voices. (See below, chapter 7.1.2, for more information

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on the techniques available for announcing a voice's appearance on the 'written' scene). However, alternations of this kind are not always happening between two interlocutors only; conversations often get many-voiced. In addition, the strict alternation that we are familiar with, and are socialized into from early infancy ('Wait for your turn', 'Don't speak out of order', and so on), is the exception in a number of cultures, rather than the rule. Typical cases of neglect of Western-type conversational practices may thus result in what we would call a 'cacophony', but which is commonly accepted as a normal way of making conversation in other cultures; as an example, compare the 'broken dialogues' described by Reisman (1989) for the West Indian community of Antigua. A more complex (and in many ways, more effective) method of keeping track of the voices is the use of deictics, by which we are able to maintain a distinction not only between the different speakers and their voices, but also between what they say as the expression of their personal beliefs, and other (explicit or implicit) indications of their 'points of view'. A third, even more sophisticated ascription of vocality relies on textinternal means such as content or 'theme', and what one could call, to use a Bakhtinian term, 'tonality'. We may ask, with Morson and Emerson (1990: 334), how we can perceive such a thing as "the tonality of the Oblonsky family" in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; after all, this is a concept not belonging in the domain of speech, but derived (as are so many of Bakhtin's terms) from the sphere of music. There, for instance, we may speak of a 'Wagnerian' tonality, characterized by such traits as the composer's love of dramatic octave jumps, or by the particular 'signature snatches' of tone (descending quarts) and rhythm ('DAAA daa da daaa') found scattered through his music. How this term may be applied to literature is a question that traditionally has been discussed in stylistics; in the present context, I will restrict myself to a few comments. Despite its somewhat idiosyncratic associations, the expression 'tonality' is perhaps to be preferred to that of 'zone', a concept that Bakhtin also uses, but never properly defines (as in 'character zone' or 'speech zone': zona geroev, recevaja zona; Holquist 1992: 434). The image of a 'zone' tends to suggest the existence of something outside the voicebearer, an objective quality standing on its own—in the manner of a bad

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weather zone or a fog area which one may enter or leave, quite independently of the lives of the people and of whatever else happens there. In the spirit of the musical metaphor (and without pushing the similarity too far), it seems more appropriate to compare the managing of voices to the writing or execution of a piece of polyphonic music, preferably a fugue, in which the various voices blend, but keep their own characteristic thematic, tonal, and rhythmic properties, at least within the limits of their appearance on the musical stage. An illustrative example of ingenious voice management is found in Virginia Woolfs novel Jacob's Room, which (more than any other novel I know) is built on the availability of this technique. The novel's voices describe and comment on, in fact construct, the 'room' in which the protagonist is said to live. Jacob's 'room' is first of all a polyphonic framework of voices—and only secondarily represented, in parts of the novel, by concrete physical locations. In the following quote, 'Jacob' is present in much of the inner and audible dialogue; the 'room' he occupies is constructed through the musings and longings of the narrative's changing voices. Woolf manages these voices, and their changes, with extraordinary skill; to make her voice management technique visible, I have inserted a marker (|) in the extract below, whenever a shift in voice takes place. Voice shifts may be officially announced, as when the utterance, in so-called 'reported speech or thought', is prefaced by a verbum dicendi or sentiendi ('say', 'think' etc.); or they may be inferred, either from the content of the uttered phrase or sentence or from the external circumstances surrounding it. (On 'announced' voice shifts, see further chapter 7.1). [Clara, who is secretly in love with Jacob, lives with her mother, Mrs. Durrant, a tyrannical socialite airhead, and helps the latter entertain her numerous guests, among these an elderly gentleman, Mr. Bowley, who understands more of Clara's affliction than he dares to express. Much of what transpires about Clara's state of mind is given in a long analeptic segment in the middle of the following excerpt, in which we obtain some insight into her background and the reasons of her almost rash behavior during a walk with Mr. Bowley. Here, she comes close to revealing herself to him and discovering her true feelings about her relationship to her mother (and, indirectly, to Jacob); she also realizes the futility of her role as the nice, obedient daughter who sacrifices herself

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silently in the hopes of one day being rescued by the white knight on his steed. So when the 'steed' does indeed materialize (unfortunately, only in the shape of a runaway horse), it serves to give the frightened Clara an occasion to throw herself into the arms of Mr. Bowley, her eternal near-confidant and stand-in male attachment—but of course only for the duration. In the end, the complex voice construction called 'Jacob's room' drowns out her own voice, and reduces Mr. Bowley's to a "profound comment, though inarticulately expressed": "Tut-tut".] The Aberdeen terrier must be exercised, and as Mr. Bowley was going that very moment— | would like nothing better than a walk— | they went together. Clara and kind little Bowley—Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany, Bowley who wrote letters to the Times in a jocular vein about foreign hotels and the Aurora Boreal is—Bowley who liked young people and walked down Piccadilly with his right arm resting on the boss of his back.

| "Little demon!" | cried Clara, and attached Troy to his chain. Bowley anticipated—hoped for—a confidence. Devoted to her mother, Clara sometimes felt her a little, | well, her mother was so sure of herself that she could not understand other people being — being—"as ludicrous as I am," | Clara jerked out (the dog tugging her forwards). And Bowley thought she looked like a huntress and turned over in his mind which it should be | —some pale virgin with a slip of the moon in her hair, | which was a flight for Bowley. The colour was in her cheeks. To have spoken outright about her mother—still, it was only to Mr. Bowley, who loved her, as everybody must; but to speak was unnatural for her, yet it was awful to feel, as she had done all day, that she must tell some one. "Wait till we cross the road," | she said to the dog, bending down. Happily she had recovered by that time. | "She thinks so much about England," | she said. anxious—" I

"She is so

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Bowley was defrauded as usual. Clara never confided in any one. | "'Why don't the young people settle it, eh?" | he wanted to ask. | "What's all this about England?' | —a question poor Clara could not have answered, since, as Mrs. Durrant discussed with Sir Edgar the policy of Sir Edward Grey, Clara only wondered why the cabinet looked dusty, and Jacob had never come. | Oh, here was Mrs. Cowley Johnson... | And Clara would hand the pretty china teacups, and smile at the compliment—that no one in London made tea as well as she did. | "We get it at Brocklebank's," | she said, | "in Cursitor Street." | Ought she not to be grateful? Ought she not to be happy? Especially since her mother looked so well and enjoyed so much talking to Sir Edgar about Morocco, Venezuela, or some such place. "Jacob! Jacob!'" thought Clara; and kind Mr. Bowley, who was ever so good with old ladies, looked; stopped; wondered | whether Elizabeth wasn't too harsh with her daughter; | wondered about Bonamy, Jacob— | which young fellow was it— | and jumped up directly Clara said she must exercise Troy. They had reached the site of the old Exhibition. They looked at the tulips. Stiff and curled, the little rods of waxy smoothness rose from the earth, nourished yet contained, suffused with scarlet and coral pink. Each had its shadow; each grew trim in the diamond-shaped wedge as the gardener had planned it. | "Barnes never gets them to grow like that," | Clara mused; she sighed. | "You are neglecting your friends," | said Bowley, as some one, going the other way, lifted his hat. She started; acknowledged Mr. Lionel Parry's bow; wasted on him what had sprung for Jacob. (| "Jacob! Jacob!" | she thought.)

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| "But you'll get run over if I let you go," | she said to the dog. | "England seems all right," | said Mr. Bowley. The loop of the railing beneath the statue of Achilles was full of parasols and waistcoats; chains and bangles; of ladies and gentlemen, lounging elegantly, lightly observant. | " | 'This statue was erected by the women of England...' | " | Clara read out with a foolish little laugh. | "Oh, Mr. Bowley! Oh!" | Gallop—gallop—gallop— | a horse galloped past without a rider. The stirrups swung; the pebbles spurted. | "Oh, stop! Stop it, Mr. Bowley!" | she cried, white, trembling, gripping his arm, utterly unconscious, the tears coming. | "Tut-tut!" | said Mr. Bowley in his dressing-room an hour later. | "Tut-tut!" | —a comment that was profound enough, though inarticulately expressed, since his valet was handing his shirt studs. (Jacob 's Room, Harvest ed, 165-167). In this segment, we encounter a number of different styles of voice management. First of all, there are the changes from the narrator's voice to that of one of the characters in the story: Clara, Mr. Bowley, and so on. Usually, these shifts are announced by a verbum dicendi: 'cried,' 'said,' 'jerked out', 'read out'; or a verbum sentiendi: 'thought,' 'turned over in his mind,' 'wanted to ask,' 'wondered,' 'mused'—all these are verbs of the kind earlier (chapter 3.3.3.2) introduced as 'parentheticals' (see also chapter 7.2.1). As a rule, with the first kind of parentheticals, the voices are set off typographically by quotation marks: "She thinks so much about England," she said. "She is so anxious—" In contrast, the verbs of the second type usually lack quotes, as they are dealing with thoughts or feelings, not with properly spoken utterances:

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And Bowley thought she looked like a huntress and turned over in his mind which it should be—some pale virgin with a slip of the moon in her hair,... In other cases where a new voice is introduced to the familiar accompaniment of quotation marks, the device serves to indicate a kind of 'sotto voce quoted discourse': the reporting parentheticals do not pierce the tonal surface of the narrative, so to speak, in contrast to the pieces of regularly quoted, direct discourse inserted in a normal dialogic score. Here are some examples: •'Jacob! Jacob!" thought Clara. ("Jacob! Jacob!" she thought.) "Barnes never gets them to grow like that," Clara mused; she sighed. Such 'utterances' are not uttered (and some are not meant to be, cf. our discussion of the 'unspeakable sentence' in chapter 4). Still, they usually could have been spoken as parts of a dialogue, and sometimes are pursued in the sequel as if they indeed had been: "Why don't the young people settle it, eh?" he [Mr. Bowley] wanted to ask. "What's all this about England?"—a question poor Clara could not have answered,... —and a question, we might add, poor Mr. Bowley will have to answer himself; which in fact he does, a page later, by a rather timid, direct utterance: "England seems all right," said Mr. Bowley. All the cases mentioned here can be subsumed under the heading of •quoted discourse': the voices express, more or less verbatim, what is being said or thought by their owners. Yet another technique of voice management is put to work, when quoted discourse appears without there being any verb explicitly announcing the corresponding, expected shift in voice:

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... and as Mr. Bowley was going that very moment—would like nothing better than a walk—they went together, ... Here, the narrator's voice is interrupted by Mr. Bowley saying that he would like nothing better than a walk. However, the quote is unannounced, and can only be recognized by its content, which has to do with Mr. Bowley's feelings. In addition, the way these feelings are expressed here, viz., by the modal 'would like', rather than by a factual 'did' or Miked', serves as a subtle sign of direct speech creeping into the unobtrusively quoted thoughts (here, as in the previous example, helped by a pair of Woolf s famous long dashes), and thus also is helpful in our recognition of another voice's taking the lead. The same can be seen in the next example, where the narrator's voice alternates with Mr. Bowley's inserted question "—which young fellow was it—'*: ...kind Mr. Bowley... wondered whether Elizabeth wasn't too harsh with her daughter; wondered about Bonamy, Jacob—which young fellow was it—and jumped up directly Clara said she must exercise Troy. Not only the reference to Clara's mother, Mrs. Durrani, as 'Elizabeth', but also the use of the contracted form 'wasn't' (not used by the author except in dialogue) 45 alerts us to the fact that we are listening to Mr. Bowley, whose voice is further reintroduced directly in the passage between the dashes. A further interesting instance of voice management can be observed in cases when the narrator, without warning, introduces one of the actors as speaking in 'free indirect discourse' ('FID', cf. chapter 3.3.3.2; for a theoretical discussion of this phenomenon, see section 5.4, below). Here is an illustrative example from our excerpt: The colour was in her cheeks. To have spoken outright about her mother—still, it was only to Mr. Bowley, who loved her, as everybody must: but to speak was unnatural to her, yet it was awful to feel, as she had done all day, that she must tell someone. After the voice of the omniscient narrator has informed us about Clara's physical appearance (the color of her cheeks), Clara's inner voice takes

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over. We hear self-accusation, mitigated by extenuating circumstances, such as Mr. Bowley's love and understanding, perhaps also his somewhat foolish persona. Also, there are generalizing observations, propped up by the invocation of her particular need on this particular occasion ("all day"), and brought to a dramatic height by the sudden shift in tense (from past to present) in must, spoken with an emphasis and strength that would have been fit for direct discourse. All these factors contribute to establish in the reader a mental image of Clara's inner voice.46 Voice changes like these can be very subtle, almost unnoticeable, as when we first hear Clara being described by the narrator as 'devoted to her mother', then hear Clara herself express less positive feelings towards her mother (in unfinished free indirect discourse), to end up with a full-blown, dramatic exclamation, proffered vehemently in direct discourse, and "jerked out", to the physical accompaniment of the Aberdeen terrier's tugging: Devoted to her mother, Clara sometimes felt her a little, well, her mother was so sure of herself that she could not understand other people being—being—"as ludicrous as I am," Clara jerked out (the dog tugging her forwards). In this excerpt, we see the discourse gradually evolving from narratororiginated to FID to direct discourse, with the accompanying changes of voice. The question is: when do these changes happen, and can we at any point register them as clear breaks? The next section will deal with this problem in detail; here, let me just point out that the question itself has a certain 'fuzziness' built into it, which reflects also on the boundaries whose existence it presupposes. Thus, it seems reasonable to say that the expression "well" in the above quote indicates a kind of hesitation on Clara's part: she is about to launch into a criticism of her mother's, but feels it is improper to do so, hence her use of the mitigating adverb well. This being said, we can now, in retrospect, read the preceding phrase "felt her a little" as presaging the Onslaught' of an emerging FID. As readers, having been 'primed' by a clearly narrative voice ("Devoted to her mother"), we will naturally continue in that mode by force of a certain obstinacy or Obstination', as Weinrich calls it (1985: 14; see above, chapter 2.5.1, especially footnote 15, and cf. Fludernik 1993: 181). It is not until we

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reach the word "well" that we are warned about a possible change towards FID. In the same manner, we are alerted to the imminent change from FID to direct speech by the repeated "being—being". Formally, Clara's repetition can be explained as an expression of her emotional conflict: she is groping for words to express her anger while at the same time trying to hold it back. But at the same time, the referential connotation of the two tokens of the expression "being" changes: Clara speaking about her mother as not understanding other people "being [whatever Mrs. Durrant thinks of other people]" is suddenly invaded by the discovery that these "other people" include herself—and that this self is "being ludicrous" at that. Starting out as an indirect, emotional muser, Clara becomes gradually involved in the situation through her speaking. When in the end, the transition to direct discourse has become complete and irrevocable, we are also formally jolted out of FID by the "jerk" of Clara's voice and the "tug" of her dog.

5.3. How are voices managed? The above excerpt has provided us with some examples of how authors manage to keep the voices of their characters separate by the technique I have called voice 'management'. Let's consider in more detail how this management is exercised in practice. The most obvious voice management technique available to an author is by way of content. In the present section, I will restrict myself to commenting on a few illustrative cases; an in-depth treatment of this technique will be left to chapter 10. Knowing the characters of a narration, we also know what to expect of them: what they are able to say and what they are likely to say. Once a theme has been introduced into the narrative by a character, it is likely that the same person will have more to say on this theme, and that its repeated occurrences will tend to become 'attached* to that character. For example, in the lengthy quote from Jacob 's Room above, the terrier Troy is attached to Clara in the very beginning and we may suppose (if no other clues are provided) that she will have things to say about him in the sequel; utterances related to the subject of 'dog' will preferably be spoken in Clara's voice. In our excerpt, the subject is introduced in the first lines, where Clara announces that the Aberdeen terrier will have to be walked. In the next para-

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graph, Clara puts on the dog's collar, uttering "Little devil"—again, clearly having the dog in mind. Of course, a theme may be introduced by one character and subsequently taken up by another. This happens in the intercalated analeptic sequence of the above extract, where Mrs. Durrani discusses "England"' with her guests—a subject in which Clara shows no interest at all. Still, it becomes attached to her in the description of the tea table conversation ("—a question poor Clara could not have answered, ..."); later on, she gives vent to her frustration during the walk with Mr. Bowley— who, in his turn, picks up the subject and continues to comment on it a page further down in the narration. In cases like these, content alone cannot provide enough background for successful voice management; hence, the necessity of having explicit indicators of 'narrative deixis' such as the above mentioned (parenthetical) verbs of "thinking and saying', verba sentiendi & declarandi: 'Mr. Bowley said,' Clara mused,' and so on. Other, more interesting ways of voice management are based on the use of 'regular deixis' (demonstrative or personal; see chapter 3.1); actually, this is the most frequently used method. In these cases, rather than repeating the name of the character to which a particular voice is attached, every time that character appears in narration or dialogue, we refer to 'him' or 'her' by using & pronoun (as I just did) or some pronominal expression, in accordance with the morphological resources of the language and the conventions of writing, prevalent in a particular literary community. It is here that we register the greatest amount of variation, cross-languagewise, in the management of voices: some languages make a greater use of pronouns and pronominal reference than do others, due to the build-up of the individual languages' morphological systems and the number and variety of the distinctions that these systems allow. To take one example: in Finnish, the personal pronoun for the (human) third person singular ('he/she'), is the 'unisex' hän (the plural he, 'they', is, perhaps less surprisingly, uni-gendered, as it is in English). This simple morphological fact results in a voice managing technique in Finnish written style that is considerably different from that used in most other (Indo-)European languages. Where an author using English or Swedish (the latter language being the closest geographical and cultural, albeit not linguistic, neighbor to Finnish) would use a 'he' or 'she'-type pronoun to mark a deictic reference, a Finnish

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writer cannot do the same, on the penalty of giving up control of the voice allocation and possibly losing the readers in the process. Rather than using a personal pronoun in connection with a parenthical (such as 'said', 'asked', 'answered' etc.) as administrators of narrative deixis, Finnish is compelled to 'over-specify' the reference and identify the characters by name, title, or other ascriptions (some of which may be gender-distinctive (e.g. Heikki sanoi 'Heikki said', komisario kysyi 'the inspector asked', laulatar vastasi 'the [female] singer47 answered', and so on). Translators who are not aware of this peculiarity of Finnish often Over-translate' such references by truthfully and completely rendering the Finnish linguistic expressions into the corresponding, say, Swedish or English ones. This 'morphological overkill' betrays the very principles of voice management in the latter languages by overdoing the reference for the sake of supposed faithfulness in translation. At the other side of the spectrum are those languages whose pronominal richness far surpasses that of English morphology (and that of most other Germanic languages as well). One such language is Spanish; more or less the same holds for the other Romance idioms. Here, the omission of a normally expected deictic or referential device may lead the reader into a morphologically constructed, narrative 'trap' (as it is skillfully done by Julio Cortazar in his Historia con migalas; see Mey 1992a for an analysis of this case). Conversely, when trying to emulate this kind of narrative sophistication in another language (such as English), the translator is faced with the insurmountable difficulty of finding mostly non-existent morphological alternatives in order to capture the original text's essential ambiguity. As a rule, personal or demonstrative reference is determined by whoever or whatever has been focused upon previously (often, as a rule of thumb, but not always a very reliable one, we can presume that this is the last mentioned, suitable character or object). Thus, for example, in the third paragraph of the long excerpt from Jacob 's Room cited earlier, we first meet Clara, then Clara's mother, then Clara, then her mother, and finally Clara again: Devoted to her mother, Clara sometimes felt her a little, well, her mother was so sure of herself that she could not understand other people being—being—"as ludicrous as I am," Clara jerked out (the dog tugging her forwards).

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The first occurrence of 'her' is a special case and an exception to the rule of 'previous focusing'; the pronoun points to Clara by way of 'forward reference', also called 'cataphora', as mentioned earlier (chapter 3.2). The second 'her' is understood to be Clara's mother, who was mentioned just before; similarly, 'she' in the next line continues to refer to Clara's mother, the latter being the same person as that referred to in the following by the reflexive pronoun 'herself. Finally, the last mention of the pronoun 'her' again refers to Clara, who (being the one mentioned last) is the person we are currently focusing on. The narrative continues with Bowley's daring musings, in which he compares Clara to the goddess Diana: And Bowley thought she looked like a huntress... Again, we know that 'she" is Clara here, for the same reasons as given before. However, the next paragraph presents a puzzle: The colour was in her cheeks. To have spoken outright about her mother—still, it was only to Mr. Bowley, who loved her, as everybody must; but to speak was unnatural for her, yet it was awful to feel, as she had done all day, that she must tell some one. "Wait till we cross the road," she said to the dog, bending down. Here, we have no trouble identifying the first occurrence of 'her' ("her cheeks") as referring to Clara: after all, she has been in focus in all of the preceding two sentences, being described, in Mr. Bowley's unaccustomed flight of poetry, as the "huntress", the "pale virgin with a slip of the moon in her hair". The voice shift by which Clara starts to speak and think in FID from this point on does not change the referent of this "her", as compared to the first occurring token: "her mother" here is clearly Clara's. But who is the "her" that "everybody must love"? At first blush, it seems that we should continue to assign the reference for this pronoun to the speaker, Clara, especially as the following (three in all) occurrences of 'her' and 'she' again have to do with Clara. On closer inspection, however, the matter is not so simple. Why couldn't, for instance, the "her" in question refer back to the mother—the last suitable person mentioned? Here, the rule-of-thumb 'Look for the last person mentioned' conflicts with the principle of'syntactic obstination'

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quoted in the previous section, by which we continue to assign the same reference to a character who has already obtained focal privileges. But then again, one could also argue that the phrase "her mother" in reality contains a potential double focus: not only on Clara's mother, but also on Clara herself as 'possessor'. It seems that the problem cannot be solved by appealing to strictly formal criteria. The crucial clue to the mystery is found, as before, in the content of the passage. Consider again Clara's 'utterance": "Mr. Bowley, who loved her, as everybody must". Here, Clara enunciates a universal principle, embodied in the words "everybody must [love X]". Notice that this is a 'gnomic' use of the modal 'must', as opposed to the 'deontic' occurrence of the same verb at the end of the sentence: "she [Clara] must tell some one" (italics in original). In the first case, Clara, conforming to her role of obedient and subservient daughter, enunciates the principle according to which everybody is obliged to love 'X'; clearly, this 'X' cannot possibly be instantiated as Clara speaking in narcissistic hubris. 'X' must be interpreted as Clara's mother, Mrs. Durrani—even if Clara apparently has some trouble following her own maxim, when applied to this person, to the point of showing nervous symptoms as a result of her trying. As this case shows, in order to assign voices correctly, we cannot let ourselves be guided only by strict rules of 'whatever comes closest' or of 'whatever is most in focus'; we take our marks from what we know about the persons involved in the narrative; that is to say, in addition to the strictly 'textual' context and the text's linguistic and other formal characteristics, we rely chiefly on the content of the narration for a proper understanding of the text. The above observation is of importance when we want to determine the true character of a phenomenon such as FID. It appears to be not the case that FID (and a fortiori the concept of'voice' itself, with its underlying notion of'speakability', as discussed in chapter 4; see also below, section 5.4.3 and chapter 12.3.3.2) can be defined in purely linguistic terms, as Fludernik seems to maintain (1993: 322; 98). But how is FID defined? That will be the topic of the next section.

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5.4. The Optics' of FID Many authors assume (either tacitly or explicitly; see Fludernik 1993: 319) that the occurrence of free indirect discourse (FID) presupposes (that is: conceptually and really depends on) the existence of some stretch of 'direct discourse' that somehow gets transformed into FID. This assumption leads directly to the necessity of defining under what conditions such a transformation is possible, and what its mechanics could be (linguistic and otherwise). Among those who have reflected on this problem, Ann Banfield (1982) is most consistent in her approach, based on what she broadly calls 'transformational theory'. Banfield pushes this theory to its extremes, reducing the whole complex of FIDrelated problems to the finding of an acceptable linguistic explanation for the phenomenon—"linguistic explanation', in the parlance of the Banfield tradition, meaning: a generative-transformationally motivated explanation. It is my suggestion that such efforts fail on two counts: first of all, the linguistic framework invoked by Banfield and her followers is uniquely based on the structure of the sentence (as is all traditional linguistic explanation). However, an explanation in purely linguistic, sentence-based terms will never be adequate for dealing with phenomena transcending sentence boundaries. Second, positing the transformationally explained generation of 'direct discourse' (DD) as the necessary condition for, and substrate of, FID requires the invocation (not to say: the invention) of a plethora of techniques (such as 'rewrite rules' and 'root transformations'; Banfield 1982: 38ff), whose explanatory power as parts of an 'expression grammar' of English is at least as doubtful as that of the corresponding constructs in linguistics—even allowing for the fact that contemporary mainstream linguistics has long since changed its formats and descriptive conventions from those that Banfield was trained to use, and is using in her study. The real crux of this type of explanations of FID, however, lies elsewhere: viz., in the fact that neither Banfield and her school, nor later exponents of similar ideas (notably Ehrlich 1990) take the pragmatic nature of narration into account. By that, I mean that we must concern ourselves with the ways texts are received, not only how they are produced by a (visible or invisible) speaker or writer. Voice is a pragmatic concept; in fact, as we will see in chapter 8, the exercise of voice is a

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"pragmatic act', as I define it (Mey 1993a). This means that the successful use of a voice in narration, in direct or in (free) indirect discourse, is contingent upon its being used in an interactive situation, in a situation of dialogue. The concept of voice is quintessential!)/ dialogically oriented. A dialogic situation naturally presupposes the existence of (a) dialogue partner(s), whose contextual conditions (in the broadest sense) determine the possibility of a successful production and reception of the dialogic parts. Thus, rather than uniquely concentrating on the originating causes of utterances, we should include their effects at the other end in our considerations, in order to provide a fuller explanation of why a particular utterance can be, and is, uttered here and now. It is thus by no means necessary or advisable to discount what Fludernik has called "the intuitive readers reaction" (1993: 319) to the factual utterance, as an element of the total explanation of the discourse; however, she is right in maintaining that understanding (a) 'voice(s)' in narrative should not exclusively be equated with the presence of such a reader reaction (cf. Fludernik 350-351). As any pragmatic act, the act of 'voicing' requires an active cooperation between 'utterers' (author/narrators and characters) and hearer/readers; it is in the interplay of these narrative instances that the true 'voice of the text' is born. (The dialogic aspects of text production and consumption will receive a fuller treatment below, especially in chapters 8 and 12).

5.4.1. Voice management and vocality Given the fact that "voices' in texts are born as a result of a dialogic cooperation between author and reader, we must now look into the problem of how the voices, once born, are managed and guided in, and throughout, their textual lives. Just as the voices of a text originate in dialogue, so they are managed dialogically. Voice management is the result of a cooperative effort between the two text-producing instances, author and reader. What traditionally has been regarded as a 'creative' act on the part of the text producer (the author) alone, must be reconsidered, in the light of the 're-creation' that takes part in the process of text consumption by the reader (or hearer), as a 'co-creative' activity involving both instances. And not only that: co-creating the text involves not just the producer and the consumer, but also the circumstances

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that govern their production and consumption, in other words, their textual and extra-textual contexts. The criterion of speakability', introduced and advocated so strongly by Banfield and her school, is but one aspect of this contextual co-creative process; if 'speakability' is to function in a context-oriented, pragmatic view of textuality, it needs to be reconsidered and redefined in the light of what I have said here. The next sections will offer some more detailed views on this question.

5.4.2. Narrator 's deceit As readers, we instinctively acknowledge, and accept, the special conditions of the narrative situation. The moment we deliver ourselves into the hands of the author/narrator (or the "narrative instance', as some prefer to call it; cf. Bal 1986), we manifest an unquestioning, blind trust in his (or 'its") powers. The narrator is the 'subject that is supposed to know', to use a Lacanian term. His powers include, if not always omnipresence and omnipotence, most prominently that of a near-divine omniscience. Voices alternate in dialogue, as we have seen. Also the narrator's voice may blend in (to various degrees of perceptibility) with the other voices in the narrative. When the narrative voice makes itself heard, intruding into the text, as it were, in overlap with or to the exclusion of other, present voices, we may be confronted, not just with a voice 'shift', but with a voice 'clash'. These matters will be dealt with specifically below (especially in chapter 7); for now, I want to address the uncertainty in voice management that arises in the case where the voice of the person telling the story, the T of the recit, clashes with the intruding voice of the narrator, and especially with the latter's omniscience. By virtue of this latter capability, the narrator may impart some of his universal knowledge and capabilities to the persons carrying the narrative, either by making them do things they cannot normally do, or by unveiling particulars about the narration that are not (yet) accessible to either character or reader. It may also be the case that the intruding voice is foreign to the narrative, and shows this by having a character speak another 'dialect' than his natural, own. In such cases, the taleteller's cover is suddenly blown to reveal the bare, non-narrative truth: we are looking at the bare bones of the narrative skeleton, and what we

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are listening to (we may have suspected it for some time), is no longer narrative fiction, but a figment of the narrator's imagination. As an instance of this 'voice interference', consider the following. In Saul Bellow's autobiographic novel Augie March, we get to know a young man in his never-ending quest for knowledge and the meaning of life. At a certain point in the story, we meet the young hero standing in an elementary school yard in Chicago's inner city, trying to figure out how to be a teacher. One of his old roommates, the sloppy literate Kayo, takes him for a walk, while quoting poetry to Augie "in his [Kayo's] tense tenor voice". While the voice here indubitably is the character Kayo's, the poem he cites is by Baudelaire, and is recited in the poet's own language; for all his dirty, Beethoven-like habits (such as keeping a bottle under his bed 'to do duty' and save a trip to the bathroom), Kayo is well-read, and probably knows enough French to recite poetry in that language. What is puzzling, however, is that Augie, that half-literate, good-fornothing drifter, who never has done anything of consequence in all his life, never been to college, barely finished Middle School, and generally speaking, not has had the opportunity to pick up any of the genteel arts (such as reading French poetry in the original), suddenly seems able not only to understand the allusions in the French text, but also to offer a suitable riposte: Les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-la [sic] seuls qui portent Pour partir; co>urs legers, semblables awe ballons. De leurfatalitejamais us ne s 'ecartent, Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours: Allons! On hearing Kayo recite this Baudelairian verse, Augie reflects as follows: This last was probably aimed at me and accused me of being too light of heart and ignorantly saying good-by. I seemed to have critics everywhere. (Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March. Penguin ed., 1984, p. 449).

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We note how Augie not only is able to grasp the original French of this sonnet (witness his allusion to the cceurs legers and the "saying goodby" implied in the Allans), but that he is also able to ratiocinate intelligently about how the poet's words fit his own life. In terms of (non-) acceptability and (non-)authenticity, Augie might as well have exclaimed: 'Ah! du Baudelaire/''Or some such rot. Here is the same Augie March, deciding after many years to pay a visit to his retarded ("idiot", as they used to say then) kid brother George, who is living somewhere in southern Illinois. They had made a shoemaker of him [George]. He couldn't run one of those machines you see thumping under their fender in a repair shop with the screaming disks and circular brushes, and he wasn't equal to making shoes by hand, but he was good at heeling and soling. ... I saw him bent over the last, taking nails out of his mouth and sending them through the leather. 'George!' I said, looking at the man he had grown to be. He knew me right away and he stood up, happy, and exactly as in the old days said, 'Hi, Aug! Hi Aug!' in his nasal voice. (The Adventures of Augie March. Penguin ed., 1984, p. 419). Augie is paying this visit to his brother on a whim, traveling from Mexico to Chicago. Before getting to the place where George has been institutionalized since childhood (Pinckneyville, III., some forty miles out of Carbondale), Augie knows nothing about his brother and the place where he lives, except that he is in a home for retarded folks; yet, even before he has started talking to him, he is already thoroughly familiar with George's place in the institution, his job, how he's making out as a lowgrade shoemaker, and so on. All of this would have been suitable as part of Augie's reflections on George's status after he had left the place; instead, it is conveyed in the form of knowledge that rightly would have to be retrieved from some pre-scient (indeed omniscient) narrator's mental database. The problem is that while this knowledge really is the narrator's, it is presented to us in the voice of Augie; the facts are the narrator's who is trying to make us believe that the voice we are hearing is the character's. Indeed, "the voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau,'" as it is recorded of one of the earliest known cases

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of vocal deception (Gen. 27: 22). Neither is Augie's voice itself always too easy to place or recognize. His musings are often clad in obscure, quasi-learned wordings, often of the sophomoric kind, as when he constructs his relative sentences with the help of the time-honored device of classical grammar called 'relative attraction'. Here is an example. [Augie's temporary employer, a millionaire called Robey, wants his company for a night on the town.] And that evening he phoned me and asked me to come and get him downtown. I could hear that things weren't right. He said he'd be in the Pump Room, than which few places were considered niftier in the city. (The Adventures ofAugie March, p. 445). This construction ("than which few places") is a pretty special one, even though a few more instances of it are found throughout the book. It represents a direct stencil of the Classical Latin technique of 'relative attraction', by which an antecedent (here: "room') is put inside its relative pronoun ('which'), letting it be engulfed, so to speak, or 'attracted', by the relative, the conjunction 'than' functioning as the constructional 'hook' into the comparative 'niftier'. This 'hook' may be dropped in Latin on the condition that the compared noun (or relative pronoun, as in our case) be placed in the ablative. A Latin translation of Bellow's phrase would thus be quite straightforward and without problems: qua lepidiores in urbe tabernae paucae inveniebantur,48 One is reminded of Horace's famous lines in which he admonishes the winds to give his friend Virgil free passage across the Adriatic. The much feared Notus, the South wind (our modern scirocco) to whom are attributed all sorts of magic powers with regard to people's mental and bodily health, is individually apostrophized as second to none in "lifting and dropping the waves of the raucous Adriatic":

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...nee rabiem Noti quo non arbiter Hadriae maior, tollere seu ponere vultfreta. ('...neither the fury of the Notus, who reigns supreme (lit.: 'none than whom reigns higher') in the Adriatic, when it comes to control the rise and fall of its waves.') (Od. I: iii.13-15; Wickham ed. p. [4]; my translation). Phrases like these (quo non ... maior, 'none than whom') may sound perfectly normal in Latin, but they are found in English only in very special circumstances, such as in the willful parodying of the classical style that used to be common among undergraduate students. But a Chicago-born and -bred, streetwise kid like Augie March is, by his social station and his upbringing, a long way from these circles (where one also would encounter a typical adjective such as 'nifty'); as such, he is neither familiar with their linguistic registers. What we are listening to may pose as Augie's real voice, but is not; the true voice is the authors.

5.4.3. ''Voicing' andspeakability In the traditional view, authors create a text by inventing some characters, who then proceed to act out some series of events, called 'stories'. The characters are the author's 'creatures': we attribute the creational origin of a particular character (e.g. Huckleberry Finn) to its creator, a particular author (here: Samuel Clement, a.k.a. Mark Twain). It is essential for the author (as it is for any decent creator) that his creatures stay in line and do not transgress the boundaries of the story or of the roles they have been assigned; in particular, the characters should preferably stick to their authorized voices. However, even within the classical tradition of writing, characters do not always 'behave'. This may be due to authorial inadequacy (the author not paying attention, or just being incompetent); often, however, more is involved. Authors frequently complain that their personae assume independent lives and voices and that the plot starts to develop

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by an inner logic of its own, with the author as a bemused spectator on the sidelines, following the antics of his creatures and chronicling them as best he or she can. In extreme cases, the characters may confront the author with their demands and enter onto the stage by themselves, as real, live persons, as it has been immortalized in the famous play by Luigi Pirandello, Six characters in search of an author. (See also below, chapter 1 1 ; cf. Mey 1994a). The use of the 'stage image' in the previous paragraph is perhaps more than a facile illustration. Besides being the locus of a literary genre in its own right, the stage as metaphor may serve to illustrate some of the viewpoints that I want to propound here, and in this way further our understanding of the discursive processes of narration. A stage basically consists of characters speaking in the voices that have been assigned them by the playwright. The voices are used in the context of an actual setting, that is, a context created by the physical stage, by the director's interpretation of the text, but most of all, by the wider ambiance of the literary playhouse and its temporary inhabitants, the audience. In particular, the audience should be understood as representing (a segment of) the broader context of society. The nature of this representation will vary widely, of course, depending on the kind of society we are dealing with: elitist and aristocracy-oriented, or a more democratically organized type of commonwealth. The process by which (theatrical or literary) voices are created is called voicing. 'Voicing' is a many-sided concept that can be described either negatively or positively. In the negative mode, voicing, as to its roots, does not exclusively belong to the privileged domain of the playwright or author; as to its execution, the literary or theatrical text is not just a context-free blueprint of fictional or dramatic interaction. From a positive point of view, the playwright/author constructs a possible universe of discourse, whose interpretation is closely related to an (actual or potential) audience. The audience, on the other hand, must be willing to take a chance on the text, to let itself be 'seduced' to a particular interpretation. 49 The voices appearing on the scene are embodied in the dramatis personae, originally 'personified' (as the word's etymology indicates) 50 as the masks worn by the actors in the classical theatrical performance. Voices are made possible within this universe of discourse. That is, they neither represent independently created roles, to be played at will as exponents of an actor's self-expression, nor are they strictly grammati-

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cally produced and semantically defined units, to be interpreted by linguists and text analysts as to their abstract 'speakability' (in the sense of Banfield); rather, voices have to be understood as 'speakable' (and 'understandable') in an interactive process of ongoing contextual collaboration between all the parties involved. It is this cooperative process that I call 'voicing'. It follows that speakability, as such, is not the last word in the construction of a narrative (but see chapter 12.3 below). In a very broad sense, every utterance has an utterer, which is not the same as saying that every sentence must have a speaker; the latter is patently untrue, as Banfield correctly observed. The point is that the narrative voice cannot be identified only with 'speaker's voice': the hearer/reader has a voice as well (see on this chapter 8.4); together these two voices make up what Bakhtin (1994a: 98-99) has called the dialogic text's obrascennost', literally "the act of addressing and being addressed', or 'addressivity', as current translations have it (cf. Morson and Emerson 1990: 130; but see my discussion on the term's suitability, above, in footnote 44) •Readability', the literary equivalent of speakability, is similarly defined within a context of 'addressing'; it expresses the way authors and readers address each other, and are being addressed. Consequently, readability tells us how the literary text, being the product of this cooperation between the voices, is produced and understood. (See further section 5.5, below). Consider the following extract from Tolstoy's Λ««Ο Karenina: [Levin has just blurted out his proposal to marry Kitty, and feels he has been rejected by her uttering: ] —Etogo ne mozet byt'... prostite men/a... Kak za minutu tomu nazad ona byla blizka emu, kak vazna dlja ego zizni! I kak teper' ona stala cuzda i daleka emu! —Eto ne moglo byt' inace.— skazal on, ne gljadja na nee. On poklonilsja i xotel ujti.

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('This cannot be ... Forgive me ...' A minute earlier, how close she had been to him, how important for his life! And now, how aloof to him and distant she had become! "This could not have been otherwise', he said, without looking at her. He bowed and prepared to leave.') (Anna Karenina, I: xiii.1962 ed., p. 57; my translation). In the above extract, the reflections on the contrast between 'closeness' and 'distance' that are sandwiched between the two pieces of dialogue (attributed to Kitty and Levin, respectively) are not ascribed to either of the characters by any explicit device, linguistic or otherwise. In particular, as to the FID part of the above excerpt (Levin reflecting on "... how close she had been to him, ..."), the reader understands this to be 'uttered' in Levin's voice by considering the content of what is being reflected upon. The preceding context has directed our attention to Levin's doubts and anxieties about proposing to Kitty, and how the outcome of the proposal would affect the rest of his life. Though by nature a timid person, Levin has decided to wager everything, to put all his spiritual energy into one decisive move. When things go terribly wrong, we instantly recognize the voice of the reflecting character's as Levin's: it is Levin's inner voice uttering the words ("A minute earlier ...") depicting, in free indirect discourse, the horrible contrast between the situation just a moment ago and the present point of time—just as some of us will remember it from Paul McCartney's famous song Yesterday, where he comments to himself on his lost love: 'Yesterday/Love seemed such an easy game to play...' We conclude that 'readability' (just as speakability) depends on the interplay of the agents in interaction; narrator and narratee in concert make up the succcessful narration. (More on this in chapter 9.1).

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5.4.4. The object of description The problems of distinguishing voice and discourse can be considered from two opposite viewpoints. One tries to define the various ways of representing literary discourse by the uses made of 'voice'; the other represents the effort of recognizing 'voice' itself, not only in relation to the various linguistic and literary devices employed, but mainly by appealing to an extended notion of'readability' such as I have argued for in the previous sections. Fludernik, in her 1993 book, clearly takes the first stance: ...the very definition of various forms of speech and thought representation often depends on the establishment of the 'voice' of the represented speaker. (1993: 319). Fludernik then goes on to mention Banfield's effort to define those various forms, "not in terms of'voice'—the intuitive reader's reaction—" (ibid.), but as a function of certain linguistic properties of texts, such as deictic devices, tense shift, personal pronouns and other shifters, and so on—all those properties which in Banfield's terminology account for so-called 'speakability'. Considered from the other point of view, however, the problem of speakability acquires a different perspective. If one's descriptive and explanatory aims are not identical to those articulated by Banfield and (to a certain extent) also Fludernik, the question becomes a different one altogether: Given the role of the 'voice' phenomenon as a narrative device, how do readers (and hearers) go about recognizing a 'voice' as representing its origin or Owner", and how do authors establish this (apparently working) interpretive relationship with their readers? The aim of the analyst, then, is not so much to define 'voice' by the abovementioned properties, as to show how these properties assist the reader in making his or her decisions. The result will not be a definition of 'voice' in linguistic or other technical terms, but a (hopefully more satisfying) explanation of reader/hearer activities, based on an elucidation of 'voice' as a pragmatic phenomenon—in fact upon the exercise of reading as a 'pragmatic act', as we will see in chapter 10.4. The question before us is thus not so much one of speakability in the abstract, but one of voicing, taken in the broad sense, introduced above, of a collaboration between an author (traditionally the 'giver of the

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voice') and a reader (its 'receiver'). Speakability in the strict sense (as negatively defined by Banfield as 'narrator-less' or 'subject-less' discourse) is a narrowed-down, specialized instance of this voicing. 51 Adopting this perspective on speakability entails that we consider the reader as taking an active part in the narrative process. The reader enters upon a binding agreement (but one that is liable to be abrogated at any time, as I will show) with the author as narrator, by which the reader adopts the current position of the narrative, and fulfills the narrative requirements of keeping consistency and coherence by identifying with the current voice. (This can be popularly described as 'knowing where you are in the story', or more pompously as 'co-authoring the discourse'). Common examples are found in the ways that readers are told 'parenthetically', as it were, who are the voices speaking in the discourse. Usually, this happens by way of the so-called verba dicendi: 'he said, he uttered, he repeated, ...' or sentiendi: 'she thought, she felt, she believed, ...'. When such verbs are used to mark off voices in discourse, they are often inserted between commas or in parentheses (hence the expression 'parentheticals'; Ehrlich 1990: 1 Iff). A parenthetical that has been used to introduce a particular voice may be expected to be supplied by the reader further on, once the terms of the 'narrative contract* have been agreed upon, and the 'contract' has not been suspended by voices changing or clashing. Here is an example from Virginia Woolf: "Jacob! Jacob!" cried Bonamy, standing by the window. The leaves sank down again. "Such confusion everywhere!" exclaimed Betty Flanders, bursting open the bedroom door. Bonamy turned away from the window. "What am ! to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?" She held out a pair of Jacob's old shoes. (Jacob 's Room, Harvest ed., p. 176). In the above excerpt, the reader automatically inserts, after the utterance

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"What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?" a parenthetical phrase of the form: 'said (asked, exclaimed, ...) Betty Flanders'. Compare, by contrast, the following excerpt from Tolstoy, where the ascription of voice not so much hinges on repeated (or reader-supplied) mentions of proper names (as in the Woolf extract), but on an extensive use of parentheticals and referring expressions (including 'shifting' deictics such as 'here')—supported (not to say Over-determined') by typographical devices such as dashes and quotation marks. [Vronskij has come to the door of the Oblonskij house, but left again; upon which Oblonskij remarks: ] — / ne za cto ne xotel vojti. Kakoj-to on strannyj,—pribavil Stepan Arkad'ic. Kiti pokrasnela. Ona dumala, cto ona odna ponjala, zacem on priezzal i otcego ne vosel. "On by l u nas, — dumala ona, — / ne zastal i podumal, ja zdes V no ne vosel, ottogo cto dumal — pozdno, Ί Anna zdes'. " ("— And there was no way he [Vronskij] would come in. Somehow he [is] strange,— Stepan Arkad'ic remarked. Kitty blushed. She figured that she was the only one who understood what he had come for, and why he had not come in. "He was at our place,— she thought,— and he did not stay, and assumed I [would be] here; but he didn't come in, because he thought — [it's] late, and Anna [is] here".') (Anna Karenina, \: xxi. 1962 ed., p. 87; my translation). In analyzing this extract, one should keep in mind that the morphological richness of the Russian language makes it easy to identify the subjects of the parentheticals by way of the gendered forms of the preterit: dumal, dumala (vs. the uniform English thought), even where there is no explicit referential element present. Parentheticals can be used to express what has been called 'psycho-narration' (as in the first occurrence of dumala: "she [Kitty] figured that she was the only one ..."), or for reporting direct, 'internal' discourse such as Kitty's 'internally spoken* thoughts in the second occurrence.

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Since, in the same excerpt, the next two occurrences of parenthetical "thinking verbs' are in the masculine (podumal, dumal), they must be ascribed grammatically to Vronskij as the subject of the respective phrases. In the first case ([Vronskij] podumal, ''[Vronskij] assumed"), however, it is Kitty who does the ascribing of Vronskij's thoughts (almost taking the part of the omniscient narrator), in a kind of psychonarration, once removed. Even though Vronskij does the 'thinking', it is Kitty who keeps the floor, as it were, and speaks on his behalf; but when she makes the local references, it is on her own, not Vronskij's terms: "at our place", "here". While it is Vronskij who assumes that Kitty is at the Oblonskijs' (which for Kitty would be 'there"), it is Kitty who determines the deictic reference as 'where I am' (that is, 'here'). By contrast, in the second occurrence ([Vronskij] dumal, "[Vronskij] thought"), Vronskij refuses to come in because it's late and (mainly, of course) because Anna is with the Oblonskijs. Here, the thinking happens with Vronskij at the deictic center: what he is narrated as thinking is expressed in (reported) direct inner speech: "It's late, and Anna is here". We see how these two occurrences of "here" have different deictic references: they 'shift', not with the subjects of the parenthetical phrases, but according to the voices that are on the floor at any time. On this particular narrative 'sub-level', the voice of the character and 'subnarrator' Kitty contrasts with the narrated character Vronskij's voice— the latter also typographically 'announced' by the use of a dash. Notice furthermore that the referential system functions beautifully on all these different levels of narration and 'sub-narration', despite the fact that Russian forfeits the use of the copular predicate connector (Engl. to be) and its 'indispensability' in referee identification—which is why I had to supply the be-forms in square parentheses in my translation. In the above extract, the cases of psycho-narration and reported (internal) direct discourse were marked off on the surface of the narration by the occurrence of parentheticals and varied typographical devices. Such techniques (practiced consistently by many, especially 19th century, authors) of course offer only a first aid in understanding the problems of correct voice ascription; they cannot be what determines this assignment, which also depends on such morphological elements as deictics, mood and tense (as in the Latin consecutio temporum in 'indirect speech'), and the like. (The phenomenon of the 'sequence of tenses'

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was discussed above, chapter 3.3.3; for an overview, see Fludernik 1993: 178ff). In the end, and most importantly, it is the reader's understanding of the internal evidence of the voicing that (supported by the morphological and structural evidence) determines the appropriate reading. In the following extract (again from Tolstoy), the markings are all in place and the attribution of the voice poses no problems. Which is why, despite the conceptual and narrative complexity of the passage in question, we are safely guided towards a perfect understanding by the authors skillful use of his narrative toolkit. [Anna, having met Vronskij in Moscow, is returning to St. Petersburg; on the night train before retiring, she is trying to read an English novel, whose hero is busy acquiring the objects of his dreams. Happiness is knighthood and a castle!] Geroj romana uze nacal dostigat' svoego artglijskogo scastija, baronetstvo i imenija, i Anna zelala s nim vmeste echat' v eto imenie, kak vdrug ona pocuvstvovala, cto emu dolzno byt' stydno i cto ej stydno etogo samogo. No cto emu stydno? "Cego ze mne stydno? " sprosila ona sebja s oskorblennym udivleniem. ('The hero of the novel had already started on the path towards achieving his English happiness, a baronetcy and a manor, and Anna wanted to join him in his journey towards that manor, when she suddenly realized that he ought to be ashamed, and that she ought to be ashamed likewise. But what [should] he [be] ashamed of? "And what [am] I [to be] ashamed of?" she asked herself in irritated wonder/) (Anna Karenina, I: xxix. 1962 ed., p. 114; my translation). Notice how, in this abstract, the voices intermingle, yet are kept strictly apart. It is the narrator who puts forward his knowledge of the (unidentified) 'story-within-the-story': about its hero, about the latter's secret wishes, and also about Anna's empty-headed desire to join him in his journey towards their futile accomplishment. This (psycho-)narration continues with Anna suddenly realizing that she has been taken in by the trashy sentiments of this generic 'English novel'; 52 and looking at

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the hero in the light of her own, more enlightened views, she finds his ambitions utterly contemptible. By extension, she feels ashamed of herself for uncritically adopting the unknown novelist's cheap standards of happiness in life: titles and riches. This realization on Anna's part happens first more or less unconsciously: the author uses his (psycho-)narrative omnipotence to brief us about Anna's state of mind and her obligatory sense of shame, both on her own part and on that of the hero. But then, the voice of the narrative changes directions: Anna asks herself, in free indirect discourse, what reasons the hero may have to feel shame. And the text continues with a direct question from Anna to herself, placed between quotes: "What am I to be ashamed of?", with reported inner speech replacing free indirect discourse. The parenthetical "she asked herself' closes this coda-like development of Anna's reported (inner) speech and thought on a resounding final chord: "in irritated wonder". The help that the Russian author provides in this case by carefully marking off the boundaries of the various voices' domains, is somewhat lacking in the following extract from a modern British writer: [Stephanie has a visit from Gideon's wife Clemency. Gideon is the vicar of the parish where Stephanie's husband Daniel is the curate. One of Gideon's community programs is called 'The Young People', a gathering spot for teenagers. Clemency is speaking.] "I don't know how to say this. I've had—complaints—complaints—from a Mrs. Bainbridge." "Tom Bainbridge's mum." "Milly Bainbridge's mum. Milly goes, now and then. To the Young People. Mrs. Bainbridge claims that Gideon—Gideon has been interfering with her." "Mrs. Bainbridge is a very unpleasant woman," said Stephanie, truthfully and rapidly. "But that isn't the point," said Clemency. "Is it?" (A.S. Byatt, Still Life, Collier/Macmillan, 1986, p. 353)

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Besides the direct discourse of the dialogue (where the interlocutors are unannounced, except for the last two interchanges), we encounter in this fragment a stretch of reported indirect speech (Mrs. Bainbridge's), viz., when Clemency refers to "Milly Bainbridge's mum"'s allegation of Gideon's messing with her daughter. If we restrict ourselves to the grammatical devices employed here, and to the strictly local context of this utterance, there is not the slightest indication that "her" in the subordinated sentence ("... that Gideon—Gideon has been interfering with her") should not be taken to refer to the subject of the main sentence, Mrs. Bainbridge, as would indeed be the normal reading of this utterance out of its local context: Mrs. Bainbridge claims that Gideon has been interfering with her. But knowing Gideon and his earlier alluded to propensity of fondling (preferably female) minors, in addition to having been told how unpleasant Milly's mother is, we decide that this probably is not the case. Two avenues of explanation are open to us now. Taking the first one, we can mechanically "step across" possible candidates for reference, and "go back three, four or more sentences ... before finding the substantial element", as Halliday and Hasan describe the technique of "processing pronouns" (1976: 15). The problem of course remains that we never can be sure that our journey across the sentences does indeed give the desired result; besides, how can we be sure of having reached the final stage in our quest? In our case, we would simply identify the "her" with Mrs. Bainbridge's daughter, Milly, as being the next suitable, higher up candidate; that wouldn't be wrong, but would it be totally satisfactory in terms of knowing what we are doing? The other way of going about this problem is to consider the totality of the text that we are working with, and establish some pragmatic priorities for pronoun assignment. This involves knowing something about the text, and not being afraid of using our knowledge. In the present case, as distinguished from the case of the sentence in isolation, we are aware of the fact that Clemency has established, as topic for her talk with Stephanie, the problems with a minister who abuses his position; and we know that this has come out into the open because of a complaint addressed to the ministers wife. As readers, we are tuned in to this topic, and in this way we will understand what is being said, placing it in the broader context of the problems with Gideon. From the

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viewpoint of the reader of the 'total text', the "her" in the quoted sentence is therefore understandable, and must be understood, with pragmatic and textual necessity, as 'Milly'. The constraints of pragmatic readability override and sublimate the rule-based, narrow contextdetermined identification of textual elements such as pronouns.

5.5. Speakability and readability At the beginning of this chapter, 1 remarked that the concept of 'speakability', as used in the Banfieldian tradition, is in reality a misnomer: it restricts our perspective to speech (as opposed to written text), and it puts the focus unilaterally on one of the partners in the dialogic discourse, on a single participant in the interchange of voices. What I hope has become clear from the preceding discussion is that such a notion needs to be extended as to its scope, in order to include the other, receiving part (listener or reader): 'readability* is a determining factor in the management of a text, in particular of its different 'voices'. But even the concept of'readability' does not do full justice to what is being expressed here, viz., the notion that a text is not the sole property of the author, but rather (being placed in the public domain) 'public property', to be used and consumed by readers as they see fit. The pragmatic concept of text production and consumption bases itself on the idea that any linguistic or literary (and in general, any societal) activity involves the collaboration of all involved parties: texts are readers' as much as authors', the reader is always in the picture: lector infabula, also in this sense (cf. above, chapter 2.5). The above view is expressed admirably in the following quote from Bakhtin: The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one). The word ... is performed outside the author. (I994b: 121-122; my italics)

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In the above text, Bakhtin employs the term "word" in a generic sense, corresponding to my term 'text', or what elsewhere often is called 'discourse'. Similarly, another Russian thinker, V. N. Voloshinov, comments on the 'collaborative' character of texts in the following way: In point of fact, the word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As a word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. (Voloshinov 1973: 86; original emphasis) It is this two-sided relationship that I want to capture by interpreting the concept of'speakability' and its extension, 'readability', in the light of the general notion of 'voicing', understood as the "reciprocal relationship", the collaborative process by which "speaker and listener, addresser and addressee" (and I add: author and reader), co-create the text. Voicing is the dialectic process of text producing and text consuming, of voice organizing and voice recognizing. It explicitly denies the author's 'hegemony' (cf. chapter 11.2) in the creation of a text, and specifically abrogates the latter's authority in unilaterally determining its speakability or readability. The management of voices happens in a cooperative process, by which the reader enters into a constructive dialogue with the author. As long as this cooperation is in force, the dialogue partners can agree to let the words pass back and forth between themselves: voices may shift. However, when the cooperation, for one reason or another, is interrupted and cooperative voicing has become impossible: we perceive a clash of voices. 'Voice shift' and 'voice clash' will be dealt with in chapter 7; but before that, in the next chapter, 1 want to go a bit deeper into the problem of how voices relate to the 'real' world.

Chapter 6 Voice in focus 6.1. Perspective and voice 6.1.1. Focalization and localization The texts we have been looking at so far as examples have all been instances of narration, that is, they contained stories. When people tell a story, they present their audiences with a view on a piece of our world that is typical for whoever tells the story. The point of story telling is not just to refer to some happening or event, to give 'the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts'; a story that limits itself to 'facts' will never get off the ground. What makes a story interesting, what allows us to distinguish between a story and a mere chronicle, is that the teller of the tale looks at the facts in an interesting way, by focusing on points of interest for his or her audience. It is the privilege (and the duty) of a good story-teller to present the world as he or she sees it. Let me draw an analogy. Anybody can try and represent the world visually, using pencil and paper, a spray gun and a blank wall, or a brush and a piece of canvas. But only the professional draughtsman, graffito artist, or painter knows how to represent the world interestingly, by imposing upon it his or her personal view, based on his or her skilled perception and particular focus, by which the professional artist is able to present the facts of life under a certain personal perspective. By this, 1 mean not necessarily the classical technique of representing the world which, from the early Renaissance on, became common practice in the European visual arts, and by which a jumbled mass of lines in two flat dimensions suddenly could be perceived as having a third dimension, that of depth. The general perspective I am referring to here is called focalization; it has to do with the fact that every presentation is made in relation to the point of view of the presenter and his or her focus on the world. Perspective and focus, in this sense, are relative to a particular world of 'seers': they presuppose a system of coordinates and dimensions which determine our human perception not only from the point of view of the presenter, but also relative to that of the presentees (viewers or

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listeners): the latter, too, are perceivers in their own rights. In a willed oxymoronic formula, perspective and focus thus express the absolute relativity of our world. The Dutch literary theoretician Mieke Bal has the following to say on this subject: [w]henever events are presented, they are always presented from within a certain 'vision'. A point of view is chosen, a certain way of seeing things, a certain angle, whether Teal' historical facts are concerned or fictitious events. (1985: 100) Bal goes on to tell us that we can, of course, choose to represent events Objectively', that is, in strict accordance with the 'real' world. But she immediately contradicts herself when she remarks (in my opinion, quite properly) that such an Objective' view at most is an attempt to present (only) what is seen, but that in fact this seeing, too, depends on "the eyes of the beholder", in Keats' immortal words. Actually, even the driest of chronicles and the most unimaginative chaining of historical dates (as many of us were trained to reproduce in our early school years) express some 'point of view', viz., of the person who determined which were the important dates to be focused on in the classroom, and learned by heart during home study. Similarly, even the most impersonal, Objective' chronicling (such as by way of counting time by the years, or places in terms of geographical distances) cannot avoid a personal touch. The pious monk called Nestor, supposed to have been the author of the Old Russian chronicle Povest' vremennyx let ("Chronicle of years in time'), cannot help putting in a snide aside on Rjurik or Helga from time to time, so as to manifest his own allegiances; and even such 'factual' military strategists and chroniclers as Xenophon in his Anabasis or Caesar in De hello gallico, who, for each and every day of their campaigns, punctuate their stories by faithfully recording the stadia and parasangges or milia passuum covered, the rivers crossed, the hostile chieftains placated, and the rebellious tribes subdued, are still highly biased historians, in spite of their professed adherence to the naked facts. At the other, receiving end, stories will only be successful if they correspond to what the reader perceives and feels about the world. A story that has no relation to the way 1 see the world is probably not going to interest me as a potential reader. Stories from distant literary periods

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and domains often leave us cold because we cannot identify with the world view that is presented there. Thus, both Jane Austen (in Northanger Abbey) and Aleksandr S. Pushkin (in Evgenij Onegin) mock the hapless Grandison, the hero of an interminable novel by Samuel Richardson, ''whose bore matches our snore", to paraphrase Pushkin's original pun on the character's (and perhaps also the author's) name.53 And why is, in Jane Austen's words, "Sir Charles Grandison ... a horrid book" (Northanger Abbey, ch. 6)? Simply because Richardson's ways of perceiving and portraying the inimitable hero's world were out of touch with the perspectives of Austen's generation, and did not portray or represent the heroes and events of their lives in ways favored and understood by a contemporary readership. Reconciling a story's different perspectives, the author's and the reader's, cannot be achieved without some work being done on each of the two sides. One could regard this work as originating in a 'contract' between author and readership, a kind of agreement entered upon with the purpose of constructing a story in mutual understanding and cooperation (see Mey 1994a: 155ff). The process by which the author's perception of the events is married to the reader's situation in time and place I will call focalizing. 54 And inasmuch as the process of situating the narrative voices in their proper contexts ultimately has to be grounded in some spatial and temporal universe, the focalization of the text presupposes the localization of its characters. On the other hand, focalization, as the process by which one perspectivizes the characters, bringing them into verbal and visual 'focus* and assigning them a place on the fictional scene from where they can be seen, and their voices heard, is intimately bound up with the creation of those 'voices' in the process called vocalization. The vocalizing process necessarily implies a focalization and localization of the text's voices, both author's and characters'. In the following, 1 will mainly concentrate on the voicing processes inasmuch as they focus on the author and the characters populating the represented world of the text, both in time and in space; the question of the 'readers voice' will be taken up in chapter 8.

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6.1.2. Focality and vocality Focalization is defined by Bal as "the relation between the elements presented and the vision through which they are presented" (1985: 100). The first point to note here is that vision as such is not yet narration; neither is a text that is created by an author merely to present some facts. The force of a story, its 'narrativity', as it is often called, comes into being by the combination of the two, facts and fancy. As Robert Scholes has noted, the very idea of narrativity is bound up with the reader's entering the story world, the 'fictional space'; a "process by which a perceiver actively constructs a story from the fictional data provided by any narrative medium" (1982: 60). The creation of the story depends on the collaboration between author and reader. The reader's active intervention, the participation of the lector in fabula, may in some cases go a bit too far, overshooting the mark, as Eco has skillfully demonstrated in his analysis of a short story by the French author Alphonse Allais (Eco 1979: 256ff). On the other hand, without the participants' active collaboration, without everybody voluntarily signing up for the flight of narration, even at the risk of getting trapped in some 'narrative web' (Mey 1992a), neither author, reader, or story will fly. The second point to make is that focalization involves a voice. Focalizing means concentrating upon, singling out, a particular character's perspective. In the narrative, the character is represented by a 'voice'; hence every focalization induces a vocalization. A voice is nothing but a vocalized perspective, a 'vocal vision', one could say. As a first illustration, consider the following personal anecdote (here borrowed from Mey I995c). At one time during the winter semester of 1994, I was sitting in the sauna at the Crown Aquatic Center of Northwestern University, Evanston, 111. I was enjoying myself, thinking about nothing in particular, paying not much attention to what was going on either inside or outside of the sauna room. People came in and went out again to take a shower, some stayed longer, some shorter, some were reading their newspapers, others were talking, some were throwing water on the stove to produce steam and get the temperature up. All this had been going on for quite a while; I hadn't paid much attention to the time. Suddenly I become aware of a balding, middle-aged

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man sitting outside the sauna on a chair, looking in through the big glass door. I remembered him vaguely: he had been inside and gone out, then had come back in again; now, having taken another shower, he is sitting outside, watching. I'm directly in his line of vision, and suddenly I start focalizing: my perspective is no longer that of watching a scene with some persons and objects in the background, but of watching some person watching me. My immediate, conscious reaction is, of course, that I am making things up. The man may be there for a number of reasons, and why should he be watching me? Still, something interesting happens the moment I realize I'm no longer looking at some irrelevant piece of humanity, but at somebody who is somebody, even though I don't know him. When I start focalizing, I am at the same time setting a narrative process in motion: I start making up a story 'in my head' (or maybe not even there: much of it is still daydreaming, and happens somewhere below the explicit level of consciousness). For example, depending on my previous experiences (or, if you want, my private hang-ups), I attribute a character to the man, trying to figure out if this is somebody I know, or ought to remember. In a more interesting scenario, I might consider him to be an elderly homosexual, waiting for me to get out in order to make a pass at me. Even though all of this is pure fantasy (and though I know it to be pure fantasy), it is still a fact that I have given this man a role as a character in my story, an actor in my little play; the next thing I know is that the character starts speaking. In my head, I hear snatches of dialogue: the character is asking me questions ('Do I come here often, where do I live, what kind of music do I like; do I have a phone number', and so on), and I listen to myself providing non-committal, evasive answers ('No, not really; down in South Evanston; no particular preferences; no, I don't have a phone', etc.) No matter that this dialogue never has taken place, and probably never will, and regardless of the psychological explanations of my sauna day-dreaming (earlier experiences, repressed feelings, anxieties, or what have you), the act of focalization makes a piece of my environment come alive. From being a silent prop, the person becomes a talking character, a \o\ce: focalizing implies vocalizing. What this little anecdote is supposed to show is that we cannot separate perspective and voice. Every point of view belongs to a character, hence every focalization happens according to a character's perspective; similarly, every character's voice presupposes the existence of a foca-

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lizing perspective in which that character is vocalized. For this reason, I do not agree with Bal's thesis that there is "a distinction between those who see and those who speak" (1985: 101), understood as implying either an obligatory denial of a voice to the 'seers', or a mandatory, visual presence of speakers of 'voices'. Consider Bal's standard example Elizabeth saw him lie there, pale and lost in thought. (1985: 101) According to Bal, we have here a case where a view is presented, but no voice is heard: to say that the stretch "pale and lost in thought" in reality is spoken by the character Elizabeth, is "nonsensical" (ibid.). In my opinion, this stricture is simply too strict. Bal's example owes its persuasive force to the fact that it is quoted out of any context, without reference to any larger framework. 55 Whether, or what, Elizabeth 'speaks' (or doesn't "speak') in the above quote depends entirely on the framework in which she is presented, that is to say, on the point of view that author and reader have agreed on with regard to this character. (I will come back to this point below, at the end of the present section). Voices do not have to be heard as directly 'spoken' by a character, nor do points of view always have to be those of an explicit character appearing on the scene (see chapter 8.4.3 for more on this problem). In fact, a voice may be explicitly denied its existence in the narrative, and still represent the character; that is, it can still be 'heard' as part of the narrative, even though it isn't officiallly there. Consider the case of Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina, whose voice is 'heard' all through a longish passage in which he reflects on his relationship with Vronskij in a kind of syllogistic reasoning: Vronskij has rejected Kitty, Kitty has rejected him (Levin), hence Vronskij has the right to hold him in contempt, and consequently Vronskij is Levin's enemy. But, having suffered through this despised lover's sad, self-effacing monologue for the length of an entire paragraph, the reader is suddenly told that "All this Levin did not think"! (L. N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, II: xvii; 1962 ed. p. 190; emphasis added). The concluding remark of the above excerpt: No etogo vsego ne dttmal Levin, "But all this Levin did not think' represents a departure from the text's neat, logical application of the transitive properties of the verb 'to despise', based on the character Levin's perspective of the events, his 'focus'. This localization, however, is expressed by a voice

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that is expressly denied legitimacy, is not 'heard'; the thoughts it utters are not just in general without fundamentum in re (in the way that the entire novel, as a matter of narrative principle, is a figment of some author's imagination), but are explicitly declared by the omniscient author to be non-existent within the text, qua real representations of Levin's point of view. In other words, the fact that we are told that 'Levin did not think all this' serves to alert us to the possibility that the quoted passage's point of view (which we at first may have thought was Levin's own) in the end is not Levin's at all, but the author's—as a kind of meta-comment on the story, rather than being part of the story itself. Note that it is not the case that this particular perspective has no voice; but the voice attribution is different from the one we at first had assumed as proper to the character's perspective. A change in point of view has imperceptibly taken place, resulting in a 'voice change' (see further chapter 7.1). The requirement that voices be 'heard' in order to be accepted as real becomes even more grotesque in the case of Levin's old dog Laska, who is said to 'think' that her owner should mind his business of hunting, rather than talk to his brother-in-law: [During a hunting trip, Levin has just been told by Stepan Arkad'ic that Kitty neither has married nor is going to be married, but that she has been sent abroad on doctor's orders, and that one fears for her life. Naturally, Levin demands an explanation, forgetting all about the wood-snipes they're supposed to be hunting. The whole situation displeases Laska to the extreme.] V to vremja, kak oni govorili eto, Laska, nastoroziv usi, ogljadyvalas' werx na nebo i ukoriznenno na nix. "Vot nasli vremja razgovarivat, — dumala ona.— A on let it... Vot on, tak i est'. Prozevajut... " — dumala Laska. ('At that moment, just as they [Levin and Stepan Arkad'ic] were talking like this, Laska pricked up her ears and looked up in the skies, with a reproachful glance at the two men.

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"Look how they have time to make conversation, — she thought. — And the birds are coming... In fact, here comes one. They're going to bungle it..." — Laska thought.') (L. N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, II: xv. 1962 ed. p. 185; my translation) Clearly, no matter how intelligent she may have been, Levin's dog Laska cannot, by the longest stretch of imagination, be supposed to have formulated such coherent thoughts in (near) well-formed sentences. It is us, the readers who are asked to look at things from the 'canine' perspective, in which hunting is more important than a regressive delving into the miseries of a Move that should have lasted years': Laska wants to go hunting, and wants to do it right now, now that the birds are coming within shooting range. But if the voice does not have to be 'heard', then Bal's argument in favor of restricting voices to those 'who speak', falls flat on its face. Let's return for a moment to the first of Bal's two cases pro her view (1986: l O l f ; 1 will leave it to the reader to argue with Bal about the extract from Doris Lessing's The summer before dark on p. 104 of Bal's work). Quoting the (as I said, presumably constructed) sentence: Elizabeth saw him lie there, pale and lost in thought, Bal maintains (as we saw above) that the "claim that... from the comma onwards, this sentence is narrated by the character Elizabeth; that means it is spoken by her ... [is] nonsensical" (ibid.). If one takes Bal's postulate that narrating voices must be 'spoken' in order to be real, literally, her peremptory rejection of this "claim" makes sense. However, in my interpretation of focalization and voice, the sentence indeed represents Elizabeth's 'voice', in the sense that it does not just tell us that Elizabeth "saw him lie there", but furthermore implies something about the way Elizabeth sees this "lying", viz., as "pale and lost in thought". This 'seeing' can only be attributed to a human point of view: it is 'spoken' (not necessarily uttered} by a human 'voice' (in this case, Elizabeth's). The representation of the person "lying there" as "pale and lost in thought" is part of the character Elizabeth's focalization, her mental picture of the situation; and even if this picture is not worded by the

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author so as to suggest that the character actually utters the words (notice the difference from the case of the 'speaking' dog, above), they still represent a human vocalization: Elizabeth's 'voice' expressing her point of view.56 1 conclude that since voices do not have to be heard in order to be real, the argument that narration always implies a spoken voice cannot be sustained. As a consequence, the strict line of demarcation between "those who see" and "those who speak" (Bal 1986: 101) lacks proper substance. The implication is that one cannot really focalize without attributing a voice to the focalizer: as we saw earlier, focalization implies vocalization. The remainder of this chapter will discuss the question of how different points of view result in different voices, and how this 'multivocality' is managed in narrative discourse.

6.2. Multivocality In this section, I want to address the question of how the voices in a text interact, 'dialogize', as Mikhail Bakhtin has called it. This dialogue is not an external one, in the sense that is represents some actual conversation going on somewhere; it is the voices within the text that are being ordered dialogically, Orchestrated' under the baton of the author, as Bakhtin calls it (orkestrovka; 1992a: 372). The voices themselves are always already there: they speak their different languages, and the blend of these languages constitutes the true character of novelistic narration, with its concomitant 'messiness' and 'heteroglossia' (Bakhtin 1992a: 63, 1992b: 26Iff; cf. Morson & Emerson 1990: 139). What do these voices represent? First of all, they belong to a world of their own, in which questions of truth and meaning are secondary to the telling of a story; within this narrative world, they are further defined by the societal conditions that determine the 'real' world and its characters. As to the latter, although they are independent actors within the plot, the story world, they live dependent lives with regard to the world at large: dependent not only on the 'whim' of the author (in fact, many authors experience themselves as being at the beck and call of their characters, rather than the other way 'round), but first of all on the preexisting conditions of the reality in which they are being brought to life. On Bakhtin's view, a text is 'populated* by its characters, just like words are by their meanings. A better term would perhaps be

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'colonized', since the population in question is neither independent in its own rights, nor exclusively dependent on its author: as in the case of true colonies, their lives consist in fights for independence (the birth of narrative), while always remaining, to a certain extent, under the protective aegis of their colonizers (the narrative process, as it is conceived by the author and received by the readership). Narrative texts are thus neither 'about' truth or meaning, nor are they 'about* historical events, even though they may lead us to valuable and truthful insights into, and provide us with useful information about, the happenings and mores of a particular epoch. The voices of the narrative are consequently always potentially at odds with themselves and with their worlds; it is an author's task to impose order on these unruly populations, and to sell this particular brand of 'world order' to the reading audience—a minimal condition for success in authorial endeavors. This is not an easy task, and narration seems always to be torn between the worlds of truth and fiction: the truth has to be fictionalized to be readable, and fiction has to ring true in order to be believable. Narration strains between truth and 'fiction', even to the point where the latter at times seems to have taken over completely, as in the designation 'fiction', attached to a particular narrative genre whose first and foremost representative is the novel. The next sections will have a closer look at this strain, and how it affects our conception of'character' and 'voice'.

6.2.1. Language, meaning, and truth In the 19th century Dutch novel Max Havelaar, or: the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, an initial voice is heard, attributed to the coffee merchant Batavus Droogstoppel. This person incorporates all the vices and virtues of the Dutch colonial system, as represented at its receiving end, the coffee market and its colonial traders, while the real 'colonials' serve at the other end, that of producing and shipping, as administrators, shipbrokers, cargo handlers, and military officials, all there to make sure the coffee gets out of the fields and on to the freighters. 57 Droogstoppel has, among other things, his very personal views on the arts; specifically, he is 'tough' on literary matters. To him, literature should represent reality; any deviation from the 'real' has to be condemned in the name of'truth'. In order for a story to be credible, its plot

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should be true to life, and its characters should speak in 'real', not theatrical or assumed, "character' voices. Even today, we often hear this claim phrased as the 'credibility requirement', whereby actors, whether in the theater or on the literary or political scene, are supposed to make us believe in what they say, no matter 'whose language' (and truth) (see Mey 1985) they are speaking, and irrespective of where in life the truth of their statements may be found. In the vein of the above, Droogstoppel, for reasons of trustworthiness and truth, professes complete diffidence and aggressive incredulity towards the whole belletristic enterprise. How, for instance, can it happen that actors, in the form of theatrical production that has been prevalent in Western literature since Marlowe and Shakespeare, "know* what their antagonists are going to say? And know this they must, since it is crucial for them to pronounce their lines in such a fashion that the responding character can bring his or her own line to a successful, i.e. rhyming conclusion. Thus, says Droogstoppel, providing an example from Teal' life, it makes no sense, in the name of truth, to have the royal castle's commanding officer tell his queen that the enemy have already forced the bridge across the moat, and let the queen reply by an exhortation to a courageous last stand—if such replies have to match rhyme-wise. In order to utter the 'correct', rhyming reply, the queen would have to know that the castle's drawbridge actually was down; however, this knowledge is only available to her after the commander has told her. Conversely, if the bridge still had been up, she would have been deprived of her rhyme and line; in which case she would have had to compromise on poetics, in exchange for a chance of keeping her crown—truly a royal conundrum, one might say. Here is the passage in question, with my (free) translation: HOOFDMAX. Mevrouw, het is te laat: de poorten zi/n ontsloten. VRÜVWE. Welaan, dan, onverveerd laat ons het zwaard ontblooten. ('CAPTAIN. Madam, it is too late: the bridge has been forced down. QUEEN. Then with the bared sword let us defend our crown.') (Multatuli, Max Havelaar. 1962 ed. p. 27; my translation)

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The comical aspects of the above interchange aside, we may ask: But what exactly, from a narrative point of view, is DroogstoppeFs problem? It isn't just the case that the man is an unimaginative dimwit, without any feel for poetry or fiction, with a freshman Republican congressman's appreciation of the arts. The problem underlying his anti-poetic diatribes is that of the 'hegemony of language' as I have called it (Mey I993a: 288; more on this in chapter 11.2). For Droogstoppel, language (more precisely: his language) is the only possible and authentic embodiment of truth and meaning. Language has invaded, taken over, occupied his reality, giving it a unique name and a voice, bringing him close to the biblical Adam. Indeed, the very name of the man—'Batavus'—matches his antediluvian religious and philosophical beliefs; as we have seen, his onomastic double is the tribe of the Batavi, the first named inhabitants of the region now known as Holland—the 'Adams and Eves of the Netherlands', if you wish. Our Batavian Adam holds his own language to be the only true namer of words, the trusted safekeeper of all things, just like his first parent must have felt, when he was given orders to name all the beasts in Paradise (Gen. I : 25; cf. fn. 57). In contrast, as Bakhtin tells us, language is never just One and true': what we have is a vast plenitude of national and, more to the point, social languages— all of which are equally capable of being 'languages of truth,' but, since such is the case, all of which are equally relative,... as they are merely the languages of social groups, professions and other crosssections of everyday life. (1992a: 367) What Batavus Droogstoppel specifically does not realize is the extent to which his language expresses the consciousness of a particular "social group" (or "class", as I would call it); the truths and realities that he allots an independent, free-standing value are actually socially and ideologically bound. Multatuli's tongue-in-cheek portrayal, with its facetious overtones, of this stolid Dutch burgher should not obscure the fact that his character is attempting to lay down the law for a greater and much more important area than mere versified interlocution. If language and truth are one, then language speaks to us with One voice' (which, in Droogstoppel's case, conveniently and naturally happens to be his

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own). Banfield will echo this formula in another connection, a century and a quarter later, in her famous principle: One expression, one speaker'(1982: 57). In reality, as I already adumbrated, languages vary, and every text is 'settled' by different voices. The result is not just a homogeneous population of peaceful settlers: every text is "(over)populated" ((pere)naseleri), as Bakhtin calls it (1992a: 294), by voices, all speaking their own 'dialects'. Strange as it may seem, the result of this colonization is not, however, simple confusion: as a rule, the voices are managed by the author, such that their heteroglossia is kept within strict limits, just as the different voices of an orchestra are assigned each their proper place in the performance of a musical work. The next section will deal with this orkestrovka, this Orchestration' (Bakhtin 1992a: 325, 375).

6.2.2. Orchestration and dialogizing Current discussions about 'voices' and especially about the phenomenon of 'double voicing' or 'dual voice' (for an overview, see Fludernik 1993: 323-324) are either too narrowly linguistics-based or too unfocused, in that they only deal with 'voice' as a narration-interior phenomenon and leave aside the question of 'whose voice' we are hearing in and through the narrative. Even Fludernik, whose professed perspective on voice is consistently less language-bound and more encompassing than that of her predecessors such as Banfield and Ehrlich, refuses to come to terms with the most interesting aspect of voice, viz., its anchoring in the social and economic conditions of the Owner* of the voice and the ways these conditions are reflected in his or her language through "socio-linguistic orchestration", as Bakhtin calls it (1992a: 325). In chapter 4, 1 dealt with the linguistic explanation of 'voice'; there, I maintained that it is not conducive to a better understanding of phenomena such as FID to limit oneself to describing (not to speak of defining) voice phenomena exclusively in terms of morphology, syntax, and other. As regards formal features, the "sociolinguistic orchestration" of voice, this is often neglected, even among those who in principle accept the necessity of anchoring voices outside, and beyond, the strictly linguistic level of description and explanation. Fludernik, who in other contexts is sympathetic to the idea of calling into doubt the 'linguistics

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only' tenet, feels clearly uncomfortable with what she calls the "ideological" character of the Bakhtinian concept of multivocality (or 'polyvocality', as she prefers to call it; 1993: 324); she cautions us against identifying Bakhtin's 'heteroglossia' with the concept of'double voice', as it is normally used in studies of "free indirect discourse pure and simple" (ibid.: 325)—whatever that is supposed to be. It is essential to realize that Bakhtin's heteroglossia takes its departure in what he calls the essentially "dialogic orientation of discourse" (1992a: 279). This means that speakers speak in order to be understood, and hearers listen in order to understand; the language that is spoken, thus takes its cues from the potential hearers, just as the language that is heard, orients itself towards the speaking subject for understanding. One could say that our use of language is forward-oriented: our discourse looks towards the future results of our using language. But our language is also oriented towards the past, in that it incorporates the private and social history of the speakers and their historical background. Speakers therefore never speak just one language, but always several. The dialogic nature of language makes discourse 'heteroglossic' in that it combines several languages; the text of a particular discourse contains always an 'over-population' of voices (whose number, in principle, is unlimited): ...prose discourse—in any of its forms, quotidian, rhetorical, scholarly—cannot fail to be oriented towards the 'already uttered,' the 'already known', the 'common opinion', and so forth. The dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is a property of any discourse. (Bakhtin 1992a: 279; only last emphasis in original) Heteroglossia, says Bakhtin further, is always "another's speech in another's language" (ibid.: 324). In a sense, "all speech is reported speech" (Morson & Emerson 1990: 138), to which we should add: reported not only by some speaker, but even more importantly, reported to some hearer. In that consists the essentially dialogic character of language. Language, being dialogic in nature, represents different agendas. The voices coming into play in discourse have different backgrounds and different objectives. Hence discourse is, in principle, always messy; the activity of the author consists in reducing this messiness to an ordered universe of speech and thought, a kosmos represented in discourse. This authorial activity should not be seen as superficial, cosmetic rather than

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cosmic, merely adding some touch-ups to an untidy surface or beautifying uncultivated areas of speech. Of course, the latter activity (generally accepted as good authorial practice in the classical literary novelistic tradition) has a right to life as well. But the practice we are looking at here is more than a simple, superficial incorporation of some additional 'voices'; it is a total re-ordering, an imposition of an order from the inside out; the result is the creation of a 'new world order" in the literary universe. Bakhtin himself uses the term orkestrovka, Orchestration', for this imposition of order ("the orchestration of meaning by means of heteroglossia"; 1992a: 371). Bakhtin alludes here to the composer's creative activity when ordering the different musical voices into one score, the symphonic whole. But by itself, heteroglossia is not able to constitute a literary universe; the different voices must be marshaled, and given specific parts to execute, under the direction of the authorial instance. But this direction has to respect the characters' social and personal backgrounds. The voices that the author orchestrates are always already existing voices, voices with a 'room of their own', in addition to having a language of their own. As Bakhtin puts it, ... language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word (according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic) but also—and for us this is the essential point—into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, 'professional' and 'generic' languages, languages of generations, and so forth. (1992a: 271-272) \fvocality can be defined as the way the single voice is managed, then multivocality could be an appropriate label for this process of dialectic 'refraction' in voicing between the 'personal' and the 'social'. By this, Bakhtin means that ... the intentions of the ... writer are refracted, and refracted at different angles, depending on the degree to which the refracted, heteroglot languages he deals with are socio-ideologically alien, already embodied and already objectivized. (1992a: 300) Multivocality is thus more than heteroglossia: it refers to the active management of voicing in the text, rather than to the passive existence

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of different voices. As we will see later, multivocality is the basis not only for voice harmony, the symphony of the orchestrated voices, but also for 'voice clashes', Le. cases where voices leave their proper places in the score and encroach upon other voices' parts (characters' as well as authors'). Bakhtin envisions the dialectic tension in heteroglossia as obtaining between what he calls the ''unitary language" (the norm) and the diverse individual languages; the resulting "speech diversity" is opposed against the "normative-centralizing system of a unitary language" (1992a: 272). These dialectics cannot be accounted for by merely considering the surface level of speech; they need to be founded on the deeper level of multivocality. And the motivation for digging towards this deeper, foundational layer is found in Bakhtin himself, where he draws our attention to the fact that words have a history and may have "conditions attached" to them (1992b: 76). Such conditions do not only prevail in particular cases, when they are explicitly or implicitly invoked (for instance in parody, which is Bakhtin's illustrative case; 1992b: 76), but they have to be respected wherever language is used. Hence the language I choose to characterize a person (the voice I ascribe to him or her) is itself always already fraught with meanings and conditions governing its use, and can therefore not be assigned indiscriminately to just any character. The various tensions arising from this opposition may be specified as one, the split between the words as originally given, and the personae which are the creation of the novelist; two, the split between the character and his or her language; and three, the split between the person as Owner' of a voice and the voice as Owned' by the language. The latter is not necessarily the "unitary language" that Bakhtin speaks of; rather, and more precisely, it has to be conceived of as the particular language that goes with the individual persona as a member of a societal class or group, as one who has lived a life and gathered experiences, as one who has gone through emotional and intellectual stages and has emerged, well, yes, as a 'person'. The "hidden conditions" of the words thus stand in opposition to the "hidden conditions" of the person: the underlying confrontation between these opposing sets of conditions with their concomitant societal charges often sets off a discharge on the level of vocalization, a discharge which may be registered by the reader as a 'clash' of voices.

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The subject of "clashing voices' will be dealt with in more detail in chapter 7.2. For now, let me illustrate how the individual voices happen to manifest themselves using language. As my example, I will take the case of (grammatical) first person.

6.2.3. Problems of person: T, 'eye', and skaz Vocality implies that voices are not only conditioned societally; they are also localized, or 'anchored', in the reality of their language. It follows that it is legitimate (and necessary) to probe into the mechanisms that the language has at its disposal to make these voices heard. One of these devices has been known in grammar ever since antiquity as the category of 'person". While I do not subscribe to the 'pan-linguistic' tenets of Banfield and others, stipulating that voices have to be expressed strictly linguistically on the penalty of not being 'recognized' (in the double sense of the term), I still believe that linguistic devices have an important mission in guiding us towards a correct interpretation of vocality. Linguistic techniques, however, even though often a necessary condition for interpretation, are never sufficient by themselves. The voices of a text's population are on record; but in order to check that record, we cannot depend uniquely on a single type of recording apparatus, the grammar of the language, and the evidence it provides. First of all, grammatical data are rather different from language to language; in addition, they are not necessarily always adapted to the ends of a pragmatically oriented literary study such as the present work. Any kind of 'linguistic exclusivism' condemns us to remain within the narrow confines of linguistics, where the pragmatics of the discourse forever will escape us. To start off the discussion, I want to reintroduce the problem that we already approached above: the question of "whose voice' we are hearing in the narrative. If voices have owners, then we must be able to ascertain who those owners are; if we fail to do so, we may set the wrong signals and in the end derail the entire narrative enterprise. Banfield (1982: 115) provides an interesting test case—interesting both in itself and because it shows how Banfield must arrive at the wrong conclusions precisely because she bases herself on the same linguistic exclusivism that I have criticized in connection with the discussion on speakability (chapter 5.4.4).

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Banfield quotes a passage from D.H. Lawrence's novel The first Lady Chatterley, in which Parkin the game-keeper58 muses about the effects that the war has on genteel people like "my lady", and he concludes: "She was but a girl after all. Ay, the war hit the gentry hard." (Lawrence 1978: 23). Banfield goes on to remark that the exclamation "ay* appears not so much as a way of pronouncing 'yes' as a different affirmative morpheme with its own expressive value. The passage is in marked contrast to those passages of direct speech in the midland dialect in the same novel, such as 'Ay, come if yer like. But dounna come afore midnight....' (Banfield 1982: 115; Lawrence 1978: 170). Unfortunately, Banfield misses a crucial point here, restricted as she is to looking for linguistic solutions to literary-pragmatic problems. The all-important question is: Whose voice are we hearing, and how is this voice manifested to us? Clearly, the word ay refers to a character speaking a Midland dialect, hence to the gamekeeper. This it does in both quoted cases, irrespective of whether the gamekeeper is introduced as speaking directly (as in the last example), or we are listening to him expressing his thoughts in 'inner monologue', as in the former case. Saying, as Banfield does, that ay is a morpheme with different expressive values is begging the question, or rather, evading it by displacing it and reformulating it as an exclusively linguistic problem. In reality, although those "expressive values' do hinge on a particular phonetic or phonological representation, their main function is pragmatic, namely to indicate and identify the person using the language, here: the speaker. While the latter functions may not primarily interest the linguist as linguist, they are of prime importance to the user of the text, the reader, and hence also to the pragmatically oriented linguist. Thus, I am not for a moment in doubt that Banfield, as a reader and a pragmaticist, will be able to recognize this rather obvious function, which she may want to disregard as a professional, that is, as a card-carrying linguist. Determination of voice ownership is the central clue to understanding texts. Ownership can be assigned in various ways, some linguistic (or 'grammatical'), some 'extra-linguistic'. Among the grammatical devices we have at our disposal, the category of 'person' is foremost. Classical grammar tells us that the first person expresses the speaker's

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voice, the second person's voice is that of the addressee, while the third person represents the position and voice of the more or less innocent bystander—all depending on, and shifting in accordance with, the point of view of the current speaker (as we have seen in chapter 3). These grammatical categories roughly correspond to the narrative categories distinguished by Bakhtin, but only very roughly. In particular, the 'presumed innocence' of the third person is called into question by Bakhtin in the name of an invisible 'third person', the so-called 'superaddressee' (nadadresat}, to whom our utterances (also) are addressed, and whose necessary 'invisible presence'... follows from the very nature of the word, which always wants to be heard, always seeks responsive understanding, and does not stop at immediate understanding, but presses on further and further (indefinitely). (1994b: 127; Morson & Emerson 1990: 136; my italics) 59 Leaving aside the question of the 'superaddressee' for a moment, we could ask whether the other persons, too, can be said to suffer from a similar fall from innocence. In the following, I will concentrate on the case of the first person as particularly illustrative, both from the angle of who the 'first' person is that the 'voice' represents, and who the 'second' person is that the voice of the first person tries to address; towards the end of the section, I will briefly touch upon the 'second' person itself. For both persons, I will assume that the Bakhtinian term of 'addressivity' should be conceived of as having both an active and a passive quality, by asking not only: who is addressing whom?, but also: who is addressed by whom? 60 The various avatars of the Ί-story' down through the literary ages and periods show interesting differences from the perspective of involvement and addressivity. As extremes, consider the case of Homer, where the first person only occurs in the poet's invocation of the Muse in the opening verses of the Iliad and Odyssey, either as a (perhaps) perfunctory tribute to the goddess and/or the tradition of oral poetry, or (possibly) as an author's appeal to a validating authority; then compare this to the modern, hard-boiled spy story, where the first person is used in an attempt to bring the reader directly into the action as a voyeurparticipant in the scene of the crime and, if possible, gross him or her out by any amount of gory detail. For a simple, old-fashioned sample of

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the style, cf.: "I shot him three times in the back and spine" (from an old 'Special Agent Lemmy Caution' story, This man is dangerous}, or, for modern equivalents, consult every other page in Bret Easton Ellis' cult novel of the 'nineties, American Psycho. Sometimes, the question: 'Who addresses whom?' is relatively simple to answer. In the travelogue type of narration, the author poses as the persona of the traveling narrator, while the reader is the interested audience who wants to be informed about what the author has truly seen and experienced on his or her travels. As a result, there is very little multivocality in this type of narration, even though fictional traits appear from time to time, and other voices than the narrator's may be heard. When Goethe, for example, in his recounting of his travel to Italy (1786-87), has finally traversed the Alps and emerges into sunny Italy from the cold and snow and misty clouds of Northern Europe, he writes down: "The sun is out, and one believes once again in a God" (Die Sonne scheint, und man glaubt wieder an einen Gott; from Die italienische Reise, eh. 7). Here, the T yields the scene, so to speak, to the impersonal voice of an 'everyman': the German man (for want of a specific equivalent translated here as One'). There is little doubt that it is Goethe himself who establishes this tongue-in-cheek connection between God's existence and fine weather and that it is his voice we are listening to here. But the voice is muted; Goethe is hiding behind the impersonal man, 'ventriloquizing', one could say, borrowing a term from Talbot(l 995: 60).61 While in the case of the autobiographical or travel account, the emphasis is on the T of the narration, as representing the authorial voice more or less directly, this is not the case in most of classical 'homodiegetic' narration (that is: stories that are told in the M-form', as opposed to "heterodiegetic" narrative; the terms are due to Gerard Genette, see Fludernik 1993: 47). We have been trained (as 'versatile readers*; see below, chapter 8.5) to consider those 'first persons' as parts of a narrative technique, and by accepting this T of the story as different, and even distant, from the T of the author's voice, we allow for a great number of what would otherwise be experienced as irritating inconsistencies (cf. Batavus Droogstoppel's somewhat pathetic appeal to 'truthfulness' in the literary work, referred to above, section 6.2.1). Like all techniques, the art of reading is not innate, it has to be acquired; the reader has to learn how to consciously deliver him- or her-

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self into the hands of the author-as-storyteller in order to obtain the full benefit of the telling. As a boy, deeply immersed in the wild adventures of Old Shatterhand in the Wild West, or Kara-ben-Nemsi in the Orient, as 're-told' by their authorial 1-hero, the German writer Karl May, I was often plagued by doubts as to the authenticity of the episodes in which the Ί'-hero invariably emerged as the noblest, most successful, and invincible character of the lot, a paragon of moral, masculine, and military virtue—to the point where I could sense a slight feeling of distrust, not to say disgust, raising its ugly head. However, being (albeit unconsciously) mindful of the 'contract', by which the 'fictional space' (Scholes 1982: 25) of the narration is created in active cooperation between reader and author, I taught myself to deliberately silence those voices of doubt, in order to be able to enjoy the story. Similarly, I had no problem with the fact that the I-heroes in those stories could imbibe manly quantities of strong liquids and gorge themselves on piles of food, but never seemed to feel the need to practice the other side of the human metabolism. I did not attribute this to some superhuman quality in the protagonists, but simply accepted that the world of fiction was not the same as the world of my everyday life. I clearly separated out the T of the world of fiction and the T of 'reality': the two Ts did not speak with the same voice. A difference in voice attribution was thus brought to bear on the distance between the two worlds, that of the narrative and that of one's own reality. Which brings us back to the problem of "person' and of the ways we have of establishing and recognizing the link between a character as fiction and that same character as belonging to the real world. While it is quite reasonable to imagine (and easy to verify) that a poet called Johann Wolfgang von Goethe actually did travel to Italy in the mid-1780's, this is not the real issue for the T-story as genre. We listen to the voice of the Ί-person' as that of one of the characters in the story, not as that of an outsider whose world of reality we have to check out in order to lend credence to his or her claims to legitimacy and knowledge. 62 In Lermontov's classical story A Hero of Our Time, the narration starts out by the narrator's I-voice telling us how he is traveling in the Caucasus: "I was traveling by stage-coach from Tiflis...", the very first sentence of the book (1961: 17). On this trip, the l-person meets the old warrior, staff-captain Maksim Maksimyc, who is not only knowledgeable about the customs prevailing in those parts and about the dangers from nature and natives threatening the inexperienced

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traveler, but in addition has a story of his own to tell—one of the several episodes which make up the bulk of the book. In homodiegetic novels, the T person tells his or her story to some (present or imagined) listeners. The dialogic first person is characterized by its 'addressivity', that is: the person represented as the speaking (narrator) T is addressing a listening, cooperating second person, an (implicit) reader-'you'. Banfield (1982: 171ff) distinguishes between a 'general' addressivity, where the narrator merely 'poses' as an T (I will call this "an I for the purpose of narration') and a 'special' case in which the narrator enters the story scene and becomes a voice in the narrative ('an 1 for the purpose of action'). The addressivity that is involved in this latter, 'action-Γ is not only directed to the story's reading audience, but in addition, to the (listening) audience within the story: the narrator voice becomes indistinguishable from the voice of a character. As a result, the story character 'invades' the narrator, whose voice, in order to represent a credible character, now has to compete with the other voices in a natural, 'dialogized' fashion. Among other things, this results in oral, vernacular language taking its place in the \arrative on an equal footing with the language of the original narrative voice. In extreme cases, this 'character invasion' may entirely crowd out, so to speak, the normal, 'neutral' language of the narrative voice. What we observe in this case is a kind of 'reciprocal infectiousness', as it has been called (following Voloshinov 1973: 133) by Morson & Emerson (1990: 169), between the voice of the narrator and those of the narration's personae. The case is canonically exemplified in the storytelling genre called skaz (lit.: 'speech'), in which a character (usually an T) is introduced for the purpose of narration and/or action. The 'skaz' has its name from its connections to the direct oral discourse, as this is delivered by the character; more on this below.63 Fludernik, following Stanzel (1984), calls such traces of the introduced character's vocality Anstekkung, literally 'contagion' or 'contamination' (1993: 290; 333). 'Skaz'-like features are found in many surroundings, literary as well as linguistic: for instance, Tolstoy in his novels uses vernacular elements to characterize his peasants (thus in Anna Karenina), and he apes (or caricatures) the upper classes' affectation of injecting bits and pieces of foreign languages (mostly French) into their speech (both in War and Peace and in Anna Karenina}. Similarly, certain types of linguists (among these especially the conversation analysts, following the lead of what has come to be called 'ethnomethodology') are prone to transcrib-

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ing authentic vernacular in a rather "coarse' phonetic manner (i.e. without having to use technical notation, such as a special alphabet). Because this way of characterizing a form of speech directly appeals to our visual perception of the sounds when written in normal orthography, as in y'r for 'your', missuz for 'Mrs.', aiggs for 'eggs' (seen in Kentucky), thaing for 'thing' (Texas), and so on, this technique often goes under the name of 'eye-dialect' (compare also some authors' intentionally facetious notations, such as Joyce's eyetallyano for 'Italian', Hemingway's Ayrab for'Arab'). Both 'eye'-dialect and 'skaz' represent what I have called the Ί for the purpose of narration' posing as, and in fact taking over, the Ί for the purpose of action'. In all these cases, the presence of another voice is made visually manifest to obtain an effect of immediacy, of 'having been at the scene', with the aim of making the reader feel that he or she is part ofthat same scene. Overall, the story-telling genre of 'skaz' is colored by the intrusion of the vernacular into the language of the characters (including the language of the narrator as a character). Let me illustrate this 'character invasion' into the narrative, along with the ensuing voice contagion, by reference to a particularly interesting case, that of the 'narration Γ-cum-eponymous main character ('action Γ) of the novel Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980). One could perhaps say that Hoban's novel is a story in "super-skaz' style: special for Riddley Walker is the way the dialect voice is used to set up the story scene, not just the dialogue. Thus, the narrative universe is not propped up locally by quoting references to (an)other voice(s), including that of the protagonist's 'narration Γ; it is in and through the immediacy of the other voices (especially Riddley's 'action ,Γ) that the dialogue comes to life and the story takes off. Riddley Walker is a 'super-skaz' story written in a 'super-eye dialect', as we will see shortly. What happens in Riddley Walker is this: after a short nuclear war some time around the turn of our century, the world is bombed back to a new Stone Age which, at the moment the story begins, has lasted for a couple of thousand years. People are living in bands, trading whatever primitive products they can lay their hands on (one of these is scrap iron from old factories and installations); there is a vestigial remembrance of, and a yearning for, the 'good old times', before the 'Big One' blew everything sky-high. In the course of the story, the eponymous, narrating I-hero of the story gets himself involved in a dispute between rival-

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ing clans, one of which has discovered some means of producing an explosive black powder and now dreams of using it to bring back good times for themselves by subjugating the rest of the known 'world'. The reader can guess what happens next—Hoban spares us the unhappy ending. Hoban's novel is entirely written in what I have dubbed 'Nuclear English', i.e. a dialect of the language as it is projected by the author to be spoken somewhere around the year 4,000 of our present era (Mey I995a). This dialect, which (not so incidentally perhaps) is strongly flavored by local traits of the area where the author lives and where the narration unfolds, viz., the region around Canterbury in Southeast England, is not only the vernacular spoken by the characters in the book, but also the language in which the book itself is written: the 'I-person' as narrator has been invaded by the dialect of the characters, Riddley Walker and his band of contemporaries. The reason 1 call this story a 'super-skaz' is that the voice of the narrator, the 'I for the purpose of narration', to a large extent is preempted by the voice of the characters, first among them that of the Ί for the purpose of action', Riddley Walker himself; the narrator is thus qua voice mostly indistinguishable from the novel's otherpersonae. Mostly, but not quite: for interestingly, even in this artificially created world with its quasi-future vernacular, we distinguish other dialect voices, older and younger, emergent as well as abandoned, all of them used to characterize certain special narrative sub-contexts, in which 'narrration Γ and 'action Γ part ways. One such sub-context is that of the 'Power Leat', the elite band that sits on certain powerful pieces of knowledge which have been salvaged down through the dark ages; another is the environment of the keepers of the 'sacred story' of the tribes, the medieval Legend of St. Eustace with its accompanying mural, a reproduction of which somehow made it into what we figure must be the fifth millennium A.D. Incidentally, St. Eustace is also the saint who figures as a kind of Virgilian quasi-eponymous ancestral hero of the 'inland people' (consider that in Nuclear English, his name is spelled Eusa); here we spot a link to the initial authorial voice, whose (Modern English) presentation of the facts about the Legend prefaces the book, and whose modern English description of the mural is among the highest treasured, but least understood parts of the inlanders' oral tradition.

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All in all, Russell Hoban's effort to create an entire narrative universe around, roughly speaking, a single first person voice is an interesting and daring attempt at manipulating the readership by means of an invasive addressivity, demanding a total, 'addressable' response. On the plane of practical readability, this translates into a great deal of effort on the part of the readers, who may not be willing to let themselves be introduced to Riddley Walker's world so easily, given that the dialect actually is not all that transparent, even for native users of English. To give some examples: what follows is a hymn traditionally sung whenever somebody's dead body is placed on the funeral pyre for cremation (I am providing some extra context for better understanding): Arnge flames upping in the dark and liting all the faces round... The fire blowing in the wind and the sparks whup off in to the dark and gone. Dark and gone. Before the wording we sung Sarvering gallac k Seas: Pas the sarvering gal lack seas and flaming nebyul eye Power us beyont the farthes reaches of the sky Thine the han what shapit the black Guyd us there and guyd us back Straiter Empy said, 'Thine hans for Brooder Walker.' We all thinet hans then round the fire and Straiter Empy wordit 1st. He said, 'Brooder Walker. A good man and done good connexions. Done his bes for this crowd like his father done befor him. Like his son wil after him. Out of the dark he come and in to the dark he gone.' (Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker. New York: Simon & Schuster 1980, p. 22). The main obstacles to a correct understanding of this extract are in the purported phonetic development-cum-reanalysis of words such as 'sovereign', 'galaxies' and 'nebulae', written in the Nuclear 'eyedialect' of English as "sarvering'', "gallack seas'', and "nebyul eye". Another difficulty lies in the author's recategorization and semantic

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reanalysis of certain Modern English words, as attested by the Nuclear English verb 'thine' in 'Thine hans for Brooder Walker" ('Join hands for Brother Walker'). This verb is originally an Older Modern English possessive pronoun (cf. the original text of the hymn: "Thine [is] the hand which shaped the black"), which now has acquired the meaning 'join (hands)' (cf. also the verb 'unthine' on p. 23 of Hoban's book, describing the inverse process of 'letting go of each other's hands'). Once these hurdles are surmounted, and the narrative has kicked in, the 'super-skaz' magic has efficiently performed its job of'seducing' (see chapter 8.6) the reader to enter this new/old, frightening fictional space. As promised, to conclude this chapter, a final brief remark on the role of the 'second person'. Fludernik remarks that 'skaz'-like traits are neither necessarily inherent in, nor limited to, 'first person' narrative; the addressivity that the 'skaz 'incorporates can equally well be incorporated into a second person narrative. An egregious, though rare, example is found in the quasi-autobiography by Oriana Fallaci of her lover Alekos Panagulis in Un Uomo (Fallaci 1979). This story is told in the "you'-form, the author addressing her dead companion, 'telling' him what he did in his life. Here, 'addressivity' implies a sort of tromperoiuil presence of the reader, resulting in a voyeuristic participation in the events of Alekos' life and in the intimate conversations believably taking place between the narrator and her remembered lover. The following is an instance of this peculiar story-telling style: // giorno seguente lo avevi impiegato a far do ehe in fondo all 'anima ti premeva di piu: umiliare Joannidis. II sistema ehe avevi scelto era semplice: mostrarti in vari punti della capitale con apparizioni fugaci e improvvise, da Primula Rossa. Entravi in un bar, ti fermavi su un marciapiede, salivi su un taxi, ne scendevi, indugiavi nella hall di un albergo, e appena udivi quel gridolino soffocato, "Panagulis! E Panagulis?!" spariviper riapparire altrove, magari in un quartiere lontano, alimentando stupori e incertezze. ('The next day you were busy doing what deep down was most important to you: making a fool of Joannidis [Alekos' sworn enemy, the wicked police chief who had been responsible for his capture and torture]. The system you had chosen was simple: show up in various locations of the capital, making quick, unexpected appearances, like another Scarlet Pimpernel. You went into a bar, you

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stopped on a sidewalk, you jumped into a taxi, went out of it again, you loitered in the lobby of a hotel, and as soon as you heard the muffled cry: "Panagulis! Is that Panagulis?!" you disappeared, to turn up some other place, perhaps in a far away district, causing perplexity and uncertainty/) (Oriana Fallaci. Un Uomo. Milano: Rizzoli 1979. p. 236; my translation) In cases like these, the reader is sometimes hard put to keep in mind whose voice is being heard; but the same may occasionally happen in regular, 'third person' narration, where sometimes voices are heard that cannot possibly be thought of as 'real' in the sense of 'actually speaking'. We have already seen an example in the case of Levin's "talking" dog Laska in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, who is said to be mentally reproaching her employers for not paying attention to their business (above, section 6.1.2). Another case is that of Anna's boy Sereza, who is given thoughts to think about Anna's relationship with Vronskij that seem to be well beyond his age ("What is this supposed to mean? Who is this man? Why must I love him? If I don't understand, it must be my fault; either I am stupid or a bad boy." Anna Karenina. II: xxii, 1962 ed. I: 208). Clearly, as I already intimated above, we are approaching another problem complex here, that of the 'clashing voices'; on this, more will be said in the next chapter.

Chapter 7

Voice in transition 7.1. When voices change 7.1.1. 'Whose voice...? ' There is a well-known poem by Horace, in which the poet starts out singing the praises of the simple country life among the cows, far from the hubbub of the city and its hectic occupations. The poem begins with the famous lines Beatus ille qui procul negotiis ui prisca gens morlalium paterna rura bubus exercet suis solutus omnifaenore,

('Lucky the man who, far from the bustle of business, just like the people of old, labors the ancestral acre with his oxen, free of all debts,...') (Epod. II, Wickham ed. (1955), pp. [144-146]; my translation & page count). and continues in this vein for two more pages, some seventy lines. Only towards the very end, in line 66, Horace tells us that he all the time has been pulling our legs: the poem's speaking voice, which we innocently and unquestioningly had been attributing to the author, is suddenly "unmasked" as belonging to the usurer Alfius who, after a short bout of daydreaming and indulging in sweet fantasies, reverts to the realities of life and starts speculating about how to best place his funds by the next upcoming first of the month:

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Haec ubi locutus foenerator Alfius iamiam futurus rusticus omnem redegit Idibus pecuniam quaerit Kalendis ponere. ('Having said this, the usurer and would-be farmer Alfius withdrew all his funds by the middle of the month, in order to reinvest them by the next first'). In this case, the sudden change of voice is overtly indicated (but as late as possible, for greater effect) by the poet himself. 64 We are told that (contrary to our normal expectations) the words we just have heard were not 'spoken' by the poet (as in most other of his epodes and odes), but by somebody else, the usurer Alfius who, "having said this, ... withdrew all his funds". The comic effect of this unexpected and unforeseen change of voice lies in the fact that we were not hearing the 'double voice" of the narrative before it was too late: we walked straight into the trap set for us by the author. In other cases, the voice changes are less explicit; sometimes, they are even completely hidden and we can only register their presence by their effects on us, the readers. The following is a relatively simple case, where the change is implicit in the choice of words. In Eudora Welty's story The Robber Bridegroom, a simpleton named Goat reports to the wicked old woman Salome on his unfulfilled mission: to kill young Rosamond, the future 'robber bride*. His excuse is that a raven had told him to return, so he had to come back without having accomplished anything. ''What raven?" cried Salome, for she did not know what raven he could mean. Well, he said, it was simply the raven they kept to answer the door, he supposed, when they were not at home. And now might he have his pay? (The Robber Bridegroom, Harvest ed., p. 90).

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The initial utterance is attributed to Salome in direct speech: Salome is quoted by the narrator as having said "What raven?" Next, the words attributed to Goat are first referred to as recorded speech: "Well, he said, it was simply the raven...'" But then the voice changes to the character's inner level of thoughts, where he 'supposes' things: "the raven they kept to answer the door, he supposed, when they were not at home". This "he supposed" is not a recording, a description of a speech event, in the manner of the earlier "he said"; it is a rendering of Goat's (unspoken) utterance "I suppose that they keep that raven to answer the door when they are not at home". Thus, free indirect discourse is introduced, with a change in voice sustained throughout the last sentence of the excerpt: "And now might he have his pay?", which exhibits all the classical features of FID that were discussed above, in chapter 3.3: shifting of personal pronoun, 'backshifting' of tense, and so on. The crucial feature that determines this reading in the first instance is the 'inqtiif character of the verb 'to say', used to report here, in a very general sense, whatever is going on in the narrative. 65 In contrast, a verb such as 'to suppose' carries with it a strong feature of being actor-based: only an utterer can 'suppose' something about the mental state he or she happens to be in. One is reminded of the restrictions that are imposed on certain speech acts, such as 'to promise', where the essential condition (according to Searle 1969) is that the utterer take responsibility for the promise; a "third person' cannot promise anything with responsibility, hence the words 'he promised' can only be uttered in a recording mode, unless the third person is the result of an FID-commanded shift. Other features include deictics of the kind we considered earlier (the so-called 'shifters', see chapter 3.1). Often, such deictics are used (malgre ewe, so to speak) to become the tell-tale traces of a change in voice that has not been announced (and probably shouldn't have happened in the first place). Consider the following extract from a novel by Saul Bellow: [The novelist is describing Charlotte, a hard-nosed woman by fate, not by choice. Facing a sea of troubles, Charlotte pulls herself through by concentrating away from what she is suffering at any given time, fixing her mind on distant, solvable problems.]

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Somebody wrestling a bear for dear life, and with forehead lost against the grizzly pelt, figuring anyway what to do next Sunday, whom to invite to dinner and how to fix the table. (The Adventures ofAugie March. Penguin ed., 1984, p. 466). The tell-tale deictic in this case is in the phrase '"next Sunday". Expressions like these belong either in direct speech or in FID and suggest the way a person talks about what he or she is going to do to-morrow, next week, next month, or next Sunday. If this had been simple, reporting narration, we would have expected at least a 'the* before "next Sunday"; cp. the difference between: 'Come back tomorrow' (direct speech) and: 'He was told to come back the next day" (a report). Charlotte is described in the first part of the excerpt as somebody who is wrestling for her dear life with a bear; however, towards the end we hear her talking to herself and making plans for dinner the following (or next?) Sunday (in FID). We are witness to a shift of voice, from narrator's report to character's reported speech and thought ('RST'; see chapter 4.2.3); while the change is not explicitly announced, nevertheless it is still a real, and very noticeable one. The next section will detail the mechanics of'announcing' such shifts.

7.1.2. Announcing a voice shift How do authors manage to tell their readers that the character whose voice they have been listening to in narration has finished her or his contribution, and that someone else is taking over? How are changes in voice (from narrator to character, from one character to another, from character to 'intruding author', and so on) announced in the narrative? The most obvious, and probably oldest, technique of announcing a shift in voice stems from recorded dialogue, as we find it written down in Plato's purportedly authentic conversations between Socrates and his disciples. The technique here is not much different from that used, ever since antiquity, in stage-writing: here, the different voices are distributed among the individual actors by means of a piece of paper containing their contribution, and carried around by them on the stage in the earlier phases of rehearsing. The paper was rolled up for easier handling and thus became a 'role'. 66 When the full 'score', comprising

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all the individual parts or 'voices', sooner or later came to be published, it seemed natural to indicate the individual lines by the initials of the characters; a format for play-writing and -editing which has remained intact from the days of Aeschylus and Euripides through Plautus, Shakespeare, Schiller, and Ibsen down to our own age. Implicit in this assignment of individual roles to interactants in a dialogue or in a play is their general role of 'uttering': the caption SO[KRATES] in front of a line in a Platonic dialogue is understood as implying: 'Then Socrates said the following:', while PHAI[DON] means that the next upcoming speaker is Phaedo, and so on; similarly in an Ibsen play, the word HEDDA, placed line-initially, is to be read as: 'Now Hedda utters the following line(s):...'. In prose, such lapidary announcements of voice-by-character are usually either omitted (when they are unnecessary, as in a two-way dialogue, where the characters' voices alternate) or 'beefed up' by some verb, usually the classical grammar's verba declarandi & sentiendi, indicating that character said or thought as follows (or as preceded). Here are some examples (all found within three pages of a recent Danish novel): 'Sa, ' sagde jeg, sow det var meningen her. 'Lad nu stakkels Ncestved vcere.' Nicolaj var oprindelig fra Ncestved, et faktum han aldrig havde glemt eller tilgivef, ... Nicolaj sagde: Og nu harjegfäet en grufuld tanke.' Han tcendte cigaret ogposerede. ... 'Grufuld simpelthen, hvor mange tror du der i dette land skriver digte, sädan med tanke pä at fä dem udgivet? ' 'Jeg syne s du Icegger op til en aßen med mange tal,' sagde jeg. 'Lados sige 1000,' sagde Nicolaj rundt. ... 'Hvin skrig, ' sagde jeg og tog mig sammen, kom sä, Tante Bla, videre. 'Det er virkelig en grufuld tanke, men er den scerlig original, der er mange digiere og ingen Ice sere? ' 'Det er nyt og grufuldt at tcenke sä konkret pä det, ' sagde Nicolaj dystert uden rigt ig at mene det, ...

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("OK," I said, as I was expected to at this point. "Just leave poor Naestved alone, will you?" Nicolaj was originally from Naestved [a town in the Danish provinces], a fact he never had forgotten or forgiven,... Nicolaj said: "And now 1 got this horrible thought." He lighted a cigarette and struck a pose. ..."Simply horrible, how many do you believe write poetry in this country, I mean with the idea of getting published?" "Looks to me you're getting ready for a night with a lot of numbers," I said. "Let's say 1,000," Nicolaj said roundly. ... "No shit," I said, and pulled myself together, get on with it, Auntie Blue. "That's really a horrible thought, but is it particularly original, there being many poets and no readers?" "It's new and horrible to think of it in this concrete way," said Nicolaj darkly without really meaning it,...') (Kim Fupz Aakeson, Lyden af Eva. ['Sounding Eve']. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. 1994, pp. 90-91; my translation.) In the above excerpt from a conversation between two friends in a downtown Copenhagen cafe, the author uses one single verb, the preterit of 'to say' (Danish sagde} to mark off the interchanges in the dialogue. Other verbs may be used too, though; these are often expressive of the speech acts embodying the reply ('ask', 'answer', 'suggest', and so on), but can also indicate other, more pragmatically tainted acts accompanying or substituting for the actual words ('sigh', 'cry', 'nod', 'roll one's eyes'), describing their intent or effect ('try', 'deny'), or 'tagging' the original verbs (like 'have' or 'do'; more on this below). Compare the following interchanges (taken from the same conversation):

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'Hvadskal vi sige til hinanden i aßen? ' spurgte han ... ' Vi starter med at sporge hvordan vi har det, 'foreslogjeg. 'God äbning,' nikkede Nicolaj. 'Tak godt, jeg har lige fäet afsat min poetik.' 'Tillykke,' sagde jeg selvfolgelig. '... kau du se hvorjeg v/7 hen?' Jeg svarede et cerligt nah. 'Jeg har en ide,' havde jeg. 'Skriv en folkelig Icegeroman og lad vcere med at pive.' 'Ah nej,' Nicolaj himlede. 'Jeg bliver dar Hg af sä mange ord pä engang, ...' 'Du ved jeg elsker dig, min skat,' sagde han og da jeg ikke lige svarede spurgte han igen. 'Hvad er du i gang med?' 'Novellerne er pä vej,' forsogte jeg. 'Trist med alt det toj,' sukkede Nicolaj, [pigerne] var begge to i frakker og trojer og torklceder i tolv forskelligefarver. 'Kob peanuts,' räbte Nicolaj efter mig. Jeg nikkede. 'Nej, popcorn.' (""What are we going to say to each other tonight?'' he asked. "For starters, we'll ask each other how we're doing,'" I suggested. "Nice opening," Nicolaj nodded. "Thank you, fine, I just got my verse placed."

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" Congratulations," I said naturally. "... can you see what I'm driving at?" I answered an honest Not really. "I have an idea," I had. "Write some doctor-and-nurse pulp and stop whining." "Oh no," Nicolaj rolled his eyes. "So many words in one spot make me puke." "You know I love you, my angel," he said and when I didn't answer he asked once more. "What are you working at?" "The short stories are coming along," I tried. "Too bad with all those clothes," Nicolaj sighed, both [girls] had coats on and sweaters and scarves in twelve different colors. "Buy some peanuts," Nicolaj called after me. I nodded. "No, popcorn."") As we see from this second series of extracts, the "introductory verbs and parenthetical tags", as Fludernik calls them (1993: 296), can be of a great variety. 67 Certain authors seem to have specialized in creating ever more unexpected forms, sometimes over-exerting their ingeniousness; Fludernik (1993: 317) mentions Virginia Woolf s use of 'smiled' as a 'tag' parenthetical: "So that was the story of the Rawleys, Lily smiled.'" (from To the Lighthouse ΙΙΙ,ν; Woolf 1985: 162. Incidentally, Woolf, according to Fludernik (1993: 165), "probably over-uses the [tag] device"). I remember also how my own oldest children used to snigger during reading aloud time, whenever the notorious Mrs. Pepper (from Five Little Peppers And How They Grew) would "ejaculate" something or other. Irrespective of their form, parentheticals and 'tags' have a clear/wwo

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tion in narrative: they serve to mark off the alternating voices in oral dialogue. However, as we also have seen in some of the dialogue quoted above, not all turns in the dialogue are introduced by an appropriate verb or parenthetical 'tag': whenever the turn attribution is obvious, or the respondent otherwise manifest, the assignment of the proper voice, being obvious, is performed automatically; for instance, in the last three lines of the cafe dialogue above, we probably don't have to mobilize much syntactic sophistication to determine the origin of the utterance "No, popcorn", even though no clarifying verbal introduction is provided. In much current writing, the voices are left to their own devices when it comes to the visible expression of turn taking; usually, a line shift will do, accompanied, if necessary, by a typographical device such as a dash, or inverted (single or double) commas, appropriately called 'quotation marks' or "quotes'. There is a functional difference, though, between such purely score-oriented indications as 'quotes' in dialogue, where a person is merely reported to have taken a conversational turn, and the use of inquits, as exemplified in the turn-indicating verbal expressions used in dialogue: the latter serve at the same time to express how the replies function in the dialogue, and thus carry the narration a little further than a mere turn-indication would do (compare 'she said' to 'she agreed', 'she nodded', or 'she smiled'). This difference between "reporting" and 'quoting' may be graphically indicated in the text: thus, in the Russian editions of Tolstoy's works that I have been using, the dialogue turns are reported by dashes in front of every new reply, whereas double quotes indicate represented speech or thought.

7.1.3. 'Changing voices in mid-stream' The voice changes discussed in the previous sections all had to do with dialogue. As examples of voice shifts, they have the advantage of being clearly marked and presented in the text by means of mostly unequivocal techniques: deictics, inquits, or even typographical means. However, the voices of dialogue are not the only ones heard; in many texts, they are not even the ones heard most frequently. As a consequence, the mechanism of voice shift in dialogue is not too illustrative of the way changes in voice attribution help build up the narrative (or, as the case may be, when voices are not managed properly, undo its

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structure). In addition, the voices heard in narrative are not only those of the characters; an all-important, though most of the time hidden, participant in the vocal chorus of narration is the author/narrator, whether not she or he is posing as an Ί-person' or as an unobserved and unobtrusive, nameless chronicler. 68 The narrating voice usually goes unannounced: it is the "default voice', so to speak. All other things being equal, we tacitly assume that the voice we're hearing is the voice of the chronicler, of the (visible or invisible) person telling the story. We only become aware of this voice's presence the moment a shift occurs; and even though these voice shifts are mostly unannounced, there are certain tacit conventions we adhere to in order to ensure that the shifts are properly registered. Unannounced voice shifts, when left to their own devices, can wreak havoc in a story, just as an unexpected alternation in a dialogic pattern leaves us confused as to who the currently speaking person may be. Consider the following excerpt: [Russell, a book editor in a minor, but respected publishing firm, is sitting in a Manhattan bar with some friends and business associates. He has been worried about misplacing a manuscript given him by a notorious gossip columnist, who suddenly appears on the scene out of nowhere.] A tiny elfin figure passed in front of their booth, a young blond man dressed entirely in black, his long, pale face bisected by heavy dark glasses. He fluttered a hand at Washington. "Aren't we important tonight," he said. "Every night," said Washington. To Russell: ''Still looking over my book proposal?" "We're looking hard at it," said Russell. Who was this guy? "Who was that," Whitlock asked. "I thought Truman Capote was dead." "Got reincarnated as a gossip columnist," said Washington. (Jay Mclnerney, Brightness Falls. New York: Vintage, 1993. p. 208).

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In the above, we first hear the voice of the narrator telling us what is going on in the bar and announcing the appearance of Juan Baptiste, the columnist. Next, the latter bestows a fluttering greeting on Washington and inquires about his manuscript from Russell, who cannot remember who the man is, even less where he put the manuscript, and sketches an evasive answer. The answer itself is provided with the appropriate neutral inquit of the dicendi type: "said Russell"; the question is prefaced by an indication of an Out-of-ordef turn: "To Russell", so as to prevent the reader from assigning this reply to the 'default speaker', Washington, who is still on the scene, so to speak. An interesting, unannounced change of voice occurs right after Russell's answer to the Capote look-alike would-be author: "Who was this guy?" (italics in original). This is something Russell doesn't actually say; but it's still his voice, Russell musing to himself. The shift from narrator voice to character voice (and to FID) has not been announced (as would have been the case if the author had put in an inquit of the sentiendi form, such as 'Russell thought' or 'Russell asked himself); even so, we have no trouble identifying the correct origin of the voice as being the character, not the narrator. The following extract from a contemporary English novel furnishes another instance of the same unannounced shift in voices. [Daniel is holding his newborn son, William, and tries to feed the baby while his wife, Stephanie, is fixing him a cup of tea.] His son looked at him with beady black eyes when Stephanie stood up to go, and opened his mouth to protest. Daniel spooned up some apple and pushed it into the incipient noise. Much spluttered out in droplets. The round tongue curled around the rest, spoon shaped, and sucked. Daniel felt every man's pleasure that apple was becoming baby, that fruit was going into flesh, that the curled pads of fist and finger, neck and cheek, were almost visibly expanding. The little black eyes looked into his. The mouth opened like a bird's. Daniel touched the warm head, the hair that was his hair and bent his nose to it. William smelled right, under all the alien muddle, sweet and sour. He smelled human; he smelled of Stephanie, of Daniel, of himself. (A.S. Byatt, Still Life. Collier/Macmillan 1991, p. 155).

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In this passage, we have first a lengthy description of Daniel feeding his infant son, and how he proceeds to trick the baby into eating his apple sauce. Daniel's actions are described in narrator voice up to and including his touching William's head. In the middle of the sentence beginning with "Daniel touched the warm head", the 'deictic center' changes, and with it the voice; "the hair that was his hair" represents Daniel's inner musings, not the narrator's telling us something about the boy's hair. After a short voice relapse into story-telling ("and bent his nose to it"), we hear again Daniel, who remarks to himself that the baby "smelled right" (again, 'right' from the point of view of Daniel, not the story-teller), "sweet and sour", and "human" (in the next sentence). The latter point of view is still in force when Daniel is reminded of his wife's smell as well as of his own, so this is again expressed from Daniel's point of view: "Stephanie" (not 'his wife'), and "himself. 69 The following case shows some more intricate voice changes. [Russell, who is married to Corrine, has turned down an invitation from a French girl, Simone, whom he'd met at the MOMA, and about whom he'd been having an 'African Queen' type of fantasy. She invites him over "to see her father's Giacometti", but Russell holds firm in the face of temptation, goes home, and makes love to his wife.] Corrine was exhausted, but Russell was in the mood so she took advantage. He was very passionate, and attentive, too—sometimes he seemed to forget she was there during sex, as if she were a car he was driving to a private destination. She fell asleep almost immediately, contented. Russell lay awake for several minutes thinking idly about a boat chugging up a jungle river, but his conscience was almost clear, in fact it was more than clear. This morning his fidelity had been untested of late, while tonight he was a man who had turned down an invitation to see another woman's etchings—or rather, her father's Giacometti. The narrowness of his escape, the degree to which he had been aroused by the idea had rebounded to Corrine's advantage, the nearness of his infidelity having erotically charged his cells, he'd watched Corrine all through dinner, couldn't wait to get her home, and the happiness he found in this vision of himself as an upright

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husband had increased his appreciation of the wife for whom he performed this heroic feat of abnegation. He was barely troubled by the thought that Simone had given him her phone number, since he knew he would never use it. (Jay Mclnerney, Brightness Falls, New York: Vintage, 1993. p. 69). In the above text, the initial voice is the describing narrator's, telling us what has happened during story time, both on the narratorial outside ("they returned") and inside the characters' heads ("He was very passionate, ... he seemed to forget ..."; an instance of psycho-narration). Russell's thoughts after love-making ("thinking idly", arguably about a boat with Katherine Hepburn on board) are also described in the same way (i.e. from the narrator's point of view) up to where a subjective deictic ('this') breaks into the narrative: "This morning ...". Here, we hear no longer the narrator telling us about Russell, but Russell himself, who uses his own voice to arrange the time indications so they fit his personal perspective: "This morning" is the morning of the same day (or, more correctly, the day before: cf. "They returned after midnight"), seen from Russell's point of view; the same goes for "tonight", where the time adverbial indicates a talking-subject oriented view of the point of time at which Russell is indulging in his self-congratulatory thoughts. Deictics like these refer to the current character's (here Russell's) 'center of consciousness' (Fludernik 1993: 228), and are therefore indicative of whose voice we are hearing: in our case, Russell's, not the narrator's. In this way, we know that we are dealing with the deictic perspective of the 'reportee' (the character), not with that of the 'reporter' (the narrator). As to the ensuing passages, beginning with "The narrowness of his escape...", an argument could be built that these equally well should be interpreted as psycho-narration, not necessarily representing Russell's continued voicing of his own reflections on the previous day's happenings. However, two arguments militate against this assumption: first, there is the general tendency of the interpretive process to stay with the voice choice once made, by what is often called the principle of 'cognitive obstination" or 'interpretive obstinacy', but which I have proposed to call 'interpretive perseverance' (see chapter 2.5.1). In accordance with this principle, we continue to attribute the already intro-

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duced voice (Russell's) to the passages following his reflections on the day's happenings. The second argument is the occurrence of the reflexive pronoun "himself towards the end of the paragraph ("the vision of himself as an upright husband"), which clearly points to Russell as having a vision of, and using the reflexive pronoun about—well, himself. This means, furthermore, that the last sentence of the paragraph has to be interpreted in an ironic fashion: Russell characterizing his own feat as 'heroic' (any other interpretation would be in extremely bad taste), and now referrring to Corrine by the distancing expression "the wife for whom..." I conclude that the shifting of tenses in this excerpt is pragmatically motivated (as opposed to the classical consecutio temporum, which is a mechanical shifting under the influence of the reporting verb; see the discussion in chapter 3.3, above, and Fludernik 1993: 178ff). Hence, the past perfects ("had been untested'", "he had been aroused", "had rebounded", "he'd watched", "had increased", "had given") are all expressions of 'true anteriority' (chapter 3.3.2.2) from the subject's (the 'speaker's') point of view. They are not automatically sequenced temporal 'back shifts', operated under the influence of the tense in a previously occurring verbum dicendi or sentiendi, but contrast with the storyline's use of the simple past (e.g. "This morning his fidelity had been untested ... while tonight he was a man ..."). Several authors have remarked on the fact that English, in contrast to French (which distinguishes an imparfait and a passe defini), does not possess a fixed grammatical technique for distinguishing the narrative proper from non-narrative inserts. In Banfield's words, ... the passe simple (or 'historic preterit or 'aorist') never appears in the style indirect libre [FID]; instead, the imparfait is the only past tense simultaneous with NOW. A shift from the aorist to the imparfait ... marks a shift in point of view in the interpretation of the sequence. (1982: 104) Hence, this tense is particularly well-suited for the representation of a character's speech or thought. For English, the corresponding functions are filled by the 'past progressive' (was saying, rather than said); Banfield comments on the

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shift from [French] aorist to imparfait or from [English] simple past to past progressive ... as a sign of a shift to represented speech or thought. (ibid.\ 200) However, this should not be interpreted as implying that the English past progressive always and necessarily is the sign of shifted 'RST': other factors may be involved as well.70 For instance, Smith (1980) has discussed the notion of 'captive sentences', i.e. sentences that only can be determined as to perspective or point of view by reference to their 'captors', i.e. the elements in the preceding text that determine their reference. And in general, as Ehrlich has pointed out, there is always the "discourse aspect" to be taken into consideration (1990: 60): thus, in the case of the past tenses in the above excerpt, a past progressive may be pragmatically motivated, and not be caused by syntactic or semantic mechanisms such as the 'sequence of tenses' or 'captivity'. 71 The phenomena of voice change, as described here, confirm our impression that voices are subject to rather rigid constraints governing who can say what in the narrative, and how, and at what point. 'Voice' is not an imponderable, undefmable concept; voice shifts are defined as tightly as roles are in drama, or parts in a musical score. The competent readers know how to deal with that score; they will detect any changes in voices and incorporate them in their current consciousness of the work's developing themes. From the reader's point of view, voice transitions are, as a rule, clearly-indicated, even though it may sometimes be difficult to translate these indications into a recognized linguistic or literary parlance (witness the efforts spent over the past decade by workers such as Banfield, Ehrlich, and Fludernik, not to mention their predecessors such as Benveniste or Weinrich). The next section will deal more explicitly with the ways voices blend into each other in narrative.

7.1.4. A smooth transition? Narrativity builds upon the interplay of the different voices in the narration. The previous sections have dealt with the 'unmarked' case of narrative 'hand-over', possession of the narrative floor passing from one voice to another in well-defined, properly announced shifts and sequences. Still and especially, whenever there is more than one voice present

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in the narrative, there is the possibility of voices clashing or getting tangled up, rather than proceeding in smooth harmony (these 'clashing voices' will be the subject of the entire next section). In a non-confrontational voice change situation, the announcement of the transition may either happen in broad daylight, so to speak, with a flourish announcing the shift: 'And the king spake...' (which is how speaker shifts are usually indicated in epic style or in the Bible). Alternatively, the indication of voice change can be more insidious, indeed almost unnoticeable except to the trained ear. Consider the following example, due to Haberland (1986: 231): The lady said that one day her daddy had tried to take a gun into a Dallas department store. He was just a stranger in town, from San Tone. Woke up that morning and strapped on his gun, like he always done. Nothing funny about that. Done the same thing every day of his life. Went in the store, packing his old gun. He was a huge man, way over six feet tall. The department store girls figured it was a holdup as soon as they seen him. They stomped on the alarm. All hell broke loose, but daddy didn't mind one bit. He pulled out his gun, and when the police came along, daddy said, "Okay, boy, let's git 'im!' (Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonia Express. New York: Bantam Books 1979, p. 29) In this excerpt, the narrator starts out reporting that "the lady said". What she said, is prefaced by "that", as is usual in English (in contrast to, e.g.. Classical Latin, which would use an accusative with infinitive construction after a verbum dicendi such as 'say'). At the first period, however, after the introductory stretch of reported speech ("The lady said ..."), there is a change of guard. We don't perhaps notice it right away, but by the time we get to ''San Tone", we realize that this is typically local Texas talk, in the style attributed to tall men in 10-gallon hats and spurs. The short sentences describing the old man's getting-up and gun-packing habits evoke a rather typical way of speaking; with a little imagination, we can hear the masculine Texas drawl come off the page almost as clearly as if we had been there, standing next to the old man. This effect is achieved by the narrator letting "daddy" speak in his

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own voice: "He was just ... from San Tone. Woke up that morning and strapped on his gun ... Done the same thing every day of his life. Went in the store, packing his old gun". This is Texas cowboy speech, and 'indirect speech' at that, where "his" represents the obligatory 'RST' transposition of "my" in "every day of his [my] life", "packing his [my] old gun", and the preterits "was", "woke up", "done", "went" are 'backshifted' from a direct discourse, present narrative. This voice shift is then followed by another one, in which the narrator takes over again: "He was a huge man,..." and so on. The signal itself that alerts us to the first occurring voice shift, however, is rather minimal: it is the familiar, local form "San Tone", in use only among native Texans of a certain age, sex, and class, when referring to the city of San Antonio. Similarly, the endearing adjective "old" is appropriate only when speaking about an object that is the target of a serious cult in a cowboy-like or otherwise he-mannish tradition. Then, as abrupt and unnoticed as this shift to 'free indirect' monologue was in its onset, as abruptly does this stretch of Texan voice end. When we read "He was a huge man,...", we know that the voices have changed: "daddy" would never describe himself in that way; and even if the referent of "He" is the same person as the one referrred to by "his" in the immediately preceding sentence, the reference is differently voiced: the voice naming "he" is the narrator's, whereas "his" is attributed to the character "daddy"'s own, free indirect discourse. What we have here is therefore not so much a "smooth transition from direct to indirect speech" and vice versa, as Haberland seems to argue, but rather a well-hidden, but still somehow indicated, change of voices—hidden to the point that we have to be pretty observant to determine the exact point of change. Locating this "transition point..., where indirect speech stop[s] and direct speech take[s] over" is not a futile exercise, but is highly "relevant for the analysis of the whole passage", as Haberland says (ibid.); identifying the voice of the current speaker, knowing who is speaking, is the first and foremost condition for understanding literature and savoring its systematic polyphony. However, as I said in the beginning of this section, voices do not only shift; they also sometimes clash. The remainder of the chapter will deal with this phenomenon in detail.

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7.2. When voices clash Going back to the definition given above, chapter 6.1 (cf. also Mey 1995c: 8), we recall that voicing, or 'vocalization', is the technique by which an author populates a narrative universe with characters, giving them each a voice as a distinctive way of expressing their relations to this universe and their relationships with one another. The universe of narration is a fictitious "reality'; but in order to be accepted by the readership as depicting a possible (and interesting!) world, fiction has to be believable. That is, while it need not be real, it should be realistic, in the sense that the characters must be consistent, both with themselves throughout the story and with each other in their respective dealings; in this way they help establish and confirm the universe created by the author—which is what 'reader edification' (Mey 1994a) is all about. Unfortunately, the pulp that is being poured out on the mass literature markets today, has little to do with real(istic) fiction. Most of it consists of repeat sequences of well-established patterns of "action", in which the characters' voices are confined to pre-determined, predictable interchanges accompanying the plot like the standardized replies of a soap opera. In contrast, a good piece of fiction is not one in which action is predominant, but one in which the characters live up to our expectations, not only through what they perform, but through what they are and through what they, using their voices, reveal themselves to be. The following sections will examine some cases where these 'revelations', however interesting in themselves, are marred by a lack of inner consistency in the voices heard. At this point, I want to make it clear (I will come back to this below, section 7.2.3.2) that the narrator, too, has a 'voice', in fact is a character in the story, either as the underlying, omniscient, and omnipotent instance of narration, or made 'visible' in the shape of an actual narrating person (such as the Ίcharacter' that we discussed earlier, section 6.2.3). As a general descriptive term for the phenomena under discussion I have chosen, borrowing an expression due to Toolan (1994: 129), that of voice clash. A voice clash occurs whenever voices don't match: either the character and a voice that is attributed to that character are out of sync, or two or more of the voices heard in the story are perceived as disharmonious. Such dissonances can be due to inner factors, as when the character speaks Out of order\ so to say (the voice is not appropri-

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ate to the character for any of a number of reasons); alternatively, the clash may be due to external circumstances, such as when the character speaks Out of turn\ such that the reader either is unable to determine whose voice is being heard or perhaps is hearing a wrong voice altogether. Finally, there are the cases where a character (most often the narrator) oversteps the assigned boundaries of narration, is ''out of place, as when a narrator starts speaking in an 'story character' type voice. In this case, the narrator, impersonating the author, may actually 'gate-crash' onto the scene to take part in the action; alternatively, he may insert his own 'persona' in more insidious ways. I will take on these three sub-categories of 'voice clash' (called respectively 'trash', 'mash', and 'crash') one by one in the three sections following below.72

7.2.7. Voice trashing: 'What are you doing to my character?' 7.2.1.1. A time warp Telling a good story has a lot to do with creating plausible characters, that is to say, characters that will not creep up on you from behind and punch holes in your laboriously constructed narrative fabric. Lending credibility to one's characters depends, naturally, to a great extent on the voices they are supposed to embody, and it is here that the professional narrator distinguishes him- or herself from the (however successful) amateur. The South African/Australian Bryce Courtenay, the author of a first novel called The Power of One (1989) belongs in the latter category, albeit at the better end. Courtenay's book, which generally is a good read, and gives us an interesting and moderately realistic picture of what is it like to grow up as a White male in a racially divided country such as South Africa; actually, the 1996 reprinted edition advertises this book as "the classic novel of South Africa". But it also bears out the weaknesses of much modern writing with respect to handling problems of'voice'. The novel is written in a first-person style occasionally approaching the 'skaz'-format (see chapter 6.2.3), and is thus somewhat reminiscent of its eternal prototype, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn—in Ernest Hemingway's

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opinion, the one novel in American literature that every writer tries to emulate (without succeeding, of course). The Power of One is a 'homodiegetic', Ί-story' (see above, chapter 6.2.3), and the voice of the narrating ego is that of a young boy who, through most of the tale, moves up from age five to age twelve (only in the concluding two chapters the 'skaz-Γ is presumably 17-18 years old). The book is thus a kind of 'growing-up novel', a sub-genre of the Bildungsroman. A major problem with this type of story is how to control its natural progression in time and theme; among other things, this involves keeping the maturing main character and his 'voice' right on track. Apparently, this has been a major stumbling-block also for this author: on numerous occasions, the reader is confronted with clear instances of 'clashing voices'; in many of these cases, the overlaying voice of the narrator/author totally eclipses, 'trashes', the voice of the Inarrator, the boy called PK ('Peekay') in the story).73 [Peekay is six, and has just finished a year at boarding school. He moves to Barberton, a small town where he is going to live with his mother and grandfather. The first morning he climbs a hill to get a view of the town. Beyond the town is a square of dark buildings.] The walls facing me stood some three storeys high and were studded with at least a hundred and fifty tiny dark windows all of the same size. ... I had never seen a prison, nor had 1 even imagined one, but there is a race memory in man which instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it. (Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One. London: Mandarin, 1989. p. 125) The first question here is: if you have never seen a prison, how do you know one by seeing one? And what does the six-year old Peekay (or, for that matter, any normal adult) know about "race memory'"? This is at best a highly speculative idea. The same holds for the "architecture of misery''—a much too high-flowing (not to say: high-falutin') metaphor to put into a six-year old's mouth. Peekay's voice is squashed, 'trashed', by the author's: his 'inner monologue' is rendered hollow and im-

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plausible by the voice overlay of the author masking as an 'I-instance'. A few more examples follow. [On the train from the boarding school town to Barberton, Peekay befriends a railway conductor, Hoppie, who gets him something to drink at one of the innumerable stops—"a bottle of red stuff, as Peekay describes it. He goes on to tell us about his sensations on tasting this wonderful new drink.] Tiny bubbles ran up the bottle and went up my nose and it tasted wonderful. On the side were the words American Cream Soda. It was the first bottled soft drink I had ever tasted, (ibid, p.96) The last sentence is a meta-statement which could not possibly have been uttered by the 6-year old boy then and there. It contains a comment on Peekay's experiences by the adult narrator/writer, but in the disguise of the story told by the boy, whose voice rings false in the last sentence with its abstract categorization of soda pop as a "bottled soft drink". There is an obvious discrepancy between the well-formulated, generalizing, "adult' voice and the preceding I-voice describing the event in primitive, immediate sensory terms—yet, the implicit suggestion is one of homodiegetic continuity. [Peekay wakes up on the train, after having watched his first boxing match the night before. Hoppie, his new friend, who turned out to be the near-had been welterweight boxing champion of the South African Railways, is asking him:] "Did you sleep good, Peekay?" "Ja, thanks, Hoppie. I'm sorry I couldn't stay awake." "No worries, little boetie [Afrikaans for 'kid'-JM], there comes a time for all of us when you can't get up out of your corner." I didn't understand the boxing parlance but it didn't seem to matter. (ibid. p. 85) The boxer/conductor is referring to something that commonly happens

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in boxing: a contestant fails to make a come-back into the ring. He expresses himself in boxing jargon, using a metaphor one hardly can expect a 6-year old boy to be familiar with, or even know about. The voice of the T providing the retrospective comment "I didn't understand the boxing parlance" is 'trashed' by the narrator/author, who also is the real origin of the insightful meta-statement "but it didn't seem to matter". [Later in the story, Peekay enters another boarding school; by this time he is 11 years old. He has acquired a Jewish friend, named Hymie, who tells Peekay the story of how he and his family escaped from Poland, disguised as Roman Catholics, and managed to emigrate to South Africa. The scene is rural South Africa, the year 1946. Hymie says:] "You know something Peekay? History stinks ... Take my word for it, in another thirty years the Germans will claim that only a handful of SS caused the Holocaust unbeknownst to the good burgers who stayed at home and knitted socks for Jewish prisoners of war." (ibid p. 451) As readers, we must ask ourselves: How could a boy like Hymie, presumably of more or less the same age as Peekay, have used the word "Holocaust" at the presumed time of speaking, in 1946, right after the war? After all, the word came only into its current English use as meaning: 'the calculated extermination of five million Jews by the Germans during World War ΙΓ some fifteen years later, through the works of writers such as Elie Wiesel (e.g. in Night}; it probably made its way into South African English even later.74 Neither is that the only 'voice trashing' happening here: when Courtenay lets his character Hymie carry on about the SS, and the "good [German] burgers" knitting socks for those "Jewish prisoners of war", one wonders what he is thinking of. Even granting that there were (Ron Zweig, pers. comm.) a few Jewish prisoners of war in the German camps (kept there in secret as hostages until the day of the 'final victory', and then to be finished off like the rest), how could the character Hymie possibly have known about this at the time and place of narration? Poor Hymie's views on recent world history presuppose clairvoyance or genius; in the book, he does not exactly seem to be endowed with either. In a case like this, the voices clash in total, fatal trashing; the result is

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a cacophonic blend, in which the voices of the author/narrator and the characters mingle to a point where the befuddled reader no longer knows who is speaking for or to whom, and with whose authority and voice. Voice trashing is not the exclusive privilege of dilettante writers: professional, respectable authors, too, indulge in it, albeit on a lesser scale, and probably unwittingly; as an instance, consider the following extract: [Frederica is having her period, and spending the day in bed.] ... Frederica was confined to her bed with curse pains, lying curled self-protectively under a heap of blankets ... There was a line of pain like a sword slash along the groin to the aching pubic bone, and sick knots of thicker pain in the lumbar and cerebral ganglia. ... She was trying to read, some Proust, some Racine, some Plato, the lines of words becoming attracted to the floating waves of pain as tapes are held to sheets of cloths with the minute nylon hooks of Velcro sealing. She had discovered that in these circumstances short bursts of concentration were possible. The paragraphs then too settled into fortuitous relationships ... In the window over the desk geometric fish shapes ... danced and circled on their fine threads. (A.S. Byatt, Still Life, p. 311) In this paragraph, the author is telling us what is going on in the heroine's mind and body during a heavy bout of menstrual pain. The images and words are carefully chosen to depict, with great skill, what is happening; even a male reader, who by definition is barred from experiencing these sensations, is swept off his feet by the precise descriptions and vivid evocations of pain and blood, ache and by Frederica's desperate efforts not to let herself be trapped in pure animal resistance.75 In the middle of all this wonderful imaging, the "hooks of Velcro sealing" stick out like so many sore thumbs. The picture evoked here of 'attaching something to something else' decidedly does not belong to any imagined world on Frederica's part: Byatt's novel is set in the earlyto-mid 'fifties, whereas this particular kind of fastener came into common usage in England much later. (In actual fact, Velcro was developed in France in the late 'forties—hence the name, from crochets de velours—but only manufactured and exported commercially to the other

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European countries by the end of the next decade).76 We see here how an accomplished author/narrator, taking the lead in her psycho-narration and getting carried away by her own imagery and language, may impute a world view and a voice to her heroine that is definitely alien to the character herself. While one could argue that the above case simply reflects authorial privilege (an author is free to determine the fabric and cut of the narration, even if she wants to weave in pieces and threads that are not strictly germane to the story), the characters must not be made to speak with a voice that cannot possibly be theirs, for whatever reason, material or chronological. A few more things need to be said as to the latter. With regard to chronology, one may distinguish between cases of 'external anachronism' (as in the Velcro case and in some of the incidences of "visual trashing' to be discussed below, in section 7.2.1.2), and what one could call an 'internal anachronism", understood as an inconsistency in the very progress of the narration, such as when factual knowledge of future story events is attributed to a character. In the storyline, the event in question has not happened yet—so how could the character possibly know about it? The following is an instance, also taken from Byatt's novel Still Life. [As Vice-Chancellor of the newly founded University of North Yorkshire is appointed a certain Dutch expatriate, Gerard Wijnnobel, a rather pompous and unpleasant character, who has been earlier introduced in a small, concentrated chapter bearing his name and covering a mere 6 pages of Byatt's book (ch. 15; pp. 189-193). Among other exploits, this worthy gentleman manages to reduce a woman novelist (with the revealing name of Juliana Belper) to tears and nothingness during a luncheon given in his honor at Broadcasting House, London. The same Wijnnobel makes a come-back later in the story, when he gives the inaugural address on the occasion of the opening of the new University, with royalty presenting the University charter and all the new professors in attendance. The speech is about "links' in history, art, science, and so on (Wijnnobel is a "supermath", we have been told earlier, on p. 190); it is referred to, and rendered as to its contents, on pp. 295-297. It is this speech by Wijnnobel which Frederica harkens back to in the passage quoted below. But notice that there, we are still on p. 284 of Still Life—which means that Frederica still hasn't met the man, let alone heard his inaugural speech (on p. 294, we are explicitly told that

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"This was Frederica's first sight of Gerard Wijnnobel"). In addition to this, all earlier references to, and descriptions of, the man and his work occur in the earlier chapter 15, entitled "Wijnnobel", during an interview-cum-lunch-cum-rhetoric at Broadcasting House, where Frederica was not present. The crucial question is, then: How can Frederica, in the following excerpt, refer to Wijnnobel's thoughts (in particular, to his ideas about linking', as expressed in his inaugural address), when the event itself (and, in fact, Wijnnobel's entry on her scene) are still pages away?] The life of English literature lived in her like genes for red hair and irritable movements of the hands and mouth. From Bill [Potter, Frederica's father] she had learned to learn poetry, to shape an argument, to recognize forms of thought. Where is the borderline between nature and culture? Gerard Wijnnobel believed that the neural links of the brain itself in all probability provided the material fusions and connections that allowed all human creatures to recognize certain grammatical structures as certainly as they are born with a geometric capacity to organize perceptions into horizontals and verticals, round shapes and cubes. Was it possible to inherit an ear for language as one might inherit perfect pitch or mathematical intuition? And did this bear any relation to inheriting Shakespeare's vocabulary and rhythms, Lawrence's pugnacity, Milton's artifice and self-assurance? (A.S. Byatt, Still Life, p. 284) The character referred to by a 'bald-on-record' 77 name-dropping as "Gerard Wijnnobel" is by the same token, and as a matter of course, established as a familiar face in the context of the passage. However, the character 'Wijnnobel' is not yet part of Frederica's universe at the point at which these reflections are offered. We have no evidence that Frederica ever has met this amazing man or that she has listened to Wijnnobel holding forth on 'linkage', let alone heard him spout the neoChomskyan ideology of language acquisition that he is implied to have embraced—quite the opposite: we have evidence to the contrary, as I remarked above. On p. 294, we are expressly informed on the appearance of the new Vice-Chancel lor "in black silk with violet hood and violet linings, decently rich," and how "[t]his was Frederica's first sight

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of Gerard Wijnnobel". So how could she possibly have used this man as a centering funnel for her own earlier musings on the problem of inherited vs. acquired characteristics? The author might reply, in response to my objections, that she had indeed foreseen this problem, and therefore taken her precautions by introducing a temporal reference prefacing the passage that I just quoted, thus taking it ahead of itself, placing it in a future time, so to speak. Consider the following sentences, immediately preceding Frederica's musings quoted above: Frederica thought she had inherited it [her memory] in the form most like the one it took in him [her father]. She had inherited greed for learning, greed for knowledge and information, as surely as she had inherited red hair, sharpness, and something that could euphemistically be called impatience, from him. Where do inherited characteristics cease, and acquired characteristics begin, she was to ask later, (ibid., p. 284; my italics) The problem of Frederica's access to this 'later' knowledge does not go away, however, by what is essentially hand-waving on the part of the author. It is surely legitimate for Byatt to tell us that the question of inherited vs. acquired characteristics was raised "later" in Frederica's life, on the conditions and according to the expectations that would hold for that later time. The content of Frederica's reflections on the matter, however, cannot be made known to us in terms of such a 'future knowledge' on the part of Frederica, unless we are explicitly told how she had come by that knowledge. Byatt's description of Frederica's inner life is interspersed with bits of free indirect discourse, or even 'semi-quoted', future inner monologue ("Where do inherited characteristics cease ..." etc.). The author shows us a Frederica who struggles free, so to speak, of the boundaries set by the narration, a Frederica jumping back and forth, into and out of her own current story time ('event time', ET; cf. chapter 3.3.1)—the latter being the period in which she still is blissfully ignorant of the Wijnnobels of this world and their pontifications on 'links', as well as of their (hopefully unconscious) buying into the 'innateness' doctrine of grammar, current in certain schools of modern linguistics. All of this is clearly not part of Frederica's world and can only be attributed to the author's own, surreptitious intrusion onto the narrative scene (thus

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coming close to another kind of voice clash: open or veiled authorial intrusion, the authorial 'gate-crashing' of section 7.2.3, below). As to the voices heard in the above piece of text, Frederica's is in fact canceled out by the author/narrator's, forcing her to speak in another time and place, with a voice that is not Frederica's own, but one speaking from experiences which have yet to be hers.

7.2.1.2. A trashy view The need for authors to make their characters speak in 'true' voices naturally brings along the need to 'see' the world with the characters' eyes. The illusion of a 'true' world is persistent in all fiction; one could in fact say that the essence of novelistic writing is to produce a 'fictive truth', an oxymoron by which I intend to capture the novelist's need of making people believe, and hold as truths, not only what they cannot see (the classical definition of a religious belief, or 'faith', according to the famous chapter 11 of the Epistle to the Hebrews)78, but also what they know not to be true—and not just because the author tells them so, in the usual disclaimers on the back of the title page. The romantic story-teller was greatly concerned with proving to the readership that he 'had been there', that he knew the places and people he was writing about. This he did by providing interminable descriptions of locations, customs, geographical and cultural matters, and so on; often, such novels read like treatises on colonial and native institutions, on the local flora and fauna, on ways of survival against nature's odds, on popular beliefs, customs, and crafts, as is the case in stories from the Western frontier like Swiss Family Robinson, or Wörishöffer's tales of adventure, or even in novels by Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas Sr., or other great romantics. The modern author, by contrast, demonstrates the authenticity of her or his writing by letting the characters refer to incidents and settings, to people and places that they, as characters, have exclusive knowledge about. In this way, the characters confirm their own authenticity (and indirectly, that of the writer) by proving to the audience that their auctores, their authors, had been there themselves, having left their 'Kilroys', their narratorial graffiti, all over the place, so to speak.

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What's more, such markings confirm that the authors are still on the scene, as narrators; by 'being there', they make their world of fiction believable: whoever has been there and left his visual marks (and lives to tell) can also demand to be believed. Such place- and name-dropping may backfire, however, and end in a 'visual trashing' of voices: the narrative marks are faked, and the narrator's voice sounds hollow. This happens when a supposedly authentic character is shown to be a jerk, an impostor whose claims to authenticity are built on an inaccurate rendering of historical events, incorrect place descriptions, or, worst of all, an attribution to the character of a certain attitude or knowledge which she or he either could not possibly have been in the possession of, or probably would have disagreed with, had he or she been a 'real life' person. When authors make their characters speak about things they (as characters) don't know anything about, or in ways that are inconsistent with the roles they are supposed to represent, the voices of the story start clanging and clashing and the narration comes to an abrupt stop. The following is another excerpt from an earlier quoted novel by Bryce Courtenay. [A character named 'Doc', an old German piano virtuoso and music professor, who had fled to South Africa before the war but had been interned by the authorities for the duration, becomes Peekay's fatherly friend during his time in Barberton. Peekay, having become buddies with the local prison warden, obtains permission for Doc to play at a fund-raising concert in the Barberton city square. For this special occasion, the pianist chooses the very piece that had abruptly ended his career back in 1926, when he had a blackout during a concert in Berlin, where he was playing Beethoven's Fifth—surprise, surprise— Symphony. Here are Doc's comments on this incident and on the piece of music that was involved in his debacle and subsequent withdrawal from the performing scene:] Beethoven's Symphony Number Five is great music but it is kind to a good musician, the great master was a piano player himself and it is not full of clever tricks which try to play schmarty pantz with the piano player. That night I played the great master goot until the third movement...

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(Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One. London: Mandarin 1989. p. 253) Here we have a supposedly professional German musician, lecturing on the qualities of Beethoven's piano music, perceived from the inside by one who actually knows what he is talking about: a "piano player" himself, just like "the great master". The problem here is that what Beethoven wrote under the label 'Fifth Symphony' is a piece of orchestral music, not a work for the piano—unless we are dealing with one of those notorious nineteenth-century German so-called Klavierauszuge, extracts for piano of the classical symphonies; however, these can hardly be attributed directly to Beethoven and certainly do not provide valid testimony to his supposedly straightforward way of writing for the piano and his avoidance of "clever tricks". So, either this is not Beethoven's 'Fifth Symphony' or the piano professor doesn't know what he is talking about; in my terminology, his voice in the narrative has been taken over by the incompetent author and 'trashed' in a hostile bid. One could perhaps, on a more charitable reading, assume that one had to do here with a half-inadvertent slip of the pen on the part of the author, or even a (narrated) slip of the mind or tongue on the part of the aging character—perhaps either of them was thinking, respectively is depicted as thinking, of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto but 'dropping' the wrong name and reference? One might also point to the author's consistent use of'eye-dialect' (see chapter 6.2.3) for increased Germanic credibility in characterizing Doc's voice: "goot", "schmarty pantz". However, even under that assumption, old Doc is in 'voice trouble' again on the next page, where another clash of the same kind occurs: Doc paged quickly to the beginning of the fortissimo movement [sic], which in Beethoven's Fifth occurs at the end of the second movement [sic]. Then he started to play... On and on Doc played, through the second into the third movement, and, hardly pausing, into the fourth... (ibid., p. 254). Since Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto has three, not four, movements, it must be the 'symphony' that Doc is playing, after all, but how this is done, the author alone knows. The baffled reader no longer has any safe

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clue as to whom s/he is listening to in this clashing confusion of authors, narrators, movements, symphonies, concertos, and voices. The voice's localization, its 'being there', with the concomitant, intended illusion of authenticity, requires that the location (the 'there') be depicted truthfully, in accordance with the actual historical, topological, geographical, and other details. It is not without reason that modern novelists study the history and the setting of their stories on location, most of the times traveling there and often even writing the story on the spot, so as to capture the essence of their backdrops for better 'fiction'. Seemingly small details of time and space, if placed intelligently into the narrative progression, contribute greatly to the enhancement of authentic voicing; conversely, even insignificant slips may cause a story to fall flat on its face. The following extract (also from Courtenay's novel) evinces the homodiegetic voice's rather odd confusion in matters of history, botany, and the seasons of the year on the geographical latitude where the M-charactef is said to live and the story is unfolding. [The location is, again, Barberton; the time is near the end of the World War II, presumably some time in late March-early April of 1945. With the end of the war, prisoner Doc expects to be released, and be able to go back and tend his beloved garden. The narrating I-person's voice is heard.] News of Germany's imminent collapse was coming through on the wireless daily.... We were already into the first days of summer, and Doc and I talked about being out of prison in time for the firebells, the exquisite little orange lilies no bigger than a two-shilling piece... (ibid., p. 341) The reader can't help wondering how Peekay and Doc, talking about the upcoming season of the "firebells'', cart refer to the time of speaking as "the first days of summer". The setting of the story is South Africa, a country on the Southern Hemisphere, where the months of March-April mark the beginning of the winter season (as September-October would on the Northern Hemisphere). The phrase "Germany's imminent collapse" refers to a point of time close to VE-Day, May 8, 1945; and speech time can be pinpointed even more accurately by referring to

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what the narrative voice has uttered a few pages earlier: The war in Europe was rapidly drawing to a close. The allies had crossed the Rhine, and were rapidly moving towards Berlin, (ibid., p. 336) This places the presumed point of time for the appearance of the firebells as sometime after March 21, 1945 (the day the Americans crossed the Rhine at Remagen), but prior to VE-Day—that is, in the middle of the South African fall season. Clearly, the "first days of summer" are nowhere near the speaking voice's ST ('speaking time'). Apparently, another voice is taking over here, but whose? Our mysterious "voice trashef can hardly be the author, Bryce Courtenay, who (according to the cover blurb) "was born in South Africa, but lives in Sydney"; he, if anyone, must surely be aware that the beginning of summer on the Southern Hemisphere does not occur in March-April. And if indeed those firebells are coming out in "the first days of [South African] summer", that is, in the beginning of November, then neither would the narrative voices of Doc and Peekay have any need to worry, at the end of March or in the beginning of April (which is the start of the winter season), about being out of prison in time for their blossoming. I must conclude that the question of whose voice does the trashing here remains a mystery—unless the bio-blurb on the back of the volume also is 'fictitious'. Courtenay's case is by no means unique; neither are voice clashes of the kind described above restricted to less serious writers (as the case of a highly respected author such as Byatt, quoted above, shows). Besides, the whole purpose of this exercise is not to find authors at fault, but to demonstrate something about the ways voices can interact and clash. The next section will deal with another variety of clashes: so-called "voice mashing".

7.2.2. Voice mashing: 'Who 's that character speaking?' Earlier (chapter 6.1), we have seen that vocalization is a dialectic process. Voices are not created out of the blue, by the whim of the author or narrator, but arise in a particular narrative context which both shapes the voices and is affected by them. Thus, voices are born and

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live in a particular context of discourse. They only produce 'speakable' discourse provided they respect the conditions under which discourse is produced: temporal, cultural, historical, social, economic, personal, and so on. These discursive conditions for voice production do not affect only the producer of the narrative work, the author, but also its recipient, the reader. Upon entering the universe of narrative discourse, the recipient becomes a lector in fabula, a reader by the grace of narration. The reader trying to discriminate the vocal chorus carrying the narrative production, by assigning to each of its voices their proper parts, depends just as much on the dialectic conditions governing discourse as does the author composing the music and orchestrating the score. It follows that the mechanics of voice change not only are important from the point of view of the authorial structuring of the narrative; they are also an essential part of the reading process. In chapter 3, we have looked at certain linguistic ways of supporting this process (deictics, anaphoric reference, tense, and so on); in addition, I mentioned Weinrich's principle of 'interpretive obstinacy' (better named 'interpretive perseverance'), which guides a reader quasi-automatically towards the most plausible reading of a voice's origin by assuming that, everything else being equal, and unless one is told explicitly that such is not the case, the voice one hears is the voice one has been hearing all along. In the following excerpt, no voice change is announced, and the reader is therefore initially misled into assuming a vocal continuity. [The scene is a luncheon party. Mr. Plumer, a Cambridge don, has invited a number of students, including Jacob Flanders, to his house. Jacob arrives late and is hurrying through his main course so as not to hold up the dessert for the others.] Seeing this, Mrs. Plumer said that she was sure Mr. Flanders wouldn't mind—and the tart was brought in. Nodding in a peculiar way, she directed the maid to give Mr. Flanders a second helping of mutton. She glanced at the mutton. Not much of the leg would be left for luncheon. It was none of her fault—since how could she control her father begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious, with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the

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ladder and an ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of the ladder? (Virginia Woolf, Jacob 's Room, Harvest ed., 1960, p. 32) Mrs. Plumer is the person referred to as 'she' throughout the excerpt, the maid in the third line being excluded from our consideration by the application of the principle of 'syntactic inertia' that was mentioned earlier (section 2.5.1). Mrs. Plumer is also the one who glances at the remaining piece of mutton, and whose worries about what to serve at luncheon the following day are expressed in free indirect discourse at the end of the paragraph: "Not much of the leg would be left for luncheon" [thought Mrs. Plumer]. But crossing the lines into the next paragraph, the unprepared reader may be confused. Even though the next upcoming 'she' still refers to Mrs. Plumer, the reference is made in another voice, viz., the narrator's; Mrs. Plumer's 'inner voice' is no longer On the scene'. Thus, the phrase "her fault" is to be read as the narrator's comment on something that objectively is the matter, not as something that Mrs. Plumer is imputing to herself as a past mistake—which would be the 'normal' reading, applying the principle of 'interpretive perseverance' that I invoked above. That such is not the case, however, does not dawn on the reader until well into the paragraph: one could (and one does in fact, normally) assume that Mrs. Plumer's muttony musings indeed go on to include a fault-finding with her father, who had had the misfortune of "begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester"—the temporal expression "forty years ago" being neutral in this respect (that is, not having to "shift" with the character's viewpoint, as would, e.g., an expression such as 'yesterday'). What finally blows the whistle on this at first blush plausible misinterpretation of the passage in question is the use of the word "ambitious' and the long, complicated prepositional phrase following it, and ending at the question mark. Mrs. Plumer would hardly refer to herself as being "'ambitious", and certainly not use the expression "antlike assiduity" to metaphorically characterize her activities in promoting her husband's career. All these things are said in the authorial narrator's voice, evaluating and ironically putting down poor Mrs. Plumer along with her insignificant husband, who finally becomes a "Professor of

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Physics, or whatever it might be"—in the subjectively evaluating narrator's sarcastic aside (ibid.: 35). As we see, the voices in this excerpt are not clearly distinguished: rather, they overlay and overlap in various ways. They certainly do not blend into one another by any kind of'smooth transition' (announced or not; see section 7.1.4), but engage in a competition for dominance, which may leave the reader somewhat puzzled. When, in the end, the huddle clears, and the competing voices are back on their places in the vocal arena, one can clearly see the traces of the struggle: there is no doubt as to who dealt, and who caught the blows (and perhaps in the end succumbed to them). Even so, the initial confusion, that is, the 'voice mash' preceding the fight, is still a problem for the uninitiated reader, a dilemma to be resolved only through a 'reading-through', a proper 'dia-lectic' of the fabula. Consider also the mashing voices in the following extract from Tolstoy: [Aleksej Aleksandrovic Karenin is sitting in his office, pondering an administrative problem which has bothered him for a long time, and for which he now thinks he has found a solution] On cuvstvoval, cto on glubze, cem kogda-nibud', vnikal teper' v eto usloznenie, i cto v golove ego narozdalas'—on bez samoobol 'scenija mog skazat'—kapital 'naja mysi', dolzenstvujuscaja rasputat' vse eto delo, vozvysit' ego v sluzebnoj kar'ere, uronit' ego vragov i potomu prinesti velicajsuju pol 'zu gosudarstvu. ('He felt that he now had penetrated deeper than ever before into this problem, and that his mind had engendered a superior idea—he could say this without self-aggrandizement—which was bound to clear up the whole matter, further his professional career, discredit his enemies, and besides be of enormous benefit to the country.') (Anna Karenina I I I : xiv; 1962 ed. p. 319; my translation) In this passage, the omniscient narrator tells us (in psycho-narration) everything that is going on in Aleksej Aleksandrovic's head: what he felt, why he thought his "capital idea" was going to be a true break-

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through in the affair which he had inherited from "his predecessor's predecessor", and which had been dragging on for years (ibid.: 320). It is not until we come to the part between the dashes ("—he could say this without self-aggrandizement—") that the voicing becomes somewhat unclear: Who is saying this? the narrator? or Karenin himself? On a more thorough dia-lectic, however, the ambiguity is only superficial. Taken by themselves, the dashes could be understood as indicating the insertion of a parenthetical remark by the narrator into the psycho-narration, with the voice staying the same, in accordance with the principle of'interpretive perseverance' that I introduced earlier. However, on closer inspection, this reading does not hold water, as the word samoobol'scenie 'self-aggrandizement', combined with the modal mog '[he] could', makes it clear to us that this can no longer be the voice of the narrator, but that we must be listening to Karenin himself, to a piece of Karenin's thought in free indirect discourse, where the "he could" represents a 'backshifted' "I can", in accordance with the rules for FID (see chapter 3.3.3.2). In this parenthetical insert, it is Aleksej Aleksandrovic's own voice that is being heard: Karenin evaluating the expression of the "superior idea" put into his head (even literally, as a 'capital thought') by the narrator, and concluding that the words chosen represent an appropriate way of'putting it'. The interpretive cinch is in the word mog '(he) could': while the narrator is allowed to refer to Karenin in psycho-narration, using expressions like 'himself or 'self-', only Karenin can be the judge of what he can and cannot say about himself. And as soon as the FID interlude is over, psychonarration yields the floor: Aleksej Aleksandrovic's voice is drowned out, 'mashed', by the voice of the narrator who, in the three pages immediately following the excerpt above, uses all of his authorial license to tell us, in all possible detail, about the problems of irrigation in Zaraj prefecture and related matters. Whereas the voice of Aleksej Karenin in the preceding extract, so to speak, is kept within bounds, confined between its dashes, in the following we may see a more serious mash of the character's and the narrator's voices, with the former gradually encroaching upon the latter's territory for in the end to achieve a complete take-over.

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[Washington Lee, a black editor in the New York publishing house run by Harold Stone, is having lunch with a writer's agent. His thoughts are drifting off.] Sipping a Bloody Mary in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons, Washington pretended to listen to the agent pitch a book. Though this was hardly his scene, he was none too thrilled with his table position in the middle of the room, right about where Nebraska would appear on the map—the power tables being the banquettes that lined the room, facing in so that all the players could see one another. Harold Stone and all the other big publishing dicks. Not a whole lot of brothers here in the Grill Room, it went without saying—... (Jay Mclnerney, Brightness Falls. New York: Vintage. 1993. p. 109). The excerpt starts out with a bit of psycho-narration, the narrator's voice being in charge and telling us what is going on inside Washington's head, while the latter pretends to listen to his lunch companion trying to sell him a manuscript. It is not until the beginning of the second paragraph that the reader suddenly realizes that s/he is listening to another voice, whose free indirect discourse clearly must originate from the black character Washington. The tell-tale shibboleth is in the word "brothers": no white person (our narrator is white) would ever use this expression with its special meaning of 'black men when spoken about by black men', except in bullet-proof quotation marks. But where, and how exactly has this voice mash taken place? As is typical in voice mashing, the point of take-over is not too clearly marked, and by the time the reader becomes aware of who is really speaking, the mashing has already taken place. The narrator has 'snuck* the Washington voice onto the scene, as it were, by switching the textual references from the still ongoing (psycho-) narration to certain, clearly scene-oriented perceptions the owner of the voice is having. Thus, in the expression "where Nebraska would appear on the map", the reference is to a metonymic topology of the grill room, with Nebraska smack in the middle. Here, we are confronted with a virtual map of the United States that only exists in the character's head, not in the

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topography of the grill room, and which is visualized and commented on by Washington in those words "where Nebraska would appear on the map". In the same episode, an even more poignant voice mashing can be heard when reference is made to Harold Stone and the other big publishers as "dicks''. Again, this is something only Washington could say (and which he, given the opportunity of direct discourse, probably would have said, if we are to judge from his previous appearances and performance); it is his voice cropping up in the middle of the ongoing pycho-narration, in which the narrator is telling us what Washington feels and thinks. We witness an encroachment onto the narrative voice by a character's actual speech; the character steps onto the scene, as it were, letting his voice take over. This happens first tentatively, in the middle of the first paragraph of the quote ("Nebraska"); then more firmly towards the end of the paragraph ("dicks") and all the way into the next ("brothers"). Here, finally, the voice mash is completed with the firm establishment of the new voice in Washington's FID. A special type of voice mashing occurs whenever the narrative description engulfs a given character entirely, even to the point of partially or wholly identifying with the character's speech, yet without allowing the narrative voice to shift into character-oriented free indirect discourse. The phenomenon has been known for a long time; Fludernik (1993: 332) attributes its discovery in English to a 1978 article by Hugh Kenner, who christened it the 'Uncle Charles Principle', after a character in Joyce's Portrait of the artist as a young man.™ Rather than by reference to a prototype, the phenomenon can also be characterized in terms of how it operates. In his 1929 work, Marxism ana1 the philosophy of language, the Russian linguist and philosopher V. N. Voloshinov talks about a "reciprocal infectiousness between the reporting context and the reported speech" (Volosinov 1972: 133). In more or less the same metaphorical terms, the phenomenon has been named 'contagion' (as in 'contagious disease' or 'contagious laughter'), or 'contamination* (but without the negative connotations usually inherent in this term);80 I will revert to this 'principle' in chapter 11.2.3, below. What happens in this 'engulfing' of voices is, to quote Morson and Emerson (1990: 168), that "a story's narrator may so admire a character that his speech becomes saturated with the character's way of speaking". In order to clarify the point at issue, Morson and Emerson quote Voloshinov's own example (taken from Dostoyevsky's^i nasty story):

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Once in winter, on a cold and frosty evening ... three extremely distinguished gentlemen were sitting in a comfortable, even sumptuously appointed, room inside a handsome two-storey house on Peterburg Island and were occupied in weighty and superlative talk on an extremely remarkable topic. All three gentlemen were officials of the rank of general. They were seated around a small table, each in a handsome upholstered chair, and during pauses in the conversation they comfortably sipped champagne. (Volosinov 1972: 135; italics added by Voloshinov himself to the original Dostoyevsky text). The narrator's use of the italicized words ("pompous", as Voloshinov calls it) reflects an anticipated, 'pompous' discourse on the part of the characters. It is as if the narrator unwittingly and unwillingly quoted from direct discourse by one of the characters, without bothering to represent the character's speech or thoughts in one of the usual ways, either through psycho-narration or as free indirect discourse ("quasidirect discourse", in Voloshinov's words). Voloshinov's term for this technique is "speech interference"; more technically, one could speak of "anticipated direct discourse': the narrator's words anticipate a character's. In a sense, this is the inverse of what we were witness to above, section 7.2.1.1, where we saw how a narrator/author could preempt a character's voice, already on the scene, by "priming* it with words the character could not possibly have spoken ('voice trashing'). Whereas that phenomenon could be called 'character's forced borrowing into narrator's real, existing voice', what we have here, in 'anticipated direct discourse', is a movement that goes in the opposite direction: "narrator freely borrowing into character's (not yet articulated) voice' ("voice mashing'). The point of the latter technique is not so much to ensure credibility to a voice as to prepare the readers for the latter's forthcoming discourse, or even for a new character's entry onto the narrative scene, as when a signature melody announces an upcoming event in a movie, or when a theme-call preludes on the entry of a hero in a Wagnerian opera. Thus, a narrator can not only force a character to adopt the existing (past or future) world of the narrator/author, making the character rely on factual information that is not available at the current time or the actual point in the narrative (narrator subsuming

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character), but also adapt a character's speech to foreshadow narrative events that are going to take place later in the story (character subsuming narrator). (In section 7.2.3, below, where the phenomenon of 'voice crashing" is discussed, I will have more to say on these matters of reciprocal 'borrowing'). The anticipation of voices that Voloshinov talks about is a special case of a more general phenomenon of borrowing into foreign discourse types or into registers that are not appropriate to the circumstances of narration, as in the case of misused, or antiquated, slang expressions—a danger that is present whenever voices deviate from their pre-set trajectories. This can happen through unawareness, as in the case of the foreign speaker who involuntarily reveals his or her identity through improper identification with a particular dialect or accent. A typical instance is that of the poor foreign student who insists on taking his leave from his first English garden party by addressing his hostess with the words: 'Well, old gal, it's been a topping party but now 1 must sling my hook'. 81 Another glorious example is found in Mary Wesley's story The camomile lawn (1988), where Max, the philandering foreign musician, is caught 'red-handed' (if one can say this, where language is involved) by his inappropriate use of 'Ta' for Thank you, OK' in front of his wife. ''Who taught you to say that?", she wants to know, quite naturally. In more deliberate uses of 'voice mash', one may come close to phenomena of irony and parody, where the voices do have conflicting interests and the words play a double role, or as Voloshinov puts it, serve "two masters, participating simultaneously in two speech acts" (1972: 137).82 As such, though, this 'double voicing' is not necessarily or always parodic; occasionally, it can be the expression of some profound sentiment. In the following extract, different speech registers are employed in a non-parodic way: the speaker invokes an authority who for him is resident in the very choice of the words he uses. It is as if he wanted the voice of God to speak through him, or at least have the Divine Voice lend him, the earthly speaker, some of Its authority and weight:

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It was one of Caleb's quaintnesses, that in his difficulty of finding speech for his thought, he caught, as it were, snatches of diction which he associated with various points of view or states of mind, and whenever he had a feeling of awe, he was haunted by a sense of biblical phraseology, though he could hardly have given a strict quotation. (George Eliot, Middlemarch IV: xxx; 1982 ed. p. 395. Quoted in Morson & Emerson 1990: 142). The "double voicing' in the above excerpt can be characterized as a case of "voice mashing* in the sense defined in the present chapter, inasmuch as we are unable to ascertain what is the part of the speaker, and what is to be attributed to the outside source. In this particular case, 'double voicedness' takes the guise of what we more properly could call a 'voice overlay', as when we detect an accent in a foreign speaker, or determine a person's local origin by the quality of his or her vowels. Which serves to confirm the insight formulated in chapter 4, viz., that the phenomenon of voice never can be isolated from the world of speakers, inasmuch as it reflects the speakers' anchoring in reality. As part of our normal, linguistic life, 'double voicing' expresses the fact that the reality we live in is not defined by a one-way, single-level dependency on language; nor are we, in our dealings with the world, bound to one particular way of realizing that dependency: voicing is a dialectic process between language and world (cf. above, chapter 4.3.3 and see further chapter 11.2; also Mey 1985, chapter 3.1).

7.2.3. Voice crashing: 'What's that character doing in my story?' 7.2.3.1. The apostrophizing author Readers are not the only ones who enjoy the privilege of forming part of the narrative; there is not only a lector, but also an auctor in fabula. Below, in chapter 8, I will bring up the question of the 'reader's voice'; for now, let's concentrate on the well-known change of voice that signals the point at which an author decides it is time for him or her to make an entree en scene. Consider the following extract from a modern English novel:

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Then he asked me if I would like some supper, and what about some bacon and eggs? Fine, I said, and then discovered that I had to cook them. I suppose that it would have been unlikely that I should have stood round and watched him do it, but nevertheless, the thought of myself in an apron asking him if he liked his eggs hard or soft or fried on both sides did not accord easily with my ideas of passion. And you may say, after a remark like that, do you still call yourself a practical woman? and I will say no, not perhaps that, but a factual one still, a factual one. We ate our bacon and eggs,... (Margaret Drabble, The Garrick Year. New York: Popular Library. 1977. p. 191). In the above excerpt, the readers are officially addressed by the Mperson': "And you may say, ..." and a question is put in their mouths: "'[after a remark like that,] do you still call yourself a practical woman?'" But the voice speaking here is not just that of the presumed 'narratrix' (TTje- Garrick Year is actually set in the first person, and the homodiegetic protagonist is a woman). Rather, we are listening to the author formulating a possible objection on the part of the readers against the whole tenor of the current episode, by which the heroine is depicted as a woman dabbling in some half-hearted adulterous activity with the man she is visiting: a person who doesn't know what she's doing and therefore cannot be taken seriously. By dissociating herself, as author, from the person she is describing, as narratrix (a woman to whom she is ascribing a rather silly and not very 'practical' attitude towards matters of the heart), Drabble manages to keep this rather ridiculous incident within the bounds of the acceptable. The heroine's characterization of herself as a passionate woman "in an apron" asking her prospective lover non-passionate questions about how to do his eggs, is framed as an (implied) author's innocent remark addressed to her readership. But by placing the question within her own, rather than the heroine's, problematic, the narratrix takes on the situation's tacit social and sexual-political presuppositions qua author of the story, not qua heroine or narrative instance. Drabble has got herself caught in a dilemma: either the story and its protagonist are silly, or its author is (and in the worst possible case, they all are). Her way out is by casting her heroine in the image of a 'factual', rather than a 'practical' person: dissociating the story from the

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heroine (as the Ί-character'), and inserting herself into the narrative as the questioning author who suggests a distinction between 'factual' and 'practical', the author Drabble is able to resolve the dilemma, voice her own objections against the I-person being framed in that sordid situation, preempt any possible misunderstanding on the part of the readership, and go on, as narratrix, with her agenda: to describe the sequel and outcome of this rather lame seduction scene ("We ate our bacon and eggs"). Continuing in the spirit of the story, the couple make "factual", rather than "practical" love once, rather halfheartedly and without much trumpeting; but they do not do so until some forty pages later, towards the very end of the book. Some authors are more given than others to this kind of 'authorial intrusion', and the individual authors' reasons for employing this technique are as diverse as the techniques employed. A well-worn trick used by authors to justify their intrusion on the audience is that of the direct address, so familiar from older literature as the 'Consider now, gentle reader' approach—with us ever since the Greeks invented a technical term for the phenomenon: apostrophe, literally meaning: "a turning away [from the text and towards the reader]'. Here is an example found in the 19th century Brazilian author Machado de Assis' humoristic novel Bras Cubas: [In the following, the reader is apostrophized as a "tender soul", on account of his or her presumed uneasiness with the fate that the author, speaking through his Ί-personage', the eponymous hero of the novel, has meted out to his erstwhile love, the poor "bush flower" (flor da moitd) Eugenia—a fate which had been amply foreshadowed in the preceding chapters. A point to keep in mind here as well is that these memoirs are called 'posthumous' by their author: that is to say that the 'I-voice' we are listening to is in 'reality* a dead man's—which in itself poses interesting interpretive problems, not to be delved into here.] Ha ai, entre as cinco ο dez pessoas que me leem, ha ai uma alma sensivel, que esta decerto urn tanto agastada com o capitulo anterior... e talvez ... la no /undo de si mesma, me chame cinico. En cinico, alma sensivel? ... Nao, alma sensivel, eu nao sou cinico, en fui homem. ...

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("There is at this point, among the five or ten persons who read me, there is at this point a sensitive soul who probably is rather indignant about the preceding chapter ... and perhaps ... there, in the innermost of his or her soul, calls me a cynic. I cynical, tender soul? ... No, tender soul, I am not a cynic, I have been a human.') (Machado de Assis, Memorias poslumas de Bras Cubas, ch. xxxiv. Rio de Janeiro & Paris: Gamier. 1924, p. 108; my translation). [1880] Most of the times, authors limit their intrusions to invocations of higher powers, statements of purpose, comments on the characters or the plot, or observations of a more general character. Classical examples from antiquity include the famous first lines of Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey, both containing first person references to the poet, either explicitly, by an invocation to the Muse to "tell me the tale of an artful man who has traveled widely" (Od. I.1-2), or implicitly, by ordering the "goddess" to ''chant the account of Achilles' nefarious rancor" (//. 1.12). Compare also the self-assured and rational motivations that Thucydides exposes in the first chapter of his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, where the author tells us that "he set out to describe this war because he from the very beginning could see that this was going to be the greatest event in Greek history so far" (Hist. I.I). St. Luke, in the first lines of his Gospel, echoes this authorial selfjustification when he states his intention to give an "orderly account" of the events about which so many others already had written (implying: in not too orderly a fashion; Lk. \: 1-4). In modern prose, the cases of authors directly identifying themselves as involved in the narration—even posing as, or invoking, a particular character or narrative instance—are in the minority. Victorian authors, like Anthony Trollope, still loved to step onto the narrative scene with factual or psychological information—on train connections, postal routes, the readership's mental or other states, and so on. "And now, with my reader's consent, I will follow the postman ... " (there follows a detailed, three quarter page account of the route a letter takes from Chaldicotes to Framley (Framley Parsonage, 1860, p. 41); as we know, Trollope spent much of his life in H.B.M.'s Postal Services). At other times, the author takes us in by phrasing our human weaknesses and deepest wishes, in the manner of the chorus in a Greek tragedy: "It is no

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doubt very wrong to long after a naughty thing. But nevertheless we all do so." (ibid., p. 32). Sometimes such an apostrophe leads to a lack of likelihood, or even contradiction, in the author's self-representation: an authorial 'auto-crash' worthy of the good Batavus DroogstoppePs merciless critique (see above, chapter 6.2.1), as when Trollope remarks, near the end of Barchester Towers (1857), that the publisher ("Mr. Longman") will not allow him a fourth volume, for which reason he has to "disposfe] of all our friends in the small remainder of this one volume" (p. 396). Not only that: the exact page count of the novel the author is writing ("477") is mentioned as the upper bound of his novelistic endeavors (ibid., 461), even though no author, at the time of writing, has ever been able to predict the exact number of pages his or her work is going to fill. In relatively rare cases, the writer as a character appears physically (albeit anachronously) on the scene, as in chapter 55 of John Fowles' Tfte French lieutenant's woman (1969), where "a bearded gentleman" enters the railway carriage in which the main character Sarah's erstwhile lover Charles is traveling to London in pursuit of his beloved. The bearded character keeps staring at Charles (who has fallen asleep) with "that particular look, with its bizarre blend of the inquisitive and the magistral; of the ironic and the soliciting" which is said to be typical for "only one [the writing—JM] profession"; then, by a pronominal twist of person from third to first, which is as sudden as it is unexpected, makes himself known as the author of the novel ("Now the question I am asking as I stare at Charles ...") and starts interfering in the story directly, even suggesting an alternative plot and ending to the readers, flipping a coin to determine his first choice, before fading out of the picture again at Paddington Station ("The bearded man has disappeared into the throng.").83 More directly related to the telling of the story is the frame that many authors like to construct around their narration, by pretending it was found in an old chest, told by a distant relative, or even, in modern times, retrieved from a dead man's computer (two of these devices have been used recently by Umberto Eco in his well-known novels // nome della rosa and // pendolo dl Foucault). In Germany in particular, this genre, called Rahmenerzählung, "framed narrative', or 'story within a story', represented a popular trend during the Romantic period; classic examples are Theodor Storm's novella Der Schimmelreiter ('The Horseman on the White Steed'), and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff s Die

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Judenbuche ('The Jew's Beech'). In these stories, the author/narrator appears both at the beginning and the end, introducing the protagonists and wrapping up the story, often providing it with a moral or giving it a moralistic twist, sometimes embodied in a concluding, gnomic sentence (cf. the last line of Die Judenbuche, which reads: Le vrai n'est pas toujours le vraisemblable The truth doesn't always look true'). In all these cases, the question arises 'whose voice' we are hearing. Is it truly the author's, appearing live on the scene and making a statement about what is going to happen, only to disappear into the wings as soon as the real play starts? I think this would be misinterpreting the author's role, by limiting its scope to that of the chorus in Greek tragedy (as I suggested above), or making it similar to that of the speaker of a prologue in classical drama. Being at the same time a 'real' person and (potentially) one of the 'voices' in narration, the author cannot be said to belong exclusively to either reality or fiction. Or more precisely: reality and fiction cannot be sharply distinguished in this case; as we have seen in the above examples, authors dash in and out of scenes and narrative sequences, blurring the distinctions between the two planes. We may willing to honor, at face value, Eco's assertions about how he lost both his companion and the precious manuscript by Abbe Vallet (on which // nome della rosa is based) even before arriving at Salzburg en route from Prague, the person with whom he traveled having abandoned him, such that "I was left with a number of notebooks filled in my handwriting and with a great void in my heart" (Eco 1984: 11-12; my translation); still, we do this only as part of our narrative task, as readers, as participants in the story. As readers, it doesn't occur to us to check if Eco ever has been to Prague, was given a manuscript there on August 16, 1968, "six days before the invasion by the Soviet troops", or indeed had a companion who left him "during a tragic night in a little hotel in Mondsee" (ibid: I I ) . As competent readers, we know how to react to such 'framings'; and we do it according to our usual 'readerly view' ('if that's what the author wants us to believe, that's all right with us'). This cooperation in the creation of fiction is an aspect of reading which I will detail more explicitly in chapter 8, below.

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7.2.3.2. Authors' untimely antics While authors and narrators usually harmonize their input in the symphony of the narrative, or even speak with the same voice, there are numerous cases where this relationship ends in dissonance, sometimes even disrupton. Such 'clashes' may then affect the other characters (including the readers) and the parts they play in the story; one result of this is that the readership may be manipulated into positions that not always reflect their own best narrative interests. Consider a work such as that by A.S. Byatt, Still Life, where the narration is constantly interrupted by the voice of the author telling the reader about the decisions she has made in choosing her subjects, about the reasons why she is including or excluding this or that particular development, about what is going to happen at some later time in the story (facts that the characters of the novel in principle cannot know about at 'narration time'), and so on. Below are some examples in which Byatt, on her authorial metalevel, discusses the reasons for the choices and decisions she has made during the writing process, i.a. to include or to exclude certain happenings or themes. [A "long and troubled conversation" has taken place between two characters, one of whom is Raphael, whom Frederica is in love with, and who also is the man she wants as her Ph.D. adviser.] That conversation is not part of the stuff of this novel, and Frederica was not aware of its substance, nor that it had happened,... (A.S. Byatt, Still Life, p. 305) Some further examples from the same novel follow: ... a friend had founded the Peace People, whose brave beginning and sad end will not be chronicled here, (ibid., p. 90) Later, at least for many years, she [Frederica] was not to see this time as part of her life, and perhaps therefore it need not now be told at length, (ibid., p. 58) There is a temptation to hurry over the next part of their lives, particularly Daniel's. It feels a little like discretion; it is both

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English and composed to turn away for a time, and take up the narrative again when there is something to narrate, (ibid., p. 368) Others of Byatt's authorial meta-statements have a 'stage direction'-like flavor: April had come in Blesford, to go back a little, (ibid., p. 90) Very often, such directions have to do with what I will call 'authorial un-timing', understood as an 'ex-cursion" into extra-textual reality or 'narrative non-time', by which the author manages to tell us something important about the characters, their experiences, and their reactions. She does this using language, or providing descriptions, that the characters themselves couldn't possibly have used or recognized at narration time. Such narratorial excursions are like Proustian escapes into "lost time"; most often, they are preceded or followed by adverbials of time ('then', 'later') or demonstrative pronouns indicating past tense ('those times', 'those days', etc.), and accompanied by the author's disclaimers, 'disowning' the discourse, as it were, in order to keep the fiction of narration alive. Some examples: The language with which I might try to order Frederica's hectic and somewhat varied sexual life in 1954-55 was not available to Frederica then, (ibid., p. 136) These habits took some learning and there were moments when she lost her nerve, even wondered if she were cheap, or a tart. (Fast would have been a good word for her but came from another decade), (ibid., p. 137) Frederica arrived when the beach party at Les Saintes-Maries was already settled in. At some distance from other groups, in those days not numerous, on the beach, it had arranged itself around bright canvas bags and wicker baskets in the part-shade of a fishing boat. In those days also the boats were unchanged since Vincent Van Gogh had spent one week there in June 1888 and had painted them,... (tow/., p. 78)

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They mounted the white dunes and set off toward the town square and church, past a few white cottages. At that time the Camargue had not been invaded by the tourists, ... Nor had the later overlapping visitation of hippies of the sixties taken place,... In the sixties any vaguely holy and distant place became heaped and congested with the bodies of the seekers of the holy and distant. Frederica at that time wrote an essay on overpopulation, ... That was before Stonehenge, in 1980, became encased in a concentration camp cage. ... [A] world was coming in which it would almost certainly never again be possible to walk quietly as Frederica and Alexander walked, through the village where Van Gogh tramped and set up his easel in the clean dust, (ibid, p. 86-87) Among the more spectacular textual acrobatics that Byatt engages in is a kind of jumping in and out of the narrative, in order to tell the reader about the details of the writing process, or to situate herself in 'real time', compared to the time of the narrative. As an example, consider the following: ... Frederica, like many of her politically placid contemporaries, was unaware of revolt in east Berlin or rumblings in Poland. The Hungarian revolution, like Suez, [was] news, in every sense ofthat word. They were—we were—a generation who had ... innocently and unwittingly lived through a convulsive and exhausting piece of history, (ibid, p. 300) In the two following, closely related passages, we are told about Byatt's own frustrations in composing the novel, and how she had to renounce on earlier conceptions of how to put the story together: I had the idea that this novel could be written innocently, without recourse or reference to other people's thoughts, without, as far as possible, recourse to simile or metaphor. This turned out to be impossible, (ibid, p. 116) I had the idea, when I began this novel, that it would be a novel of naming and accuracy. I wanted to write a novel as [William Carlos] Williams said a poem should be—no ideas but in things. I even

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thought of trying to write without figures of speech, but had to give up that plan, quite early, (ibid., p. 323) At other times, the author discourses not only about certain general problems that she encounters in writing, but specifically about such matters as the differences between painting and writing, the choice of a particular word (e.g. 'bourgeois', ibid, p. 301), the difficulties of writing about 'strangeness' (ibid, p. 63), and so on. Invariably, these meta-musings are prefaced by parentheticals in the first person: Ί do not think', Ί am trying' (ibid, p. 63), 'When I write', Ί record', Ί mean' (ibid, p. 301), 'in my experience' (ibid, p. 306), and so on. Occasionally, the author slips into the impersonal: 'It should by now be clear' (ibid, p. 138) or indulges in a gnomic phrase such as 'This is usual' (ibid, p. 114). What we are witnessing in all these cases is a process of dissociation of the author as narrator from the author as writer. In the quoted excerpts, these two indeed have distinct voices, and operate sometimes like blind or sleeping partners; the left hand, that of the author, does not now, or pretends not to know, what the narrating right hand is doing. Most of the times, however, the 'contextual coercion' that I talked about earlier (see chapter 2.5) will teach us how to tease out the different voices in each case; I say: most of the times, because it does not always happen, as the following excerpt will show. [The newly installed Royal couple are on a trip to Cambridge, where they also visit Frederica's college, Newnham. Stephanie is Frederica's sister, who had given up her studies in order to get married and have a baby.] She [Frederica] was afraid of confinement. The new Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited Newnham, and the Duke, surrounded by hair-dressed academic ladies and gowned, demure-looking girls, asked the senior student jokingly, 'Do you ever get out of here?' and Frederica felt rage—rage that he could ask, when she herself was never in, had so much life, was so free, much more free, she innocently imagined, than he would ever be. The word confinement reminded her of Stephanie, (ibid., p. 139)

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In this excerpt, the author intrudes twice: first, she adds a footnote, as it were ("she innocently imagined"), to Frederica's reaction (in represented thought) to the Duke's ham-handed remarks: the author in fact disrupts Frederica's FID, thus combining her authorial intrusion with 'voice trashing'. Second, and this is the more interesting case, Byatt not only tells us what the main character is thinking, is "reminded of (which is standard procedure for the omniscient narrator), but in addition, she steps on the scene like a stage director would, during rehearsal, to address an actor who has forgotten his cue, or when a line is delivered in the wrong way. In cases like these, the author not only directs her character to be 'confined' and to be afraid of'confinement', but actually forces her into having said words to the effect of Ί am (or: feel) confined'. For in no other way could the character continue her musings (in FID), as based on "the word confinement" [my emphasis], when that word factually had not been spoken, whether in direct or in (free) indirect discourse originating from Frederica. Authorial intrusion, in this case, consists in the author's extending a helping hand to the character, word-wise: out of compassion with the naYve and inexperienced character, the author (parting ways with the narrator) resolves to relieve the character of her innocence by infusing her with the correct expression. As a result, the character has to 'borrow into' the text, as I have called it earlier (section 7.2.2), in order to speak—but strictly on the lending conditions set by the author. We see here how authorial intrusion actually may change the very polarity of the narrative, making the flow of narration turn 'assbackwards', as it were. The narrator, who also is an actor having a voice on the narrative scene, is being outmaneuvered by the author's voice putting in her two-bits of authorial wisdom; in addition, the author tells her characters not only what to say, but what to think, and how to think what they think. If they haven't picked up on a particular word, no problem: the author steps in and effortlessly pulls the missing word out of her writer's hat, and nobody the wiser. The following is another outstanding example of such authorial manipulation. [Frederica is touring the countryside with Nigel, an occasional friend, whom she ends up sleeping with.]

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They looked around Ely Cathedral where he revealed unexpected characteristics, though Frederica caught herself up sharply on this word later, asking herself what could be 'unexpected' about someone about whom she knew next to nothing, (ibid, p. 288) In this extract, the second occurrence of the word "unexpected" figures in (original single) quotes, which suggests that it was borrowed from some character's direct discourse, as a verbatim quotation from someone in the narrative. However, if we try to determine where in the text the word originates, we discover to our astonishment that it actually, in its first, 'unquoted' appearance, forms part of the narrated report on the couple's visit to Ely. Hence, it is the narrator who informs the readers that Nigel, the person referred to as "he", is in possession of "unexpected characteristics", and that these characteristics are revealed during the visit to Ely Cathedral. Frederica, on the contrary, as not pertaining to the readership, is not informed of the young gentleman's "unexpected characteristics". So, when Frederica "later" thinks back to this episode, her use of the word "unexpected" in her reflections cannot be traced back to an earlier use by herself; yet, cross-examining her memory, she finds her (alleged) use of the word inappropriate. In retrospect, the expression "unexpected" strikes her as odd when used to refer to properties of a person about whom she, Frederica, in fact of history, "knew next to nothing"— Frederica is retrospect!ng, as it were, on an event unseen. In order to be able to make this kind of comment and meta-comment, Frederica must draw on the unlimited knowledge sources of the omniscient author, who has decided to let her, and the readers, in on some thus far hidden characteristics of the person referred to as "he". It is almost as if Frederica, while writing down her impressions of the trip to Ely at a later stage of the narrative, were casting about for a good word to cover what happened in the church. The friendly author then prompts her into borrowing an expression ("unexpected characteristics") that she, the author, thinks fit for the description of the Nigel character; Frederica promptly incorporates this borrowed term into her own mental account of the trip. While this provides her with the needed wording, it should leave her (and us!) wondering about how she came to be 'quoting' herself when in fact she hadn't said anything at all. The voice may be Frederica's, but the words are surely the author's. What we are looking at here is in reality nothing but a roundabout way

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of describing the character in question (Nigel) from Frederica's point of view by telling the readership, in Frederica's name, about certain "unexpected'* properties that this character is supposed to possess. However, since Byatt is not able, or does not want, to order Frederica directly to say 'quotable' things, by giving her the kind of stage directions that I was referring to earlier, she takes an indirect path, by establishing a 'reader-oriented' discourse. Next, the author asks Frederica to listen in on this discourse, making her borrow bits and pieces, to be used in Frederica's own treatment of the happenings "later", when she is contrasting her earlier impression of the "he" character with the events that took place in Ely Cathedral. These events were as 'un-expected' by Frederica in reality as they were 'un-represented' by the author in the original context; but now, thanks to the author's discussion of the matter with the readership, they can be put in their proper place in Frederica's discourse. When Frederica finally jerks her own post factum impressions of the Ely episode "sharply" into agreement with the consensus obtained between author and readership, the derailed narrative is back on its tracks. The readership is made part and parcel of this process, being just as much steered in the proper direction by the intruding voice of the author as is Frederica herself. This "authorial hectoring' is more than a simple intrusion; it represents an extreme case of authorial invasion, an author body-snatching the readership, as it were: the readers discovering themselves, somewhat to their surprise, caught red-handed in the act of attesting to, or even embracing, positions that they at best were unaware of having; at worst, may have to reject. As Talbot puts it, expanding on an expression coined by Fowler (1981: 90), "the readers may be in the position of jurors doing jury service, but they are also in the dock" (1995: 68, 71), either as witnesses or as accused. The readers are themselves turned into characters, as Talbot also remarks (ibid.: 66); as a consequence, when apostrophized in this fashion (even indirectly), the readers acquire a voice of their own. (See chapter 6.2.3; more on this below, chapter 8.4).

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7.3. Unvoicing Earlier in this chapter (section 7.1), I have mentioned the possibility that the phenomenon I have called 'voice clashing' is liable to be exploited by authors who are in search of some special effect. One could compare such organized voice clashing to an authorial wake-up call, whose purpose it is to make the readership realize that something special is the case: either that some particular development in the narrative is about to take place, or that a character may in fact be speaking with different voices, belonging to the different sides of a split personality. Distinct from the general phenomenon of 'heteroglossia', which Bakhtin defined as characteristic for all novelistic discourse (more on this in chapter 11.1.3), we have here a sort of'special heteroglossia1, by which our readerly attention is directed to certain, special conditions obtaining on the narrative site, and by which authors have us adjust our readerly behavior in order to meet those conditions. Consider the following excerpt from a recent novel by the BritishJapanese author Kazuo Ishiguro: 'Now, sir, if you'll just bear with me a moment,' Gustav said, 'I'll show you the features of the room. That way, your stay here will be as comfortable as possible.' I followed Gustav around the room while he pointed out switches and other facilities. At one point he led me into the bathroom and continued his explanations there. I had been about to cut him short in the way I am accustomed to doing when being shown a hotel room by a porter, but something about the diligence with which he went about his task, something about his efforts to personalise something he went through many times each day, rather touched me and prevented me from interrupting. And then, as he continued with his explanations, waving a hand towards various parts of the room, it occurred to me that for all his professionalism, for all his genuine desire to see me comfortable, a certain matter that had been preoccupying him throughout the day had again pushed its way to the front of his mind. He was, in other words, worrying once more about his daughter and her little boy.

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Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (London & Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp. 13-14. In the above excerpt, the main character and I-person of the narrative, a pianist called (Charles?) Ryder, has just arrived at his hotel in a Central European city, where is he supposed to give a recital at some cultural festival of sorts. The person called Gustav is an elderly hotel porter showing Ryder to his room. During their ascent in the elevator, the porter lectures to Ryder at great length about the professionalism that is the hallmark of the portering profession, and which (according to Gustav) has fallen into disrespect among the younger generations of porters (vanishing professional pride is a well-known theme in Ishiguro's quasi-nostalgic work, and one that is familiar from, e.g., an earlier novel by the same author, The remains of the day, Ishiguro 1991). When the porter and his guest finally reach the room, the former starts explaining the various available facilities: switches, curtains, electrical connections, bathroom equipment, and so on, in the usual porterly way. While listening with a half ear to the porter's explanations, Ryder muses about Gustav and his peculiar way of looking at life; in particular, he is struck by the kind of old-world courtesy that he discovers in the porter's pledge to professionalism. All this in itself poses no particular problems of a narrative kind: the beginning story unwinds in a perfectly normal manner, and the voices are allocated in accordance with the techniques we have discussed earlier (chapter 5): anaphoric reference, syntactic and semantic consistency, as well as overall pragmatic acceptability. However, in the last sentence of the extract, where Ryder's reflections are voiced (in the same homodiegetic fashion as before), an odd thing happens. Ryder seems to be in the possession of a knowledge to which he, as the person described, and in the context so far available, has no access. We're still at the very beginning of the story, and there has been no mention made of, or any information made available (from any external or in-textual sources) about Gustav's private affairs that Ryder, as a character in the novel, could have been privy to. In fact, Gustav's daughter and her child (who will turn out to be among the novel's main characters) have not been mentioned at all; but when they make the scene, Ryder suddenly seems to "remember' them—in fact, he appears to have been living with the mother and child in an earlier period of his life, though nothing of the

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sort transpires during either the porter's monologue or the guest's musings; nor have these historical events been announced, using the usual omniscient narrator's 'psycho-narrative' privilege (see sections 4.3.1 and 7.1.3 above) in the ten-odd earlier pages of the book. The average reader's first reaction will credibly be one of disbelief. How could the character Ryder know what the porter was thinking, unless the author had told him? And if that had been the case, why weren't we, as readers, told too, or why weren't we at least informed about such a telling in one of the usual ways of narration? It seems as if the author is entering upon the scene and suggesting lines to his characters behind our backs; a clear intrusion of the kind we have discussed earlier under the label of'voice crashing'. In particular, we seem to be witness to the special kind of voice crash that I have laid at the 'apostrophizing' authors door (section 7.2.3.1). Such an explanation, however correct on a superficial level, does not do justice to all of the aspects of the phenomenon described here. Besides, once this 'voice crash' has been recognized, a number of other phenomena with dubious narrative status turn up and demand an explanation as well. Right before the excerpt quoted above, there is a lengthy passage in which the porter and his guest are riding the elevator up to the latter's room. The porter's monologue, which fills almost four entire printed pages in the novel (Ishiguro 1995: 5-9), can hardly have been delivered as such during the short elevator ride. Reading a paper of comparable length at a convention would take one about 10 to 12 minutes (depending on one's speed of delivery), and even allowing for greater speed in informal talk, one would still be looking at a stretch of oral discourse lasting for at least five minutes, enough to ride the New York World Trade Towers' high speed elevators up and down four times. This clearly is an absurdity in terms of 'real' time, and it is not the only one in the book. The same happens in the realm of space: when the ego-person is following a red car in order to get to his destination, his company (the mysterious porter's daughter and her son) want to have a break, so they turn into a wayside diner for refreshments and a visit to the restroom. In the process, Ryder has to make a lengthy phone call to one of the organizers of his stay; all this, of course, takes "quite some time" (Ishiguro 1995: 255). Still, when they finally get back into the car and turn out from the parking area back onto the highway, Ryder spots the red car in the far distance, "proceeding as before at a leisurely speed"

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(ibid.: 257), just as if this were the most natural thing in the world. The baffled reader asks him- or herself: 'But had that red car been waiting for them? But why? And if so, why weren't we told? Are we perhaps missing out on something?' One may wonder if this isn't precisely the effect that the author wants to obtain through his bewildering use of the time and space categories in the narrative of The Unconsoled. One could say that Ishiguro, by setting the parameters for the physical conditions for the narrative in a certain, unaccustomed way, imposes impossible constraints on his characters (and indirectly, on his readers) on a 'take it or leave it' basis. By this narrative forcing of the reader's hand, the author makes him or her accept the reality of the impossible, in order that the possible may be realized. If we, as readers, accept to be constrained in this way, we are then ready for the next step, which is to accept the occurrence of unlikely and even contradictory voicings: characters having access to nonexistent information (as when Ryder is 'reading' the porter's mind); intrinsically conflicting information (Ryder both knowing and not knowing the woman he is supposed to have lived with, and even may have a child with); inconsequentialities in the narrative action (from the storyline, it is never clear what exactly Ryder is expected to do in the city he is visiting as an important cultural ambassador; his appointments are forever changing, unannounced, delayed, forgotten, or canceled; time and again he gets entangled in local gossip and personal conflicts, in impossible disputes about irrelevant details of organizational and aesthetic character, and so on and so forth). The reader ends up asking him- or herself if anyone in this novel knows what he/she is doing, or is supposed to be doing. In The Unconsoled, we visit a never-never land of impossible constraints and irrelevant circumstances, a Bakhtinian 'chronotope' where everybody's perspective on the events is strictly idiosyncratic and makes no (common) 'sense', in every meaning of the word. Voices clash profusely; the narrative proceeds exclusively by its own logic (or lack of logic). We are dealing with a distorted universe of discourse, a crooked mirror whose reflections of reality are forever changing. This discoursal universe represents a universe of "reality' where nobody's voice is heard or answered, an empty place filled with fleeting, shadowy figures who do not operate according to a normal schedule, and do not respect the temporal prius acposlerius that one associates with rational behavior.

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One could say that Ishiguro's novel consists of disjointed monologues spoken on cue, and connected by only the barest of narrative threads. And indeed, the characters are all over the narrative space and hold forth interminably, like the Mahabharata'1 s king Yudhisthira on his death-bed (who is reported to have used his last breath to admonish his sons in an Odyssey-long harangue of 18,000 lines of verse). But this only touches the tip of the iceberg. True, the voices of The Unconsoled hold forth in their own time and in their own spaces, unchecked by any higher controlling narrative instance, or so it seems. But the real problem lies deeper. Why does this novel appear to be such a deserted, timeless space, reminiscent of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, with its "courage of empty or dead surfaces" (to borrow the Danish painter Per Kirkeby's expression; 1993: 12), only accentuated by the presence of a lonely figure in a corner, or a far-away railway clock? Why do its characters' voices appear to be "calling out in the wilderness" (cf. Lk. 4: 5) — the "abyss invoked" by Ishiguro's narrative (cf. Ps. 43: 13)? The answer to our question lies precisely in the very narrative technique used by Ishiguro, an extreme instance of what Shklovsky has called priem ostranenija, the 'technique of bestrangement' (to be discussed in more detail later; see chapter 9.2.2). The 'bestranging' that takes place here consists in depriving the characters of a point of view, of a perspective on their own actions as well as on their placement in the narrative as a whole. Having lost one's point of view, one is also deprived of the necessary perspective, that is, of the focalization and localization that go hand in hand with it. And since, as we have seen in chapter 6.1.1, focalization and localization are indispensable conditions for vocalization, this implies that an 'unfocused' and 'displaced' character also loses its voice. Bereft of a proper voice, the characters are now condemned to eternal, repetitive, individualistic talk: hellish monologues like the ones Sartre has depicted in his Huis Clos (1952). The Unconsoled narrates a man's journey to and from that most private of all places, where the others are the self-designated and self-maintained torturers of the individual afflicted character — are in fact hell: "I'enfer, c'est les autres", in Sartre's immortal phrase. The bestrangement by which Ishiguro's perspective-less desert is created is based on the technique of voice deprivation that his book embodies. The 'unconsoled' are basically decentered, de-perspectivized, and as a result 'unvoiced', characters. Like Evelyn Waugh's "orphans of the storm", they have nowhere to

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hide but in each other's arms and voices: the "fair waters" of consolation are to the unconsoled the deadliest of poisons, just as they were to that other Ryder, the unconsoled protagonist of Waugh's famous novel (1993: 235). But in contrast to Waugh, his colleague Ishiguro does not offer us an existential or religious out: Ishiguro's 'Brideshead' is visited and revisited in an incessant infernal carrousel of haunting, but at the same time extremely banal and repetitive visions. Thus, the 'unvoiced' become the 'unconsoled'; the clue to the novel's bestrangement, its mysterious 'unvocality', is in its very title.

Part Three Perspectives

Chapter 8

The dialogic perspective 8.1. Understanding as dialogue In most of post-Saussurean linguistics, the notion of communication is tied to that of the message, to be conveyed from a speaker to a hearer through a channel (vocal, written, or other). The classical communication model involves (usually two) 'talking heads' addressing their listening counterparts, as in the well-known illustration from Saussure's Cows (1916: 32). The model was later taken up by Roman Jakobson, who in his highly influential 1960 'Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics' to an edited volume on Style in Language (Sebeok 1960) laid the foundation for several generations of communication models, including some that were professedly oriented towards the analysis and understanding of dialogue and text, from the so-called 'Paris School' of semiotics under Greimas (1966) and some early, pragmatically-oriented Danish models of communication (e.g. Wille 1968) to present-day, more or less modified or popularized versions (e.g. Togeby 1993; Chalhub 1994).84 Jakobson's prestige and the model's disarming simplicity may explain its longevity and success; however, its inherent limitations must not be overlooked. Among the latter, its insensitivity to the dialogic aspect of communication should be singled out: the model assigns the Other part' of the communicative dyad, the 'hearer', to an at least temporarily passive, static role, only to be given up when the roles change, and hearer becomes speaker, speaker turns into hearer, in the next interchange. Such a purely mechanical alternation between two 'hats', to be donned and doffed at will by 'talking heads', can at most deliver a feel for the interplay between voices on the 'conversational' level; there will be no deeper understanding of what goes on between the speakers/hearers in terms of real dialogue, on the level of'discourse'. 85 In the case of the literary text, the dialogic aspects of communication can only be safeguarded if we take the role of the reader as a communicative partner seriously. The reader does not happen upon the literary scene by accident, as if he or she were an occasional passer-by, stopping up out of curiosity and looking in on the narration, as it were, to see what

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is going on between the covers—of book or bed. Quite the contrary: as the ultimate instance for whom the product is intended and by whom it will be judged, the reader is an integral part of the process of literary production. I am not speaking here of the simple commercial sense in which the reader buys the product, thereby securing the publisher's profits and (indirectly) the author's survival; rather, I am thinking of the reader as 'buying into' the story, by becoming part of the dialogue that the author initiates by setting out to write. Bakhtin has captured this aspect of literary activity by the term obrascennosl', a Russian word that means, literally, 'the property of turning oneself towards somebody or something'. The term is rather idiosyncratic (even in Russian) and difficult to render into English by a direct equivalent (in German, one might say Zmvendiing—pers. comm. by Werner Winter). Most professional Bakhtinologists use the word 'addressivity', which evokes a somewhat passive state of affairs on the part of the reader, with the author doing the active addressing (just as the term 'aggressivity' reserves the act of 'aggression' for the active part, that of the aggressor, while only indirectly implying the passive, undergoing role of the aggressee). The root of the Russian word obrascerwosl', however, is a reflexive verb, obrascat 'sja, meaning literally 'to turn oneself around, to turn around' (intrans.), as in the movement one makes when noticing something that deserves one's attention. While the English expression 'to address' (a person, a question, an issue) focuses on the unidirectional process of 'turning to', the Bakhtinian term allows the movement of addressing to include the addressee to whom one turns and whose presence is 'turned back' in 'addressability' as well as 'addressivity': obrascennost'.(SQQ also chapter 4.3.3, above, and especially footnote 44). These philological musings contain more than a grain of literal truth in interpretation; they have a literary consequence as well. Dialogue is usually understood as the 'speaking together' of two persons; how dialogue comes about, and what its preconditions are, is usually not taken into consideration. People talk, and have always been talking; why make this into such a complicated affair? The answer is that the act of speaking is a complicated affair from its very beginning. A dialogue is between partners; finding a partner is half the dialogue. Moreover, partners must be willing and active, and have some idea of who their interlocutor is, and what he or she is aiming at. If

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these conditions are not met, the dialogue becomes uneasy and stinted; in extreme cases, the partners may start manipulating each other verbally. Behind all this is the fact that the dialogic partners are speakers in a world whose essence is 'dialogic', according to Bakhtin, just as is truth itself. As Morson and Emerson express it, the dialogue of life requires a dialogic method and a dialogic conception of truth to represent it. (1990: 60) Or, in Bakhtin's own words, truth is not bom nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born beftveen people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. (1984: 110) It is this dialogic interaction (or "dialogism", as Bakhtin calls it) which is at the basis of the construction of the literary universe with its population of voices, among these the author's and the reader's. Neither of these voices are single or isolated; neither should drown out the voice of the others. In particular, the voice of the author should not make us overhear that of the reader's; the 'conversation' between author and reader is always going on and never comes to a final stop, not even when the last page has been turned and the story has been brought to a (more or less) happy ending: Real dialogism will incarnate a world whose unity is essentially one of multiple voices, whose conversations never reach finality and cannot be transcribed in monologic form. The unity of the world ... is polyphonic. (Morson & Emerson 1990: 61) I will have more to say on this 'never-ending polyphony' at the end of section 8.3; chapter 9 will deal in detail with the 'reader's voice'.

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8.2. Ownership and responsibility An utterance does not only depend on the utterer, who pronounces the words, but also on the listener, who is their intended recipient. Voloshinov, in his Marxism and the philosophy of language, remarks that [every] word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. (1973: 86; original italics). Pronounced in the absence of any recipients, without any context, in vacuo, our words will forever be empty of real meaning, like the "sounding brass or clanging cymbal" that St. Paul warns his Corinthians about (I Cor. 13: 1). That is to say: my utterance, in its final analysis, receives its meaning not only from what I put into it, but to an equally high degree from what the other gets out of it. Actually, the only context in which word ownership can be univocally (and is necessarily) determined is the particular setting of legal proceedings, where the witnesses' as well as the defendant's utterances are taken down and reproduced verbatim. This assignment of ownership (and hence, of responsibility) starts the moment the judicial procedure is initiated by the policeman making the arrest and 'reading the detainee his rights', and continues all the way to the court hearings, where everybody is under the personal obligation of saying "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"—a statement that only can be interpreted as holding for an individual's subjective truth, having to do exclusively with the utterance as owned by, and reported back to, the speaker. In the same vein, we are admonished by St. Matthew to heed our words, because in the final account, we will be held personally responsible for them, since: every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give an account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shall be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned. (Mt. 12: 36-37) The point of interpersonal dialogue, however, is precisely that inasmuch we are dealing with people, we are not engaged in legal proceedings; nor do we have to confront a 'strict judge', the iudex strictus of Judgment

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Day.86 The 'addressivity' that we talked about in the previous section (8.1) is not an abstract one: we never 'address the matter' only, we address the person who matters. As Voloshinov puts it, The word is oriented toward an addressee, toward who that addressee might be ... . There can be no such thing as an abstract addressee. And he continues: I give myself verbal shape from another's point of view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong. (1973: 85-86; last italics mine) The question of ownership has thus been raised, not only as regards dialogue, but in all use of words. We must constantly remind ourselves of the perennial and vital question (raised in an earlier book of mine): "Whose language are we speaking?'' (cf. Mey 1985). Bakhtin says: The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one). (1994b: 121 -122) Morson, and Emerson, in their commentary on the above quotation, conclude that "the words and linguistic units themselves belong to 'no one', so long as they are viewed as just linguistic units" (1990: 129). The moment the words enter a dialogue of reciprocal understanding, they belong to the public domain, in the strict sense of the word. Consequently, the problem of'addressivity' cannot be solved by pointing at the abstract relation of addressing, viewed as a bidirectional, reversible relation: addresser is to addressee as addressee is to addresser, only with the direction of the relational arrow reversed. Being addressed implies taking the responsibility for the common production of the utterance and assuming one's part of the duties that are incumbent upon the interlocutors, as 'co-owners' of the utterance. Joint proprietorship, however, creates joint responsibilities, something Bakhtin is aware of when he talks about otvetstvennost', literally

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'answerability'. Using a modem (not to say modish) term, one could say that 'cognition' by itself is not sufficient. To be of interest (to users as well as scholars), cognition must be accompanied by 're-cognition', i.e. an understanding of the connections that make cognition possible, as well as by a strong will to 're-cognize' those connections as important and to assume the responsibility that is inherent in the joint proprietorship that I mentioned above. In actual fact, the notion of 'proprietorship' itself is somewhat of a misnomer: I do not exercise proprietary rights to the utterance I have produced; rather, I am a 'keeper of the word' for the time it takes me to pass it on to the next user. When it comes to using language, we're talking about stewardship, rather than ownership. The Russian term otvetstvennost' harks back to the word for 'answer', 'response' (Russ. otvet), implying that 'being responsible' in reality derives from 'answering' the call for cooperation which is implicit in any utterance, in other words, from participating in a dialogue (on this, see the next section). The English counterparts of the Russian term, 'answerability' and 'responsibility', show the same derivational origin as does the Russian word ('answer', 'response'), but in addition, the language marks a distinction in meaning and use, corresponding to the fact that responsibility presupposes answerability. That is to say that true responsibility can only be exercised in answerability; the addressee's answer is an essential condition for my 'responsible' speaking. The addressivity by which I make the addressee a part of my addressing is at the same time the necessary condition for my own speech. In the same way, an author's literary activity presupposes, in a dialectic relationship, the reader's 'taking over' part of the responsibility for the text—indeed, literally playing a 'part' in the production of the text. Playing a part means being assigned a role, with which there comes a voice; it is in this sense that we can talk about the 'voice of the reader' (below, section 8.5). For now, let's ask ourselves how this dialectic movement of addressing in being addressed and of being addressed in addressing, is realized in the text.

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8.3. From dialogue to discourse: Cooperation and constraint The word 'dialogue' can be understood in a number of ways: from simple interaction in conversation to the learned enterprise of making one's ideas available, as in the genre immortalized by Plato (and, incidentally, criticized by Bakhtin as in the end turning into an empty 'catechism'; 1984: 110). What we are interested in here is not the literary or conversational genre 'dialogue' as such; rather, it is the principles underlying dialogue as an activity and specifically, the implications contained in a view of dialogue as a human activity. In its crudest form, the principle of dialogue says that we must be heard in order to be able to speak: the addresser presupposes an addressee. But it is equally true that in order for us to hear, something must be said: the addressee presupposes an addresser. However, as long as this dialogic movement stays on the level of the purely interactional, not much is leamt about its conditions and consequences. It is only when we place addresser and addressee in their proper contexts that we can begin to understand their roles. Dialogue is not an empty dialectic game, a "self-consuming artifact" (Morson & Emerson 1990: 55) of the mind; it is an interaction of persons living in the world, each characterized by his or her limitations and possibilities. This interaction, moreover, reflects back on its participants, shaping them and conditioning them for further, renewed interaction. This is also the ultimate ground why (as discussed in the previous section) the 'addressivity' relation identified by Bakhtin cannot be considered a unitary, reversible one, by which addresser is to addressee what addressee is to addresser, only with the direction of the addressing reversed. Such a purely analytical approach to addressivity fails to capture the interactive aspect which characterizes true dialogue. Commenting on Bakhtin's earliest conception of dialogue, Morson and Emerson remark: According to the young Bakhtin, every action of every person is conditioned by the singularity of each in time and place. When 'theoretists' of ethics or action consider the world, they generalize to patterns, norms, and rules, in which these singularities are lost. Their descriptions are 'reversible' in that they allow either person to be in the other's place. Analysis can reverse participants as surely as people can alternate the first person pronoun. But the essence of real actions

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is that they are irreversible and particular. (1990: 53; my emphasis) This basic conception of the interactional, irreversible character of dialogue is the hallmark of Bakhtin's entire oeuvre. By introducing the active, engaged interactant into the dialogue, an interactant who is seen as a living person with all his or her inherent possibilities and limitations, we manage to escape the sterile insufficiencies of the traditional communication model, the 'talking heads' that I mentioned earlier. An author cannot construct a dialogue by introducing some abstract 'characters', just as a country cannot just import abstract 'labor power' into its economy. Characters are persons, living beings, just as are the workers whose labor power is bought by the importing country. Following a remark once made by the late Swiss author Max Frisch, a country always in the end will have to deal with immigrants who are living men, women, and children and who, in addition to their productive hands and heads, have their very real problems and demands, not unlike the demands and problems loaded on to the author by the characters he or she has created. It has often been observed that without certain principles for conversational behavior, one cannot too well expect a positive outcome of one's dialogic interaction: the success of a dialogue rests on the participants' mutual cooperation and respect. However, the principles and maxims that have been set up for language interaction by the philosophers and linguists barely scratch the surface in this respect: they state what we should be doing, from a rational point of view, to facilitate conversational cooperation, but they never ask the all-important question why this is a necessary condition for interaction, and how people can be cooperative in the face of their conflicting interests. Cooperation is not the final answer to all our questions about interaction in dialogue; whoever mentions cooperation, or states a 'cooperative principle', must be prepared for the next question: Why do people cooperate, and to what extent can they be expected to truly collaborate towards a pre-defined and agreed-on goal? The answer to this question cannot be found in the contemplation of dialogue as it happens; one has to look behind the actual scene of the conversation, and get acquainted with the private (and maybe not-sopnvate) agendas of the interactants. That is to say, we have to figure out the premises on which the interlocutors in the dialogue have entered the dialogic frame; we must ask ourselves to what extent they are aware of the limitations that this frame imposes upon them, and to what extent, if

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at all, they are willing to accept the existence of such constraints. Stretched out between the two poles of cooperation and constraint, dialogue is transformed into what is often called discourse, loosely defined as the invisible scaffolding of interaction, that which remains when all the visible props of the societal scene have been removed from sight. 'Discourse' is what Bakhtin calls the "essential messiness" of the world, transposed into language; a messiness that linguists and literary scholars have tried to eliminate in the name of the descriptive destiny of their respective sciences: linguistics, stylistics, literary criticism, the history of literature, and so on. It is this pipe-dream of universality and regularity which is behind all the towers of Babel erected in the name of science, whether they are called structuralism, generative grammar, new criticism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, or what have you. Discourse is essentially a polyphony, but a polyphony with flexible rules; in musical terms, it recalls an Indonesian gamelan ensemble than a strictly organized, rather Western-type symphony orchestra. I said above that the concept of addressivity entails the taking on of a role, and consequently of a voice embodying that role. In the framework outlined here, the next question is how the reader becomes a member of our dialogic vocal ensemble, by entering the 'polyphony' or 'concentus' of discourse. Does the reader have a voice, and if yes, how does it sound? The next section will deal with this question.

8.4. Does the reader have a voice? 8.4.1. 'Tell me a story' Consider the writer who is telling a story, by 'action in distance', one could say, to an unknown readership. There are some clear parallels to the case of the oral storyteller who addresses a visible audience. In both cases, there is an addresser (the author) and an addressee (the reader/listener). In both cases, a story is being told; whether that story is the product of the author's creative imagination or a retelling of some folk tale doesn't really matter in this connection. But what does seem to matter is the fact that a listener who is physically present has the possibility of reacting instantly and vocally to what he or she is hearing, whereas the reader lacks this instant feedback channel (as does a person

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who is listening to the radio or watching a show on TV). So, in addition to the similarities, there seems to be a whole world of differences between the two kinds of addressees, listeners and readers; differences based on the former having direct access to, and an ability to 'have a say' in, the proceedings, as opposed to the latter. The all-important question is: To be or not to be the 'Master of a Voice'; the listener is, whereas the reader is not—or so it seems. On closer inspection, however, the situations and their differences turn out to not be as well-defined and clear-cut as we first assumed. On the one hand, the physically present listener is perhaps, all things considered, not all that much of an asset to the storyteller; and many of the restrictions that apply to the reader have some validity in the case of the listener as well. Vice versa, the privilege of the listener of 'having a voice' carries over to the reader, to a certain extent. The reasons for this 'equalization' of reader and listener positions are to be found in the way the relationship between the author and the (listening and reading) audience operates: that is, in the general conditions for authoring and listening/reading that prevail in a literate society such as ours.87 First of all, the authorial qualities of omniscience and omnipotence that I referred to above, in chapter 4, are not exercised in vacua and entirely ad libitum: both author and reader are 'creatures' of the society surrounding them. The author's position is socially created and maintained vis-ä-vis the readers, in the sense that there exists a societal bond between author and readership, by which certain attitudes and dispositions are considered necessary preconditions for any literary activity. The reader is invited into a kind of "fictional space" (Scholes 1982); upon entering this space, the reader surrenders to the 'authority' governing that space, the author, whose instructions are to be followed, on the penalty of missing the point of the story. Conversely, the author's success in telling a story depends on the readership's willingness to follow those instructions and to participate in the common task of maintaining and co-constructing the fictional space, the "narrative universe" of which both author and readers are active inhabitants (see Mey I994a: 154-155). Another way to express this is that the author's authority depends on the reader's "complicity" (Mey 1994a: 161). In order to be a successful author, you have to have cooperative readers. But what can you, as an author, expect from your readership? Readers are, after all, no abstract positions in some narrative schema; they belong to the same social uni-

Does the reader have a voice? 243 verse as does the author. The fictional space of the text is 'populated', to use Bakhtin's expression, by socially positioned individuals; it is a Canterbury Tales-type world where everybody tells his story from his or her own point of view, his own social position: the Miller's, the Franklin's, the Reeves', the Prioress', the Host's Tale, and so on. As Talbot remarks, a text is the product of the social activity of discourse. ... the act of reading places the reader in relation to the text, the text's producers and the social world. (1995: 61) This telling and 'co-telling' of tales is the essence of the fictional space: the author must assist the reader in "actively producing meaning" (the expression is Lotman's; 1976) through an active participation in the narrative process. Elsewhere (Mey 1994a: 162f¥), I have analyzed this participation from the communicative point of view, distinguishing between the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary aspects of what is intended to be communicated in the narrative context. Here, I will concentrate on the cooperative aspect of that communication and ask: What are the author and reader supposed to bring to the narrative, and how are their contributions Orchestrated? in the common choir of voices? What, specifically, is the reader's part in this performance? The following sections will try to answer these questions.

8.4.2. Implied authors and readers Wayne Booth (1983) has given us the concept of the "implied author" as the underlying central authorial instance of the text, the authority backing "the totality of meanings that can be inferred from a text", as Bal has paraphrased the term (1985: 120). In my interpretation, the 'implication' that is at work here represents the precondition, and at the same time the result, of the author's involvement in the creation of the textual meaning. In a wider perspective, it involves the creation and maintenance of the entire context of production of the literary work. Analogously, the concept of the 'implied reader' serves to underline the reader's involvement, not just in the consumption of the actual text, but in the entire societal con-

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struction supporting the text and its creation by the author, respectively its co-creation and re-creation by the reader. Implied author- and readership should thus not be taken as simple, hypostasized narrative instances (like 'narrator' and 'narratee', posturing as 'author' and 'reader');88 rather, they serve to help us understand the societal anchoring of a text and spell out the limitations and possibilities that reader and author have in dealing with it. Instead of, with Fludernik (1993: 446), "quickly disposing]" of the implied author (and, by extension, of the implied reader), I want to save these notions as expressing the links that tie authors and readers to their respective extra-literary contexts, to the societies in which their literary activities are made possible. It is these implications that enable the author/reader positions vis-ä-vis the text, in that they allow us to raise the pragmatic question about author- and readership, viz.: 'What can the authors produce?', respectively: 'What can the readers consume?' They also provide the answers to these questions by appealing to the conditions that govern the production and consumption of texts; thus, any deeper ('transcendental') understanding of those conditions as forming part of a universal textual and societal fabric involves what has come to be called a metapragmatic answer (see Mey 1993a: chapter 13). But how do these conditions affect the tasks of the author, respectively the reader, in the cooperative process of text creation and re-creation? As to the author, the formidable powers of omniscience and omnipotence traditionally attributed to his or her position are nevertheless exercised very selectively; the author decides not only under what circumstances the actors are allowed to proceed about their business (this includes the features of plotting, characterizing, backgrounding, etc.), but also what information should be made available to the readership, and at what point of the narrative this information is to be divulged. These decisions touch not only on the Outer' plot of the story, but also upon the 'inner world' of the characters' thoughts and represented speech, as is the case in FID: it is the author's privilege, as Talbot has pointed out (in a personal letter) to decide which persons' FID will be made available to us, and what its contents are going to be. And— perhaps even more importantly—the author also decides what not to tell the audience, and who, among the characters, is not going to be allowed to speak, either in direct or (free) indirect discourse. An author's reasons for exercising this privilege of selecting information strictly on a "need to know' basis may vary greatly: there is the

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need to keep up the flow of the story; there is the desire to keep the reader on tenterhooks for more suspense; and there is (perhaps most importantly) the wish to include the reader in the world of the narrative by issuing an appeal to his or her understanding ofthat world. Such an appeal can be issued directly (e.g. in the form of an old-fashioned apostrophe of the 'Gentle Reader' type; cf. the examples given above in section 7.2.3.1) or it can be kept under cover, so to speak, by a more suggestive approach. Authors vary not only greatly by the various devices they use to obtain this effect, but also in the ways they skillfully mix the two approaches, switching almost imperceptibly from one to the other, from implicit (Booth's "implied") to explicit reader understanding, and back again. The following passage from Virginia Woolf s novel Jacob 's Room may serve to illustrate this process. [Jacob Flanders has taken up with Florinda, not exactly a woman of virtue (one of "these little prostitutes", ibid., p. 94). Betty, his mother, worries, as mothers do, and writes him letters]. The letter lay upon the hall table; Florinda coming in that night took it up with her, put it on the table as she kissed Jacob, and Jacob seeing the hand, left it there under the lamp between the biscuit-tin and the tobacco-box. They shut the bedroom door behind them. The sitting room neither knew nor cared. The door was shut; and to suppose that wood, when it creaks, transmits anything save that rats are busy and wood dry is childish. These old houses are only brick and wood, soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt. But if the pale blue envelope lying by the biscuit-box had the feelings of a mother, the heart was torn by the little creak, the sudden stir. Behind the door was the obscene thing, the alarming presence, and terror would come over her as at death, or the birth of a child.

Let us consider letters—how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark—for to see one's own envelope on another's table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the

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power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table. (Jacob 's Room. Harvest ed. p. 91-92) In the first part of this extract, Woolf carefully sets up two separate fictional spaces, the one inside the bedroom and the other outside, in the sitting room. The former is the space of "the obscene thing, the alarming presence" of Jacob "stretched with Florinda", the woman about whom we know next to nothing, except that she can't spell, is scatterbrained, and in the end deserts Jacob for another man. The latter is the empty space from which we, as readers, perceive the events going on in the other space, behind the bedroom's shut door. Since initially, there are no characters present, the sitting room is narratively neutral: the "sitting room neither knew nor cared"; however, it becomes populated by a presence who knows and cares, and listens to the sounds coming from the other space, courageously trying to explain them away as normal in old houses that are full of rats, where the wood is dry, and "little creaks and sudden stirs" are to be expected. As readers, we become aware of this presence through our 'reading' of the letter: not in the literal sense of opening it and perusing its contents, but in the sense that we perceive its lying on the table as the presence of Jacob's mother, whose "hand" has been recognized on the envelope and whose presence has been explicitly rejected and shut out. It is important to note that even though we enter into this perception as readers, our "perceiving consciousness" (Fludernik 1993: 391) is an implicit, rather than an explicit reader's. What we read is not the letter itself; we read "the pale blue envelope" as representing Jacob's mother, and hear its voice as that of an 'implicit character, a voice that remains inside the envelope so to speak, and whose message only can be taken in from our own position as implicit readers. In Fludernik's words, we are dealing here with a reading process in which the reader takes an internal position on events (as if through a witness) rather than [from the external position of; JM] a mere camera-eye, (ibid).

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The reader position is called 'internal' (or 'implicit', as I have termed it), because there is no character on stage to which we can relate explicitly, through an external perception. What we perceive, on the narrative scene, as implicit readers, is an implicit 'character', which in this case starts out as a lifeless object, an envelope "lying by the biscuit-box", and which, as if by miracle, blossoms out before the reader's eyes, transforms itself into an external representation (a "phantom", as Woolf calls it, ibid.: 92) of the living person who is the sender and writer of the pale blue envelope's contents: Jacob's mother, Mrs. Flanders. The envelope, as implicitly representing Jacob's mother, is what has been called a 'reflector' character89 (Stanzel 1984), representing the way we "see the fictional world" (Fludernik 1993: 391) from the empty space of the sitting room. We identify with the letter's sender, imagining and worrying about the events happening between the couple in the other space, that of the bedroom. But the "pale blue envelope" does more than that.

8.4.3. A dialogue with death Having initially (in the first part of the extract) been invited on to, and made part of, the fictional scene, we are subsequently (in the second part of Woolf s text) ushered out of this scene again, when the author invites us, apostrophizing us as 'versatile' readers, to partake of her reflections on the alienating effects of letter-writing. Letters are ways of getting in touch across distances, of exerting influence on, and controlling, people and things that are out of one's reach. At the same time, letters symbolize our lack of power, our inability to change the course of events. In this dialectic fashion, letters are powerless instruments of power; and they separate as much as they unite. Jacob's mother can write a letter, but it needs an (explicit) reader to make that letter come alive in the real world; as long as it is lying unopened by the biscuit-box, it is dead and powerless. Letters thus foreshadow, says Woolf, the final separation of the immortal mind from the mortal body.90 By their intrusion into our intimate spheres, "at breakfast and at night", they represent deeds done and words said: words that perhaps had better not be spoken, deeds that might have better remained undone. This, for Woolf, is the final alienation of letters: they make us realize "how soon deeds sever and

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become alien", and thus prefigure the end of all our words and deeds, the separation of mind and body. In a way, every letter is a bomb threat. There is an historic corollary to this dialectics of mortal immortality. Clearly, letters are not just 'letters', in the standard sense of the term that we are using here: pieces of written communication between people. There is another, wider sense of the term (as in 'literature', or a university's 'Faculty Of Arts And Letters'; see further chapter 11.1); in this sense, letters are what remains of a generation after it is dead and gone. As the people of letters, the poets, have always known, a written document, and in particular a piece of literature, represents a "monument more durable than bronze", monumentum aere perennius (Horace, Odes III.i. 1-2), This "monument", furthermore, "is not made by hand" (as Pushkin has it: pamjatnik ... nerukofvornyj; 1946b: 37),91 but always recreated in the spirit which makes it come alive. That is, literature by itself is a dead letter, lying on somebody's hall table; but as a 'monument', in accordance with the etymology of the word, it is at the same time a live 're-minder'. Still, letters (in both senses of the term) can only direct our minds, not create them for us; nor can they substitute for the opening activity of the mind itself, i.e. the independent observation of our world and the active, readerly co-creation of our literary texts. Reflecting on the importance of these observations for our concept of the 'implied reader', we may again take our initial cue from the original meaning of the term, by which an 'implicit' understanding on the part of the reader builds on his or her passive 'implication' in the text, his or her "internal position" (Fludernik 1993: 391) of unseen observer, of silent narratee. This internal position, however (which is the closest Fludernik comes to the notion of 'implied reader'), can only exist in conjunction with what I call an 'external position': the reader's active implication in the text, based on his or her (supposed or real) knowledge and his or her attitudes towards the narrative; in short, his or her 'answerability' (in the Bakhtinian sense discussed above). As Fludernik remarks, [t]he line between an overt and a covert narrative voice cannot be drawn succinctly, and it is here in fact regarded to be a function of interpretation: the reader qua textual recipient constructs a narrative voice from textual indications.(1993: 443).

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That is to say, the reader is 'answerable' qua reader. The question now is if, and how, such a reader answerability leads to a reader's answer: that is, whether the voice of the text addressing the reader (directly or indirectly) expects an (implicit or explicit) reaction, thus confirming the assumption of a reader's 'voice'; or is the textual voice merely one that, having been sent, "fall[s] upon the tea-table" like Betty Flanders' letter (Woolf ibid: 93)? This question will be dealt with in the next section from the perspective of the 'not (yet) spoken': that by which author, and in particular, reader, exist and are seen as pre-figured, 'pre-conditioned', by the world in which they live and by its textual representation.

8.4.4. The not (yet) said As we saw above, the reader is not 'just' a reader: he or she is part of a social universe in which certain roles and qualities are associated with certain positions. For every reader, this (external) position includes such things as previous texts read, a familiarity with the kind of texts he or she is about to embark upon, an understanding of the role of the author in text production (most commonly understood as an agreement not to 'shoot the piano player'), 92 and so on. This 'external' reader position is the basis for, and also complements, the 'internal' position (the 'implied' reader) that I talked about in the previous section; it also is the position from which the reader has an opportunity to let his or her voice be heard, by 'filling in the blanks', so to speak, in the narrative discourse. In the simplest and most straightforward cases, this appeal to reader participation may take the form of allusions, puns, double entendres, and so on, by which the reader is asked, implicitly, to take an active part in the production of the text by supplying the necessary back-up to the text. Here is a rather obvious example, taken from a novel that excels in literary allusions: [Frederica's undergraduate existence in Cambridge is analyzed, and especially her falling in love with a certain don named Raphael Faber. She has had an earlier, inconclusive affair with the poet Alexander Wedderburn, who now lives in London, together with married friends in their flat in Gower Street, where Alexander is carrying on with his friend's wife.]

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She [Frederica] had already loved Alexander, who worked with her father, and had been seen as authority to be subverted or seduced.... Alexander had been—was, indeed, but he was busy with Van Gogh and the lineaments of gratified desire in Bloomsbury—very handsome.

(A.S. Byatt, Still Life, p. 221) The fact that Alexander is handsome (even compared to the beautiful, but unapproachable Raphael, Frederica's love object in Cambridge) is totally overshadowed by his "[being] busy ... in Bloomsbury"— 'Bloomsbury' being both a physical location (the flat in Gower Street is not far from Bloomsbury Square) and representing an allusion to Alexanders life in a 'circle' of friends, complete with all sorts of innuendoes of sexual and literary sorts. These allusions are further annealed, when we are told by the author that "these were Alexander's Bloomsbury days" (ibid: 171). What Alexander is doing in Bloomsbury is likewise described by a couple of allusions: the one straightforwardly referring to his occupation with Van Gogh (writing a book), the other, more deviously, to his affair with Elinor, the married woman living in the flat. The latter effect is mainly brought about by the author's quoting the well-known passage from William Blake's Note-Book ("the lineaments of gratified desire"). By offering the reader these gambits, the author expects him or her to 'co-create' the image of Alexander in his Bloomsbury flat. She humors her willing reader by adding a touch of the 'not yet spoken' to the text—in fact, enhancing its quality by repeating and reaffirming Blake's line against the backdrop of her own, Woolfean-inspired constellation: 'Alexander doing Blake in Bloomsbury'. Blake is invoked also on another occasion in the same novel, this time in a not too subtle manner, the author almost forcibly making the reader chime in with the pleasure of recognition. [Alexander and Frederica meet in the Camargue, half a year after their unfinished affair. They go for a swim; Frederica's face has been badly burned by the Provensal sun.] He dived, and swam, and turned to see her enter the water, neat as a needle, if inelegant. Her curious visage reminded him of something

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but he could not think what. She looked flayed, or striped. Tiger, tiger. Not that, despite the staring. More simian. (A.S. Byatt, Still Life, p. 83) Keeping Blake's original spelling ("Tyger") here would perhaps have been too obvious and unlikely a hint (especially if occurring in a passage of FID). But Byatt has other ways of leading her readers down the allusion path (not to say: rubbing their noses into the clue): notice the force of the repeat ("Tiger, tiger.") and the way the author encourages us to go beyond the original allusion, and implicitly includes the animal's "staring" ("in fearful symmetry", as we remind ourselves). In this way, Byatt repeats and reinforces the 'not yet spoken' verbal picture that emerges of the peeling heroine, bravely swimming along while fighting and sorting out her emotions—only to have Alexander cruelly degrade her to monkey status ("More simian.") in the end. In all these cases, the reader's voice blends in with the voices of "prior texts" (Talbot 1995: 61), "prior" to be understood here as not only to include earlier texts alluded to externally, by overt or hidden quotes (such as in the two Blake cases), but also texts that remain below the surface, hidden like the warp and weft in the fabric of the story (in 'intertextuality*, as Talbot calls it with a traditional term).93 The latter is illustrated by the Bloomsbury case, where 'Bloomsbury' is both referred to by Byatt as a real place, and alluded to in the shape of a 'virtual reality', as in the quotations above. In Bakhtinian terms, "what already has been said", the uze skazannoe, either in the current text or in other, prior texts, has thus to be expanded by the reader into "what has not yet been said", Bakhtin's esce ne skazannoe (1994a: 91-94). This tension between the voice of the reader as a docile, reiterating basso ostinato and the same reader's voice as a creative, proactive instrumentalist in the orchestration of discourse is what makes this reader voice unique: if forms a bridge between the "bespoken" (Bakhtin's ogovorennyj) and the 'un- (or "not yet") spoken' of a text, between its said and its unsaid. Concluding this section, we may consider what Bakhtin has to say elsewhere about "real people" engaging in dialogic interaction as applying to the readership as well, inasmuch as the reader, in and through a given text, dialogizes with its author:

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... language ... lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes One's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language, ... but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other peoples' contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from these that one must take the word, and make it one's own. (Bakhtin 1992: 292, 293-294) A special case of such "other people's intentions" is that of 'negative allusion', to be discussed in the next section.

8.4.5. The elusions of allusions Consider the following poem by the American writer Peter Meinke.

Surfaces darling you are not at all like a pool or a rose my thoughts do not dart in your depths like cool goldfish nor does your skin suggest petals you are not like anything (except perhaps my idea of what you are like I think you are like what our children need to grow beautiful what I need to be most myself) when the moon comes out I do not think of you but sometimes you remind me of the moon: your surfaces are unbelievably real

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This is how I feel about you: suppose on the surface of a rippling pool the moon shone clearly reflected like a yellow rose then if a cloud floated over it I would hate the sky The New Republic 163 (13), September 26, 1970, p. 22. On the "surface" of it, this poem describes the feeling of a man in love with his wife, telling her all the things she is not: a rose, a pool, the moon. This is the poem's "alienating effect", to use Viktor B. Shklovsky's classical term (1917): by telling us what is not, the poet draws our attention to what is, and does so in a more effectual way than if he had simply told us what he feels his wife is like. And yet—the very reason that the poet can permit himself to choose this devious path is that the 'normal' way of poetic self-expression is commonly understood as being familiar to the readers. We all know that Ά rose is a rose is a rose ...'; what the moon is like is everybody's business and everybody's choice: a green cheese or sixpence, or even one's wife, if one's poetical inclinations point that way. In other words, alienation presupposes the familiar which it negates.94 On the other hand, the 'bestranging' quote or question presupposes the existence of a willing and receptive reader, of a 'reader voice' reiterating the negative formula, and by doing so, transforming it into something positive. In the poem quoted above, this appeal to the reader seems at first blush rather heavy-handed, with the poet delving deeper and deeper into the depths of his metaphors in order to obtain ever more alienating effects. Not satisfied with simply stating that his wife is not a rose, he has to spell it out in capital letters: her skin "suggests no petals". And not only is she neither pool nor pond, nor any watery body: we have to be told explicitly that the author's "thoughts do not dart about in [her] depths like cool goldfish". What is supposed to be a poetic description of a woman in rich, metaphoric terms turns seemingly into its opposite: a non-poetic, negative account of the respective metonyms that the metaphors are turned into. In this way, the reader is 'fooled', taken for a ride: having become

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accomplice to the act of alienation, the reader then is asked to deny what it negates and in doing so, affirms the positive, non-alienated act. In the end, the 'defamiliarization', the negative side of ostranenie, serves to underscore the familiar, positive aspect of a husband's feelings for his wife: she is not like anything familiar (read: 'anything trivial'), that is to say, she is unique, like the moon, whose surfaces are "unbelievably real". It is as if the author encourages the reader not to go into any well-known and recognizable, cognitive "depths", not to explore the familiar and worn metaphors of "rose" and "pool"; but instead, concentrate on their seen "surfaces" and the effect they have on us. Seeing, not recognizing, is what 'alienation' is all about, as Shklovsky himself admonishes us: The point of art is to make us see things as they are seen, not as they are recognized; the way to do this is to make things unfamiliar and render their perception difficult. (Shklovsky 1917: 14, as quoted in StefTensen 1973: 37; my emphasis). In order to accomplish this 'seeing', however, the reader must be able to actively identify with the textual object that is tendered him or her; she or he must be able to do this not only from an 'internal' position (as discussed in the previous section), but from an 'external' one as well. This 'external' position is where reader's voice finally joins up with author's in a real world context, in the poem's contemporaneous setting. At the time of its writing (1970), the surface of the moon, in all its "unbelievable real[ity]", had just entered our common human, 'storyexternal consciousness' (to paraphrase Fludernik 1990: 391): the first moon landing had happened about a year earlier. We see how the "prior texts" of which Talbot speaks (1995: 49f) in a very real sense are present by their very absence: in the silence of those "prior texts", the voice of the 'competent reader' (see chapter 9.1) comes through loud and clear. The whole process of describing by negation, especially through the technique of exploiting language's explicit gaps and creating 'elusive absences', has been admirably detailed by A.S. Byatt in the following passage, where she in fact describes her technique of describing. By eliciting reader response by verbal allusion, by successively negating

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the descriptions she offers the reader, she cajoles the reader, so to speak, into agreeing with her on what "language might say", instead of what language actually says. [In a chapter appropriately called "Figures of Speech", Alexander Wedderburn, the poet, is asking himself the question: "How would one find the exact word for the color of the plumskins?"] There was a problem of accurate notation, which was partly a problem of sufficiency of adjectives. Do we have enough words, synonyms, near synonyms for purple? What is the grayish, or mauve white, or whitish, or silvery, or dusty mist or haze or smokiness over the purple shine? How do you describe the dark cleft from stalk pit to oval end, its inky shadow? ... A writer aiming for unadorned immediacy might say a plum, a pear, an apple, and by naming these things evoke in every reader's mind a different plum, a dull tomato-and-green specked Victoria, a yellowbuff globular plum, a tight, black-purple damson. If he wishes to share a vision of a specific plum he must exclude and evoke: a matte, oval purple-black plum, with a pronounced cleft. You may use the word 'bloom' for the haze on this plum, and it will call up in the mind of any competent reader the idea that the plum is glistening, overlaid with a matte softness. You may talk about the firm texture of the flesh, and these words will not be metaphors, bloom and flesh, as the earlier 'cleft' was certainly not a metaphor but a description of a grown declivity. But you cannot exclude from the busy automatically connecting mind possible metaphors, human flesh for fruit flesh, flower bloom, skin bloom, bloom of ripe youth for this powdery haze, human clefts, declivities, cleavages for that plain noun. The nearest color Alexander could find, in his search for accurate words for the purple of the plum, was in fact the dark center of some new and vigorously burgeoning human bruise, but the plum was neither bruised nor a bruise nor human. So he eschewed, or tried to eschew, human words for it. (A.S. Byatt, Still Life, pp. 176-177)

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Notice how, in her description of Alexander's creative engagement in language, the author manipulates and controls the engaged readership by throwing her 'addressivity' into successively higher gears, as it were: from the impersonal One' in the beginning, through the inclusive English pronoun 'we',95 ending up in the directly apostrophizing 'you', by which the reader is directly invited to join in the discussion and help Alexander find his right adjectives and metaphors. The technique of 'voicing' the reader with the help of the linguistic category of 'person' will be the subject of a brief, final discussion in this chapter.

8.4.6. Person and voice The use of the second person addressive form, you, towards the end of the passage quoted above could be explained away (as it is often done) as being a mere stylistic variant of a common usage known under the name of the 'impersonal' form. Typical representatives are the French on (as in on ne salt jamais One never knows'), or the German man (as in man weiß nie, with the same meaning). Other avatars and various circumlocutions of the 'impersonal' comprise the Norwegian en One' (replacing the Dano-Norwegian man, which for some Norwegians still represents a German import), as in en vet aldri; the Czech substantive clovek 'man, human', as in clovek nikdy nevi, or the Italian use of a reflexive pronoun with the verb, as in non si sa mai (all meaning: One never knows'). The problem with such constructions (if used as arguments for or against a particular use of'politically correct' language) is that language never quite obeys the rules that we would like to see it respect. Thus, participles, adjectives, and pronouns obligatorily follow the (masculine) | of the generic expression, irrespective of its 'real' meaning in terms of sex, and no matter what the language reformers say. A German question like Hat jemand seinen [a masc. possessive pronoun 3d person sg.] Lippenstift auf der Toilette vergessen? ('Has anybody left her lipstick in the ladies' room?')

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actually has to use the male possessive pronoun (because of the grammatically male antecedent jemand), irrespective of the fact that under normal circumstances, the lipstick owner must be supposed to belong to the female sex. Similarly, a Czech sentence such as Rano vstaval [masc. part.] clovek zdravy a silny [both masc. adj.] a vecer lezel zeslably [masc. part and adj.], se znamenim smrti v ocich. ("In the morning one gets up, healthy and vigorous, and at night one lies there, collapsed, with the mark of death in one's eyes.') (Eduard Petiska. Golem a jine zidovske povesti a pohadky ze stare Prahy. [The Golem, and other Jewish stories and fairy-tales from Old Prague]. Prague: Martin, 1992, p. 29) has all the gender-determinable forms in the masculine, despite the clearly non-gendered meaning of the sentence. True, the Czech word clovek, meaning 'a human being', avoids the embarrassing connotations that still cling to the German man and its derivatives je mand 'someone' and niemand 'no one'. Being 'neutral', content-wise, clovek does not lend itself to linguistic manipulation of the kind known from wellmeaning, but slightly excessive feminist discourse (e.g. by replacing the English word 'history' by the constructed item 'herstory', or exchanging German man byfrau, in the generic meaning of'somebody'). However, as we have seen, language always has the last laugh: a raised consciousness is one thing, grammatical rules quite another. What is overlooked in such explainings of the role of gendered language in relation to biological and social sex is the real role played by the impersonal forms in eliciting reader response, viz., that of allowing the reader to speak, that is, of creating a "visible space in the text for the reader", to borrow a particularly felicitous expression due to Talbot (pers. comm.). Fludernik (1993: 389) characterizes such a usage (especially of the second person) as "most odd", and quotes a passage from Katherine Mansfield as evidence:

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It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling — how far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again. (Katherine Mansfield, 'At the Bay', 1988: 264; as quoted in Fludernik 1993: 390, with the latter's emphases omitted). Fludernik comments on this excerpt as follows: This comes from section one of'At the Bay', which ... introduces an intra-diegetic viewpoint [i.e., of a story-internal narratee-JM], but one that is clearly personalized, although no character is On stage'. (ibid.) Contrary to this, I would prefer to say that there is a character On stage', and that this character is the reader, whose active participation in the textual process is elicited and explicitated through the use of the 'including' pronoun you. This use of you is clearly different, and must be distinguished, from the same pronoun when it occurs in self-apostrophizing FID. Compare the different uses in the following two passages from an earlier quoted novel by Jay Mclnerney: [Jerry Kleinfeld is the manager of a decaying New York publishing house, whose publisher is Harold Stone.] Kleinfeld had worked his way up through the sales force and prided himself on being approachable and more or less one of the guys. In contrast to Harold's, his office contained a photographic history of the occupant's life and career, including scores of chummy photographs of Kleinfeld with celebrities from the worlds of politics, show business and sports—any one of whom, you got the impression, might be about to call on business more important than you were bringing into the office. (Jay Mclnerney, Brightness falls, p. 131-132) [Trina Cox, a New York investment banker, is musing over a lunch

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invitation from editor Russell Galloway, who works at the publishing company mentioned in the previous passage, and is now, after a confrontation with his chief editor Harold Stone, plotting a hostile takeover.] A man had a harder time treating you like a bimbo if you'd hammered him at squash the week before. He might hate you, or he might want to marry you, but he would surely stop asking you to fetch him a cup of coffee, (ibid.: 147) In the latter passage, the Ί-voice', Trina, is speaking to herself in free indirect discourse, and the use of'you' is clearly indicative of an inner dialogue, without any active reader involvement. By contrast, in the first quoted passage the readers are invited to come in from the outside and voice their opinions, writing themselves into the text, so to speak, and providing their comments on an imaginary dotted line. An inclusive approach to the readership is often couched (and I'd almost say: naturally) in the most inclusive pronoun of the English language, we. We have already discussed several examples in the passages quoted above from Byatt's novel Still Life. Here is another female novelist, antedating Byatt by a century and a half, apostrophizing her readers, and indirectly taking a pot-shot at her colleagues, other 'lady novelists': Let us not desert one another — we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers;... (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Wingate edition, 1948, p. 22-23). Earlier, Austen had commented on "that generous and impolitic custom, so common with novel-writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding'' (ibid.: 22). In the passage quoted above, she leaves the detached, descriptive mode to launch herself full-force and wholeheartedly into an apostrophizing appeal to her misguided colleagues. But not only that: the readers of novels are also said to carry much of

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the blame, in that they only half-heartedly (not to say shamefacedly) dare to acknowledge their preference for this literary genre. Austen finishes her diatribe by letting the readers out of the closet, giving them a voice, as we can see in the continuation of the above quote: Ί am no novel-reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that /often read novels — it is really very well for a novel.' Such is the common cant. 'And what are you reading Miss — ?' Oh! it's only a novel!' replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame, (ibid.: 23) This ''common cant", as Jane Austen brands it, in reality voices the previously criticized, 'impolitic' attitude, prevailing among contemporary novelists and readers, of demeaning the novel as a genre, including the habit of "decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them" (ibid.). Among the thusly apostrophized, the feeble-minded readership-atlarge is singled out and endowed with an actual voice:'" I am no novelreader—I seldom look into novels—'" and so on. And from this potentially innumerable choir of actual and potential readers, a single (not accidentally female) voice is then allowed to step On stage' and deliver her reply in a brief, imagined direct dialogue, as in the ensuing interchange ("'And what are you reading Miss — ?' Oh! it's only a novel!' replies the young lady.") This is then topped off by an 'authorized' apology ("'It's only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda'"), by which Austen retakes the lead, ties up the digression, and continues, tongue-incheek, with a bit of ironical self-defense: ... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the bestchosen language, (ibid.) Rather than trying to explain the above phenomena by postulating the existence of an "empty narrative centre", as Fludernik (following Banfield 1987) calls it (1993: 388ff.), 1 prefer to keep the focus, as

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before, on the role of the reader. In accordance with this view, I will assign the name 'reader's position' to the phenomenon of a "physical subjectivity which may remain impersonal" (Banfield 1987: 274)—but which, I add, need not be impersonal, and in fact is so only on the surface, most of the time. Such a reader's position is either actualized, as when the reader is given an audible voice, or it may remain in potentia, that is to say, it encapsulates and recapitulates the conditions of the text that are applicable to the reader with regard to the presuppositions that he or she brings to the text. Taking off from what Byatt, in the passage quoted above, calls the "competent reader", one could speak of a 'reader competence'; the question then is what to expect of a 'competent' reader, and how 'reader competence' can be described and defined. This will be the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 9

The reader perspective 9.1. Reader and text 9.1.1. Reading across space and time As I have stressed many times in the preceding chapters, neither authors nor readers exercise their literary activities in an imaginary space, far from the hustle and bustle of the world, in a kind of literary Ivory Tower. When discussing the text as the focus of those literary activities, we tend to focus on their authors; the important 'role of the reader' is often glossed over. Readers bring to the text a particular set of preconditions from which to approach the text and which, from a reader's point of view, make the text possible; there strictly is no reader's text until there is a reader. The deeper reason for this is that the text describes a possible world, not a world of facts, of occurrences: it requires a reader to make these possibilities come into existence. Speaking on the general conditions of novelistic work, Milan Kundera has remarked: A novel examines not reality, but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But again, to exist means: "being in the world." (Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, p. 42) Only through the intermediaryof an existent reader can the text become existential; in itself, as an author's product, the text realizes only a possibility—one out of the many ways of'being in the world' that a text can assume by being consumed by a reader. It follows that the text which the reader approaches is not the same as the text which the reader leaves behind: the text will have been augmented by the 'added-on value' represented by the reader's experience of reading and understanding creatively. This may not seem so obvious in

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the case of the single reader; after all, we cannot see the text change before our eyes, and when we close the book, it is in a sense the same book as before (except perhaps for the comments we have written in the margins or on the fly-leaf, if we are the kind of people who write in books). But seen in an historical and societal perspective, the appropriation of a text by a particular generation or period does indeed change its character. Today, for instance, we read Jane Austen in a totally different way than people did when she first wrote her novels. The reason for this is that the 're-ception' of the text (as it is often called) changes, and is changed by, its 'per-ception' by an actual or potential readership. True, we may try (more or less successfully) to re-establish the Original' version of a text, using the literary methods of text criticism, or the historical methods for dating products of earlier civilizations; but by itself, even the most meticulously reconstructed text tells us nothing about the 'working conditions' of authors and readers at the time and place of its original creation. And even if we should manage to reconstruct a text perfectly, 'relocating' it in its exact historical time and place, it is still the case that the temporal, local, and cultural coordinates that governed the particular society in which the text was produced, remain nothing but a reconstructed world, whose reality it is as difficult to establish, even with the methods of modern anthropology, as is the reality of the text itself. This is, of course, not to say that such 'text work' is useless or unnecessary; but it should be supplemented with an understanding of the historical limitations of all textual criticism. In a way, this means reintroducing an element of subjectivity into a discipline, literary criticism, from which it had been banned by proponents of the so-called Objective' view according to which the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text should be the target of our investigation (see Mey 1993b for a critique of this view). To see the limitations of such an approach (usually referred to as 'New Criticism'), consider the following passage from a contemporary novel. [In this excerpt, the talk is about money; the context is that of the attempted take-over of the publishing firm referred to in extracts from the same work in the previous chapter. The text distinguishes itself by a composite and rather intricate use of metaphor. We hear the company manager, Jerry Kleinfeld's, voice.]

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" Nobody pays for anything anymore, that's the fucking problem. They're totally leveraged. Bridge loans, junk bonds, whatever. The money's out there. Money's cheap. The banks used to be like convent girls, you couldn't get a feel without a marriage license. Then Drexel started to practically give it away, and now they've all got red lights on over the door. " (Jay Mclnerney, Brightness Falls, p. 217; emphasis and quotation marks in original.) What this excerpt describes is a particular situation in the U.S. in the late 'eighties, when the world of finance was characterized by an expanding money market with no real assets to back it up; hence the expression "junk bonds". Buying something big without having the money was possible if you had "leverage", that is to say, you were able to find some of the money you needed, and you sort of waved your hands at the rest. The money you had to come up with needn't even be there in actual funds, you could borrow it, getting a "bridge loan", sometimes on real (but overvalued) assets, but preferably on borrowed, or even fake, collateral. The reason behind all this was, of course, that the banks were anxious to get rid of their cash glut: wealthy overseas depositors demanded that their interests be paid on time, so the money had to be 'put to work', read: "practically given away", even to less than serious borrowers. The metaphors used here appeal to a variety of experiences, mostly from the male sexual area: "convent girls", "feel", "marriage license", "red lights"—all of which blend into a rather graphic icon of the typical financial whiz kid operating this racket, usually a male in his mid-tolate twenties, with an enormous appetite for the 'good things of life'. 96 Many erstwhile respectable firms became players in this risky game (such as "Drexel", the since failed Wall Street broker firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert) and ended up being sucked up in the vortex of the debacle which became known as the 'Savings & Loan Scandal'. Imagine now that a text such as this by some quirk of fate were transposed into a future that was as far removed from us as the past that we're familiar with from the classical Greek and Latin literature—two thousand years, give or take a few centuries. During all those years, our text probably would have undergone a number of changes (have been 'corrupted', as it traditionally is called). In order to establish the text's 'correct' or 'canonical' version, the discipline that busies itself with the

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reconstruction of older texts ('text criticism', in a now somewhat antiquated sense of the term) would have to be called upon. The methods, however, that this science offers us today (collection and collation of all the extant manuscripts of a given text, then comparing them for authenticity and temporal precedence in order to establish the better 'readings') would be hard to put to work in the year 4,000 A.D. In all likelihood, there would be no way (and perhaps not even much need) to employ this venerable discipline in our thought experiment. Text criticism, as we know it today, would probably not have been able to survive the modern, mechanized book reproduction processes and the advent of computerized authoring: it would have gone out of business for simple lack of manuscripts to work on. But how about that other time-honored text discipline, the one that used to be referred to in the German tradition of classical scholarship as Realwissenschaft, literally 'the science of real things' (understood as: knowledge of the nuts and bolts of an older period's everyday life and trade)? By supplying future readers with the proper references of the names and objects occurring in the text, such knowledge could indeed be helpful; moreover, by explaining the meanings of the different institutions and artifacts that composed the make-up of the text's background, a knowledge of realia might help elucidate an older text's metaphoric structures, and establish reference points to the current period's conceptual 'spaces'. But even with all these props and supports, I doubt that any of our readers in the year 4,000 A.D., attacking a text such as the excerpt above, would be able to experience its metaphors and savor its peculiar "carnal similes'" (Mclnerney, ibid.) in the same way that our average contemporary, 'competent reader' does—without even trying hard. It is precisely this unencumbered, carefree experiencing which carries the main weight of text understanding: a reader who has not 'been there' will have a hard time figuring out what went on 'there' and where people were 'coming from*. A reader who has not lived, 'existed', in an epoch's 'real' reality will probably be at a loss to experience its simulated counterpart, 'existing' in 'virtual' reality, no matter how well the latter is orchestrated, or how many of the period's realia he or she is able to assemble. Paraphrasing Kundera's words, quoted at the beginning of this section: reality is not existence; literature is about the latter, not the former. Reading is thus not mainly or exclusively a matter of possessing and

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accessing factual information, of parsing sentences correctly, or assigning proper references to anaphoric items. All this is indispensable to text understanding, as we have seen in chapter 2; it minimally makes up a competent reader. But it does not explain the fact that, despite their individual and historical differences, readers do indeed move freely between different periods and styles, do indeed experience and savor literary productions from earlier periods, and in general "can handle the literature of remote as well as of recent historical periods" (Tsur 1992: 289) not only competently, but with a certain amount of 'versatility' (see below). Otherwise, how could we explain the everlasting standing of the classical authors, some of whom even anticipated their continuing, future fame?97 The answer to the questions raised in the preceding paragraph is in the 'creative cooperation' between authors and readers, even across time and space. Such a cooperation is understood as the ability to take up different positions, depending on the kind of reading one is engaged in; more specifically, it is the capacity of cooperating with different authors in different ways, realizing different 'possible worlds'. To achieve this ability, for which I (following the Israeli literary theoretician Reuven Tsur) will set aside the predicate versatile, it is not sufficient for a reader to be knowledgeable or even 'competent'. In Tsur's words, "cognitive structures and processes and their exploitation for aesthetic purposes [which includes knowledge of, and the capacity to handle, the linguistic structures of a text; JM] ... combined with all the knowledge acquired for specifically literary purposes as well as that required for extraliterary purposes of survival, are indispensable, but still insufficient for an explanation of the performance of the Versatile Reader" (1992: 292). 'Versatility', in the above sense, is thus closely related to what I have called the creativity, or more precisely, the co-creativity and recreativity that are required for the consumption of any literary product. Reader versatility is an indispensable condition for appreciating both the odes of Horace and the sonnets of Petrarca, Pushkin's lyrical effusions as well as the grotesque verse of the Hebrew eleventh century visionary Ibn Gavirol or the work of the English seventeenth century's metaphysical poet John Donne—not to speak of modern 'proesy and pose'. For now, let's have a closer look at this versatility, in particular as regards its relation to reader competence.

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9.1.2. The reader: Competent or versatile? As we have seen, readership (as embodied in the (re-)creative abilities of the reader) is always exercised within the constraints posed by the reader's competence. This competence works in two ways: for one, it is a facilitating factor in text comprehension; but at the same time, it may limit our understanding of a text. The reason for this is that humans can only achieve understanding on the basis of their sensory experiences; as the old Aristotelian adage has it, nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu 'nothing is in the intellect unless it first has been in the senses'.98 This holds also for our reading activities: we understand by our senses, that is, on the basis of previous experiences and understandings, including those experiences and understandings which have arisen from earlier read texts; still, we must transcend those understandings and experiences by engaging actively in the process of creating and co-creating the incoming text. This dialectic movement between constrained reception and unlimited creation is characteristic for a way of reading which is not only competent, but also versatile. In reading, there always is a tension between competent versatility and versatile competence; this tension has its origins in the 'duty-bound freedom' on the part of the reader to not only create, but re-create; to not just re-construct, but also 'de-construct' the text. As I have formulated it elsewhere, "the text is what we have, but what we have is not what the text w" (Mey 1993b: 227); that is to say, the text's meaning goes always beyond that which it shows itself to be on the surface (see chapter 8.4.4 for an illustration). The surplus of meaning that is involved here can only be realized by "questioning the ground" (Miller 1985: 423) of text production and consumption, by deconstructing the text itself, instead of merely dissecting the textual product (as advocated by the New Critics) or analyzing the author's mental and personal history (as was customary in classical literary criticism). But this questioning the ground of text production and consumption also implies probing deeper into our own 'ground'. We must go 'behind' our presuppositions," and examine our own discourse—that in which we necessarily embed the text and our understanding of it. Tsur talks about "Seven Towers of Consciousness" in which we are "inescapably imprisoned ... a consciousness that has been shaped here and now, and which no amount of knowledge will let us break out of (1992: 302-303).

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At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned the 'ivory tower' that we should be careful not to get trapped in when we are dealing with literature; a fortiori, we should not let ourselves be imprisoned in a sevenfold structure of the same type. But notice that Tsur's notion of the "seven towers of consciousness" is an abstract metaphor which disregards the very essence of versatility by placing an inordinate emphasis on "knowledge" (quantified as an "amount"), as embodying the final constraints on our literary activities. The point here is that consciousness is more than just knowledge. When dealing with texts, it is important to remember that consciousness \sfor real: that is to say, our consciousness does not emerge out of the blue, but stems from our interaction with the world. Neither is it, or can it be, confined within any kind of'tower'-like structure: our consciousness, being practical, wants out. The inevitable distortions in our world picture cannot be remedied, in principle, because we are ourselves the distorting factor; but we can recognize the distortion for what it is, and where it comes from. As Tsur puts it, we must find out about our "tools and strategies of perception ... as well as about the peculiar biases of our individual lenses that seem to be responsible for individual differences in perception" (1992: 303). As truly competent readers, we must do this 'recognizing' not only individually; we must practice our competence in inter-individual versatility. As truly versatile readers, we must learn to operate cross-generationally, performing competently across the successive periods of literary production and consumption.

9.2. The implied reader revisited 9.2.1. Tex t work So far, the present chapter has dealt with the perspective of the individual reader and with the ways the consumer of a literary work approaches a text and in this process is approached by its producer. We have seen how the main characteristic of this double approach is a dialogic reciprocity, a dialectics of text production and consumption, as it has been called in the preceding section. Readers depend continuously on the text and its author for narrative support ('enter-tainment', recalling the word's original meaning); at the same time, they want to

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retain the privilege of choosing not to be entertained uniquely on the premises determined by the author and the text. The reader is no 'lonely rider', but neither is the writer a 'lonely leader'. This readerly 'self-determination' is arguably of the utmost importance for readers who are obliged to try and make the most of the text on their own premises, on the penalty of at best, not being entertained, and at worst, not understanding the text at all. 'Text work', however, as one could call it, is not a simple, straightforward business, depending on the individual workers only. Making the most of a text one has received from elsewhere, on external authority, always involves a certain amount of 'alienation'—understood, in the strict sense of the term, as: subjecting oneself to an alien influence. Whatever the author may have had in mind when creating the text, is by definition hidden from the reader. The latter may try to escape this quandary by blindly accepting the text's authority, as when Joseph Smith received his inspired texts from the Angel Moron and never doubted for a moment that this was a pure revelation of eternal truth, or when Moses came down from Mount Sinai in order to integrate human morals and beliefs in a divine, never to be questioned, 'decimal' code. Such attitudes towards the text reflect the solitary perspective that we have rejected above: text work understood as the single reader's unique effort, not to be doubted or relativized by being put into its proper context, or, as we say today, 'contextualized'. Of course, Smith and Moses are exceptional cases: their divine submission brooked no contextual restrictions, and the tablets they received, whether made of gold or stone, incorporated an everlasting code of 'covenants and doctrines', extending far beyond the confines of literary interpretation. In normal circumstances, however, according to modern theories of text, the reader's acceptance of the text's authority is more or less implied and conditional, the condition being that he or she be able, and willing, to 'work with the text'. The reader must enter into the dialogic relationship with the text that (as we have seen earlier, following Bakhtin's lead) constitutes the main ingredient in text comprehension. In this dialectics, the reader's acceptance of the author is matched by the author's need for a reader. The crucial element in this text work is the opening up of the •fictional space' (Scholes 1982), mentioned at the beginning of chapter 6 as the locus of poetic creation. 100 The fiction of this space is not just a figment of the author's imagination, but a work of fiction, both in the

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literary and in the literal sense: a working space constructed by speaking voices, and a stage where characters go about their business. For the duration of the fictive time span (in the case of the novel, physically symbolized by its first and last cover pages), this fictional location is also the readers' reality: the work space-cum-stage in which readers move together with characters, in which readers address characters, and readers are addressed by characters' voices, thus entering into a dialogue with them. The next section will detail some aspects of this dialogue.

9,2.2. Communication and alienation The dialogic process is not simply one of 'communication' in the narrow sense of certain facts being passed back and forth, or 'communicated', as in the minutes of a business meeting or the Communications of a professional society (such as those of the Association for Computing Machinery, known by its abbreviation C-ACM). Rather, we are dealing with what Malinowski over half a century ago established as "communion", that is to say the process by which speakers and hearers, authors and readers, enter into a dialogic "compact" (Malinowski 1923). For the writer, the dialogic partner is the reader; but a reader who, at the moment of the author's writing, is not present, but only 'implied', that is, presupposed as a conditional audience (see chapter 8.4.2). The author thus strictly writes for an invisible and inaudible audience; so how can we talk about a dialogue? If a dialogue has to take place, there must be an audience that is both seen and heard; in other words, the reader must have a voice. This readerly voice, as we have seen, does not originate in the author's head, even though qua voice, it is part and parcel of the writing process and therefore underlies the writing individual's sphere of influence. Writers address their audience through the medium of society, hence they do not make up their readers but rather, have them 'made up' for themselves in accordance with the societal conditions under which both writers and readers live and produce, respectively consume, their texts. Writers are no "Biblical Adams" (Bakhtin 1994a: 94), populating a universe with invented names and roles: the universe is out there, and authors (as well as readers) have to go out, i.e. move out of themselves and into the world in order to find, rather than invent (pace the word's etymology), the characters populating their texts.

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This basic element of'going elsewhere', of'making different', of'defamiliarization', in short of "bestrangement" (which is how Morson & Emerson (1990: 360-361) have chosen to render Shklovsky's original term ostranenie, usually translated as 'alienation'; see chapter 8.4.4) is not just typical for literature as such, as suggested by the Russian Formalists. Bestrangement is also characteristic of the relationship between individual author and reader, as it materializes in their "dialogic compact". The author tells his or her story through the characters of the narration, just as the reader believes the 'fiction' as it is presented through these characters. Authors and readers 'commune', relate to each other, on the literary stage, for the duration of the work: they communicate in what is basically a 'bestranging' and 'bestranged' medium, as Brecht has called it. 101 The necessary response to the author's creative Fiant litterae, 'let there be (a) text' is the accepting, co-creating Fiat mihi secundum verba tua of the reader, 'let it happen to me according to your words' (cf. Lk. 1: 38; with apologies to Sts. Gabriel and Luke). Rather than being "the voice of one crying in the wilderness" (Lk. 3: 4), the reader's response is a belly-deep, resounding, and fertile be-strangement: "deep calleth unto deep at the voice of thy waterspouts" (Ps. 42: 7). However, this dialogic annunciation-cum-response is more than a generic characterizeration, a blanket formula valid for any work at all of literature (or of art in general). Bestrangement is always specific to the conditions governing the creation of the individual literary work. Morson & Emerson correctly state that "before one moves to 'literariness' (in the Formalist sense), one needs to inquire about 'novelness' ['novel* is a substantive here; JM]—and lyricness, and epicness" (1990: 361). However, they do not go far enough: 'novel-ness' as such, in the sense of the alienation necessarily taking place in the novel as genre, has to be supplemented by a 'this-novel-ness', the hicceitas, indeed the 'novelty', of this or that particular work of fiction, including the specific authorial conditions of production that the novel is based on, as well as the specific reader response that it elicits. It is in the tension between these two poles, the author and the reader, that the creative spark is ignited. But if author and reader are too far apart (as often happens in the case of older or 'exotic' literature), there is no spark and the text remains cold and refuses to ignite, like a big wet log on your campsite in late September. Conversely, if author and reader are too close, the tension gets evened out, and what could have

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been sparkling 'bestrangement' turns into boring familiarity—the case of much contemporary lackluster, uninspired, too familiar, in short: 'sparkless' writing. However, authors and readers are not only societal producers of a particular kind: they are themselves products of their society, as are the texts they compose, respectively read. As Wallace remarks, "texts cannot be understood as self-contained products" (1992: 68); texts relate to society and its members, and the voices in the texts are the voices that society endows its members with. This has certain consequences, in particular for the reader. Expanding on, and further specifying, the traditional concept, I will talk of the implied reader as a 'societally endowed consumer of texts'. That is to say, the implied reader is the reader as he or she is projected into the text and given a voice, in accordance with the historical and social structures under which she or he lives. While the 'implied reader' thus is a constitutive, universal element of all fiction, this is not tantamount to saying that we are dealing with a univocal concept. The next section will detail how and why.

9.2.3. The 'subversive reader' Depending on the individual authors and their own societal background, the 'implied readership' may vary, and so may the voices that the readers are given. One of the most important insights of text studies in recent years has been the discovery of the many ways these voices could be different, as contrasting with the few ways in which they actually differ. An author forcing a standardized voice down the readership's throat (as it happens in most pulp fiction and mass literature) erases all those possible differences by letting one voice take the lead, to the exclusion of all others. Such a 'univocal discourse1, as one could call it, represents the dominating forces in a society (in our context, that means the male voice against the female, the locals' voice against the immigrants', the employers' voice against the employees', the white voice against the black, and so on). This important phenomenon of societal dominance in literature, while often officially acknowledged, almost never makes it to the surface of individual, conscious practice. Since the dominating voices represent the power structures of society, we seldom question their legitimacy or counteract their domineering

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influence: 'You can't fight City Hall', as conventional folk wisdom has it. The dominant voices being conventionally established and recognized, their discourses are seen as "unexceptional—even obvious— both by the writer and by the typical readers of any text" (Wallace 1992: 68). For, "it is easier for those who have power to maintain it, if they can persuade everyone in the society that there is nothing unnatural about these arrangements. Things are this way because that is the way they are meant to be" (Janks & Ivanic 1992: 307). It is here that the voice of the reader may be heard as potentially subversive, interrupting the univocal, 'naturalized' discourse of power. As we saw in chapter 7, when voices clash, they do not just disrupt the fabric of the narrative (story-internally); they may well be the expression of an outside opposition, stemming from the relations that determine how people act and interact and how authors and readers blend their voices in dialogue. (More on this in chapter 12.3). The interruptions are particularly interesting in those cases of 'voice change' and 'voice clash' which have to do with what I call 'authorial intrusion' (see chapter 7.2.3). When an author in person enters the fictional space, she or he steps up on the literary scene, taking advantage of the fact that the readership has been taught, like a good audience, to listen to the story and not to interrupt. The communal dialogic space of fiction can thus be turned into a private rostrum, where the author can vent his or her own ideas about everything, from literature to politics, from history to sexual mores. It has often been remarked that a writer like Tolstoy in his larger-thanlife novels such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina in fact pursues a double agenda: telling the story, and educating the reader in the best of Rousseauian traditions. For example, Levin's ideas (in Anna Karenina) about enlightening the farmers (but without giving them too much useless knowledge), or his speculations about the morally clean and uncomplicated life of his tenants would fit well into any social treatise. Similarly, A.S. Byatt (especially in Still Life) has a knack of telling us (not just between the lines, but interspersed among the very sentences and paragraphs of the narrative) how we should feel about certain matters; how things were "at that time", and how they would be later; or which "words entered Frederica's vocabulary ca. 1960", and which were "from another decade" (pp. 58, 86, 137). Better still: by a stroke of authorial magic, the 'competent reader' may be whisked away from the theoretical level of the preceding sections, to

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be forcefully relocated in an actual text, where she/he is turned into the author's own dialogic partner. The extract below (which is part of the lengthy passage quoted in its entirety in the previous chapter) shows this operation in full force, in one of those vintage A.S. Byatt cameo appearances that the novel in question (Still Life) is particularly rich in. [The author is apostrophizing an 'implied reader', in this case an author (arguably, Byatt herself) trying to evoke in a reader's mind the image of a particular plum.] You may use the word 'bloom' for the haze on this plum and it will call up in the mind of any competent reader the idea that the plum is glistening, overlaid with a matte softness. You may talk about the firm texture of the flesh,... (Still Life, p. 176; italics mine) Here, the reader, addressed directly as "you", is almost browbeaten into agreeing with the author who, by her choice of words, implies that only incompetent readers would fail to see her point about the quality and texture of the plum's flesh and skin. If the readers want to use their own voices, they must make a space for themselves in the text, refuse to play the role of 'captive audience' that the writer has assigned to them, and instead, speak up for their rights. Not only authors are "an injured body", as Jane Austen calls her colleagues (in Northanger Abbey, p. 38)—readers, are, too: they stand accused of ignorance and incompetence if they don't follow the author's directions, or, to borrow Talbot's expression, they are "in the dock" (1995: 68), awaiting their sentencing.102

9.2.4. Reader awareness One of the major problems that we, as readers of texts, are confronted with is that we often are led to accept wordings which are neither representative for the characters in the narrative nor for what they stand for, but instead express views attributable directly to the author (who then, either overtly or implicitly, may double up as a character, lending hinWherself another, additional voice). The question is how to defend

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ourselves against being manipulated as readers into sanctioning opinions and beliefs that are not our own. How can we avoid lending legitimacy to (or even reinforcing), by our passive acceptance, a state of affairs that we, as non-readers, want to distance ourselves from—either because we disagree with the author's basic assumptions or, more often, because we simply aren't knowledgeable enough to contradict him or her? The question is neither a purely literary nor an exclusively academic one. We must distinguish between an author's naive 'pointing finger', as when Tolstoy pops on to the stage in his narrator's disguise and briefs us on a particular conversation which is about to unfold: Oni oba tut ze seli na divancik, i mezdu nimi nacalsja razgovor, ocen' inter esnyj dlja oboix. ('The two of them sat down there on the little sofa, and between them there developed a conversation that was of great interest for both parties.') (Anna Karenina III: xxi; 1962 ed., pp. 346-347; my translation), and the cases where the author (in a passage from the same novel) 'gives away' some of the plot by telling us that what Anna fears, is indeed about to happen, and that nothing is going to change in her relationship with her husband: [Vronskij and Anna are talking about Anna's possible, or rather impossible, divorce. Vronskij says: ] — Razve nevozmozen razvod? — skazal on slabo. Ona, ne otvecaja, okacala golovoj. — Razve nel 'zja vzjat' syna i vse-taki ostavit' ego? — Da; no eto vse ot nego zavisit. Teper 'ja dolzna exat' k nemu, — skazala ona suxo. Ee predcuvstvie, cto vse ostanetsja po-staromu, ne obmanulo ee. ("'Is a divorce really out of the question?" he said softly. She did not answer, but nodded her head. "Why can't you just take your son and leave him all the same?''

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"I could; but all these things depend on him. For now, I must go back to him," she said drily. Her premonition that everything was going to stay the same did not deceive her.') (Anna Karenina III: xxii; 1962 ed., p. 355; my translation). Passages like these (of which there are quite a number in Tolstoy's works) are not simple instances of what I have dubbed 'authorial intrusion' in chapter 7.2.3. In the framework of the present chapter, the reader's perspective, it is more illuminating to say that the reader is taken aside by the author, as it were, and given some confidential information (often coupled with an evaluation of the current situation), which the narrative's characters are not supposed to know, since they have no access to it. The 'voice' giving this information is the omniscient narrator's, speaking out of order and telling the reader, behind the characters' backs, of events that have not yet happened, but which are going to be realized at a later date in their lives, at the same time pointing out to the reader how these events should be evaluated. It is as if the author were addressing the readership directly, more or less in this vein: 'Now here's what you think these people are doing/thinking/saying; but let me tell you what's really going on. And even if they don't know what they are doing, I wantj'ow, the reader, to know'. In the Tolstoyan narrative, such incursions are kept sotto petto, so to speak: the author is whispering an aside in the reader's ear. But not all authors are equally subtle about their intrusion into the reader's consciousness; many times, their manipulative efforts are rather obvious, at least on the surface. Consider the following extract from A.S. Byatt: She [Frederica] consulted Raphael about the Ph.D. application, which went in the same week, the week in which Raphael had a long and troubled conversation with Vincent Hodgkiss about the ambivalence he felt towards Israel, ... That conversation is not part of the stuff of this novel,... (A.S. Byatt, Still Life, p. 305)

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Here, the author steps up front to inform the readers about the facts of narrative life (which the latter should have known about all along): namely, that authors exercise their omniscience selectively, and that readers have no say in the decisions as to what they are going to be informed about. While the reader character is cast as a necessary part of the narrative and addressed as such, the inferior status of the reader visa-vis the author is made abundantly clear: it is the author, who makes all the important decisions as to who is being heard (given a 'voice'), and who not. Taking advantage of this inherent weakness of reader's position, the author can furthermore get away with forcing the reader to double as a passive sounding board for author's voice. The reader's lack of power turns into a lack of proper voice: the reader is effectively silenced. The extreme of such authorial intrusion-cum-reader-confusion is reached when author and narrator pool their voices, conniving against the reader, as it were, such that the latter no longer is able to make out who is who, between author and narrator. The following excerpt (being the opening lines of a recent Norwegian novel) provides a prime example. Denne gang legger jeg beretninga i munnen pä meg sj0l, og da äpner den, enten dere Irur det eller ei, med at hovedpersonen slar forfatterens (altsa mitt) telefonnummer i den hensikt a oppnä en avtalefor a diskutere hans (altsä min)forrige roman ('Gymnaslcerer Pedersens beretning ... '), sow har gjort et djupt (om enn feilaktig) inntrykk pä han. ('This time I put the words of the story in my own mouth, and so it starts, whether you believe it or not, with the main character dialing the author's (that is, my) phone number with the intention to arrange a meeting to discuss his (that is, my) previous novel (College Teacher Pedersen's Narration ...), which has made a deep (albeit erroneous) impression on him.') (Dag Solstad, Forsok pä a beskrive det ugjennomtrengelige. ('An effort to describe the impenetrable'. Oslo: Oktober, 1989, p. 5; my translation).

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The sheer amount of force which is applied here to keep the reader in line is astonishing, and seems to exhaust even the usual authorial potential. In this particular case, it is important for the author to make the identity of author-as-narrator seem plausible. To achieve this effect, the narrator is made to speak in the author's well-known 'voice', which is characterized by a highly idiosyncratic, 'politically has-been-correctbut-still-consciously-used' brand of Norwegian, known as suffespräk., i.e. the vernacular of the (Maoist) Young Socialist League (SUF), of which the author used to be a prominent member. In addition, reference is made to a factually existing, previous novel by the same author (complete with a set of instructions as to how not to read that book— actually one of the present story's themes). Other identifying features include the use of the author's actual first name ("Dag"), throughout the book, whereas possible referential ambiguities resulting from this technique (such as in the use of the personal pronouns) are unabashedly squashed by the author-narrator's 'uncoupling': "the author's (that is, my)", "his (that is, my)". Usually, though, authorial omnipotence is exercised less idiosyncratically and also more selectively. Selective omnipotence goes along with selective omniscience on the part of the author, who is the sovereign instance in all narrative matters. The author is the final authority on the characters and on how they work their way through the narrative plot towards its fulfillment. This authority gives the author the right to step into the story at any time and tell us not only that such and such is happening, but that what's happening is right, correct, appropriate, usual, and so on, by authorial decree, thus evincing the author's authentic 'Sign Manual': the irrevocable wording chosen in the text, for the reader to love or leave. Here is another example from Byatt's book: [Stephanie has just had a baby, her first, and is still recovering from post partum trauma.] Stephanie laid him on the bed, making white muslin triangles for him, weeping soundlessly, sheets of hot tears over slippery cheeks. This is usual. She shook out his small nightdress and picked him up. (Still Life, p. 114)

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In the above passage, the author is addressing the readership and telling them, in an aside, that it is usual for a postpartal mother to be emotionally disturbed, to cry "sheets of hot tears" while diapering her baby and getting him ready for bed. The aside interrupts the narrative; as a result, the tense changes from the narrative past ("she laid him on the bed", "she shook out his small nightdress and picked him up") to the gnomic present ("This is usual."). It is the author's eminent privilege to tell us what is usual, what not, and this power cannot be challenged in any direct way. Reader's voice is contingent upon author's choice; no appeal is possible or allowed. Norman Fairclough is among the linguists who have given this problem of 'author omnipotence' a pragmatic turn by viewing it as a case of'hegemonic' dominance, using a term due to Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). I will deal with this more extensively below, in chapter 11.1; here, I want to focus on the problems of the reader, who is faced with a Hobson's choice of either assenting to the authors hegemonic power play as the price to pay for being told a story, or rejecting the author's bid and not being entertained. The reader vacillates between what I elsewhere have called 'letting hinWherself be seduced' (Mey 1995a) and exercising his or her critical powers. It is the latter aspect which is focused on by Fairclough (1989, 1992b) and his school under the general heading of 'critical language awareness', that is to say, an uncovering of the hidden presuppositions of authorial hegemony as exercised in language, by "guid[ing] readers to an awareness of ideological content ... so often presented as Obvious'" (Wallace 1992: 61), 'usual' (as in the above quote), 'correct', 'appropriate', 'proper', and so on. The question whose notions of 'use' or 'appropriateness' and whose ideals of correctness or propriety are embodied in such ideologies is never raised in the text as such, but can only be dealt with from a 'critical' point of view. As his own example, Fairclough uses the concept of "appropriateness" of language use, a notion which he considers to be the embodiment of "sociolinguistic hegemony" (1992b: 51). Here, the emphasis is on who defines what as 'appropriate': when this question is asked critically, it will turn out that the better contexts of life (i.e. those contexts in which societal power is possessed and exercised) are reserved for speakers of socially more acceptable varieties, while the local and social dialects may be 'tolerated' in informal and private situations (ibid.: 37).

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By contrast, a critical awareness of language, in particular (as in the case under discussion) of the role of the reader in language use, serves to dismantle the constructions of hegemony, and to "lift the veil on a tradition of prescriptive bigotry" (Fairclough 1992b: 37), to which we all are unconsciously committed, readers and authors alike. 103 (For further discussion, see chapter 12.3.4).

Chapter 10

The pragmatic perspective In this chapter, I want to gather the different aspects of text production and consumption that have been discussed so far, into one common, overarching perspective, that of pragmatics. Pragmatics is often defined as that part of linguistics which deals explicitly with the relations of the language to its users and vice versa (echoes of Morris and Carnap). Alternatively, one could (with the present author) define pragmatics as "the study of the conditions of human language uses such as these are determined by the context of society" (Mey 1993a: 42; emphasis added); among these conditions, one could include the result of human language use, and (with a take-off on some well-known formulae) ask what people can 'do with words', more precisely: with their 'speech (or language) acts' (echoes of Austin and Searle). The question to be raised in the present chapter falls, consequently, into two parts. We can ask ourselves what people (authors, readers) can do with the words that they respectively produce and consume. But furthermore, we can raise the question of how they are prepared for their tasks of writing and reading. In general, one could ask how people use language: are they free to choose whatever words they wish in order to reach their goals? And as to the words themselves: is language friend or foe, is our speech a positive potential or a negative constraint, are our words wings or chains? Contrary to popular belief, the production and consumption of language is not just a matter of personal concern and private enterprise. In the academic context of what is called 'poetics and general literary studies', the image that traditionally has seemed appropriate for the process of literary creation is that of the 'poetic flight'. The classical attributes of this flight are the wings, embodied either in a Muse, or in the winged horse Pegasus, functioning as a general metaphor for literary activity (see Mey 1987b). Yet, there is another, pragmatic side to this process as well, as we will see in the next section.

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10.1. The power of words: A pragmatic affair It has often been remarked that human language, that "hallmark of nobility of the human race", as Louis Hjelmslev has called it (1943: 5), in reality is both a distinction and an imposition: language distinguishes us from the other animals, but at the same time it imposes a burden on us. Language is a privilege that, once given, we cannot escape or deny. Not only are we, as humans, allowed to speak; we must use our language, given the occasion. And furthermore, although our language belongs to us as the distinctive mark of our noble birth, this 'birthmark' does not just appear out of nowhere: society has branded us with language, our speech is our stigma: "your language betrayeth you", as the maid told St. Peter in the High Priest's courtyard (M. 26: 73). A birthmark can be a bummer, as Gary Larson informs us in one of his 'Far Side' cartoons.104 But what has this got to do with the pragmatics of language in a literary context? First of all, pragmatics is about the use and users of language, as we have seen above. The language given to us at birth is not a 'free gift': it comes with built-in directions for use. Generalizing a remark by Bakhtin, we can say that all words come "with conditions attached" (1992b: 76); language is a pre-packaged deal to which 'certain restrictions apply', as they do for that offer of a free trip for two to Florida on the back of your toothpaste tube. In fact, those conditions may be so restrictive and binding that the offer in question is felt more like a burden than a privilege. This is why the metaphors of the poetic 'flight', of the 'wings' of the poet's horse, and so on are always complemented by another set of metaphors: Sören Kierkegaard's "chains" of language, weighing us down (see section 10.2); Jacques Lacan's linguistic 'double-binds' of language (as interpreted by Anthony Wilden; 1977: 119); the "prison-house of language", confining our mental movements (Jameson 1972); or my own grammatica tyrannus (a.k.a. the specter of'correctness'; Mey 1979: 414-416), dictating what we are allowed to say and what not, salva rectitudine. As to our literary activities in particular, what does it mean that we, as users of language, are restricted in the production and consumption of texts? Put in other words, what are the constraints that producers and consumers of texts have to deal with, and how do they deal with them? The last question is related to the crucial issue of by whose authority those restrictions on text work are imposed, and who are the (mostly

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hidden) powers that determine what texts are to be used for, and how they are going to be used. The next sections will look into some cases where those powers can be seen at work.

10.1.1. The 'superaddressee' One of the earliest efforts to deal with the pragmatic aspects of text production and consumption is due to Mikhail M. Bakhtin. The question for Bakhtin is not only what we can conclude from a text about the author's beliefs, knowledge, insights, and so on; but also, and more interestingly, what the text itself teaches us about the pragmatic relations that make up the text's internal structure and govern it in terms of power and dominance. A central issue in this connection is the question who is saying what, at what time, and with what authority. Bakhtin remarks that texts not only require the presence of a listener/reader, a "'second person", but also that of a "third person", an external authority, whose sanction is decisive for the acceptance or non-acceptance of the text's words as legitimately expressing the world of the narrative. This authority is not one that one notices straight away, by some sort of immediate sighting or listening; we must apply what Bakhtin calls a "metalinguistic analysis" (1984: 183), on which I will have to say more below. Bakhtin calls such an authority the "superaddressee" (which is how Emerson & Holquist render the Russian term nadadresat; Bakhtin 1994b: 126). Proper care must be exercised here so as to avoid any mythologizing, hypostasizing, or placing this superaddressee in the space vacated by the gods and muses of old. The superaddressee should not be understood as the Divine Voice of an oracle, or as God speaking to Moses from Mount Sinai. Neither is it the Father's Voice resounding "out of a cloud" on the Mountain of the Transfiguration (Lk. 9: 35); rather, it is the 'name of the father', Lacan's nom dupere, actively operating from within our psychological and sociological discourses (Lacan 1966b:557). The superaddressee is necessary because of the very nature of our discourse; in Bakhtin's own words, "each dialogue takes place against the background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue" (Bakhtin I994b: 126).105 The ideological embodiments or expressions of the su-

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peraddressee may vary: Bakhtin names "God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, science, and so forth" (ibid). However, all these expressions are only surface manifestations, not "the superaddressee itself which is, strictly speaking, not an ideological but a metalinguistic fact constitutive of all utterances [inclusive the literary product, the text]. ... God may be dead, but in some form the superaddressee is always with us." (Morson & Emerson 1990: 136; my emphasis and additions). 106 What is called, with a Bakhtinian term, 'metalinguistic' in the quote above, is basically a pragmatic notion: it expresses a concern with the conditions that make speech (and in general, any use of language) possible. Bakhtin points out that the superaddressee as an instance must not be confused with "any mystical or metaphysical being ... he is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it" (1992b: 126-127). Such constitutive aspects are usually hidden, and have to be brought out by a 'metalinguistic analysis'; rare are the occasions on which one has the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the actual instances supporting and embodying these conditions. It seems therefore wrong to concentrate, with Morson & Emerson, on the superaddressee as a physically present person who can be apostrophized by utterances such as "Would you just listen to him", and the like (1990: 135). Rather than discussing their (constructed) examples, let me show the presence of the superaddressee through a pragmatic (or 'metalinguistic') analysis of the following, observed situation. My friend Chip Cleary is making a cup of coffee at his own coffeemaker, installed on the window-sill of our common office at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences in Evanston, III.; the time is August, 1993. While filling the machine's coffee compartment, Chip manages to spill most of the contents of a pound package on to the floor. Rather than resorting to the usual expletives favored by American males on such occasions, Chip starts muttering, partly under his breath, in an unusual, high-pitched, measured, and censorious-sounding voice. The words the voice utters are: "You're making a mess, you're making a mess—how many times have I told you not to make a mess!" Naturally, I am puzzled by the fact that my friend chooses to address himself in this odd way. But on reflection, I realize that he in reality is imitating the voice of an authority—perhaps the person who has taught

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him the basics of life (including how to make coffee in a machine); in all likelihood, this is the same historical authority who has inculcated the precept 'Thou shall not spill coffee on floors'. While Chip apparently is talking to himself, he is indirectly appealing to this legislating instance, the superaddressee, as well as to the 'court of history', the public opinion, and all the other instances that the superaddressee represents, according to Bakhtin. By imitating the superaddressee's voice, Chip addresses not only himself, but also his officemates, Dave and me, who are present in the office and have been witnesses to the event. By berating himself in this authoritative voice (whose high pitch probably is modeled on some early female authority: a strict mother, a meddling aunt, or a busybodying older sister). Chip provides himself with some sort of safeguard against criticism from others: since he has already been censured by the superaddressee, we, his office-mates, needn't bother to give him hell for making a mess on the floor. On other occasions, authors may help us identify the superaddressee and 'its' voice, by visually emphasizing (e.g. by using italics) the portions of text that directly deal with this superior instance. Compare the following, earlier quoted extract: [Russell and his wife are visiting the MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Russell's attention is captured by a sophisticated female French visitor]. Dans le musee: Amidst the rocks and trees of Cezanne's Provence, this French girl was something dreamed by Brancusi, Russell thought, a piece that would be called Sex Moving Through Space, this notion provoking a nagging inner voice acquired via the Times op-ed and the higher media, progressive girlfriends and old New England schools. You shouldn 't entertain such thoughts, being ostensibly enlightened, liberal, and married besides. Treating women like objects; making low similes out of High art. Two violations. Still, it happened. Even here in the Museum of Modern art, where a not-sovery-jeune fille in blue jeans was standing in front of Cezanne's The Bather whispering to her friend in the artist's native tongue—even when we should be admiring Le Chateau Noir, usually one of our favorite paintings.

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(Jay Mclnerney, Brightness Falls. New York: Vintage Books 1993, p. 61; italics in original) Notice the author's use of italics in this passage: apart from their familiar function of denoting a (foreign language) quote, they serve to introduce a special 'voice', here of the "nagging inner" kind, saying: "You shouldn't entertain such thoughts, ...". The voice's addressee is Russell, the subject of the psycho-narration introduced in the beginning with the words "Russell thought"; Russell's own voice is heard next, in free indirect discourse ("Two violations. Still, it happened.") and, towards the end of the passage, in 'pseudo-quoted direct discourse' (with we, our, rather than 'shifted' they, their): "even when we should be admiring Le Chateau Noir, usually one of our favorite paintings".107 The voice replacing the current persona's is thus superimposed on the narrative and represents the superaddressee, here identified by censoring instances such as "progressive girlfriends" and The New York Times, along with Russell's own internal censors: the authoritative instances describing Russell as being "enlightened, liberal, and married besides".108 Identifying the superaddressee in its historical context is not enough, however; the question that remains to be asked is: What does this superaddressee represent pragmatically in a literary environment, a text?

10.1.2. A 'third'voice The answer to the question posed at the end of the previous section is partly contained in some of the words occurring in the passage quoted in the same section: "a nagging inner voice". On closer inspection, this "inner voice" represents an outer instance, viz., certain named authorities residing outside of, rather than within, the talking subject: Russell's "progressive girlfriends", the New York Times, the "old New England schools", and so on. In unambiguous terms, appeal is made to outside institutions and to societal authorities such as the press, the educational system, the extended peer group, and so on, whose norms, if adhered to, guarantee political respectability and 'correctness'. The 'third voice' is only apparently inside us; in reality it is the expression of an external authority. Even though the voice of the superaddressee is heard inforo interno, in the internal court, its powers and

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rulings stem from the external judiciary, quite contrary to the classic adage: deforo interno non iudicat praetor, 'the legal authority does not rule on internal affairs'. But what to say about those 'external courts' themselves, Bakhtin's "God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, science, and so forth" (1994b: 126)? The external authority that is internalized as the 'third voice' of the superaddressee is itself an expression of the relations which characterize a particular societal environment. The voices of the text are the voices of society and as such, reflect the societal balance of power. The weight of one's words, what can be said by whom and how, it all depends on where the utterer stands in that balance. This is nowhere so clear as in circumstances where words are really placed on the scales and compared for weight, to be found either sufficient or lacking. The case that comes to mind is, of course, that of the courtroom proceedings, where everything hinges on a verbal representation of events that have happened outside the courtroom, the 'report' by police and other officials. For a correct evaluation of the events, the authorities must rely on what is necessarily one particular way of representing those events in words. (I will come back to the case of'reported speech' in section 10.2). In situations such as these, the superaddressee's 'third voice' is not heard explicitly (as it was in the illustrative cases quoted above). Quite the contrary: much of the ideology surrounding the public use of language takes its bearings from the myth of 'free speech', that is, a use of language that is not fettered by any constraints, whether individual or social. A closer look, however, reveals that whenever the official doctrine proclaims freedom of speech, there is a hidden agenda stipulating how this freedom must be exercised. It is this hidden agenda that manifests itself to us in the shape and the voice of the superaddressee, particularly when it comes to regulating our linguistic behavior. The existence of such a hidden 'code' should not be confused with the explicit literary codes (such as Boileau's Art poetique; 1674) which specify the rules governing the external scaffolding and internal construction of a literary work. Being totally explicit and superficial, such overt codes do not deal with the unwritten (and by the same token, unconscious) conventions for the production and consumption of literature. In contrast, to get at the hidden codes, we must "question the ground" of what is being said (to borrow an expression from deconstructionist parlance; Miller 1985: 423); indeed, the technique of unveil-

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ing these hidden conditions amounts to a 'de-construction' of the given text (following Mey 1993b: 226-227). The next section will examine one particular genre of text, 'reported speech', from this perspective.

10.2. Reported speech: Reality or fiction? Words do not fall from heaven: language is, in the strict sense of the term, (hu)man-made. The words and utterances we produce, as well as those we encounter, are produced in a basic interaction between humans; they are a product of society. This "dialogic orientation of discourse", as Bakhtin calls it, turns every word into a "microdialogue" with other words: Only the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and verbally as yet unqualified world with the first word, could really have escaped from start to finish this dialogic inter-orientation with the alien word. (1992a: 279). But there is more: every time we utter a word, a phrase, a sentence, a pararaph, we appeal to actual as well as potential listeners This is the quality of 'being turned to' or 'turning oneself to', the 'addressivity' (obrascennost'} that I discussed earlier, in chapter 8. When we use language, we act as a sounding board for the whole of society; we cannot possibly say anything in isolation, but have to incorporate, at least potentially, all that is spoken, and has been spoken (and written) in our speech community. For Bakhtin, "all speech is reported speech" (Morson & Emerson 1990: 138); that is to say, in speaking, I address the others, using the others' words. Vice versa, my own words must pass the litmus test of being accepted as parts in an ongoing, historic dialogue. Pragmatically speaking, my words are part of human history; but also, history speaks to me, pragmatically, in the guise of human words. Through its speakers, society addresses itself in language; language is at the same time the supreme means of my self-expression and the ultimate constraint on the ways I express myself. It is in this sense that Kierkegaard characterized the essential dialectics of language, describing it as a "chain which may be light to wear but difficult to break" (1970: 512).

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But even if it is true that all language is reported language, there are times where the reporting function of language becomes more obvious. As already intimated, reported speech occupies a prominent position in our use of language in the context of the law. Much of what is said in this context has to do with rendering people's sayings: we report the words that accompany other people's doings in order to put the latter in the correct perspective. As a consequence, much of our judiciary system, both in the theory and in the practice of law, turns around the ability to prove or disprove the correctness of a verbal account of a situation. The problem is how to summarize that account, from the initial police report to the final imposed sentence, in legally binding terms, so that it can go On record', that is to say, be reported in its definitive, forever immutable form as part of a 'case' on the books. Which is why the first 'right' a suspect is 'read' on being arrested is the warning that "everything you say may be used against you". The 'right' that the detainee is allowed to exercise in this situation is the purely negative one of not saying anything, of remaining silent, lest one's words be reported to one's disadvantage. It is in contexts like these that the 'invisible hand' of society becomes a little more visible, inasmuch as it steers the pen of the recording instances, like the invisible spirit that guides the hand of the medium in 'automatic writing'. The result of such an ecriture can be every bit as bizarre as the language produced at a spiritist gathering. The Italian pragmaticist Bice Mortara Garavelli (1985), commenting on the distortions that take place when legal testimony is given and witnesses' depositions are 'transcribed' for the record, quotes the following passage from Italo Calvino: // brigadiere e davanti alia macchina da scrivere. L 'interrogate, seduto davanti a lui, risponde alle domande un po balbettando, ma attento a dire tutto quel ehe ha da dire nel modo piü preciso e senza una parola di troppo: "Stamattina presto andavo in cantina ad accendere la stufa e ho trovato tutti queifiaschi di vino dietro la cassa del carbone. Ne ho preso una per bermelo a cena. Non ne sapevo niente ehe la bottigleria di sopra era stata scassinata". Impassibile, il brigadiere hatte veloce sui tasti la sua fedele trascrizione: "II sottoscritto essendosi recato nelle prime ora [sic] antimeridiane nei locali dello scantinato per eseguire I'avviamento dell'impianto termico, dichiara d 'essere casualmente incorso nel rinvenimento di

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un quantitivo di prodotti vinicoli, situati in posizione retrostante al recipiente adibito al contenimento del combustibile, e di aver effettuato I 'asportazione di uno dei detti articoli nell 'intento di consumarlo durante il pasto pomeridiano, non essendo a conoscema dell'avvenuta effrazione dell'esercizio soprastante ". (The police officer is behind his typewriter. The interrogated sits in front of him and answers his questions with some hesitation, but keen on getting said everything he has to say as accurately as he can and without an unnecessary word: "Early this morning I went to the factory to light the furnace and 1 found all these bottles of wine behind the coal bin. 1 took one of them to drink at lunch. I knew nothing about the liquor store upstairs having been robbed". Imperturbable, the officer quickly types in his faithful transcription: "The undersigned, being present in the early hours of the morning in the localities of the bottling plant in order to effectuate the setting in motion of the thermal unit, declares to accidentally have uncovered the existence of a quantity of vinous products situated in a retrograde position to the receptacle destined for the containment of combustible matter, and to have effectuated the removal of one of the said articles with the intent of consuming said article during the mid-day work stoppage, not being conscious of the infraction perpetrated on the establishment at the superior level.'") (Garavelli 1985: 80; the extract from Calvino's Una pietra sopra (1980: 122) has been translated by me). The Calvino passage quoted above is not only 'fiction' in the usual sense (as in 'a work of fiction'): its fictitious character relies on the fact that every report of other people's speech, no matter how faithful it pretends to be, in a sense is a 'translation', "a simulation of a discourse" (Garavelli 1985: 83).l09 The grotesque rendering of the accused's account of a simple, everyday occurrence becomes, in the officer's transcription, a potentially damaging record of a reported infraction of the laws of the realm, to be punished by the same laws. What we have here is strictly a 'legitimizing' transcription of the words of the interrogated, a legalizing fiction with a "stipulation of authenticity" (ibid.: 82), one that pretends to represent reality, and one that (while misrepresenting reality in the grossest of ways) still in fact is terribly real for a

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person appearing in court who is being judged solely on the basis of a pretended "faithful transcription" of his or her words. From the pragmatic perspective of reported speech, the voice of the detainee in the above transcript has been normalized to conform with official, legal discourse, understood as the ensemble of conventions and expectations that hold in a situation where a suspect is interrogated by the police about an alleged crime. As Garavelli remarks, one cannot just normalize the expression; any "normalization'" also affects the content (1985: 80). The reason is that the norm according to which the utterances of the accused are re-shaped is one that is imposed from above: it is the exigencies of the judicial system that make the officer take down the deposition in such a ludicrous, distorted, and offensive way, not the needs of the defendant. 110 We are faced with Alice's old problem: if Humpty Dumpty's words count more than hers, it is because it is him who has the power: "the question is which is to be master" (in Lewis Carroll's immortal words from Through the Looking-Glass).

10.3. Voice power 1 will now turn to the some of the pragmatic effects of 'voice use', in literary contexts as well as in the everyday environments of spoken discourse, both that of 'emerging' societal formations and that of established social groups. These effects will serve to illustrate the points made in the previous sections: that voice is an instrument of societal power which can either be turned against the user or promote his or her personal goals, depending on the individual's social status. Language is never value-free, neither can it be dissociated from societal power; "parier n'est jamais neutre", as Luce Irigaray has expressed it in a pithy formulation (1985).'"

10.3.1. 'Your speech betrays you' The title of this section alludes to the well-known episode from St. Matthew (Ml. 26: 69-75) in which the poor St. Peter, much to his chagrin, was revealed by his speech (a rural dialect of Aramaic), as being "one of them", that is, one of a suspect band of Galilean rioters. The Biblical story contains more than a lesson in human weakness and sub-

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sequent repentance; I want to use it to illustrate the fact that 'voice' is not just something by which we recognize people; we use it to put people On the spot' or 'in their places'. The reason that this recognition was so painful for St. Peter (to the extent that he repeatedly and vociferously tried to undo his 'revealing'), was that his 'spot', his place in society, was such a lowly, undignified one. The Prince of the Apostles was not only in the wrong place that night: in addition to running with the wrong pack, he was simply from the wrong side of the tracks, and no amount of linguistic posturing could undo that fact of life. Being from the wrong kind of place and having it written all over you is what one could call the negative pole of diglossia, understood as not just the ability of switching between two languages that people in many countries and societies possess, but a societal obligation that makes them adjust their speech (whether they want to or not) to different societal surroundings and different purposes of life. 112 In societies that recently have shed the colonial shackles, or whose existence as an independent, self-conscious community is being threatened (in reality or imagination) by the influx of foreign cultural imports, it becomes extremely important to establish and safeguard the newly-won national identity; one of the prime means of furthering this end is the development or propagation of a national dialect or language (Mey 1995d). As a result, much positive attention is paid in such societies, not only to the daily manifestations of the indigenous culture(s) in radio broadcasts, in official presentations, in everyday speech, but also to cultural and linguistic norms, to the overlaying and underpinning structures that support the spiritual life of a nation. On the negative side, one frequently encounters bizarre situations in which people not only are verbally ostracized for using a dialect or flaunting an ideological or cultural norm, but where such transgressions in fact can be lifethreatening, as in the case of authors who not only have had their books confiscated, but their very existence as humans placed in jeopardy (the book burnings of the Third Reich, or the fate of a contemporary author like Salman Rushdie come to mind). On a minor scale, one recalls the linguistic skirmishes in countries such as Norway, where the use of the 'correct' forms (to the exclusion even of all disputed, Optional' ones) was the hallmark of the fanatics on either side of the language barrier: those who wanted to cultivate and preserve only the "true', rural-based, national heritage, and those who wanted Norway to continue in its age-old tradition of mixing cultures

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and languages with the peoples of Europe, first of all the Germans and the Danes, but more recently also, beyond the Continent, with the English-speaking peoples, all of who have been among the major influences in Norway's urban past and present. Literary texts written in Norway in the 'fifties and 'sixties showed a clear divide of the waters: one either wrote in nynorsk ('New Norwegian', a misnomer for the language based mainly on the old dialects) or in what had come to be called bokmäl (literally, 'Book Language', a term replacing the older riksmäl, literally 'Language of the Realm'). As to the emerging 'interlanguage' varieties in between, called (proudly or contemptuously, depending on one's allegiances) samnorsk (lit. 'Common Norwegian'), suffesprak (see above, section 9.2.4), knotespräk (lit. 'affected speech'), and a host of other names, these were by many on either side considered at best an expression of poor linguistic taste, at worst as despicable lingoes fit only for political gold-diggers and literary fortune-seekers. In contexts such as these, the question of a 'linguistic superaddressee' as an instance of appeal and decision acquires prime importance. A 'voice' is not just a voice: it is one of the means by which a social identity is constructed and the superaddressee established, respectively invoked. Likewise in literature, authors use voices to build up the identities of their characters, letting them speak in accordance with the 'voicing' that constitutes the social personae they represent. An extreme case of appeal to such a 'literary superaddressee' is that of parody, which ridicules and belittles, in the name of some higher principle (such as social or other "correctness'), a person's societal or other affiliation through a mimicking of supposedly characteristic traits of pronunciation and vocabulary, "ironically citfing] and exaggerating] the utterance of another' (Morson & Emerson 1990: 154). But even in the absence of this negative motivation, we regularly meet persons in narrative displaying a particular accent, affecting a special way of speaking, strutting their linguistic stuff, as if it were a kind of gaudy apparel to be shown offon the runway, in the presence of some judging instances. The opinions we as readers are asked to form, based on such impressions, of the narrative personae, parallel the values an author implicitly asks us to ratify when telling us, down to the least detail, what a person is wearing, what his or her taste and choice are in clothes, perfume, accessories, and sometimes even (as in James Bond-type stories) what the hero(ine)'s favorite weaponry consists of. All this is primarily done in order to provide the reader with an introduction to this particular char-

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acter and to what he or she stands for in the context of the literary work; a subsidiary aim is to reinforce and highlight an earlier sketched outline of the character's personality. In this way, the author is actively engaged in the process overeating a literary universe, heroes and all—which is what half of the pragmatics of literature is all about; the other half (about the reader re-creating the literary universe) will be discussed in section 10.4. As an illustration, let's consider the following passage from Tolstoy, in which the author takes great pains to pinpoint a successful military personage, whose shallow views on 'marrying for success' the author subtly ironicizes by parodying his use of French expressions. [Vronskij is at a reception given in honor of his comrade-in-arms, the young general Serpuxovskoj, whose career has taken off, in contrast to Vronskij's own. The general is speaking.] / vot tebe moe mnenie. Zensciny—eto glavnij kamen' pretknovenija v dejatel'nosti celoveka. Twdno Ijitbit' zenscinu i delat' cto-nibud\ ... Kak by, kak by tebe skazat \ cto ja dumaju, govoril Serpuxovskoj, ljubivsij sravnenija,—postoj, postoj! Da, kak nesti fardeau i delat' cto-nibud' rukanii mozno tol 'ko togda, kogda fardeau uvjazano na spinu,—a eto zenit'ba. I eto ja pocuvstvoval, zenivsis'. U menja vdnig oprostali ruki. No bez zenit 'by tascit' za soboj etot fardeau— mki budut takpolny, cto nicego nel 'zja delat'. ('So here you have my opinion. Women are the main stumbling block in a man's career. It is hard to love a woman and get anything done at all. ... How am I, how am I going to tell you what I feel, said Serpuxovskoj, who loved comparisons, — wait, wait! Yes, it's like carrying zfardeau [French for 'burden'] and having to do something with your hands; that's possible only when the fardeau is on your back, — but that's marriage for you. And that's what I experienced when I got married. Suddenly, my hands were free. But without marriage you're dragging that fardeau along — your hands are so tied up that you can't do a thing.') (L.N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina ΠΙ: xxi, 1962 ed. p. 350; my translation)

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Serpuxovskoj's speech is interlarded with French expressions and the effect of this 'invoicing' (in the literal sense of'making a person accountable by voice placement') is to assign to him the part as member of a quasi-sophisticated, arch-reactionary military-political clique. The general, we are also told, has plans to found a new political party consisting solely of "independent people, like you [meaning: Vronskij] and me" (ibid: 348), and patches up his neo-liberal vest-pocket philosophy by quoting himself in French. He is thus sharply contrasted to Vronskij, who aspires to be guided by quite different principles, and in fact is dreaming about Anna while the successful Young Turk is holding forth, pooh-poohing politics (especially the "Communist threat": "Tout ςα est une blague. [It's all a big joke] ... There are no Communists"; ibid: 348) and asking Vronskij to give him "carte blanche" (ibid.: 350). Even though figures such as Serpuxovskoj, just like the book's other characters, are figments of Tolstoy's imagination, the world that is created by the author in this passage is real, in the sense that it represents a particular universe of discourse, that is, a complex of social and historical relations that are characteristic for the particular period that the author is trying to describe in his works. The borderline between 'discourse as real' (or 'realistic') and purely 'fictional' discourse is sometimes difficult to discern; much depends on the reader's competence and versatility, as we have seen earlier (chapter 9.1). The modern insertion of a 'disclaimer' between the title page and the novel's beginning, by which the author symbolically interposes a fire-free zone between the world he has created and the world he lives in (and in which he is a possible target for libel suits and bullets), can be taken as an indication of the growing awareness among author- and readership of the frailty of this divider. Another, perhaps less naive view is that modern readers simply have lost some of their 'readerly' competence and versatility, and are lacking that faculty of discernment which allows them to distinguish, yet keep together, the fictional and the real in discourse. This 'narrative paradox', and the ways of dealing with it, will be discussed in the next section.

10.3.2. The narrative context The paradox of narrative is that its fictional space depends for its reality on the ability of the author to create a fiction. However, this is not the

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only condition that is in effect. Corresponding to the author's creative activity, we need the reader's cooperation as an indispensable ingredient in the making of the literary pudding, whose final proof is in its eating, its consumption by a reader, who is not only collaborating with the author, but actively re-creating the literary production in his or her own image. The author of course knows this, and tries in various ways to ensure the readers' involvement in the process: either by making direct appeals to the readers (as in much of early modern literature, where a lot of time is spent in haranguing the readers, proffering motives, excuses, explanations and so on for the author's activities), or by 'contextual innuendo', that is, by involving the readers in the narrative context in an attempt to secure their interest and cooperation.113 The notion of narrative context was introduced elsewhere (Mey 1994a) to capture this double-sidedness of the fictional space. As a realization of the typical dialectics of the narrative process, the narrative context is the common work-place of author and reader, where author's authority is matched by reader complicity in the task of "actively producing meaning", as Lotman has called it (1976). The narrative context is the ensemble of all the conditions that make up the background for this dialectic relationship between author and readers. On the author's side, this comprises such features as trustworthiness, knowledge, competence in building the plot; on the readers' side, this translates into a willingness to enter the fictional space together with the author, in a cooperative effort of construction. In the strict sense of the word, the reader is an accomplice to the deed of narration; readers are embroiled in the plot in a special way, being implicated in its construction. In short, we're dealing with "implied readers', in the sense defined earlier (cf. chapters 8.4 and 9.2). Going back to the Tolstoy excerpt cited in the previous section, let's try to find out what all this means in pragmatic terms, i.e. as author choices and reader options. The competent, versatile reader immediately associates (without being told explicitly by the author) the use of French in the above dialogue with a certain foppishness, a way of dealing with the world that is characteristic of a distinct brand of upper-class males, in particular those for whom a career means everything, love nothing: "You have never really loved", as Vronskij reproachfully remarks to his friend Serpuxovskoj; his reply is a laconic "Maybe". (Ty nikogda ne ljubil.—Mozet byt'. L.N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina I, p. 350 in the 1962 ed.)

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Such Original reader implicatures', as one could call them, are necessary conditions for the creation and maintenance of the fictional space; as such, they are an essential part of the narrative context. The 'implied reader' is, in Talbot's words, an imaginary addressee for whom the text was written, someone with particular sets of ideas and values, notions of common sense, and so on; ... someone who can readily supply the necessary information resources to make coherent sense of it [the text]. (1995: 28) Ideally, actual and implied reader meet in the narrative context, or at least are not too far away from each other: the further the real reader is removed from the implied reader's position (indicated, among other things, by an author's use of 'contextual innuendo'), the less he or she will feel at home in that context and the more difficult the common text work, the cooperation between author and reader, will turn out to be, with negative consequences for a successful outcome of the narrative effort. On the other hand, 'nobody can give what he doesn't have', as the medieval adage114 admonishes us. The actual conditions of the author and reader determine, to a large extent, what can be effectively implied by an author, and 'explied' by a reader. This is why the narrative context is an essential\y pragmatic concept: it relies heavily on authors' and readers' changing conditions of language use. As such, it is essentially an historical construct, a process-oriented rather than a product-determined concept, much like the notion of discourse itself from which it is derived. The following section will provide an illustration of this process, seen against the backdrop of contemporary European linguistic developments.

10.3.3. Changing contexts, changing users As we saw above, changes in the historical conditions determining users' lives also affect the ways the users deal with their language; the post-World War II language reforms in various countries are cases in point (an egregious example is the Norwegian 'language struggle', spräkstriden, referred to above, section 10.3.1). Recently, emerging nations in the 'new-order' Europe, as one could call, somewhat ma-

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liciously, the post-socialist political constellation of the continent, feel the need to have those changing conditions reflected through a heightened awareness of their languages, seen as expressions of the new context in which to situate their political and other narratives. In Bosnia, for instance, there is now an active movement afield to promote the use of 'real' Bosnian—that is to say, a variant of SerboCroat (as one used to call it in the good old days) that is maximally divergent from any Serb or Croat dialects, even on the penalty of having to resuscitate obsolete, South Church Slavonic-like forms. Often, people go to great lengths in such efforts at 'linguistic cleansing', as evidenced by similar 'purifying' trends that have been observed in countries as far apart as India (where there was a tendency to make Hindi more like Sanskrit, in order to mark it off against its linguistically wayward Pakistani sister, Urdu) and Iceland (where the ideal was to have the language resemble Old Norse as much as possible, even to the point of reviving or creating unusual associations, as in the case of simu 'thread' for 'telephone'). Celso Alvarez-Cäccamo, in a fascinating study (1996) on the emergence of a new standard for Galician Portuguese and its use in so-called "reported speech', comments on these developments as "the emergence of a new linguistic consciousness of independence, selfness and 'Galician languagehood"*—a development whose initial stages are characterized by a great deal of language mixing ('code-switching', as it is technically called), much of which is every bit as manipulative as the techniques employed by Tolstoy in the passages quoted above. But we have to remind ourselves that in manipulation, we are dealing with power relations; and power, as we know, does not reside in the individual author or reader: it is the power inherent in society that allows people to manipulate each other into positions of greater or lesser advantage, as the Galician case clearly shows. The development in the Galician autonomia (one of the 15 selfgoverning regions of Spain) is especially exciting, not only because it is happening before our very eyes, so to speak, but mainly because the local webs of social connections and linguistic correlations are rapidly adjusting to the changes happening in Galician society at large. Whereas earlier, the use of Galician uniquely connoted a certain rural background, now there are many different, recognized brands of 'Galician', each with their proper social and other connotations; it depends on the speaker to weigh their relative effect and appropriateness in a current

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situation in order to achieve the most effective manipulation. As Alvarez-Cäccamo expresses it, [s]peaking a given Galician variety (e.g. a stigmatized dialect) may index one's ruralness; but, speaking some other (e.g. one closer to the standard) may index one's education, structural class position, or political ideology. (1996: 35). One should keep in mind, however, that in emerging nations like Galiza, the standard itself usually is not properly and commonly standardized: its norms are neither neutral nor objective, but ideologically determined by the speakers' desire to distance themselves from 'Portuguese Portuguese'—even though, for all practical purposes (that is to say, as long as the Galicians don't have an army and a navy, in accordance with the well-known difference between a dialect and a language), Galician must be considered a dialect of Portuguese. Furthermore, whatever standard there is, it has not yet been stabilized: as Alvarez-Cäccamo points out, the Galician dialect is still busy finding its footing, both within itself (rural vs. urban, local and social varieties within locations, and so on), and against the erstwhile prestige norm of Spanish. In such a fluctuating situation, the life of a language user becomes enormously complex: the actual speaker (or writer, as the case may be) must position him- or herself in relation to an 'implied user' (hearer or reader) who is still a very Protean figure, changing with every twist and turn of the political and linguistic landscape. In the context of his article (which focuses on 'reported speech'), Alvarez-Cäccamo defines this •finding one's footing' as ^constructing] a(n ideologized) possible world ... where characters are made to speak in a believable manner" (1996: 55; italics in original). The process itself is labeled 'code displacement'; the author points out that we should not immediately assume that all actual users of the code (the 'code displacers") are aware of all the implications of their switches, in particular as far as positioning themselves vis-ä-vis some idealized (or 'ideologized') implied user is concerned. It is precisely the transitional character of the Galician situation which helps to 'veil' (as I have called it elsewhere; Mey 1985) the linguistic and social realities that are involved in code switching (including code deplacement). What some would describe as simple linguistic or stylis-

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tic variation (which is what Tolstoy's use of French in the above extracts is immediately associated with in the minds of most people), serves in reality to hide manipulative processes that are not represented by the users on a conscious level. "They don't know it, but they do it", as Marx used to say. But what do the end users of texts, the readers, actually do when they consume the literary product in cooperation with its producer, the author? This eminently pragmatic question will be dealt with in the chapter's final section.

10.4. The pragmatic turn 10.4.1. Words and things In her novel Still Life, A.S. Byatt provides an interesting discussion on the relationship between the pictorial and verbal modes of expression. This discussion reflects much of the author's own endeavor in the book: viz., to express things in words without actually relying on the words themselves, painting verbal "still lifes', as it were, catching the "lifeless life of things" (Byatt 1991: 190). The author observes that "[language runs up and down, through and round things known and things imitated in a way paint doesn't." (ibid.: 178); she goes on to describe "the nausea Jean-Paul Sartre felt on discovering that he could not, with language, adequately describe a chestnut tree root" as a "shock of another kind"— comprising, but not surpassing, the sudden sadness that hits us when we discover that no matter how hard we try, we cannot capture the essence of things in pictures (or, for that matter, in words): the classical melanconia dell'arte, the 'melancholy of art'. However, there is another distinction at work here, one that Byatt only indirectly touches upon: the difference between representing and doing, between painting and acting (including 'speech acting'); a distinction which carries over to that between pictures and actions, between words and acts. It may be true (as the popular saying has it) that a picture is worth a thousand words; yet there is a limit to what pictures can do. And, even though pictures may be better than words at expressing reality, neither of them can replace reality for us. Pictures, like words, are passive; they wait for us to get them going, to set them in motion. Just like isolated words, pictures cannot act by

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themselves. Without a human presence, all pictures are basically 'stills'; even 'moving' pictures of the kind shown in 'movie' theaters (whether or not with words added, as in what they used to call the 'talkies') are 'still-born' without a human audience. For this reason, a 'still life' is truly an oxymoron: it has no 'life' by itself, even if the artist decides to make the picture move, to build motion into it (as has been en vogue for some time). It takes a human act to breathe life into a nature morte; but what kind of act? We must distinguish not only between pictures and actions, as I said above, but also, and mainly, between words and acts', however, the distinctions are not the same in both cases. It is true that, just like pictures, so words cannot act by themselves; what we call an 'act of speech' is only an act insofar as it is performed by a person. However, words constitute potential acts, as it is called in Scholastic philosophy; they are always ad actum, being 'born to act', the same cannot be said of pictures. Humans act primarily by using language; pictures come in a distant second, in most cases. Using Byatt's painting analogy, one cannot have word images depicting life, merely using "mimetic deception" as in trompe-Vozuil pictures: "You cannot have trompe-roeuil in writing", says Byatt (ibid.). Life is more than what can be captured in a picture: what is missing, is precisely the action. While we can paint objects, we cannot paint an act; we can paint a pictorial description of the act, but the action is elsewhere. What the spectator supplies by 'stepping into the picture', 'getting into the act', as we say, is to make the description, not the action, come alive. This is precisely wherein the difference between words and pictures lies. We cannot simply create a pictorial description of a verbal act; put otherwise, we cannot paint words, since words are always potential acts. "No one ever painted "Put those apples in the basket and help yourself" (Byatt 1991: 178; emphasis original). The reason is that the invitation (the speech act of inviting) "help yourself, being part of real life, requires actors, human persons, to be executed (not just described) properly. We may compare the painter who uses his or her mimetic talents to represent an object on the canvas in colors and textures, to the writer who uses words to represent the same object on paper. But here the analogy stops: words can be used for everything, objects as well as acts. "[W]ords are our common currency", says Byatt (ibid.). While no

302 The pragmatic perspective painter can mimic, in painting, the act of putting apples in the basket, the writer can use the words 'Put those apples in the basket' to issue a speech act (of commanding) and, capitalizing on the appeal that is contained in those very words, immediately evoke the act. Even though a painter may be able to depict the apples so seductively that they almost cry out to be put in the basket or eaten, their 'words' are silent, their life 'still', and their very 'nature' dead.115 By contrast, a writer may 'paint' a situation in words that make us take part, 'participate', in that situation's actions: we grieve for Tatjana and Lenskij, we "despair with Mme Bovary" (Byatt ibid), we smile melancholically with Swann, living ourselves into, and acting in, the worlds of Pushkin, Flaubert, and Proust. Our words do not always and uniquely betray us, as they did St. Peter on that unfortunate occasion; indeed, our words are "common currency" in current context, guiding our acts, and only occasionally leaving us in the lurch (as they perhaps did Shakespeare's Hamlet, muttering his "words, words, words"; Hamlet Act II: ii). This being said, it behooves us to recall that words in isolation neither have a life of their own, nor are able to give life to our feelings, images, and thoughts. The life-giving word is a word that is spoken, a word that is uttered in a 'live' context. Conversely, words are only actively lifegiving and -preserving when uttered in the right spirit: the word's 'letters' (whether we take them 'literally', or as the metonymic representatives of what is appropriately called 'literature'), cannot by themselves give or preserve (or even imitate) life. Only when the poetic breath of human in-spiration brings those dead letters to life, in the context in which their words were uttered, is their true power revealed: "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life", as St. Paul, the author of many 'letters' himself and a great wordsmith, tells us (II Cor. 3: 6).

10.4.2. Acts in context Being our "common currency", the words of the language, in order to retain their value, have to respect the 'common-wealth' in which that currency has been issued and continues to circulate and be valid: viz., the social and linguistic context. To have my words pay for my communicative expenses in dealing with the world, I must remain a contributing member of my community, my context, by recognizing my social obligations and paying my speaking dues.

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The importance of the context in communicating may be illustrated by considering the phenomenon known in the field of telecommunication as 'noise'. The term was originally invented to characterize outside interference with a message coming in over a telegraph wire or a telephone line; more generally, it is now used for any communicative disturbance. Experiments have shown that people have a great deal of resistance against this kind of interference, and are able to pick out the gist of a message even in the face of persisting and overwhelming noise, not only in telecommunication, but also in regular face-to-face conversation. To explain this phenomenon, one appeals to the notion of context: if I can guess, guided by the context, what to expect as the next communicative element or move, it is easy to disregard an interfering noise and to fill in any lacunae in the flow of communication. The flip side of our 'common currency' is, of course, that people always hear what they expect to hear; in other words, in the presence of any noise, they preferably hear old, familiar input rather than new, unfamiliar one; many popular stories and jokes capitalize on this." 6 What is described here could be called 'contextual co-dependency': in the contexts of speaking, the words create the context, but vice versa, the context shapes the words. This dependency (well-known from the decoding of messages in an information processing environment) acquires a new sense in a pragmatic framework, where it helps explain how language users not only depend on the context for their verbal interaction, but that their linguistic intercourse is determined by the context in which it occurs; creating their context, they at the same time have to submit to what was earlier called 'contextual coercion' (cf. chapter 2.5.3). In the literature dealing with attempts to simulate human (inter)action on the computer, the phenomenon of contextual coercion is well-known under the name of script. A script is like a scenario for our actions (including their linguistic components); thanks to the script, we know, at any time and in any situation within the given scenario, what is expected of us and the others, as language users and (inter)actants. Vice versa, the scenario or script can be said to favor certain actions and utterances, while others are dispreferred. Here is a very simple example: When I am sitting at the bar of a restaurant, and the bar tender asks me what I ' l l have, it makes no sense (except as a somewhat forced joke) to tell him that I'd like a million dollars or a customized Bentley, or that I want Speaker Gingrich's head

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on a platter. What can be wanted in this situation, as detailed in the 'bar' (or 'restaurant') 'script' is strictly limited by, and predictable within, the scenario embodying the script. Similarly for the language that is appropriate to a certain scenario: much of it is pre-programmed in the script and as such, quite predictable.117 But it is not only the language which is pre-determined: language is always a component of a situation, that is, of some situated human action. To a certain extent, all human activities are situation-bound; this is true of the pre-established and familiar scenarios that make up much of our daily lives, but also of situations that we traditionally experience as being under the domain of our 'free will'. To the extent that our socalled independent decision-making depends on pre-established situational conditions, determining and limiting our decisions, the notion of the 'free spirit', understood as a totally independent agent, is exploded as a myth: whoever acts, must act in consonance with his or her surroundings, on the penalty of not being able to act at all. Since our surroundings are embodied in a greater societal context, the latter constitutes the very condition of use of our language. It follows that human speech acting is never an independent affair, but has to be set in a context in order to be valid, as Austin, Searle, and Grice, the three 'founding fathers' of modern pragmatic theory, have told us on many occasions.118 Contextual conditions, however, are not just a bunch of abstract constraints; they are the pragmatic circumstances under which the individual language user happens to live, and by which the 'speech actor' not only is restricted, but also aided and abetted. These circumstances may include, on the one hand, such relatively stable conditions as one's ethnic background, social status, and age bracket; certain characteristics of one's personality; one's familiarity with the language in question; and so on and so forth. On the other hand, we have the actual situation in which the acting takes place; this is always framed against the backdrop of the pre-existing conditions, so that linguistic agents are able to exploit their 'givens' to the utmost in order to improve and facilitate their acting, or (as the case may be) to make it at all possible for themselves to act. An act that is thus framed, 'set up' to be accomplished, and subsequently carried out with maximal contextual implication is called a pragmatic act. Elsewhere (Mey 1993a: 256-265), I have defined a pragmatic act as the (not necessarily or exclusively) linguistic "exercise of

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societal empowerment" of the user; typical examples include the use of advertising language and imagery, institutional language (as in the military, the church, the family, the educational setting, and so on; see Coulmas 1981), but also what are often called 'conversational routines' (as in exchanging greetings, asking for directions, establishing a telephone contact, 'small talk', and so on). One domain where pragmatic acting is especially important is the consumption of literary texts, a.k.a. reading. The way we approach a text as readers is entirely dependent on what we bring along, on the presuppositions we carry with us, either openly or hidden; the next sections will look at this in more detail. (For more on 'pragmatic acts', see Mey 1998a).

10.4.3. The pragmatics of reading 10.4.3.1. Coherence and understanding In order to understand a text, it has to be coherent, that is to say, the individual pieces composing the textual fabric must 'hang together' (in the original meaning of 'co-herent'). Coherence can be marked explicitly by morphological and syntactic techniques, or by referential devices of the kind we have discussed earlier (in which case it is often referred to by the name of 'cohesion'; see chapter 4.2.3); it can also be expressed implicitly, putting to use the semantic connections that the text exhibits (see Ehrlich 1990: 28f, 8If, following earlier work by Reinhart 1980; cf. also the important contributions by Giora 1985, 1986, 1988). Consider the following extract from a modern novel: [Antonia and Barbara, two young girls, are spending the week-end at their friend Henry Tillotson's country home with their fiances, Matthew and James. Henry's wife is bed-ridden—by preference, not necessity; a subject which creates some problems of conversational policy. The name of the Spanish house-keeper is Pilar. Henry says: ] "Filar tells me my wife's cockatoo gave you a fright.' Oh no, not at all.' 'We thought it was your wife.'

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The girls spoke together. Matthew frowned and James looked uneasy but Henry, watching the girls blush, said easily. 'There may well be a similarity; I had not thought. Actually, although I gave her the bird, they don't get on.' 'Does it always live loose?' James hoped to cover the girls' gaffe.

Annoyed at herself, Barbara avoided James' eye, drank her tea and looked at the view. 'How beautiful,' she said, 'how lovely,' ... There's a cuckoo, she said, the first I've heard this year.' They listened to the cuckoo.

Antonia searched her mind for a safe subject.

James, angry with himself for minding Barbara's studied the dogs sprawling round Henry's feet.

tactlessness,

Everyone laughed ... they stopped listening to the cuckoo. (Mary Wesley, A dubious legacy. London: Transworld Publishers 1992, pp. 47-48) The theme providing coherence in this passage is found in the unfortunate remarks about Henry's wife made by Antonia and Barbara in the beginning. The rest of the two pages describing this episode revolves around various attempts (by Henry, by James, by Barbara) to patch up the "gaffe", to divert the conversationalists' attention from the subject by introducing other topics ("safe subjects"; James' and Barbara's tack), or by directly tackling and desensitizing the issue (as Henry does in the beginning). Being competent and versatile readers (see chapter 9.1), we are supposed to know what the author means by a "safe subject", even if

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we aren't explicitly told. We similarly understand why the fact that the participants in the social scene depicted here "stopped listening to the cuckoo" indicates that the danger has been eliminated: social quiet has been reestablished, and the people give expression to their feeling of relief through laughter. We also understand James' irritation on account of "Barbara's tactlessness" and of his own subsequent clumsy attempt to mend the situation, and we identify with his efforts to distance himself mentally from the uncomfortable situation by concentrating on Henry's dogs. As competent conversationalists and readers, we know how to handle contexts like these, both in real life and in reading. This competence, however, is not exclusively predicated on the text (or, for that matter, on the situation as described in the text). To our understanding of the text, we bring a lot of common, or 'mutual', knowledge of situations like the above, and of the ways in which people steer through conversational rapids, while trying to avoid the rocks of socially unacceptable behavior or talk. All this knowledge is part of our cultural baggage; we come to the conversation table with that baggage in our social suitcases, so to speak. Gaston, the 'traveler without luggage" from Jean Anouilh's play Le Voyageitr sans bagage, (1961) is precisely a dramatic fiction because nobody, no matter how desperately he or she may wish to, can escape the balls and chains of history, language, and society. We all drag (and some throw) our social weight around; even if we are a bit overweight on our journey through the world of words and actions (cf. section 10.1.1), it is this very luggage that enables us to handle situations like the one described above. The reverse side of the medal is that we are not only enabled, but also 'set up', in precise, well-defined, but often hard to describe ways, to handle situations involving our use of language. Everybody knows from experience why family arguments (to take one example) have a tendency to become so vicious: there are certain pre-set patterns along which those fights take their course, almost by a logic of their own, apart from any common rationality, even defying any rational intervention. This logic, more often than not, defies the ordinary logic that is valid outside the family situation; sometimes it even defies our own. On the positive side, it is also this logic which enables us to 'act pragmatically', as we have seen earlier in this chapter. The following section will apply this latter concept to the activity of reading.

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10.4.3.2. Reading as a pragmatic act The notion that there is power in words, and that among our words, certain are more powerful than others is not new; in fact, it is at the basis of some very old and fundamental beliefs about language. The priests of Old India and Rome carefully guarded the verbal expressions of their ancient rituals, out of fear that mispronouncing might result in nullifying their force. Similarly Horace, the self-appointed 'priest of the Muses' (Musarum sacerdos), admonishes us: Favete linguis, 'Beware your tongues [while going about the sacred business of poetry]' (Od. Ill: i.2-3). From a more scientific angle, modern philosophers and linguists have tried to capture the notion of 'power in words' by creating the concept of 'speech act' as representative of a particular, well defined force called 'illocutionary'; that is, a force thought of as residing 'in' certain, well-defined words and 'locutions'. Examples are the force inherent in formulaic expressions such as "I pronounce thee man and wife", or in the formulas used by people in everyday language when making apologies, commitments, statements, promises, predictions, and so on, using the appropriate, recognized language for each particular purpose. Like all words, what a speech act needs, in order to be valid, is a proper context: considered or spoken by itself, no speech act makes any sense..Conversely, we have a wide variety of linguistic expressions that, given the proper context, all may serve to express the point that the speech actor is trying to make (usually called the 'illocutionary point'). I can express a promise in dozens of different ways; and even the humblest parenthetical in narrative, the inquit ('he/she said'), can be varied ad libitum, an art which our Victorian predecessors practiced with great versatility (see above, chapter 3.3.3.2). Standardized, univocal expressions are only useful in a scientific contexts such as mathematical formulas or computer commands; in everyday life, we prefer variety to uniformity. The theory of pragmatic acts takes this thinking one step further. If the context is so important for our understanding, can we then not say that it not only is an important, but the most important element of our dealings with language, and through language, with the world? After all, our linguistic acting is part of our overall human activity; we act in contexts, co-acting with other humans, in concerted co-operation, in their co-presence, and in the con-text of the world. The notion of

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'pragmatic act' does not try to do away with speech acts as such, though it highlights the fact that strictly 'as such', i.e. taken in isolation, speech acts are not valid instruments of speech. Basic to 'pragmatic acts' (as distinguished from 'speech acts') is the fact that the former (as opposed to the latter) do not so much depend on the actual words being used as on the circumstances that lead up to, and accompany, those words. The actual words are not even necessary, as seen in the pragmatic act of advertising for a particular brand of beer. A picture of a Carlsberg beer truck making its way up a road in the Grand Tetons is as much an advertisement for that beer as an explicit invitation to buy. The same goes for the famous (some would say: infamous) 'United Colors of Benetton' advertisements, in which socially sensitive issues (poverty, undernourishment, racial segregation, even AIDS) are used as backdrops for the brand name. The reason that displaying such minimally worded pictures can function as pragmatic acts of advertising is that they are 'set up' as ads by the environments in which they (usually) occur. An advertisement is what we expect to see on billboards, as displays in magazines, on posters, etc. Moreover, since the names identifying the advertised products (Carlsberg, Benetton) are known as the names of particular brands (of beer, clothing and so on), the omission of any overt messages of instruction, invitation, exhortation, admonition, etc. is warranted: given the brand name, an act of advertising is expected. Generalizing from this premise, we can further say that given the correct circumstances, pragmatic acts art pre-defined: a pragmatic act is a kind of selffulfilling promise, threat, excuse, or what have you, the exact nature of the act depending on the circumstances, the 'setting-up', that the context does for us. The next question is how to apply the concept of 'pragmatic act' in the context of reading. In the present section, I will deal with this question in a general way; the next chapter will detail the specifically textual implications of viewing reading as a pragmatic act. If it is true, as I have remarked elsewhere, that upon entering the fictional space, the readers more or less resign their autonomy and follow the instructions of its creator, the author, as the textual authority is suitably designed (Mey 1994a: 154-155), then it is also true that successful reading depends on the readers'

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willingness to accept their share of the text work, on their ability to take their proper seats in the fictional theater, to become true lectores in fabula (cf. Eco 1979). The readers' ability to do this, however, depends to a great extent on an author's ability to create this theater, to give the readers a possibility to assume their stance in the fictional space; it is in this 'setting up' of the readers that the pragmatic character of the act of reading becomes all-important. Consider the following excerpt. [Jacob Flanders, his painter friend Edward ('Ted') Cruttendon, and Jinny Carslake, an English girl who is living with the latter, are sitting at a table outside a little cafe in Versailles, having drinks.] "But he's quite different," said Jinny, folding her hands over the top of her glass. "I don't suppose you know what Ted means when he says a thing like that,' she said, looking at Jacob. "But I do. Sometimes I could kill myself. Sometimes he lies in bed all day long— just lies there ... 1 don't want you right on the table"; she waved her hands. Swollen iridescent pigeons were waddling round their feet. "Look at that woman's hat," said Cruttendon. "How do they come to think of it? ... No, Flanders, I don't think I could live like you. When one walks down that street opposite the British Museum—what's it called—that's what 1 mean. It's all like that. Those fat women—and the man standing in the middle of the road as if he were going to have a fit..." "Everybody feeds them," said Jinny, waving the pigeons away. "They're stupid old things." "Well, I don't know," said Jacob, smoking his cigarette. "There's St. Paul's." "I mean going to an office," said Cruttendon. "Hang it all," Jacob expostulated. (Virginia Woolf, Jacob 's room, Harvest ed., p. 129.)

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Reader competence, as it is commonly understood, comprises the ability to assign the correct references to such textual elements as pronouns, deictics, subjects of verbs, and so on (see chapter 2). To assist us in this activity, language provides us with certain auxiliary devices that we can draw upon for support. One of these is the existence of a 'normal' word order (subjects occur before verbs in English, adjectives before nouns, and so on); another is the fact that pronouns usually occur in close proximity to their referents. Further, we may expect a certain syntactic and semantic continuity in the text (cf. the principle of perseverance or 'obstinacy' that we discussed earlier, chapter 7.1.3). In the excerpt above, however, these grammatical and syntactic 'props' are not of much help: they are either absent or ambiguous. For example, who is Jinny talking to when she says "1 don't want you on the table"? Clearly, it cannot be Jacob, even though he is the most suitable immediately preceding candidate, grammatically and 'co-textually'. Similarly, the "them" in Jinny's next contribution to the conversation ("Everybody feeds them") cannot possibly be the head of the immediately preceding, grammatically and co-textually closest accessible noun phrase, "Those fat women...". Also, we are not in doubt as to the identity of "that woman", even though no women have been explicitly mentioned or are present (with the exception of Jinny); nor as to what Cruttendon refers to by "it", or who are meant by "they" in his remark "How do they come to think of it?" In the context, we know what to expect and what to exclude, even without the usual support of pronominal reference and anaphora. The mechanisms by which such expectations and exclusions are governed constitute what 1 call the 'setting-up' that is required as part of a pragmatic act. In our case, it is the entire pictured backdrop that functions as the set-up: a cafe in a by-street in a French provincial town, "where people sit drinking coffee, watching the soldiers, meditatively knocking ashes into trays" (ibid.}. Whoever has been in a scene like this, will also remember the ubiquitous pigeons "waddling round" the feet of the patrons, sometimes attempting to snatch a crumb of cake or a piece of bread from the tables; the town women parading the streets in impossible hats; and all the rest of a typical Sunday afternoon, French small-town scenario. It is on this scene that the actants and their speech and actions achieve meaning: the men engaged in philosophizing; the woman trying to make sense of her life and of her relationship to her lover by talking about it

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to the visitor; in between these strands of dialogue, the references to the general framework of the story, to what I call the 'backdrop', serving to set up the acts of talk. (See further chapter 11.2.2.1). The coherence of the conversation is not just a matter of thematic consistency (in fact, there is precious little ofthat, as in most conversations); in order to understand what is going on in the talk, we must take the whole scene into account. Reading this dialogue is thus possible only if we read and understand the entire scene; in fact, the dialogue would not have made any sense unless we had been 'pre-set' for the various snatches of talk by entering the scene and becoming acquainted with its different components. When the referent of "you" in Jinny's remark is formally identified as a pigeon, we as readers had already set up a 'pigeon-hole' for it in our minds. When Jinny says "them", we know what she is talking about, even before she starts "waving the pigeons away". Into the slots of our scenic understanding, the instantiating elements drop like keys into well-oiled locks. Just as speakability of utterances depends on their being assigned a proper speaking subject (see chapter 4.2), the pragmatic act of reading depends on the 'readability' of the written text, understood as its being assigned a proper reading subject. Readability implies thus an openended invitation to the reader to join the author in the co-creation of the story, by filling in the holes that the text leaves open. It is this spontaneous, mostly unconscious 'plugging' of the textual gaps that characterizes us as competent and versatile readers; this characteristic implies an obligation on the part of the author to offer us a 'pluggable', readable text. Just as the speaker's explicit verbal act in many cases is dispensable, given a sufficient backdrop and the listener's pragmatic act of understanding the unsaid, so the reader's act of understanding is not dependent on what is found in the text in so many actual words, but on the total context in which those words are found—and are found to make sense, through an active, pragmatic cooperation between author and reader.

Part Four The text

Chapter 11

The voice of the text 11.1. The pragmatics of the letter The history of writing is fascinating, not only because it shows the amazing versatility of the human mind and the variety of its expressions, but also, and mainly, because it testifies to the enduring will of the human race to go On record'. From the earliest written accounts, which were usually of a more practical nature (merchants' listings, legal ordinances, royal chronicles, and so on) to our present-day proliferation of the written media, the message is clear: humans want to remember and be remembered, and the pathway to enduring remembrance is the written word, 'the letter', as it is often called. Thus, to take one historical instance, when the Finnish tribes living on the Baltic seashore and inland were converted to Christianity sometime after the 10th century A.D., the Russian monks who did the evangelizing belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church, and had been exposed to strong Greek influence on the language of their liturgy and sacred texts. In Greek, the word for 'letters' (also meaning 'written document', especially 'Holy Scripture') is grammata, the plural of gramma 'letter'. This word became Slavicized as gramota in Old Russian, retaining the original meaning of "Holy Writ', along with more general ones such as '(the faculty of) reading and writing' or simply 'literacy' (especially in its derivative gramotnost', as in kompjuternaja gramotnost' or: 'computer literacy'). The term survived in spoken Finnish for hundreds of years, until it surfaced in a written form in the 16th and 17th centuries, with the translation of the Bible into Early Modern Finnish (the New Testament in 1548, the entire Bible a century later). The Lutheran ministers (among them the famous Agricola) who introduced the sacred texts to the people in their vernacular, adopted as their collective name raamattu, the direct Finnicized descendant of the old gramota, 'letters'. Thus, both the introduction of Christianity and its subsequent metamorphosis in the Reformation were achieved under the aegis, and by way, of 'letters'; to this day, the Finnish equivalent of 'The Bible' is Raamattu.

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It is trivially true that all written texts (not just sacred ones), at least under some aspect, consist of letters, or more generally, of ordered visual marks applied to a suitable medium. Though letter and text thus are united in a common origin, they have subsequently parted ways. While the letter was assigned the humble role of carrier of meaning, a linguistic vehicle at best, the text was experienced as that which gave meaning, 'had' meaning, in and by itself. It became customary to distinguish, with St. Paul (e.g. II Cor. 3: 6), between the 'letter' and the 'spirit' of the law, the 'letter' being considered as the mere outer manifestation of the law's real meaning or 'spirit': the deeper, hidden significance of the word of God. Still, the letter continues to command respect, even in our modern times. Referring to the texts best representing our culture, we use the term 'literary'; and when we refer to these texts as a body, or as an object of study, we speak of'literature'—that which the French, with their usual sense of the supererogatory, call les belles lettres, literally 'the beautiful letters'. While we may speculate about the hidden function of such a term (is it to mark off the distance between the noble, literary text and its humble cognate and literal common carrier, the letter?), we still unabashedly write 'letters' to our friends and family, continuing a tradition of penmanship (or 'lettermanship') that goes all the way back to the classical epoch. From a societal point of view, what is most revealing here is the interest, not to say the passion, that the letter always has commanded when it comes to reading and writing correctly. The theoretical and practical debates on matters of grammatical correctness in recent times would have been unthinkable without the assistance of the letter, as embodied in the magic of the word 'grammar' itself (literally, according to its Greek etymon, ta grammatika, 'things pertaining to letters'; cf. our adjective 'grammatical'). We need only look around us to discover that orthographic debates can be just as vicious as disputes over national territories or social protocol. And as to literacy, the art of dealing with letters, the discussions have gained new intensity by the introduction of a world-wide debate on the needs, functions, and dangers of 'computer literacy' (see Mey 1998b). In the following, I will briefly discuss these social aspects of the 'letter' from a pragmatic point of view, as a preliminary to an understanding of the role of the text in society.

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11.1.1. The tyranny of letters Most educated people will flinch at a misspelled word or expression, and willingly or unwillingly draw unfavorable conclusions about the intelligence, sometimes even the moral qualities of the wayward speller. Rationally, we know that this makes no sense: the ability to spell correctly is not an indicator of a person's IQ. Neither is the respect for correct orthographic behavior a natural property of humans: rather, it is connected with the way one was brought up, the importance accorded to spelling as a sign of scholarly proficiency, the amount of time spent in spelling bees, or the attitude of teachers who preferred cut-and-dried, easy to evaluate, external criteria of scholastic progression to fuzzy, content- and person-oriented evaluations. Not long ago, a prominent U.S. politician was publicly ridiculed for not being able to spell the plural of 'potato' correctly, and it is rumored that the persistent negative side-effects of this public gaffe were instrumental in terminating Dan Quayle's political career (for whatever it had been worth) in late 1994, when the Indiana politician decided not to enter the upcoming 1996 presidential race. We may either smile or frown (depending on our temperament) at such excesses, especially when they result in nation-wide strife and discord, as in the Norwegian 'textbook war' of the 'fifties and early 'sixties, when well-meaning, linguistically conservative parents purged their children's schoolbooks of unwanted orthographies and hideous Optional forms'—some gallant hotspurs even 'correcting' the spelling of the country's name (on some stamps and on the new fifty kroner bills) from the odious nynorsk 'NOREG' to the traditional form 'NORGE'. Still, it would be brash to dismiss these phenomena as mere silly excrescences on the life of language. The true issue is: Why are people willing to put so much time and emotional energy into fighting what in reality, and at most, are minor divergences on the letter level, a change in a couple of consonants or vowels? The explanation for this curious phenomenon is to be sought in the pragmatics of orthography, by which seemingly innocent spelling variants become emblematic for a person's or a group's allegiance to some higher ideals or values; we are faced with yet another instance of attitude I have discussed elsewhere under the heading of the Biblical term shibboleth (Mey 1995d).119 This particular kind of emblem, moreover,

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has the advantage of being easier to recognize and harder to defeat than most other marks signifying one's belonging to a particular class or group. Spelling is the language user's 'written accent': just as dialectal speech can be devastating in certain (mostly official) surroundings and block one's worldly progress, so one's inability to handle matters of spelling can prove to be a major stumbling stone on one's way to the good life. Thus, the ability to correctly deal with orthography has not only become the hallmark of education, but in addition a prerequisite to furthering one's career. But why, one could ask, do people inveigh with such force and venom against orthographic wrongdoers, as one may witness regularly in the 'Letters to the Editor' columns of our daily newspapers? The reason is not that breaking the rules of grammar, such as those determining the correct plural forms of 'learned' loan-words (we should write prospectus, not *prospecti; criteria, not *criterii or *criterias, and so on), in itself jeopardizes any higher societal values. That reason is found on a much deeper level, viz., there where society's hidden divisions are defined, but never made manifest. Whereas we officially proclaim our adherence to value-free educational standards and verbally dissociate ourselves from class-determined prejudice, to the point of openly denying any affiliation with linguistic or other kinds of racism, our 'hidden agenda' says differently. The 'proper' use of language (including the ability to spell correctly) are class-dependent notions, defined in terms of, and on the conditions set by, users belonging to the higher strata of society (see Mey 1985: chapter 3). In all this, there is an element of great historical irony. It consists in the fact that in earlier times, a notion such as that of an orthographic standard seemed to be non-existent in many cultures, without any damage being done to the literary life of the community. English poets such as Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, as well as a host of 'literati' of other times and cultures weren't able to spell correctly, according to present-day standards. But in those days, since nobody cared about the abundance of 'alternative' spellings, that didn't seem to matter. Or consider the fact that two great literary communities, Ancient Greece and Rome, peacefully co-existed in the same geo-cultural space of the Mediterranean for hundreds of years, despite their completely different attitudes towards uniform, linguistic standards: while every Greek writer had his own dialect, or nearly, Latin authors wrote much the same all over; yet, neither can lay claim to being the better of the

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two solely on account of their respective spelling practices.120 From a communication-oriented point of view, it doesn't really matter if the message is a bit garbled, as long as it comes through. Not until the societal engine started gearing up to its present level of universal and wholesale competition (from the mid-nineteenth century onwards), did the schools become oriented towards mass education; at the same time, teachers were ordered to introduce and practice new criteria for proficiency and 'educated-ness' in order to provide society with new and better instruments of sorting people for the expanding job market. From being an asset in its own right, education became a societal 'plus-value', to be sought after for the commodities it could get you, not for the values it had in itself. (See Luke et al. 1990: 28ff.) This process of 'commodifying education' adopted as its ultimate touchstone of educational valorization the ready-to-hand 'exchange value' of the correct placement of certain letters. No longer is there any need to study the classics or devote time to profound studies of worthwhile subjects. Instead, what is wanted is 'edufication', defined as: a quick and ready certification of having been 'educated', that is, of having passed through the obligatory processes of educational socialization, leading one into one's proper place in society. With an expression borrowed from Wolfgang F. Haug (1984), one could say that the ''commodity esthetics" of language is reflected, first of all, in the way it is spelled. When education becomes a commodity, orthography gets to be its price tag. At the level of orthography, the pragmatics of 'letters' is associated with a certain 'indexical' function, defined as a function that refers to a particular "context of occurrence'" (Silverstein 1993: 36; see further below, section 11.2.3). In the case at hand, the 'index' assigns values that are outside the realm of the text and as such have no direct connection with what the text, including its letters, signifies. In its most primitive form, this function is at work in the magical attribution of certain powers to specific letters or combinations of letters as, e.g., observed in Talmudic speculations about the name of God, or the conscious avoidance by the Biblical traditionalists of the 'Tetragram' for 'God': YHWH, replacing it by the less 'loaded' word Adonai 'Lord' (alternatively, keeping the original consonants while replacing its vowels by those of the latter word, 'Yah weh' becoming 'Yehovah'). The use of magical formulas, mantras, and other verbal wands is as old as human language itself. The magician or priest is most effective,

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when he is able to invent new letters or quote foreign, unknown words, having unsuspected and therefore more effective properties. Similarly, the poet officiating as "priest of the Muses" not only casts himself as the guardian of tongues, as we have seen (section 10.4.3.2), but in addition, he suggests words to his audience "which hitherto have not been heard" (carmina non prius audita; Horace, Od. III.1: 1-4; Wickham ed. p. [36]). The indexical properties of these collocations of letters are codified as magic powers inherent in single occurrences (of letters or words); the following sections will reveal the existence of an even greater reliance (albeit unconscious, for the most part) on this 'magic' in collective occurrences of use: the art of'writing letters', in the double sense of this construction.

11.1.2. On writing letters In a primitive sort of way, languages are (sets of) collocations of letters, usually called texts. When we determine some scratchings on a rock in the desert or in the jungle to have been caused by natural factors like erosion or water seepage, we judge them as being of limited interest to the explorer of human prehistory or the linguist; however, when we discover a regularity in those markings, our first thought is that they may represent some primitive human culture, either as ornamental figures or as inscriptions in some (possibly unknown) language. Once we have made this assumption, the placement together of those marks no longer appears to be random. Instead, we discover that their simultaneous occurrence is informed by a higher principle of meaning; in other words, we realize that they are letters, collocated with the purpose of making up meaningful sequences: texts, maybe even 'letters'. Although letters do occur among the early forms of writing in many languages (thus, the earliest documented occurrences of Old Russian are in the form of letters written on the bark of birch trees in the region of Novgorod in the 10th century A.D.), most of the earliest extant monuments are not 'letters' proper, but legal or commercial inscriptions in stone, on clay tablets, on bone or metal objects, etc. The absence of original, true 'letters' from the earliest times may be explained by the fact that for letter-writing, less expensive (and hence often less durable) materials were used, such as palm leaves, treated animal hides, wax tablets, and later even paper. The latter was the product of an Egyptian

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invention that turned papyrus grass into the stuff that subsequently was to replace most other writing materials, and which (despite its limited physical durability) has shown a considerable resilience to replacement, most recently in the face of computer-inspired pipe-dreams of the 'paperless office'—in reality, offices have never been more paperflooded than since the advent of the machines. The difference in status between the singular letter, occurring individually, and its more sociable plural, keeping company (as letters or 'letters') with numerous other individuals of the same kind, has in some languages given rise to a difference in meaning between the two forms. The Latin word for 'letter' shows this contrast, as we may see from the form litterae, technically the plural of littera 'letter', but better known as naming the collocations of letters we send to each other on pieces of paper enclosed in envelopes, i.e. 'letters', in the more pregnant sense of the word. (Compare the Finnish word for 'Bible', Raamattu, whose etymological ancestor likewise was an originally Greek, adapted Russian plural gramota "letters", as explained above, section 11.1). Letters represent more than just people's individual efforts to get in touch with distant friends. Early in the history of our civilization, letterwriting became an art and was recognized as such. In addition, there also was already then an element of politics in this noble art, to be perfectioned much later by the great letter-writers of the French 17th and 18th centuries such as Mme de Lafayette or Mme de Stae'l, who in their turn were (god-)mothers to the art of the political treatise in letter-form and the roman a lettres, so popular during that same period and the times immediately following it; the names of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Choderlos de Laclos, Richardson, Goethe, and their likes come to mind. In letters, various "voices* may be heard. Since individual letters serve primarily to express a particular person's thoughts and feelings, they usually have only one voice, the sender's (represented by a first person singular; occasionally, as in the case of royalty or collective bodies, a first person plural). In contrast, letters written by politicians and other public figures are usually many-voiced: the T-voice in Cicero's letters represents both the man, the public orator, the would-be philosopher, and the politician. In the same vein, Horace's Epistulae indicate already by their form (they are written in hexametric verse) that they are not regular letters to a particular, really existing friend or business associate; and—even though they usually contain an overt addressee (named Lollius, Roscius, Albius, Claudius, Vinius and so on) and are styled in

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the first person singular—their evident purpose is to discourse intelligently about the state of the world, current affairs, love, money, and so on. Voice-wise, Horace's 'epistles' are every bit as complex as any narrative text: they are interspersed with personal remembrances, dialogue, anecdotes, local tidbits of information, and sometimes downright adulatory passages, usually directed at rich or powerful addressees like Maecenas, or 'Caesar' (/. e. the emperor Octavianus Augustus). At other times, they take the form of treatises; thus, the famous Ars poetica is written in letter form, and—just like much of Horace's other work— retains a voice of its own, combined with a flavor of what one could call 'pseudo-addressivity' (cf. the amid, 'friends', apostrophized in the first five lines). 121 It is perhaps not without deeper meaning that letters such as Horace's should be known by their Greek name, epistulae, rather than by the original Latin designation, litterae. The art of writing this kind of letters came into being in the Greek-dominated greater cultural sphere of the Mediterranean (which, for the greater part, overlapped with the Romancontrolled physical space, though it was not coterminous or identical with it). The written word was virtually the only reliable form of communication in that period; letters were the 'long distance calls' of the classical era. As oral messages could get distorted, their carriers be killed or bought off, or simply made to disappear, there never were any guarantees for an oral message's authenticity; writing letters was thus a necessary activity for anybody who wanted to address a greater audience in a larger space. Also, the author of the letter usually was aware that (just like in a certain modern form of Christmas letter writing, or when posting messages to the internet) the 'literary' product was likely (or even destined) to go the rounds and be divulged to others than the original addressees. Still, it would be wrong to consider these letters' extended audience as simply analogous to some set of fictive ('virtual') mailbox addresses, used in a bulk mailing based on the 'pseudo-addressivity' that I mentioned earlier. Rather, we should understand this kind of letter-writing as being informed by a 'super-addressive' quality: the addressees are present in virtual reality, as a collective 'super-addressee' in the sense of Bakhtin (see above, chapter 10.1). A famous case in point are the letters written by St. Paul to the various newly-converted Christian communities in the cities that he had visited and ministered to: the Corinthians, the Ephesians, the Philippians, the

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Colossians, the people of Thessalonica and Rome, as well as those collectively referred to as 'Galatians' or 'Hebrews'; in addition, there are letters to friends and collaborators: Timothy, Titus, Philemon. Again, the voice of these texts is unmistakably Paul's (with the possible exception, already noted by St. Jerome, of the letter to the 'Hebrews'); however, the addressees are not just the people of the 'parishes' to which the letters were directed. Paul addresses his faithful in his quality of apostle (albeit the lesser one among their number, as he remarks himself; I Cor. 15: 9). Thus, he removes his correspondents from their limited level of addressability to the higher forum of "all the churches" and, in fact, of history. Thus, the circumstance that these writings were incorporated into the Christian canon of Holy Writ does not just reflect a smart move on the part of some Church Fathers purporting to cloak these pieces of sacred literature in a more authoritative garb: it primarily reflects the fact that the voice heard is not just Paul the man's, but Paul the authority's, the voice of one who has seen and knows, and bears testimony to what he has perceived as the truth. In terms of the title of our chapter, 'The voice of the text', this translates as: the voice of these letters is the voice of an addresser who demands the addressee's engagement in the act of writing and insists on "the addressee's actively responsive understanding" (Bakhtin 1994a:97). Also here, however, the letter cannot become alive unless touched by the spirit. Being in origin an "intimate style", as Bakhtin says, letters, as a "secondary genre of complex cultural [including, as in the case of St. Paul, religious] communication ... play out various forms of primary speech communication" (Bakhtin ibid.), including the revelatory moments of divine inspiration or confrontation which the apostle experienced on the road to Damascus (Acts 9: 3-8). Just as it happens in the case of the "primary communication" between a speaker (an author) and his audience (present or distant), in St. Paul's case, the intended communication of these moments by pastoral letter, and the ensuing engagement in communion by the addressees "depend on a certain sense and understanding of the addressee ... on the part of the speaker [and I add: the writer]"; the active response that is essential to the addressee's understanding "is anticipated by the speaker [and I add: the writer]." (Bakhtin 1994a: 97-98; italics original). In this sense, one could say that the pastoral letters initiated by St. Paul, and continued in the Ecclesiastical tradition down to our own

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times, mark the beginning of the later so popular, political-educational as well as vaguely religious, literary genre that reached its apogee in Europe at the time of the Enlightenment, with the all-purpose, generalaudience 'letters' by writers such as Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire as their culmination. As a speech genre of the secondary kind (in the Bakhtinian sense), the letter transcends the limitations of the singular, at the same time that it elevates the plural to a higher order of communication. Letters are always more than just letters; an observation we will see confirmed in the next section.

11.1.3. The spirit of the other Among the interesting properties, that characterize the particular style of the genre of collocations of letters simply called 'letters' are, first and foremost, an incredible versatility and variation in orchestrating the heteroglossia, or Other-voicedness', that Bakhtin considers as typical for cerain kinds of literary production. The letter, by its very nature, is an instance of addressivity and addressability; the letter writer addresses his or her correspondent and in so doing, anticipates the other's active reply, to which the original writer in turn prepares a possible response, and so on and so forth, in a true dialogic interchange of voices, based on "the correspondents' sensed presence of each other" (Morson & Emerson 1990: 156). In this way, a potential multiplicity of levels of reference and indexicality is created, each with its proper voice (see above, chapter 5.4.3); in this way, too, one understands why the letter and its literary counterparts and successors, the 'epistle' and the epistolary novel, are named among the various embryonic forms of literary production that Bakhtin identified as "orchestrating] meaning by means of [the variety of voices named] heteroglossia" (1992b: 371). In addition to its etymological claim to fame, the letter is not only one of our oldest forms of'lettering', that is, ways of using letters; its venerable status is due to its being part of what we in our daily lives, without much reflection, call 'literature'; etymology and reality join hands here. The letter's rise to general, literary status is matched by its related elevation to the high platform of'Letters'—in the sense in which this term was used until recently, viz., to distinguish the theoretically oriented humanistic disciplines of the traditional university's Faculty of 'Arts

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and Letters' from the more practical disciplines of the modern university, as embodied in its College of 'Arts and Sciences'. Among these 'Letters', by nature as well as in actual fact of history, the study of what we call literature has been, and is still, one of the paramount disciplines. If I am allowed, in the spirit of this chapter and in the tradition of Bakhtinian scholarship, to define literature as a 'universe of voices', then this universe is distinguished from the 'universe of things' by the very fact of authorship. Taken by themselves, things have no voice; the Great Book of Nature, to recall that venerable metaphor, is silent as long as there are no people around to interpret it and give it a voice. At the same time, the inhabitants of this voicing paradise are no authorial Adams or Eves: from the very beginning of literature, other voices are heard besides the authors', initiating and continuing the perpetual literary dialogue. But how to define, and recognize, such voices as authentic dialogic participants? All dialogue represents a discourse. That is to say, dialogue happens between interacting voices whose cooperation is constructed on the basis of a societal frame. Vice versa, dialogic cooperation is material in constructing and re-constructing the discourses that support it; this dialectic aspect of dialogue will be further elaborated in the sections to follow. The voices of the dialogue are not heard in a void, but in an interactive space, that is, a space in which action and interaction happen. Voicing, being a dialectic process, has both an active and an inter-active aspect: voices may be produced, created by authorial decree, but only on the condition of being recognized, co-created by an active reader's acceptance. The interactive space, therefore, is not exclusively defined by the actors, by their voices and activities. The speakability, or readability, of a particular voice (or constellation of voices), defined earlier (chapter 4.1) as the primary characteristic of literary production, is a matter of negotiation and cooperation between author and reader: the authoritative fiat of the Creation is contingent upon the readerly fiat mihi of the Annunciation, as we have seen in chapter 9.2.2. The various instances of clashing voices that were discussed in chapter 7.2 bear witness to the dangers inherent in disregarding this basic principle. Moreover, in order to cooperate in dialogue, the participants must have a "common ground" (Talbot 1995: 63), or at least be able to construct one; the voices they assume, the persons they represent, are not

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freely invented or defined ad libitum, but belong to a common 'universe of voices'. It is this latter constraint that restricts 'poetic license', usually thought of as a special authorial prerogative in the creation of the literary work, the author 'voicing' the narrative solely by virtue of a superior imagination and a singular narrative talent. Furthermore, this common universe of voices, the textual scene on which literary dramaturgy is exercised, is itself part of a greater scene. Authors and readers create the context in which voices can be heard—a context, however, which is not limited to the immediate co-text of the current enactment. Thus, the concept introduced by Bakhtin as the true hallmark of novelistic prose,122 'heteroglossia' or Other-voicedness' (raznorecie), is Other' also in the sense that the voices involved underlie an external authority: they are non-autonomous. "The speaker is not Adam", says Bakhtin (1994a: 69); in the Paradise of letters, other voices are heard and have to be taken into consideration, too. Due to the heteroglossic determination of our literary activity, the literary Adams and Eves live under restrictions that are formulated by previous, other presences and already existing, other voices. Our entire creative activity is thus an embodiment of objective otherness: Other' in the sense that its "object has already been articulated, disputed, elucidated, and evaluated in various ways." (Bakhtin ibid.) Reiterating his point that "[t]he speaker is not the Biblical Adam," and staying within this preferred metaphor, Bakhtin maintains that the speaker is not "dealing only with virgin and still unnamed objects, giving them names for the first time" (1994a: 93). The very existence of pre-existing names for these objects reveals the presence of other voices and creates a potential for voice clashes; the textual interruptions caused by these clashes suggest that there is more to the text than meets the eyes and ears of authors, listeners, and readers. The next sections will go into more detail as regards the dialectics of this paradox.

11.2. The dialectics of voicing In chapter 5, we discussed how 'voicing', the process of assigning a voice to a character in a novel or play, happens in collaboration between author and reader. Voice 'clashes' were seen (in chapter 7.2) as mostly due to breakdowns in that collaboration, with voices getting out of control and confusion resulting. In the present section, this loss of textual

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control will be examined from the point of view of the dialectics of text production and consumption. The final section of the chapter will look at the collaboration between author and reader in the perspective of a larger framework, that of societal hegemony and autonomy; the 'clashing voices' will be reconsidered in relation to the power structures that characterize our societal relationships.

11.2.1. Authorship and textual control We usually consider the author to be in control of the text. That means that he or she is the sovereign ruler of the 'fictional space' (Scholes 1982) or 'chorema' (French choreme; Brandt's term, 1992) that the text embodies. Inside that space, voices are assigned in accordance with the ruler's whims and wishes, without appeal to a higher court. The simple rule seems to be: If you don't like my space, get out of my fiction! However, the actual situation is maybe not all that simple. Most of the time, readers don't deal with authors up front, but only indirectly, through the characters. Readers are intrigued, persuaded, seduced, bothered, flattered, irritated, and so on by the characters and their voices; we rarely think of the author in this connection (except when he or she chooses to show up in the fictional space by 'authorial intrusion' or 'invasion'; see above, chapter 7.2.3.1). It is as if the author were hiding behind the characters, letting them speak in their Own' voices (but assigned to them by authorial decree) and allowing them to pursue their Own" lives (but within the space designated for them by the author). The popular belief, adhered to even by many authors, according to which the characters assume an existence of their own, and even tell the author what their next move is supposed to be, incorporates this myth and elevates it to the level of quasi-reality, as when the playwright Luigi Pirandello, in a celebrated ploy, lets his characters wander across an empty scene "in search of an author" (1921). The illusion of a relationship of independence, or even conflict, between the text's producer and his or her products, the characters, is made possible by the very fact that the characters are not created out of nothingness, ex nihilo, but within a very determined social and societally-given framework. The fictional working-space, the 'chorema', is "stabilized around an actant or a happening" (Brandt 1992: 248);123 however, the actants or happenings themselves are never pure 'fiction'.

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Despite all the disclaimers that novelists indulge in to protect themselves from possible libel litigation, characters are for real—otherwise, why would an author bother to make all those protestations? The societal framework that makes and breaks the text also decides on its fate and on that of its protagonists. Even if the author "holds us by the hand and we follow wherever she takes us", as literary critic Kate Kellaway (The Observer) has it, on the back cover of a novel by Mary Wesley (1994), the space where we can go is well-defined and rather limited. The author's 'hegemony' (as etymologically implied in the metaphors of'leading' and its correlate, 'following') is similarly a limited and well-defined one, to be exercised under conditions that are not subject to the author's free choice only. Bakhtin, in his semi-aphoristic essay 'The problem of the text in linguistics, philology, and the human sciences', remarks on the 'dialogic' relationship between the author and the reader as developing "on the boundary between two consciousnesses, two subjects'" (1994b: 106; italics original). The 'second consciousness', "the consciousness of the perceiver" (ibid.: 107) interacts, dialogizes, with the 'first consciousness', that of the author's, in a dialectic relationship: "dialogue and dialectics", as Bakthin remarks in his lapidary fashion (ibid.: 105; also 1994c: 147). Unpacking Bakhtin's expression, we can say that these dialectics are those of the context, that is, of the space in which the dialogue takes place and is made possible: the text's dialectics are acted out in the dialogue taking place in what we called (following Brandt) the 'chorema'. Within this chorema, the voice of the text is heard bouncing off, and interacting with, the limits of the contextual space. In the following, I will show how the dialectic dialogue between author and reader is manifested in this textual voice.

11.2,2. 'Pre-set' discourse 'Pre-set discourse' is the expression that the translators of Voloshinov's Marxism and the philosophy of language provide for the Russian term podgotovlennaja rec' (1973: 136). In their discussion of this notion, Morson & Emerson (1990: 329) draw our attention to the fact that Bakhtin, in his speculations about the dialectics of the text, was heavily influenced by Voloshinov's thinking, and that the term 'pre-set' reflects

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the Other-voicedness' or 'heteroglossia' that Bakhtin considers to be an essential characteristic of novelistic discourse (see the previous section and above, chapter 6.2). A more precise and telling translation of the Russian term should perhaps reflect the notion of 'pre-paredness' that is inherent in this word (as when we talk about 'preparing food'), and in particular place emphasis on the 'pre-paration' by the author. In this line of thinking, Morson & Emerson (ibid.]6S) suggest to translate podgotovlennyj as 'prepared-for; one is reminded of what in Czech grocery parlance are called polotovary, that is, the 'half-baked' foodstuffs that one used to buy in special stores in semi-cooked form to take home and finish. Such culinary allusions apart, the term 'pre-set', as I will use it here, refers to the fact that the text is not a neutral packaging material, destined to convey some author's meaning. The voice of the text, in doing the reporting, silently conveys to us (some of) what is reported, but without really seeming to do so: the reporting voice of the text is hidden in the preparation of what has gone into the report, of what is reported. One of the best examples I know of this 'pre-setting' of discourse is Virginia Woolf s novel Jacob 's Room. The author paints a young man's short life in arrangements of pre-set details, a series of impressionistic vignettes, as one could call them. The hero flits into the scene and out again, against the background of the context: the beaches and country houses of Cornwall, the colleges of Cambridge, the landscapes and cities of France, Italy, and Greece, and of course, first of all the salons, tea-rooms, and artists' studios of London, including Jacob's rented quarters in Hammersmith. 'Jacob's room', to which the novel owes its name, is the book's eponymous protagonist: it is not just a contextual prop, but the generalized chorema of the story itself. Being more than a simple stage backdrop, 'Jacob's room' allows Woolf to describe Jacob's life by reference to the places he has been, the traces he has left behind, the people he has known, in short, by the imprint he has left on his surroundings. Jacob's Room is a novel by proxy: we never see Jacob directly but, borrowing Morgan Forster's apt simile (quoted on the back of my paperback edition) to describe this ''new type of fiction", Jacob "swims into view" and out again, only restrained by his own metonymical space, his 'room'. Jacob's Room is about, but also is, 'Jacob's room': the quintessential chorema, the contextual space against which Jacob's existence is

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evoked. This is what I meant above when I said that this novel's discourse is 'pre-set', in the sense defined by Voloshinov. Jacob 's Room is not only set in its proper surroundings, as are most novels; here, it is the pre-set surroundings that determine the narration. The textual echoes of Jacob Allan Flanders' discourse, of his 'life and times', are bounced off from these pre-set, con-temporary and col-locational, contextual boundaries. From the first scene of the book, in which his mother's worried voice exclaims "Where is that tiresome little boy?" to its last page, where Betty Flanders asks Jacob's friend Robert Bonamy what to do with his old shoes ("What am I to do with these Mr. Bonamy?"—the book's final utterance), the figure of Jacob emerges through the voice of the text, in dialectic interaction with the surrounding context. Strictly speaking, we never see Jacob: he is visible only through what he leaves behind: a sheep's jaw on a beach, a pile of silver coins on a mantelpiece, a pair of old shoes in his bedroom. But conversely, the 'props' that make up the surroundings of the novel, as summarized in 'Jacob's room', are themselves only indicated in the sketchiest of ways, being barely sufficient to set the reader's imagination in motion. The backdrop receives its meaning from the actors' presence, just as in the case of the Pirandello play. Setting and pre-setting jointly constitute this dialectic process: the text voices Jacob and Jacob voices the text. Jacob is Jacob's Room, and Jacob's room is Jacob. Consider the following excerpt: The fire burnt clear between two pillars of greenish marble, and on the mantelpiece there was a green clock guarded by Britannia leaning on her spear. As for pictures—a maiden in a large hat offered roses over the garden gate to a gentleman in eighteenth-century costume. A mastiff lay extended against a battered door. The lower panes of the windows were of ground glass, and the curtains, accurately looped, were of plush and green too. Laurette and Jacob sat with their toes in the fender side by side, in two large chairs covered in green plush. Laurette's skirts were short, her legs long, thin, and transparently covered. Her fingers stroked her ankles. "It isn't exactly that I don't understand them," she was saying thoughtfully. "I must go and try again."

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"What time will you be there?" said Jacob. She shrugged her shoulders. "To-morrow?" No, not to-morrow. "This weather makes me long for the country," she said, looking over her shoulder at the back view oftall houses through the window. "I wish you'd been with me on Saturday," said Jacob. "1 used to ride," she said. She got up gracefully, calmly. She smiled at him. As she shut the door he put so many shillings on the mantelpiece. Altogether a most reasonable conversation; a most respectable room; an intelligent girl. Only Madame herself seeing Jacob out had about her that leer, that lewdness, that quake of the surface (visible in the eyes chiefly) which threatens to spill the whole bag of ordure, with difficulty held together, over the pavement. In short, something was wrong. (Virginia Woolf, Jacob 's Room, Harvest ed., pp. 104-105). This extract is typically one of the "vignettes' (as I suggest to call them), used by the author to construct the novel's discourse. In this 'minichorema', the text's voice sounds off the diverse protrusions and facets of its surface, thus guiding actors and readers towards an understanding that they would never have achieved by conventional means. Thus, there are no referential ties that could establish the actants' identity in any of the normal ways, using the techniques of pronominal reference or anaphora discussed in chapters 3.1 and 3.2; for instance, we are not told who are "them", where is "there", what happened on "Saturday", or for that matter, who this "intelligent girl" is supposed to be, introduced by her first name, but never spoken of again in the entire novel. But if we listen to the voice of the text, we may begin to have some

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inkling of an understanding: of "Madame" as the epitome of "lewdness", of the carefully kept-up appearances ("a most respectable room"), of a relationship which remains entirely on the surface of graceful smiles and "a most reasonable conversation", but in the end betrays itself by the "so many" (shall we say 30?) pieces of silver that Jacob deposits on leaving. The message that "something was wrong" (however one chooses to interpret this phrase) comes through loud and clear; however, its announcer is not the author, nor any of the persons in the text, but (exclusively and elusively) the voice of the text itself.

11.2.3. The 'Uncle Charles principle' In the previous section, I borrowed Kellaway's metaphor of an author holding the reader by the hand and taking him wherever she wants him to go. There is, of course, a certain duplicity involved here: literary seduction, like its counterpart in the real world, is always based on what Bakthin has called heteroglossia, in particular the phenomenon of 'double-voicedness'. 124 The Byrons and Pushkins of literature, just like the Don Juans and Onegins of their fictive universes, are professionally obliged to speak in two voices: one is that of the homo- or heterodiegetic narrator (see chapter 4.3), the author/storyteller preparing the ground for the reader's seduction; the other is the voice of the character^) through which the actual seduction of the reader is achieved. It is important that authors do not collapse these two voices, on the penalty of having their whole narrative enterprise founder. This is why the appearance viva voce of the person of the author on the scene usually is a risky business: unpleasant voice clashes may occur, as we have seen in chapter 7.2.3. But there are ways in which authors can manipulate their readers without having to stick their necks out; using their split-tongue privileges, they can choose to let the characters do the dirty work, or even leave it to the voice of the text to tell or imply what they, as narrators, shrink back from enunciating. While the previous section concentrated on the 'pre-sef features of narrative discourse as ways of achieving this aim, I will now consider another 'heteroglossic' device that is in frequent use in fictional prose, viz., the technique sometimes referred to under the name of the 'Uncle Charles Principle', which was already briefly mentioned in chapter 7.2.2.

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One way of characterizing this 'principle' is as a voice clash that isn't. In its original formulation, the principle derives from a twentyyear old dispute between two critics, Wyndham Lewis and Hugh Kenner, on the interpretation of a sentence found in Joyce's Portrait of the artist as a young man (1916): "Uncle Charles repaired to the outhouse".125 The sentence ridicules the character Uncle Charles' way of expressing himself in pompous and usually inappropriate language, by parodying his speech. Rather than merely stating, in neutral terms, that Uncle Charles went to the outhouse, the narrator is heard as appropriating, so to speak, the voice of the character—much as if we were given to understand that this is the way Uncle Charles would have spoken himself, had he told us about his upcoming errand to the outhouse. Instead of barging onto the scene in full authorial invasion, the narrator surreptitiously enters from behind, creeping up on one of his characters, as it were. By itself, an invasive move of this kind creates a potential clash of voices, as we have seen earlier; however, by insinuating himself into the character's voice, the narrator manages to hide behind that character and avoid the threatening clash. It is a typical case of making a point without really trying, or even appearing to try. Monika Fludernik has noted that the technique represented by the Uncle Charles principle abounds in nineteenth century English novelistic prose; the same has also been noticed by Bakhtin, who speaks about the ''infection" that occurs when a narrator "appropriates a] figural idiom" belonging to a character (Fludernik 1993: 333). In Bakhtin's own words, the speech of another is introduced into the author's discourse (the story) in concealed form, that is, without any of the formal markers usually accompanying such speech, whether direct or indirect. (1992a: 303; original emphasis). Bakhtin illustrates his point by quoting and analyzing some lengthy passages from Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit (ibid,: 303-308). Also in modern writing, the technique (sometimes used unconsciously by authors, one has reason to believe) is far from uncommon, as the following Byatt quote may show. [Ralph Faber, the Cambridge don upon which the novel's heroine Frederica in vain tries to foist her frustrated love, is finishing a lee-

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ture by quoting Mallarme (in French; hence the "bouquets" in the quote below)]. He allowed himself this one moment of rhetoric, a magician conjuring in the empty air what was not there, a word, a thing, absent from all bouquets. She was to discover that he always allowed himself this one last moment, and that its words were invariably not his own. He made them a little bow, gathered his gown about him, and neatly absented himself. (A.S. Byatt, SW//£//έ?, ρ. 218). As in the original 'Uncle Charles' case, quoted above, the "neatness" of Raphael's departure, evoked in the last sentence of the excerpt, matches the somewhat elaborate and precious wording that we associate with his figure. Byatt's choice of the expression "absented himself is congruous with this actor's appearance and self-presentation throughout the book. Her wording, though not borrowed directly from the character's discourse, is still 'infected' by it, just as the use of the word "bouquet" in the same passage invokes a typical poetic discourse of the kind we associate with the author Mallarme, who is thus 'doubly' quoted.126 Here are some further instances, this time found in that treasure-trove of all literary analysts, Virginia Woolf s novel Mrs. Dalloway: [Sir William Bradshaw, a distinguished Harley Street specialist on nervous disorders, has been talking to Septimus Warren Smith's wife about assigning her husband, who has shown "serious symptoms" of mental illness, to a "delightful home down in the country". Septimus has been awaiting the verdict in the next room.] So they returned to the most exalted of mankind; the criminal who faced his judges; the victim exposed on the heights; the fugitive; the drowned sailor; the poet of the immortal ode; the Lord who had gone from life to death; to Septimus Warren Smith, who sat in the arm-chair under the skylight staring at a photograph of Lady Bradshaw in Court dress, muttering messages about beauty. (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Harvest ed., 1981, pp. 96-97). [1925]

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In this passage, we are introduced to Septimus' state of mind, while he is awaiting the outcome of the "little talk" that his wife and the eminent physician are having about his future. The language that is used here is not Septimus' own, in the sense that he actually should have been thinking of himself in those terms while sitting "in the arm-chair under the skylight" in the doctor's office. Yet, the words are redolent of Septimus' sad, guilt-ridden state, and recall important happenings in his earlier life, some of which are to do with his war-time experiences and which have come back to haunt him after his return from the front, keeping him mentally shut off from the world as a "fugitive" and a "victim". Also, the "immortal ode" refers to Septimus' youthful infatuation with an English teacher; the "criminal who faces his judges" alludes to his feelings of not having been able to prevent his best friend's death in the last days of the war. The "Lord who has gone from life to death" (a "common delusion", says Dr. Bradshaw; ibid. p. 99) recalls the typical 'high' end of the manic depressive syndrome that Septimus is suffering from, as does the description of Septimus as "the most exalted of mankind"; and so on. In all this descriptive vocabulary, the voice is not Septimus', but the narrator's; however, by 'borrowing into' Septimus' life story and its tragic events, the narrator manages to have us look at the world from Septimus' point of view, a world in which silent delusions alternate with lightning verbal and practical insights, as in: "One of Holmes's homes?' sneered Septimus" ('Holmes' being the incompetent GP who had referred him to the high-powered buffoon in Harley Street); or in: "The upkeep ofthat motor car must cost him quite a lot, said Septimus when they got out into the street" (Septimus is referring to the "low, powerful, grey" vehicle, "with plain initials interlocked on the panel", waiting outside the doctor's house; ibid. pp. 97-98). The 'infection' mentioned above is also rampant in the following passage from the same work: [T]here was in Sir William, who had never had time for reading, a grudge, deeply buried, against cultivated people who came into his room and intimated that doctors, whose profession is a constant strain upon all the highest faculties, are not educated men. (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Harvest ed., 1981, p. 97).

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Here, we are introduced to Sir William Bradshaw, the physician, as seen by himself: a view grounded in self-pity mingled with professional pride, the whole reinforced by a humble social origin (Sir William "being the son of a shopkeeper"; ibid. p. 95). In this fragment, one looks in vain for any direct or indirect discourse that could be attributed to the noble doctor; its utterances and thoughts are not associated by the narrative with Sir William in any way, direct or indirect: on the contrary, the suggestive utterings ('intimations') are said to be those of the "cultivated people" entering his rooms. However, the discourse is certainly in keeping with Sir William's image of himself as the hard-working man who has no time for reading and suchlike frills, whose whole life is dedicated to the well-being of others; but also of a man who under the right circumstances, such as the conferring of a professional honor or the occasion of a significant birthday, certainly would not object to being eulogized by his peers using this kind of verbiage (compare a similar wording, found on the preceding page: "the stream of patients being so incessant, the responsibilities and privileges of his profession so onerous"). While Sir William is not quoted, the narrator lets the wording of the narrative be inspired by, or in Bakhtin's terms, be 'infected' with, the worthy knight's discourse.

11.3. Hegemony and autonomy: A responsible voice Both 'pre-set discourse' and the narrative technique embodied in the 'Uncle Charles Principle' are typically authorial ways of voicing the text. That is, they are initiated and offered to the reader by the author, whose job it is to construct and maintain the textual space, the 'chorema', in which the action and its participants are found. However, we have also seen how in the construction and maintenance of this space, the clever author/narrator manages to step aside, leaving the action to the characters; the latter thus seem to operate on their own premises and according to their own choices—sometimes contrary to the author's wishes, if we are to believe what some authors tell us. The voice of the author/narrator thus skillfully blends into the voice of the text and mingles with the different voices of the inhabitants of the fictional space; this creates the internal coherence and the uniform, smooth outward appearance that seem to be characteristic of good story-telling. A critical analysis, however, reveals many oppositions and conflicts

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simmering beneath this quiet surface. The very existence of 'heteroglossia' and its concomitant phenomena, as defined by Bakhtin and discussed in the preceding sections, may be taken as prima facie evidence of such conflicts: we have seen voices clash and run astray, sometimes to go nowhere; authors have been observed entering the fictional scene in order to sort things out and tell the reader where the plot is going, to insert instructions how to deal with particularly wayward characters, or to comment on important issues of a general nature. An 'authorial invasion 1 or 'intrusion' can be very direct, as when the author addresses the readership, explaining why she or he had to make certain choices, leave out some material and include other (as is done frequently by A.S. Byatt in her novels). Sometimes an author will start a debate with her readers, as does Jane Austen in her page-long oratio pro domo at the beginning of Northanger Abbey, where she passionately argues for 'novelists' rights': i.e. the right of a writer of novels to be recognized as a competent and respectable author. 127 The voice of the author is also heard in what I will refer to as cases of 'author's distancing' or even 'authorial retraction', in which an author ironically distances him- or herself from the voice of the text; at other times even takes back what had been said earlier. An example of the latter is found in the earlier (chapter 6.1.2) quoted passage from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, where the author, having relayed part of a long interior monologue by Konstantin Levin, suddenly tells us that "All this, of course, Levin did not think" (IV: xvii; 1962 ed. p. 190). In contrast, irony is predominant in the example quoted by Bakhtin from Pushkin's Evgenij Onegin, where the Byronesque wisdom of Onegin, that "Muscovite in a Childe Harold's cloak", as the poet calls him, suddenly is punctured by the author's ironic comments taking over the textual voice: He who has lived and thought can never Look on mankind without disdain He who has felt is haunted ever By days that will not come again; No more for him enchantment's semblance, On him the serpent of remembrance

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Feeds, and remorse corrodes his heart. All this is likely to impart An added charm to conversation. (Evgenij Onegin I.xlvi: 8-9; quoted in translation after Bakhtin 1992b: 44-45; italics mine): Even without the added italics, the competent reader (cf. chapter 9.1.2) understands the last two lines of the stanza as spoken in another 'voice': that of the author appearing on the scene, as it were, and providing us with a reflection on what just has been said, alternatively, with a 'direction for reading' of the bathetic and slightly pompous effusions of the novel's title hero. While the Pushkin quotation shows us an author who is patently 'personifying' the textual voice, other writers user more subtle means of letting their voices take over. For such an indirect 'impersonation' of the textual voice, consider a poem such as Podgwiazdami ('Under the stars') by the Pole Julian Tuwim (1896-1954), in which the author unexpectedly punctures the idyll that he had started to paint of the simple life in the countryside: the white house with the green shutters, the blue wisteria covering the windows, the two chestnut trees in the yard, and so on, by secretly appropriating the voice of the text in referring to himself as "a city slicker in a rural cover" (mieszczuch w wiejskimfuterale, from the collection Siowa w krwi ('Words in blood') [1926]; Tuwim 1955a: 304-305). At other times, authors may be found out to be "manipulating their audiences" (Scholes 1982) by foisting a (real or presumed) dialect upon their characters. Language's 'indexicality' (Silverstein 1993; see below) is thus put to work through the use of the voice of the text, in an indirect attribution to characters of social origin or a particular set of (desirable or undesirable) features (see chapter 6.2.3). Other techniques comprise the use of irony, parody, and other textual tricks, including the ones that I singled out for discussion earlier: the 'pre-setting' of discourse, and the use of what Voloshinov (1973) calls '(reciprocal) infectiousness' (see the discussion of the 'Uncle Charles Principle' in the previous section).

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However, leaving all this text work to be done exclusively by the author (oftest in the guise of, and speaking through, a narrator) would be to seriously diminish the importance of the reader's role, as many critics have observed (e.g. Eco 1979). To understand this role properly, we have to situate the reader's autonomous position within the generally accepted overall hegemony of authorship, and ask ourselves the double question: What is it in the text's voice that specifically addresses the reader? And conversely, in what sense (besides being a general precondition to an author's survival) can we say that readers make their own, indispensable contribution to the textual work? According to Silverstein, a text may be considered as an ensemble of indexical expressions, each referring to and connotating a "context of occurrence", for which such expressions are said to be "appropriate and effective" (1993: 36). To be appropriate, expressions must represent some valid presuppositions about the world, specifically about the world of the text; the author's job consists in furnishing those presuppositions, either directly or indirectly. Furthermore, as Talbot has remarked, "[presuppositions are a way of setting up shared assumptions and experiences as common ground" (1995: 63). Hence it is mainly the author who sets up this "common ground" as the frame in which the story is supposed to unfold; the reader is only passively involved here. On the other side, there is the matter of effect. For a narrative to be effective, the reader must not only accept the appropriateness of a context of occurrence and its presuppositions, but actively identify with the latter, and pursue their consequences (their 'entailments'). Doing this, the reader steps into the picture, as it were, and becomes part of the action. Rather than slavishly incorporating the presuppositions given by the narrative, by simply * presupposing' that things are the way the author/narrator tells us, readers need to actively create that something extra which makes the story work: viz., a sense of responsibility for the text. To use Talbot's expression (1995: 69), the reader is made "responsible"; the question is: what does this responsibility entail, and how is it assumed and exercised? In most modern texts, direct ways of addressing the readership and reminding them of their responsibilities are rare. This is in contrast to the explicit addressive formulas that are well-known from earlier periods (apostrophes of the type 'dear reader' or 'gentle soul'; see the examples provided in chapter 7.2.3.1). If such reader apostrophizing is found in modern texts at all, an overt destination is usually omitted: it is

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almost as if we were overhearing a rhetorical question asked of no one in particular, the answer being provided by the author. In the following extract from Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse, the threatening decay of the Ramsay cottage is prefaced by a couple of questions that can have no other addressee than the (not-mentioned) reader, and which are vaguely 'answered' by an implicit, authorial voice: What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature? Mrs. McNab's dream of a lady, of a child, of a plate of milk soup? It has wavered over the walls like a spot of sunlight and vanished. (To the Lighthouse, Harvest ed., p. 138). Here, Woolf is asking the readership to provide a solution to her problem: nature's insensibility, and even suggests some possibilities for the readers to consider; however, she does not do this in any overt way, by addressing potential or actual readers directly. At other times, authors' efforts to include the readership in the narrative housekeeping and make them perform their readerly chores are better concealed, even to the point of verging on the manipulatory. I am thinking of all those cases in which the readers are 'taken in' by allusions to certain institutions, customs, common interests, shared likes and dislikes, and so on. As an instance, take the 'pragmatic acts', discussed earlier (chapter 10.4.3.2). There, we saw how an act of advertising may be executed with the least possible effort on the advertiser's part, as the whole work of making a certain text-cum-picture into a true advertisement is left to the reader. It is the reader who knows what to do on seeing a picture of a certain commodity (a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, a case of Carlsberg beer) displayed on TV or on a billboard— even where (as in the case of the smoking material) the effect of the act is overtly (if only seemingly) preempted by other textual voices, belonging to the "U.S. Surgeon General", the "Hong Kong Government", a Dutch "Royal Decree", or other authorities, warning us not to buy those advertised cigarettes, as they are extremely dangerous to our health, cause cancer and heart disease, may shorten our lives, are a threat to pregnant women, and so on. Similarly, when an official notice in Lake Poinset, Ark., State Park asks visitors to "respect the environment", or when a South Evanston,

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III., houseowner complains to a newspaper reporter that "the neighborhood is going down the drain" (my italics in both cases), there is never any doubt as to whose environment or whose neighborhood is intended. By saying "the" environment, I implicitly refer to the environment that you and I are supposed to respect, to "our" environment; "the" neighborhood is synonymous with "the place where people like you and I live, and have been living peacefully for all those years—now look who's moving in next door...". It is incumbent upon the reader or hearer to make that inference, to actively complete the entailment(s) contained in the respective expansions of the text. The same goes for expressions such as 'the family dog', 'the government, 'the law', or (in upper case) 'The Law'—actually a somewhat dated way of referring to what used to be called 'your friendly local police', a term that finds itself being rapidly replaced by the current Our (or: Austin's, Branford's, Evanston's,...) Finest'; and so on. Other instances of reader (or listener) manipulation use personal pronouns, certain deictic expressions, and elliptical phrases with understood subject, such as are frequently found in populist or demagogic political discourse of the type 'We don't...' ("We don't like your kind") or 'We won't ...' ("Hell, no, we won't go", repeated across dozens of U.S. campuses as a response to Lyndon B. Johnson's escalation of the Viet Nam war in the late 'sixties). Political slogans often fall into this category, cf. slogans such as "I/we like Ike", or "[We want/Let's give him] "Four more years"; from the second Reagan Presidential campaign in 1988). Political 'hate letters' in particular capitalize on this kind of reader manipulation; as an example, compare the following extract of an anonymous letter sent to Mr. Aslam Ahsan, a Pakistani worker in Norway, who used to organize a Christmas party every year for lonely senior citizens in the Oslo area. (His advertisement had appeared in Norway's largest newspaper, the politically center-right Aftenposten). Her far du din smiskeannonse i Aftenposten i retur. Dette gj0r oss nordmenn bade kvalm og sint. Falskheten din overgär del norske folks for stand. ... Men den gar bare ikke. Vi har avslort bade deg og andre overivrige talsmennfor innvandrere her i landet.

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Vi anbefaler at du heller konsentrerer deg om alle dine kriminelle landsmenn her i Oslo ... [V]i gir oss ikke for soppelet er ute av landet, inkludert deg, ... [Vi] häper du far en svart jul, en kaldjul, og ikke minst en hateful [sic] jul. Det norskefolk hater dere alle. ('Here is your lackey ad in Aftenposten back. This gets us Norwegians both nauseated and angry. Your duplicity goes beyond what the Norwegian people can understand. ... But you won't succeed. We have unmasked both you and other over-zealous immigrant lovers in this country.

We recommend that you preferably focus your interest on all those criminal compatriots of yours here in Oslo. ... We won't stop before the garbage is out of the country, and that includes you, ... We wish you a black Christmas, a cold Christmas, and not least a hateful Christmas. The Norwegian people hate all of you.') (Arbeiderbladet (center-left), Oslo, December 22, 1995, p. 4; my translation). What this letter tries to do, using the exclusive pronoun "we" (that is, including people like me, the sender, and my potential readers, but excluding you, the immediate addressee) is to establish a faked identity between the author and his readership-at-large. Like the instances of w above, the hate letter tries to make the audience confirm what is being said in their names and in the name of "the Norwegian people". Being thus invited (or rather, forced) 'into' the text, the non-hating readers (just like Arbeiderbladet's commentator in the accompanying leader) have no choice but to distance themselves forcefully and explicitly from the presuppositions that the textual voice wants them to endorse—but they do this on the likewise presupposed penalty of removing themselves from their own people in whose name this hate is marshaled. Still, they will take this chance in the expectation that the silent major-

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ity of Norwegians will not identify with the imbecile reasoning behind this letter and its puerile wording ("lackey letter", "garbage"', "a black Christmas", and so on). To see how the manipulation of the readership by means of devices like these is able to ensure a progressively greater identification with the voice of the text, consider the following passage from a contemporary literary work. Charles Darwin, it appears, tried not to personify the force that chooses egg-cell and sperm, embryo and offspring, mate and victim, not to use of it verbs of conscious intention, as / have just used 'choose' in order not to write 'select'. Language is against us. The classic novel would have taken man and woman to the marriage ceremony or ... to the lifting of the silk nightshift and the entry between the bed curtains. We now go beyond and beyond, novelists and moralists both. But where do we stop thinking, about chance and choice, force and freedom? ... We can resist personifying sperm or compulsive force, against the grain of the language we have. But we cannot resist the connecting and comparing habits of the mind. A.S. Byatt, Still Life, p. 253 (italics added) In this extract, the author shifts from the overt and strictly personal (first person singular) metastatement-cum-justification ("I have just used ...") to a more insidious use of the first person plural, initially probably limited to "us", that is to say, "We ... novelists and moralists" (to the exclusion of the readers), but in the end comprising a full-fledged inclusion of the readership in the statements initially delivered on behalf of the author and her literary colleagues; similarly, the text following the above excerpt continues, for another half page or so, the author's inclusive first person plural musings about what "we" now can see on television about the inner workings of the human reproductive organs. Some further illustrative examples (mainly from 19th century novelistic prose) are provided by Talbot (1995: 68ff). Through questions and answers, through the use of pronouns (such as the above-mentioned 'exclusive' and 'inclusive' first persons plural, or the 'reminder' deictic that, discussed earlier; see chapter 3.1), and especially through the 'setting up' of the reader by way of the presuppositions introduced or announced by the textual voice (Talbot mentions "cultural and psycho-

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logical knowledge" (ibid.: 70), but of course there is much more), the reader is tempted to borrow into the voice of the text, and thus becomes a textual and authorial 'accomplice'. The salient feature of these 'text voicings' is not so much the author's activity in setting up the proper textual presuppositions as it is the reader's executing and following up on them. Every 'setting up' must be accompanied by a 'taking up'; the latter is the reader's exclusive responsibility. I will give two examples here, one from a nineteenth century novel, George Eliot's Middlemarch; the other from a contemporary text, Jay Mclnerney's Brightness falls. Here is first the Eliot extract.128 ... k Yes,' said Mr. Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of the voice which makes the word half a negative. (George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1974 ed. p. 194 [1872]) The author's use of the word 'that' in the above quote is a clear instance of'reminder deixis' (Gundel et al. 1993). It is a way of activating the reader's consciousness, an admonition to go and search his or her stock of experiences and to come up with an affirmation: 'Yes, we know what you mean; go on.' This 'go ahead' that the active reader 'utters', upon executing the effects of the presupposition introduced by the use of the reminder deictic, is a necessary condition for the success of the narration. The Eliot example is also quoted by Bakhtin (1984) in a context where he stresses the fact that an utterance must have an author, just as it must have a listener. This author is not necessarily, let alone exclusively, the 'sender' of the message, as it began to be called in the days when wire transfer technology 'informed' our thinking on communication; neither is the author restricted to what we usually call the 'author' of a text. Rather, we are dealing with an 'authorial instance', with what 1 have called the voice of the text, considered from its receptive end. In Bakhtin's words, it is "the creator of the utterance whose position it [the utterance] expresses" (1984: 184). Morson and Emerson (1990: 133), commenting on this passage, remark that "... when we respond to an utterance, when we treat it as an utterance, we are necessarily positing an author, even if there really is

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no author" or when the author is hidden behind (or inside) the voice of the text. In my terminology, this can be formulated as: the narrative text must have an active listener, a reader, who at the same time is an 'author', i.e. identifies with the voice of the text, or even"endows it [the text] with a 'voice'" (Morson & Emerson ibid.). We conclude that the 'listener' (or reader) is at the same time an author; the two being instances of "the two consciousnesses, the two subjects" that Bakhtin elsewhere stipulates as characteristic and essential for the textual event to happen: ... the meeting of two texts—of the ready-made and the creative text being created and, consequently, the meeting of two subjects and two authors. (1994b: 106-107). And Bakhtin goes on to stress the necessity of assuming that the creative process also happens in the second subject, the reader: " The text is not a thing, and therefore the second consciousness, the consciousness of the perceiver [the reader—JM] can in no way be eliminated or neutralized, (ibid.: 107). Our next example shows a similar reader/listener agreement, this time occurring in an explicit form, like the open-curtain applause in an opera hall, or the kakegoe in the Japanese playhouse called 'kabuki-za\ ]2g [Russell Galloway is having lunch with Jeff, his brother-in-law, who also is an author of sorts. Jeff speaks.] "... I have trouble reading these days. ... It all seems so inauthentic, and I don't just mean the bad stuff. The artifice of sitting down, the way language implicates you in the lie right off. 'April is the cruelest month.' Yeah? Bullshit. How about February? but once you start, you're inside the thing: the rhetoric has you, do you know what I mean?" He picked up a lamb chop by the bone and shook it three times in Russell's direction like a baton. "Actually, I haven't got a fucking clue." "1 once heard a story about a lecture by J.L. Austin," he said, after

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he'd dropped the chop back on his plate and wiped his hands. "The language philosopher. Austin was speaking somewhere, yammering away and then he says, 'It is interesting to note that while in most languages two negatives make a positive, it is never the case that two positives make a negative.' And then, from the very back of the room, this guy says, in a sneering tone, 'Yeah, yeah.' I'm with him—I'm with that guy. I say,yeah, yeah." (Jay Mclnerney, Brightness falls. New York: Vintage. 1993, p. 108.) This extract is especially interesting because the cooperation of the reader is presupposed on three levels: first, there is the presupposition of agreement implied in the repeated you's of the first paragraph; with the exception of the last occurrence, these serve much the same function as the 'inclusive' we discussed above, viz., that of implying the audience as an accomplice to the act of speaking. (The you in Jeffs question "do you know what I mean?" at the end of the paragraph is clearly different: this represents an 'addressive' act, directed at Russell, not at the readership). Next, there is the level of telling the story-inside-the-story, the anecdote about J.L. Austin; this narrative has its own presuppositions, not all of them neutral: the expression "Austin was ... yammering away" reflects the implicit contempt that Jeff, the story-teller, has for philosophers like Austin. By using this expression, Jeff is (likewise implicitly) trying to involve the reader in his act of contempt, in the same way that he earlier tried to 'set up' the reader by the use of you. But there is an even deeper level within the story, viz., that of the talk itself by J.L. Austin. Here, too, the process of'proselytizing-by-presupposition' is running full force. Austin, in his lecture, expects the listeners to agree with what he says, and to collaborate with him in confirming his presupposition of the "interestingness" of his observation (and, by implication, of its noteworthiness, truth, and so on). Austin does indeed obtain this collaboration from one of his listeners, who spontaneously offers an instance supposedly confirming the "interesting" hypothesis, by uttering the two 'positives' "Yeah, yeah." However, the collaboration is immediately undone on the next level down, where the affirmatives and their implicit presuppositions are negated by the "sneering tone" in which this utterance is produced. At the bottom level of the narrative, this negative presupposition is then con-

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firmed by Jeffs continued adherence to his (earlier professed) nihilistic attitudes towards language and its (meta-)practitioners, and by his declared solidarity with people like the heckler, who stick to language as it is used (and misused) in real life ("I'm with him—I'm with that guy"). By this final, wrap-up doxology-cum-invocation ("I say, yeah, yeah.""}, the reader is invited to cooperate with Jeff by saying 'Amen' on all three presuppositional levels. As we see from these cases, readers and listeners are made responsible for what is going on in the text; they are being asked to confirm what the voice of the text utters. By getting involved in dialogic interaction with that voice and its author (however implicitly, and on whatever level), they are sucked into the dialectic process of narrative creation. Once more, we are confronted with "dialogue and dialectics"—which is Bakhtin's (1994b: 104) aphoristic way of stating the ultimate essence of the fictional text, making it 'speakable'. It is this speakable text which will be the topic of the next and final chapter.

Chapter 12

The speakable text In the previous chapters, I have been busy pulling threads out of the textual carpet, in order to examine and classify them by their different strength, length, color, and quality of material. In this analysis, I had to unravel the text's structure, in the process perhaps even disfiguring its appearance. Dissolving the connective fabric of a coherent body may seem tantamount to its destruction, or 'un-doing', as the very meaning of the word 'ana-lyze' seems to imply. Now, at the end of my study, I will gather, in a final chapter, those various threads in a comprehensive characteristic of the text as a fabric woven out of many different strands, a carpet made up of knots of conflicting tendencies, linguistic, literary, and pragmatic. However, I will not try to merely put the text together again in a clumsy patch-and-darn operation; rather, I will try to specify the mechanics of our Humpty Dumpty's undoing, and show how textual 'ana-lysis', that is, the study of the rents and holes and bare patches in the surface of the text, can be sublimated in a true textual 'syn-thesis', that is, the text's gathering, its col-location, on the level ground where it safely belongs: the textual situation, seen as the text's total, societal context. It is this societal 'anchoring' of the text (cf. chapter 3.3.1, and pace Carlota Smith; 1994: 171, whose term I'm appropriating here) that I will explore in the following pages.

12.1. Dialogue, text, and sex The problem of interpreting and understanding a text can be approached from two angles: one is the point of view of the text itself, the other that of the context. As a textual problem, the question is one of interpretation: given a particular piece of text, what meaning can I attach to its (uttered or written) words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters? As a problem of context, the question may be formulated as: How could this piece of text (these words, phrases, etc.) be produced the way it (they) did?

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The two approaches are not exclusive: they complement each other, since after all, every context is itself some kind of text, and every text is a context for something else. Still, there is a decisive difference between the two approaches in that the one solidly bases itself on what, by most linguists and other text workers, is recognized as 'admissible' evidence: the text as text, while the other approach is relegated by most professional (hard-core) linguists to the 'softer' sciences of sociology and psychology, sciences that are often said to be lacking in rigorous scientific methodology, besides treating of matter that is usually disqualified as being 'extralinguistic', that is, having nothing to do with language as an object of study. Leaving those interdisciplinary quibbles behind, we must ask ourselves the crucial question: What is more important for the understanding of a text—the punctual, static meaning that one can attach to its individual elements, or the actual, dynamic meaning that results from the conditions under which the text is produced and consumed? Again, Bakhtin leads the way. According to him, a text is not just a piece of language tied together by the cohesive strings of grammar, but a coherent, organic fabric resulting from the concerted interaction of human linguistic competence and the societal forces. Texts are, in the broadest sense of the word, dialogic, that is to say, they are created and 'up-taken' in a dialogue between the text producer and the surrounding world, the latter including the text consumer and his or her context. 1 am taking the term 'dialogic* here in the sense which Bakhtin himself used it in his work of the late 'twenties to describe the "openended dialogue of life''. 130 Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue, a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of life, into the world symposium. (1984:293) I will take Bakhtin's notion of'dialogue' as the text, the various voices that are heard do now the narrator, now the main protagonist, What makes the text into a text, that is, a

emblematic for our text. In not just occur side-by-side: now the author, and so on. piece of the world, of the

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"open-ended dialogue of life", is that it addresses us, the readers, and inserts us into the dialogic fabric of the novel, understood as part of life, part of our world "symposium". The readership is captivated by the text: readers invest their "entire self in discourse", entering into a dialogue with the text, and through the text, with the world. This is, too, what people do when they enter the 'fictional space' and participate in the novelistic life on stage; we say readers 'embrace' a novel, 'identify' with a particular hero or heroine in a story. And they don't do this as passive spectators, but as active participants, with their "whole body and deeds", as Bakhtin says. A particularly gripping illustration of this 'entering' and 'participating' is found in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, in the scene in which Anna, on the way back from Moscow to St. Petersburg after the ball and her spectacular dance with Vronskij, is sitting in her train compartment with an English novel, and finds her thoughts slipping, from the text she is reading, to her own, actual situation. This slipping is not simply a matter of Anna being preoccupied, having her thoughts elsewhere; rather, it is her presence in the fictional space of the novel that forces Anna into dialoguing with her own self, with her "inner voice", on the theme presupposed by, and in part along the lines sketched out in, the novel she is reading (which, by the way, remains unnamed). [The text below picks up from the excerpt cited above, in chapter 5.] Ona [Anna] ostavila knigu i otkinulas' na spinku kresla, krepko szav v obeix rukax razreznoj nozik. Ona perebrala vse svoi moskovskie vospominanija. Stydnogo nicego ne bylo. Vse byli xorosie, prijatnye. Vspomnila bal, vspomnila Vronskogo i ego vljublennoe pokornoe lico, vspomnila vse svoi otnosenija s nim: nicego ne bylo stydnogo. A vmeste s tern na etom samom meste vospominanij cuvstvo styda usilivalos', kak budto kakoj-to vnutrennij golos imenno tut, kogda ona vspomnila o Vronskom, govoril ej: "Teplo, öcen' teplo, gorjaco". "Nit cto ze? — skazala ona sehe resitel'no, peresazivajas' v kresle. — Cto ze eto znacit? Razveja bojus' vzgljanut'prjamo na eto? Nu cto ze? Neuzeli mezdu moj i etim oftcerom-mal 'cikom suscestvujut i mogut suscestvovat' kakie-nibud' drugie otnosenija, krome tex, cto byvajut s kazdym znakomym?" Ona prezritel'no usmexnulas' i opjat' vzjalas' za knigu, no uze resitel 'no ne mogla ponimat' logo, cto citala. Ona

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provela razreznym nozom po steklu, potom prilozila ego gladkuju i xolodnuju poverxnost' k sceke i cut' vslux ne zasmejalas' ot radosti, vdrug bezpricino ovladevsej eju. ('She put the book away and sat back against the chair, holding the paper cutter firmly in both hands. There was nothing to be ashamed of. She went through all her memories from Moscow. They were all nice and pleasant. She recalled the dance, she recalled Vronskij and his tender loving face, she recalled every detail in her relationship with him: there was nothing shameful in any ofthat. But at the same time, at exactly the same spot in her remembering, a feeling of shame made itself strongly felt; as if an inner voice, precisely whenever her thoughts went back to Vronskij, told her: "Hot, very hot, burning". "So what of it? — she said to herself peremptorily, sitting up in her chair.— What on earth does this mean? Am I perhaps afraid to look this thing straight in the face? Then what of it? How should there be, how could there be, between me and this stripling officer, any other relations than I would have with any normal acquaintance?" She let out a contemptuous laugh and went back to her book, but this time she was totally unable to concentrate on her reading. She took the paper cutter and drew a line on the window pane, then put its smooth, cool surface to her cheek and could barely refrain from bursting out in cries of joy — a joy that, coming from nowhere, suddenly engulfed her/) (L.N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, I: xxix, 1962 ed., p. 114; my translation) In the passage following the above extract, Anna's emotions culminate in a near-hallucinatory state of euphoria. At the end of the chapter, in a climax to the sequence of high-strung emotions described here, she ends up finding herself on the station platform of 'Bologov' (actually called Bologoe), where her famous, and fatal, encounter with Vronskij is about to happen in the novel's next chapter. Anna's reading of her trashy novel is "set up', as 1 called it in chapter 11.2.2, by the actual context of her life, by the circumstances in which she finds herself after the initial meeting with her future lover. Dialoguing with the text, Anna is engaged in a pragmatic ad of reading, as detailed earlier (chapter 10.4.3.2). This is most clearly seen

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in the passage above where Anna, as reader, actually is engaged in a well-known parlor game with the 'instance of the text' (to paraphrase Lacan) impersonating as an "inner voice" telling Anna that she is getting "[h]ot, very hot, burning", ever closer to discovering the true nature of her confused state of mind and lack of concentration: she is in love. This discovery as such is, of course, not a result of the act of reading taken by itself. Still, the text, in its dialogic foreplay with Anna as reader, does lead up to the real thing: textual seduction leading to sexual stand-by. Anna's hidden emotions and her still implicit recognition of her true feelings are lying in waiting just outside her novel's fictional perimeter. As soon as Anna puts the book away and leaves this fictional space, having metaphorically cut her textual ties by "drawing a line" on the compartment window with her symbolic 'text cutter', the paperknife, she also physically crosses a symbolic threshold by leaving the compartment and the train itself. Once out in the real world, in "the open-ended dialogue of life", Anna exchanges her fictional space for real space, text for sex. It is in this space, physically realized as the storm-blown, snow-covered railway platform at Bologoe, that she again meets Vronskij, with the well-known consequences that form the backbone of the dramatic plot for which Tolstoy's novel is justly famous. The implicit mental acts of which Anna formally had acquitted herself in the beginning of the excerpt, are now anchored firmly in their explicit, contextual ground. In retrospect, these acts can be reinterpreted and revalorized as unconscious performances, dress rehearsals for the real acts. The missing link in between is in the crucial textual dialoguing that I have analyzed above and called the pragmatic act of reading.

12.2. Linguistics and metalinguisties In order to understand a text, it is not enough to analyze it according to the laws and precepts of linguistics. For instance, a textual interpretation of the kind I have offered in the previous section transcends linguistics, understood as the science of language as practiced by its specialists, the linguists. Rather, it is a metalinguistic interpretation, in the sense introduced by Bakhtin as: encompassing the life and history of a speech community, with an orientation

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toward a ... study of large events (events that take many centuries to accomplish) in the speech life of the people ... [and] embody changes in various cultures and ages. (1994c: 133) It would be wrong, however, to believe that Bakhtin's metalinguistics is exclusively historically oriented. The "large events" that Bakhtin mentions, are happenings that have resulted in present-day conditions, and still loom large even in our own, contemporary situation. As far as language is concerned, the diversity of human speech reflects "... the diversity of social experience, conceptualizations, and values", as Morson and Emerson perceptively remark, paraphrasing Bakhtin; which is why "language is always languages" (1990: 140). It is against this backdrop of a larger context of languages that the individual use of language has to be seen. Bakhtin's metalinguistics is thus not only coterminous with that I call pragmatics, taken as the ensemble of user conditions reflected in the different languages that make up language; metalinguistics, in this practice-oriented application of the term, is pragmatics, defined as "the study of the conditions of human language uses as these are determined by the context of society" (Mey 1993a:45). The double approach to narrative interpretation: textual vs. contextual, that I introduced in the preceding section can now be further elucidated by saying that in studying the text, we are looking for metalinguistic clues, i.e. language indicators that reveal a real or fictional context: the linguistic facts that uncover metalinguistic,pragmatic acts. According to Bakhtin, the linguistic and the metalinguistic stand in a dialectic opposition; to capture this dialectic movement, he introduces a pair of concepts: centripetal vs. centrifugal. The first is used to characterize a centralizing tendency, dominant in linguistics, to deal exclusively with a 'unitary' language, conceived of as the abstract system (Saussure's langue) which linguists consider to be the only proper object of their studies. Counter to this runs another, centrifugal, tendency, that of metalinguistics (or pragmatics, in the sense in which I have defined it above), which sees language as part of a larger whole into which its energy continually expands, and against which its light is refracted, like the colors of the rainbow against the skies (see Bakhtin 1992a: 299-300; cf. below, footnote 133).

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In this 'decentralized' view of language, there is room not only for the study of language-as-such (Saussure's langue), but also for an occupation with the different, heteroglot languages (the Saussurean paroles), the socio-ideological languages of social groups, 'professional' and 'generic' [that is, related to 'genre'-JM] languages, languages of generations and so forth. (Bakhtin 1992a: 272). However, the ways of studying this heteroglossia, those "socioideological languages" and dialects, and especially the motivation to busy oneself with such varieties, are vastly different among the different schools of linguists. Structuralist linguists, from Saussure and Sapir to Bloomfield and Labov, have done their best to legitimize, and make respectable, the different paroles by joining them up with langue. In the best of intentions, they have told us that dialects and non-standard forms of speech are the conceptual and formal equals of the official languages obeying the normative standards for 'correct' speech. And, in what currently would be greeted as a 'politically correct' move, they have been telling the Otherwise privileged' speakers of minority languages and oppressed varieties not to feel bad about speaking a dialect; to the linguist, any language is just as beautiful as any other. Sapir's often quoted remark about "the Macedonian swineherd and the head-hunting savage of Assam", who, linguistically speaking, walk with Plato and Confucius (1949: 219), is matched by Labov's defense of the Black English Vernacular as a regulated variety of the standard language, with its own claim to status and respect (Labov 1963, 1977). In the light of Bakhtin's division, such studies represent an "exclusive orientation towards unity" (1992a: 274), a majority's desire to rope in the minorities. The guardians of speech, the linguists, wanting to control the 'centrifugal" tendencies of parole, have normalized the "actual heteroglossia and multi-languagedness" of people's speech (Bakhtin ibid.) in order to reestablish the 'centripetal' primacy of langue, the norm. The centripetal and centrifugal tendencies are emblematic for the split between linguistics and the literary sciences (especially stylistics and rhetoric)—a split to which, furthermore, these tendencies have greatly contributed. Linguists operate ceniripetally: they will look at a

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particular language event (a word, an utterance, a text) from the point of view of the system, and try to connect this piece of language to the 'center', where grammatical and other linguistic rules will assign it its proper place in the overall scheme of language. For instance, as a linguist I may analyze a word's phonemic build-up, interpreting it in accordance with what I know about the sound system of the language to which the word belongs. Alternatively, I can determine the word's syntactic function, and thus refer it to its proper place in the structure of the language. When it comes to analyzing meaning, I may give the word a semantic interpretation, thereby placing it in the systematic collection of such interpretations, called the "lexicon'; based on that lexical interpretation, I will try to make sense of the word's occurrence in the text. The centripetal descriptive tradition, to which the procedures outlined here belong, is essentially oriented towards an understanding of linguistic science based on the notions of'unit' or 'component': one has to operate either within a phonological unit or component, or a syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic one (cf. Mey 1993a: ch. 4). For instance, when it comes to determining a word's reference, the first thing to do is to establish its 'center' by asking: Who or what does the word refer to semantically; in other words, what is its denotation? Subsequently (but still staying close to the 'center'), one may probe into the indirect references that the word evokes, its so-called connotation. Further expanding the range of distinctive features characterizing a particular word or expression (as different from other words or expressions), I may want not only to consider its referring, but also its indexing potential; the latter comprises all the signifying functions that a word or expression can fulfill beyond mere referentiality, such as code changing, rendering a particular value of social distance or closeness, connoting one's belonging to a particular circle of language users, and so on (we have seen an instance of the latter in the case of General Serpuxovskoj in Tolstoy'syiww Karenina, discussed in chapter 10.3.1). This indexicality (Silverstein 1993) is a particular contextual function assigned (just like referential ity) to the individual textual expression in the centripetal tradition established by Jakobson in his famous 'sixties semiotic-linguistic manifesto (1960: 350-373). In the centripetal conception outlined here, referential ity and indexicality are centered around the unitary occurrence of a word or expression: Given this linguistic item, what can it tell us about the

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context in which it occurs, about the world? However, this is not the only way of looking at the problem—and probably not even the most fruitful one. Another approach would be to place the focus of attention away from the unitary occurrence, moving away from the 'center' (to stay with our metaphor), and ask: Given this particular context of occurrence, and given this word, phrase, etc. occurring in it, what questions can be asked, what explanations offered? The most encompassing and important question to ask, of course, would be: How can this particular expression we're analyzing occur at this particular point in the narration? In the latter notional framework (which 1 will call, with Bakthin, a centrifugal one), rather than asking which rules trigger the occurrence of a linguistic item (as is standard method in grammars of all kinds), we ask ourselves what constraints determine its possibility of occurrence— constraints here understood as the general conditions that (negatively) limit and restrict, and (positively) prompt and reinforce an item's possibility of occurrence (Mey 1991). Rather than building up the context on the basis of what can occur at the individual points in the text, we start out from the actually occurring context as a whole, letting the individual parts of the text "swim into vision' as we change our focus and setting. 131 Native users of language "do not apply rules; they enter the stream of communication'' (Morson & Emerson 1990: 145); they do this, of course, with all due respect for the conditions and precautions surrounding their entry, bearing in mind (in the spirit of Heraclitus) that such entries are non-repeatable: singular, individual, and non-systematic; in short, 'centrifugal'. The reason is that [people who] talk and write, use the resources of language to accomplish something. Rather than decode, they understand and respond. (Morson & Emerson ibid.). Language use is always dialogic; vice versa, "[t]he dialogic relationships among texts and within the text [are] by their nature not linguistic. Dialogue and dialectics." (Bakhtin 1994b: 105; emphasis added). People's use of language belongs in the metalinguistic domain of dialogue, not in the linguistic domain of grammar and rules. The paradox of language use is that it, strictly speaking, is not linguistic. The next section will expand on this theme.

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12.3. Dialogue and dialectics 12.3.1. Contact and context Roman Jakobson's influential model of the "verbal message as a work of art" (1960: 350) distinguishes six 'factors' that are of essential importance in the creation of a (verbal) message.132 Along with the three principal factors of 'addresser', "addressee", and the 'message' that passes between them, there are three other factors which one could call 'auxiliary', in that they help to make the message possible, giving it a meaning and an expression: 'contact', defined as "the physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee" (ibid.: 353) along which the message passes; the 'context', which is what the message refers to by its "'denotative', 'cognitive' function"; and the 'code', which is the message's realization in some linguistic medium (voice, writing, and so on; ibid.}. Corresponding to each of these six factors, Jakobson develops six basic 'functions'; these comprise, in addition to the three traditional functions: 'emotive', 'conative', and 'referential', associated with the factors 'addresser', 'addressee', and 'context' (cf. Bühler 1934), three further functions having to do with the factors of'contact', 'code', and 'message'; these are, respectively, the 'phatic', 'metalinguaP (or, as most people say today, 'metalinguistic'), and 'poetic' functions (Jakobson ibid.: 354-356). The problem with Jakobson's distinctions is that the cuts he makes, being operated mostly for the wrong reasons, are somewhat skewed. Thus, to take one example, it obviously makes no sense to separate the factor 'context' (defined as that which the message refers to) from the 'message' itself: 'context' is sometimes more, sometimes less than pure 'reference' (and so, one might add, is the 'message'). In general, as all clear-cut distinctions, Jakobson's neat division of the labor of language both does too much and too little. As to the latter, take the interpretation that Jakobson gives of the poetic function, restricting it to a pure matter of vowel qualities, meter, and rhyme, and placing the burden of this function exclusively on the factor called 'message'. As to the former, Jakobson's scheme is far too exclusive and limiting: it isolates the various functions from each other in watertight partitions, not allowing for any interpenetration among them.

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Thus, although Jakobson borrows Bakhtin's expression metalingvistika (cf. my discussion ofthat concept in chapter 12.2), he restricts the metalinguistic function to one particular factor, the 'code'. By contrast, following Bakhtin, 1 interpret the metalinguistic function as interacting with, and depending on, a number of the other Jakobsonian functions, in particular the referential ('context') and phatic ('contact') ones. With regard to the literary text, the metalinguistic function rests essentially on the dialectics of 'voice': the voices of the characters (including the author/narrator's) are always perceived in and through their interaction with the other voices, in a "verbal give-and-take, a dialogue of languages" (Bakhtin 1992a: 314). In an even stronger metalinguistic sense, discourse always contains the words of others: even the 'word' (slovo) itself is always dialogic, says Bakhtin, since "every utterance is dialogized from within" (ibid.: 279); consequently, "all speech is reported speech", as Morson and Emerson aptly remark (1990: 138). In the following sections, I will show how the context, in any environment of language use, crucially depends on the dimension of contact, the communicative channel, as the medium of dialogue. Such an interpretation of the contact dimension goes beyond the traditional one, according to which the importance of the contact with an addressee is recognized and acknowledged only when it is necessary to establish his or her presence (as in phatic communion of the type 'How y're feeling' this mornin', ma'am?' 'Jus' fine.', or when we say 'Are you there?' on the telephone after about three seconds of silence on the part of our interlocutor). In literary discourse, this dialogic character of contact is not only an essential, but a constitutive feature of the context; that is to say, the context itself is established through the dialogue, in an interactive pattern of mutual cooperation between the interlocutors and their voices. Hence, there is no context outside the discourse, the latter gathering all the textual voices into one common fictional space or chorema, a supercontext whose heteroglot voice could be called, in Virginia Woolf s poetic expression, "the voice of the beauty of the world" (To the Lighthouse, p. 142). This is also what Bakhtin means when he speaks about the productiveness of certain narrators in representing certain belief systems, points of view, etc. that may clash with the "literary expectations and points of view that constitute the background needed to perceive them" (1992a: 313). That background becomes activated in discourse as the fictional

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space, perceived through the speech of the characters, "not in language but through language, through the linguistic medium of another'', as Bakhtin further remarks (/6/i/.).133

12.3.2. Reflection and 'anchoring' In the present section, I will explore how the dialectic creation of a context that 1 alluded to above, is in fact realized through a metalinguistic process of'reflective' language use.134 Reflective language, in general, is the (meta-)language used to 'reflect' on language itself; it is the expression of what Banfield has called a "reflective consciousness", as distinct from a "non-reflective" one (1982: 203ff). Banfield takes the former to be the exclusive domain of 'represented speech and thought' (RST, or roughly, FID; see above, chapter 4.3.1), whereas the latter is called 'psycho-narration' (Fludernik 1993: 135,378). Consider the following, somewhat modified, extract from Virginia Woolf: [Minta Doyle, a girl with "something a little wild and harum-scarum about [her]" (ibid.} has mixed feelings toward Mr. Ramsay: sometimes she is terrified of him, sometimes she is not. She is entering the dining room, being rather late for dinner.] And so tonight, directly he laughed at her she was not frightened. She knew that the miracle had happened. (To the Lighthouse. Harvest ed., p. 98, abridged). This short, rather condensed excerpt can be read, in a non-reflective way, as a record of Minta's state of mind, the narrator telling us what there is to be said about Minta's psychological state, what goes on in her head. We are told thai Minta "knew": an instance of psychonarration. But consider now the full, original text from which the above quote was excerpted: And so tonight, directly he laughed at her she was not frightened.

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Besides, she knew, directly she came into the room that the miracle had happened; she wore her golden haze. Sometimes she had it; sometimes not. She never knew why it came or why it went, or if she had it[,] until she came into the room and then she knew instantly by the way some man looked at her. Yes, tonight she had it, tremendously; she knew that by the way Mr. Ramsay told her not to be a fool. She sat beside him, smiling. (Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Harvest ed., p. 98). In this original extract, the words 'she knew' function as a 'parenthetical' (see chapter 3.3.3.2; cf. also 7.1.2), indicating the fact that we are treated to a representation o/Minta's knowledge and thoughts ("she wore her golden haze", etc.), not merely to a recounting of the fact that Minta knew, thought, etc., as was the case in the first, 'amended' extract. It is Minta's consciousness that is represented in the original text, not the consciousness of the narrator: Minta is reflecting on herself, on her appearance, on the presence or absence of her "golden haze", and on her feelings towards Mr. Ramsay. After these preliminaries, I will now go back once more to ÄlvarezCäccamo's recent (1996) study of the language situation in the autonomia (semi-independent, self-governing region) of Galicia, Spain, that was earlier discussed (in chapter 10.3.3) from the perspective of codeswitching in a changing context. In the present chapter, the focus will be on the 'constructive* aspect of such switches, that is to say, how users, by making a reflective use of their language or code, can effectively make and break the context that they will 'anchor' their speech in. Alvarez-Caccamo's study deals with the issue of reflective language from a linguistic minority perspective, in which reflective (or, as the author has it, "reflexive") language is considered not only as assigning the proper point of view to a stretch of text, but more generally, as a means of creating the very angle from which the text has to be visualized or "reflected'. This is not merely a matter of placing the text in its proper context of consciousness, contextualizing its utterances in relation to a character's or speakers conscious use of language, but of effectively creating the context that the utterances need for their validation. It is in this interactively creative movement of 'anchoring' text in context, and context in text, that we recognize the dialectics of reflectivity.

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Linguistically speaking, Galician (galego} is a dialect of Portuguese rather than of Spanish; its use as a vernacular in the province which bears its name has always been associated with rural provenience and lack of culture. However, the language situation in Galicia (or Galiza, as it is called in galego) has changed dramatically over the past few decades, more precisely since the demise of the Franco dictatorship and the advent of cultural and political freedom for the oppressed minorities of Spain, such as the Catalans, the Basques, and the Galicians. With the newly established autonomy visibly embodied in a local government called the Xunta de Galicia, the language, too, has acquired a different status: it is now seen as a rival to Spanish, with which it competes in the consciousnesses of its speakers, as well as in the general context of private and public life, in the realms of religion, politics, culture, and the media, as well as in the official discourse of government. And as a result of this altered consciousness, the indexicality of Galician and its value as a means of communication have changed. In ÄlvarezCaccamo's words, ... the traditional language-identity associations which relegated the use and users of Galician to the rural domain have given way to new, rather complex webs of social significations. Politicians, officials and intellectuals now also use Galician in public. Speaking a given Galician variety (e.g. a stigmatized dialect) may index one's ruralness; but, speaking some other (e.g. one close to the standard) may index one's education, structural class position, or political ideology. Thus, social power and control are no longer exclusively inherent to the practical use (or symbolic exploitation) of Spanish. Indeed, being, or doing being, as Sacks (1984) would put it, 'Galician' or "Spanish" through language is constantly negotiated in public discourse. (1996: 35; original italics) In the above quotation, the author rightfully emphasizes the active aspect of "doing" (especially as "doing being", that is, enact an identity through behavior) in the use of one language vs. another. This happens not only actively, as when I construct my own identity through "doing" a language; it is also valid for the cases in which a person passively is placed in a particular bracket in accordance with the language he or she speaks, or (even more importantly) the language that is attributed to him or her.

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Compare the following excerpt from an earlier quoted contemporary novel: Russell's manner of speaking had changed in the last month. Resorting to phrases like 'the reading public', he'd gone pontifical, talking about the rights of shareholders and the stagnation of American business. ... Corrine had noticed it in some of their college friends—the way they started talking like their jobs. Men more than women. Speech was the early-warning sign, the canary in the mine. Over dinner you're having a perfectly reasonable conversation about art or the sex lives of celebrities, and suddenly the word 'prioritize' would come out of someone's mouth, like a wad of gristle coughed up on the tablecloth. (Jay Mclnerney. Brightness Falls. Vintage Books, 1993. p. 245). What is interesting in the above quote is not so much the observation that people start speaking in ways they perceive as commensurate to their jobs (their 'context'); rather, it is the suggestion that we can employ people's speech to (re-)create their context and, using language 'reflectively', place its speakers in that constructed context. "'Speech [is] the canary in the mine" all right: but who put the canary there, in the first place? In our perspective, which is that of narration, the way a language of a speaker or character is reported (that is, reflected either consciously or unconsciously, cf. above) simultaneously reflects, reports on, and indeed constructs, the person's "real or typified social position, status, interpersonal orientation, or ideology" (Alvarez-Cäccamo 1996: 36). The author sees this as "the creative power of RS [reported speech]" (ibid,: 41); as an example, he cites the case of a Galician speaker who, reporting on speeches made by a Galician woman politician, the former Secretary of Education, "tended to consistently switch to Spanish" in quoting the Secretary's words—even though, as the author remarks, this "woman used nothing but Galician in public life"! (ibid.: 43). Using this technique, the Galician speaker constructs a context in which the reported person is seen as representing the overall, dominant political power in Galicia, which is still with the centra! government in Madrid, and of a ""Spanishist" ('espanholista'') political ideology" (ibid.).

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Älvarez-Cäccamo concludes as follows: Selective language choices for RS [reported speech] are an act of power. ... As in any other form of talk, in RS conversational power is the dialectic relationship between reporter and audience(s) in the negotiation of the definition of the reported situation. ... Thus, in the context of sociolinguistic conflict in Galiza, the micro-practice of speaking about speaking simultaneously plays into the construction of interactional hegemony and control, and reflects a broader sociolinguistic struggle; the ongoing struggle to conquer a social space through appropriation of the symbolic-ideological values of the language(s) of power, (ibid.: 56) The Galician situation vividly illustrates how strugglers for societal power use the means of reflective language to gain the upper hand in a sociolinguistic conflict situation, viz., by creating a suitable context to put their adversaries in (and at the same time, if possible, down). This confirms the point I was making earlier: the context is not only indispensable in my effort, as author or reader, to understand the play of voices in a narrative; contexts emerge as the result of my participation in the discourse, through my attributing or assigning, or identifying with, the language of the characters in their social context. "A dialogue of languages is a dialogue of social forces", says Bakhtin (1992a: 365). Language is thus not an absolute given: it is but one of the many pieces of the dialectic puzzle that author and reader together must solve in order to realize a successful process of writing and reading, of understanding each other's texts in contexts. As Maynard remarks, in her thoughtful study of reflective self-quotation in Japanese, our use of language is not simply "limited to ist proper context, more interestingly, [it is] a tool for creation and manipulation of contexts, thereby creating new meanings." (1996: 224, my emphasis).

12.3.3. The dialectic text In this section, I will try to arrive at a synthesis of the various perspectives on the pragmatics of literature that we have been considering in the preceding chapters. But let me first recapitulate and restate the main points of the present book.

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12.3.3.1. A 'new' voice In this book, the main emphasis has been on the notion of voice. A literary text is constituted by a multitude of voices: authorial, narratorial, character, and even reader voices. These voices blend in a multivocality which does not consist in a mere juxtapositional, or even contrapuntal, mixing of utterances, but must be characterized as a dialectic opposition in which voices, by the fact of their existence, call into life and call into question, generate and dispute, the very conditions on which they depend for the exercise of their vocality (cf. chapter 5.1). Vocality is exercised in dialogue. Neither the voices, nor the words embodying them, can ever stand alone. Every utterance is dependent on a response, says Bakhtin: ... the utterance is related not only to preceding, but also to subsequent links in the chain of speech communication. (1994a: 94) Utterances always address someone: speech is essentially dialogic (recall our earlier discussion of 'addressivity", chapter 6.2). For Bakhtin, the role of the addressed, that is, "the role of the others for whom the utterance is constructed, is extremely great" (ibid.}; the reason is that the role of these others, for whom my thought becomes actual thought for the first time (and thus also for my own self as well) is not that of passive listeners, but of active participants in speech communication, (ibid.} The addressed, the Others', are instrumental to my own human existence, considered as a dynamic process of becoming conscious of my own thoughts and thinking processes through reflecting on others. The existential dialectics of being and consciousness are thus reflected through the dialectic process of wording, as it has been called: "wording the world, I word myself (Mey 1985: 166). Only through addressing an Other can I become a Self; for this reason, dialogue, the process of addressing an interlocutor, is a creative process by which I construct my interlocutor as interlocutor. By anticipating his or her responses to my utterances, and basing myself on the results of that anticipation, I am able to construct and reconstruct my own utterances. While this process of (re-)construction is vital to the entire com-

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municative enterprise, it is most visible in the case of the writer and his or her reader, due to the greater distance between the author and the reading public (as compared to other forms of communication, such as the mass media). An author must construct his or her reader in and through the process of writing: "[i]n taking up places in interaction, ... readers are constructed by producers" (Talbot 1992: 176). Thus, the reader, being a person participating in the literary dialogue, becomes a player in the dialectic language game of text production and consumption. The same dialogic dialectics governs, mutatis mutandis, all the other players in this game, the 'narrative voices', as I have called them. Just as speech communication is based on the production of a communicative act between language users, so narrative communication (pace Banfield) is founded in the conscious creation of a field of dialectic activity between the partners in the literary dialogue, where authors, readers, and characters are all represented by their various voices. The personae that the voices represent, dialogize, interact, collaborate, and sometimes even clash; it is the shared responsibility of authors and readers to manage these voices (as we have seen in chapter 5), so as to ensure the successful production and reception of the literary work. At this point, it is important to distinguish between, on the one hand, authors and readers as voices in the narrative set-up, as partners in the collaboration that makes the literary text succeed and, on the other, authors and readers as participants in the economic activities that determine our living conditions, that is, as members of the market, our society's epitomizing emblem. In a market economy, ki even art has its price" (Mey 1994b: 193): the poet is a producer, the reader a consumer, and they meet, as all producers and consumers, in the market place. In this picture of marketing and consumer collaboration, the hidden presupposition is that the poet decides on what to offer his or her audience, but of course the acceptability of the offer determines both the amount of success of the poetic work, and the size of the poet's returns, (ibid.} This extrinsic collaboration between author and reader must be kept apart from the intrinsic cooperation in the textual dialogue that has been the main interest of the present study. Strictly speaking, the former relationship can only be called a 'collaboration' in a very weak sense.

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Intrinsic, textual cooperation between author and reader, consisting in a true, narrative interaction between all the voices heard in this dialogue, presupposes what I elsewhere have established as the prime condition for a literary work to succeed: that its fiction be accepted as "the necessity of reality imposed on the contingent, the possible" (Mey 1994b: 194). It is only in this sense that poetry, and more generally, the literary text, can be called a "cooperative act" establishing "the tie between poet and community", as (among others) Handwerk has pointed out (1985: 25). The question that remains to be discussed in the final sections of my book is if, and in what sense, all this can be said to be a matter of pragmatics. Mainly three factors seem to be of importance for a pragmatic view of writing and reading as the production and consumption of texts. First, and most importantly, there is the cooperative aspect of text production and consumption (as highlighted mainly in chapter 8), by which I mean that the processes of writing and reading must involve all of the users all of the time in all respects, and not just some text users (the authors) some of the time, and only in their 'creative' activities, or some other users (the readers) all of the time, but limited in their 'recreative' activities to looking at 'the text as such' and only the text, as it has been advocated by certain literary critics. In chapter 1, I tentatively described literary pragmatics as the study of the effects that authors, as text producers, endeavor to achieve by a clever use of the available linguistic resources. In the course of our deliberations, we have seen how these effects can only be obtained through an active collaboration between authors and readers; the text producers, the authors', endeavor is realized as a continuing effort to establish a working cooperation with the consumers of the texts, their readers. Cooperation, however, always has to be organized around a specific task, to be performed by and with particular people. In order to be successful, one's cooperative efforts have to be specifically directed at the partners one wants to target at any given time. Parents trying to have their children cooperate are very much aware of this: many times, a well-intended, practical educational venture fails because the targeting wasn't right. The way I ask my daughter Alexandra to help me clean the gutters won't work with Kristianna, and if I want to have my son Jacob cut the woodpile for me, it won't do to talk to him as if he were Sara or

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Inger Elise. One has to calculate one's audience, as Ibsen reminds us in his Peer Gynt.135 Next, there is the context as a constitutive factor in text work, as 1 already indicated in the very beginning of this book (see chapter 2.5). As discussed in one of the preceding sections (12.3.2), a text has to be properly 'anchored' contextually in order to be properly produced and consumed. Third, and finally, the pragmatics of textual activity involves what I have called the multivocality of texts, by studying the text's many voices, competing and sometimes clashing, each with their own perspective or point of view (see chapter 6.2). All three pragmatic aspects of text production and consumption: cooperation, contextual constitution, and multivocality come together under the heading of what earlier was discussed as speakability. In the context of what I just have said, I would like to redefine and broaden the scope of this term by incorporating into it the reader's as well as the author's textual efforts. The next section will clarify the details of this new, 'reformed* notion of speakability.

12.3.3.2. Reconsidering speakability By the very fact that we assign speakability to a text, we invoke the presence of a speaker who, at the same time or at some other time, may turn into a hearer or a reader. Fundamentally (and in direct opposition to Banfield's view), a speakable text is also a hearable and a readable text. Furthermore (again in opposition to Banfield), speakability should not be limited to any particular, strictly syntactically definable class or classes of sentences. In the view defended here, speakability in texts is imposed and accepted by mutual agreement between author and reader. This agreement is not just a matter of message transfer (as in information technology), or of communication-by-decoding (as in the classical Jakobsonian model). Rather, building upon, and extending, the original sense in which Malinowski defined the 'phatic* function of language (Jakobson 1960: 355), speakability should be viewed as an instance of contact and 'communion'. 136 Thus, moving away from the Banfieldian, monologic view of text production (the author writing in the splendid isolation of his cubicle;

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see above, chapters 2.2 and 4.2), we arrive at a dialogic view, in which author and reader are on speaking (and indeed, speakable) terms. Speakability, in this sense, builds on a socially-anchored and contextoriented conception of the text as dialogue. It is in this broader, socal context, rather than in the "dungeon of a single context", to borrow Bakhtin's picturesque expression (1992a: 274), that the textual dialogue happens. It follows that, instead of being modeled on simple, everyday conversation with its well-defined rules, textual dialogue represents a complex, cooperative effort. Rather than calling this dialoguing a simple 'speaking together" (a 'con-versation', or an exercise of ordinary phatic 'com-munion'), one should focus on its contextual 'sync': a dialogic discourse that is *sym-phatic' rather than 'col-loquial'. Dialogue, however, is a societal matter; hence, speakability cannot be defined purely linguistically, as advocated by Banfield. In assigning speakability to an utterance, we must look into the social factors determining its conditions of speaking and speakability, hearing and hearability (and of course including reading and readability). These conditions are seldom evenly distributed throughout a text (as they indeed are unequally distributed throughout society). Bakhtin's notion of the 'heterogeneity' of a text comes in useful here: language is always languages, he says; we are dealing with a "social diversity of speech types", a "heteroglossia" (raznorecie; 1992a: 263). And not only that: the different voices do not always speak in peaceful unison, but may oppose one another, battle against each other: ... novel[istic] dialogue is determined by the very socio-ideological evolution of languages and society. A dialogue of languages is a dialogue of social forces ... [the unity of a text is] contradictory, multi-speeched and heterogeneous." (Bakhtin 1992a: 365, 262) In order to figure out what the textual voices (including both the author's and the reader's) represent, we cannot exclusively rely on the text as such, the 'text as text', as the New Critics maintained. A text never exists in isolation; every text displays the existence of several conflicting societal discourses.^7 Even though discourse, in its various media, reflects the class structures of society, it is usually not acknowledged as belonging properly to a particular stratum or class. But the moment we start defining what is 'proper' (or 'appropriate') to a given discourse, it becomes immediately evident that such definitions

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or descriptions rely on the idea that some discourses arer better than others. While professing our faith in the equality of all men and women, we accept the fact that not all discourse is equal: while being officially on an equal footing, some individual or class-bound discourses are decidedly 'more equal' than others. Discourses, in Fairclough's words, represent ideologies, that is, they are projecting imaginary representations of sociolinguistic reality which correspond to the perspective and partisan interests of one section of society or one particular social institution—its dominant section. (1992: 48) Against an ideologically-founded and ideologically-sustained inequality, the struggle to liberate the text's voices is more than a pious exercise in social consciousness, a feeble exorcism of society's demons, in whatever discourse they choose to hide. The question is not just how to speak or read a text; rather, the problem is how to reveal the basic social inequalities that texts, as instances of societal ideology, are instrumental in supporting. The voice of the text should be freed from the straitjacket of unconscious consensus, from the hegemony of harmony which furthers the "orientation towards unity" that Bakhtin considers as specific for the streamlined stylistics of the societal majority (1992a: 274). Textual hegemony should be replaced by collaboration between the voices and their subjects; different speakabilities should substitute for the monologic notion of speakability ä la Banfield, with its monolithic vision of the text-as-one and its idealized voicing. 138

12.3.3.3. Power and distance Context is what makes the utterance, to paraphrase Duranti (1992: 7980). However, this context should not be thought of as a static entity, to be quantified in terms of occurrences of vowels or consonants, morphemes or syntactic constructions (as was done in early approaches to poetics and stylistics). In my interpretation of the literary text as made up of utterances in discourse, 'context* is a dynamic and expansive notion, based on continuous reference ('anchoring'; cf. section 12.3.2) to other texts and societal discourses; in this sense, "context" is closely

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related to what recently has been advocated (following Kristeva 1967) as 'intertextuality' (Fairclough 1989; Talbot 1995), or as 'diatext' (Mmmmetal. 1995). Viewing text and context in a societal perspective is not simply a matter of establishing textual references to sources outside the text (as is the usual practice of textual criticism and literary explanation); it implies the active pursuit of the conditions that went into the making of the text as an ensemble of voices. Every voice speaks from a particular position; the act of speaking itself not only presupposes, but dialectically reinforces that position. Establishing the right of the text's individual voices to be heard presupposes similarly an obligation for other voices to reveal their origin, background, constituency, and not least their power. As in society at large, where societally stronger positions are able to overrun societally weaker ones, so also in the text: the stronger voices are heard, the weaker overheard. A Swedish feminist song from the early 'seventies puts the question concisely, asking why women's voices are so much weaker than men's: Varför har tjejer/sa tunna roster? ('Why have girls/such feeble voices?'; Garpe & Osten 1971). However, the songwriters give us no proper answer, except that they admonish the women to "raise their voices when they speak". In the terms of our discussion, the question is not only who is strong or weak, but why 'strength' is distributed unevenly in society. In order to answer that question, we must 'read between the lines' of the text and bring out into the open the hidden inequalities of power that are prevalent in a given society at a given time: Sweden, as part of Western Europe in the 'seventies. Reconsidering and re-situating the notion of 'speakability' in this fashion may help dissolve some of the conundrums plaguing the debate. Understanding a text is a matter of understanding its societal background of production and consumption. Speakability, as I have defined it in the previous section, is a matter of societal empowerment; that is to say, the quality and value of any utterance or text, produced and consumed in a given place and at a given time, depend on the societal positions of producer and consumer and on their relative historical enablements. With regard to speakability as a user enablement, the creation and re-creation of a text are contingent upon a correct understanding of the 'medium' in which it has to be divulged—where 'medium' is a shorthand for the universe of conditions that dominate the reception of a literary product, such as: the readers and their

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presuppositions ('What does a reader know?'); the expectations inherent in a particular genre ('What does the reader expect?'); the metalinguistic conventions peculiar to a social milieu, including the 'channel' used ('Does this sound right?'); and so on.139 I want to sum all of this up by recalling an earlier reference to Bakhtin's work (see mainly chapters 4.3.3 and 6.2.3), emphasizing especially the importance of two of his key concepts for the understanding of literary texts: the pair 'addressivity' (obrascennost ') and 'answerability' (otvetstvennost').l4() In the framework of our current discussion, I would like to paraphrase the first of these concepts as 'relative speakability', the second as 'controlled speakability'. The notion of 'relative speakability' intends to capture the following observation: when speaking (or reading), we use and encounter a variety of 'voices', some of which are familiar, others foreign; some of which seem to agree with us, while others don't; some of which use 'high' language, others a dialect; and so on. Bakhtin stresses that this heterogeneity (also called "heteroglossia") is intrinsic to the dialogic character of the literary text: live and let live, listen and be listened to, let a thousand voices be heard! As to the voices themselves, their relative quality and effect depend not only on the originating instances (the 'voicers*) and their proficiency in conveying a message, but also (perhaps even more decisively) on the receivers' ability to respond to the message. Addressivity thus goes both ways: it is a Janus-like notion, designating and pinpointing the addressee by the way its head is turned; for this reason, I call it 'relative speakability'. As to 'controlled speakability', it goes without saying that properly considered, speaking is always a matter of controlling. For the conversation analysts, this control is embodied in 'the floor', as the place from where one speaks; in our case, the control of speakability lies in the fact that the effective exercise of one's voice is only possible, given a proper context. Everybody can make a soapbox speech on Hyde Park Corner, but not everybody can open Parliament, or declare a formal debate to be closed. Similarly, every voice in the textual discourse has a well-defined and properly specified speaking place, a particular piece of 'floor' of his or her own: every voicer has not only a voice, but in addition a beak, a The control that is exerted here is mostly invisible (as distinguished from the explicit controls that steer the use of the 'floor' in public speaking), but it is no less real. The cases we discussed in chapter 7.2

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under the heading of 'voice clashes' show what can happen if 'floor control' is not properly enforced and voices start to move all over the place. Insufficient or improper control of speakability results in voices getting out of hand, speakers preempting their turns like pushy persons moving ahead of others in a line, readers getting the wrong message, characters opining on matters they officially are ignorant about, and so on. It is important to keep these two aspects, addressivity as relative speakability, and answerability as controlled speakability, apart. This warning is due because the effects of disregarding speakability are very different in the two cases. While in the first case, improperly restraining the dialogic relations may kill the life of a text, a lack of control in the second case may result in a situation of anarchy, with voices out of control, a tohuwabohu of non-speakability. Such a situation may superficially look like a case of'heteroglossia'; in reality it is a free-for-all of voices, in which in the end no one can speak, no one is heard or understood. Many of the cases of'voice clash' that were discussed in chapter 7 belong in this category, and must be ascribed to the incompetence of the text handlers in steering their voices safely between these two opposing poles of attraction. But going against the controls, as embodied in my interpretation of speakability, may also have other, more positive aspects. Control can only function on the premises of some authority; in the last instance, every control touches upon an area in which 'hegemony', in the Gramscian sense, is exercised. A typical case is the control imposed in modern Western societies under the name and by the authority of correctness in spelling—or in general, by doctrines of correctness, or "appropriateness", as Fairclough calls them (1992: 51). Relaxing these hegemonic controls (as in the case of the joke and the pun, or by the use of irony and sarcasm) is not at all incompatible with the Bakhtinian notions of addressivity and answerability (or: relative and controlled speakability, respectively); while abrogating (part of) controlled speakability, we affirm the right to indulge in relative speakability, thus contributing to true heteroglossia. Heteroglossia, as we have seen, implies the creation or maintenance of differences in voicing. But by assuming a different voice, I simultaneously create a distance to the controlling instance of correctness. The more voicing power I possess, the further I can remove myself from the controlling instances, their watchful eyes and powerful voices. What I

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can say (the original meaning of 'speakability') is thus dependent both upon my stance in society, as embodied in the footing I assume for myself in dialogue, and upon the distance \ am able to create to my interlocutors (including the mostly invisible, hegemonic authority). Classical examples comprise the use of irony and other cases of 'voice distancing', as when a character speaks with a voice that is not his or hers, in order to make an ironic comment, or to address a difficult situation that he or she cannot properly handle in his or her own voice. A striking example of the latter strategy is found in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, where husband Aleksej Aleksandrovic Karen in tries to come to terms with the fact that he has been cuckolded (III: xiii; 1962 ed. p. 313). Karenin first frames the problem in general, moralistic terms; here he sounds like a handbook of Christian moral theology: "... a wretched woman has committed a transgression ..."; "I am not the first, nor the last" [to whom this has happened]; and so on. He goes on to pretend (speaking again in the voice of the morally superior person who is aware of his societal station and the duties incumbent upon him in his position) that he always has felt commiseration with those who have suffered this sad fate—at which point the voice of the narrator enters the scene to tell us that this cannot possible be the case, since Karenin never had had the slightest compassion with those unlucky husbands, but rather prided himself on every occasion on not being in their number. The distance that Karenin had tried to create by assuming the voice of an authority on moral affairs is thus annihilated by the powerful intervention of the true textual authority, the magister vocis, controlling the office of the text. Similarly, when sitting down to produce the famous letter to his wife that nearly drives Anna to desperation, Karenin's voice is that of the correct, law-abiding citizen whose rights have been trampled on. In this particular case, Aleksej Aleksandrovic sounds like he is quoting an authoritative treatise on the Divine Origin of Marriage (ibid.: 318): Whatever your conduct has been like, 1 do not have the right to dissolve a union which has been instituted by the powers from above. The family cannot be dissolved by a whim, through arbitrary decision, nor even through the criminal conduct of one of the partners; ... and so on.

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In contrast to the first quoted case, in which Karenin's voice was undone directly by the authoritative intervention of the narrative voice itself, this time the authorial authority does not pull the rug directly from under Karenin's voicing; instead, the man is given a length of rope to hang himself, by being allowed, in the sequel, to 'double-voice' his own utterances by attributing a different speakability to his words when writing to his wife in French rather than in Russian—and even, in a linguistic aside, to explain his linguistic duplicity to us. Here is Karenin's motivation, as rendered (psycho-narrated) in the text: On pisal bez obrascenija k nej i po-francuzski, upotrebljaja mestoimenie 'vy', ne imejuscee logo xaraktera xolodnosti, kotoroe ono imeet na russkomjazyke. ("He wrote to her without any form of salutation, and in French, using the pronoun vom, since the [French] word doesn't have the same kind of coldness that it[s corresponding form] has in Russian.') (Anna Karenina III: xiv; 1962 ed. p. 318; my translation) What we have here is a typical case of 'faked speakability' or 'voice dissimulation', as it could also be called. Karenin disowns his native Russian and speaks with a French voice in order to obtain an effect, that of appearing less "cold". Yet the intended effect is incompatible with the content of the message, which is cold as steel, and just as hardhitting as if Karenin had addressed his wife in Russian, using the more intimate form of address ty (more or less the equivalent of the French tu). But since the intention of the author precisely is to show the moral ambiguity and disingenuousness involved in Karenin's handling of the case, the voice clash here is operated to achieve a specific effect, and hence utterly controlled. It should not be lumped together with the clashes discussed in chapter 7, which mostly originated in authorial incompetence. A similar reasoning may be applied to the use of irony. A full treatment of this trope could fill another book, hence I will limit myself to indicate how irony and voice clash can be related in ways that do not prejudice the competence of either the reader or the author, or endanger

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the speakabilities involved. Here is an example from the same chapter of Anna Karenina that was quoted above: [Karenin is thinking about an affair which has busied him for some time, and for whose resolution he is planning to call a meeting of his committee.] On cuvstvoval, cto on glubze, cem kogda-nibud', vnikal teper' v eto usloznenie i cto v golove ego narozdalas' — on bez samoobol 'scenija mog skazat' — kapital 'naja mysl', dolzenstvujuscaja rasputat' vse eto delo ... ( L He [Karenin] felt that he had penetrated, deeper than ever before, into this complicated business and that there in his mind had sprung up — he could say this without self-aggrandizement — a capital thought, bound to resolve the entire dispute ...') (Anna Karenina III: xiv; 1962 ed. p. 319; my translation) The irony here is not made explicit, but stays under the surface of the narration; it resides in the hidden voice change in the middle of Karenin's musings, where the narrator suddenly seems to step onto the narrative scene to tell us, in a pseudo-objective statement, something about this character: *'he [Karenin] could say this without self-aggrandizement". What is really going on, though, is that Karenin, being the selfpossessed and pompous person that we know him to be, formulates this compliment to himself, but he does this in a seemingly objective voice, as if the flattering remark came from some outside authority (in this case, the narrator). While content-w\se, both "he penetrated" and "he could say" represent Karenin's thoughts, they are expressed on different syntactic levels: "he had penetrated ..." is subordinated under "He felt that...'', thus being subsumed under the regular psycho-narration, as it is voiced by the narrative instance. As to its actual content, the inserted sentence "he could say this without self-aggrandizement" represents the high esteem that Karenin holds himself in, while syntactically, it figures as a neutral narrative statement, on a par with "He felt" and "had sprung up". Since the statement in reality belongs to the thoughts Karenin has about himself (hence should be represented on the same subordinated syntactic level as "[He

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felt that] he had penetrated"), the utterance expressing Karenin's disingenuous bid for self-aggrandizement ('doing it without really trying to'), by being assigned superior (coordinated) syntactic status, acquires a peculiar duplicity: pseudo-objective praise is turned into shameless self-advertising by the narrative voice's ironic manipulation and its near-imperceptible syntactic shifts. It is this 'double-voicedness' which makes for the superb irony characterizing the passage in question: Karenin shooting himself in the foot, as it were, by complimenting himself on his "capital thought" while pretending he is not himself: Karenin is "ventriloquizing" for himself, to borrow an expression used by Talbot (1995: 60), but originally due to Bakhtin; ("... speaking, as it were through language, a language that has somehow ... become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates"; (1992a: 299). Such a "controlled speakability' is indeed a highly sophisticated application of Bakhtinian heteroglossia.142

12.3.4. Conclusion: Text, voice, and society Literary pragmatics, as part of the overall pragmatic endeavor, is concerned with the user perspective on literary activities. Therefore, the question that I want to raise explicitly at the end of my study (which at times has dealt with users in a more implicit manner) is the following: What does pragmatics, from its user perspective, contribute to literary studies? In particular, what is the user angle on what has been called 'voice'? "A dialogue of languages", says Bakhtin (and I take this to hold, by implication, for what I call 'voices') is a dialogue of social forces perceived not only in their static coexistence, but also as a dialogue of different times, epochs and days, a dialogue that is forever dying, living, being born: co-existence and becoming are here fused into an indissoluble, concrete unity that is contradictory, mutti-speeched and heterogeneous" (1992a: 365; my emphasis). Voices are 'anchored' in the plurality of discourse, in a multivocality representing the dialectic relations between the different contradictory societal forces. Similarly, the multi-speeched "double-voiced discourse"

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that Bakhtin refers to in his discussion of such phenomena as irony and parody (cf. ibid.: 374) is not just a matter of an opposition between heterogeneous voices inside the text: we are dealing with a struggle for societal power, symbolized in questions such as: 'Who can say what to whom?', or 'Who can do the talking, and why?'. In the final analysis, it all boils down to Humpty-Dumpty's old question, "which is to be master". The first point to make here is that language use, being a common human endeavor, is engendered and controlled by the society in which it originates. Furthermore, and as a consequence of this, the use of language in a literary text is governed by the same social forces that dominate the situations represented in the text. The heroes of Anna Karenina, or of any of the other narrations that 1 have used as examples, are not purely 'fictional', in the sense of 'just dreamt up' by some author. Inasmuch as they represent living human beings in society, their voices do not only have a realistic Ting' but are real in the narrative context. This kind of realistic literature can be produced only on society's conditions; all good authors are aware of this. This leads, thirdly, to an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, voicing is a dialectic process operating in constant opposition to society and its norms. The competent author always will try out the boundaries set by social convention in an endeavor to come up with "[stories] heretofore untold', carmina non prius audita, as Horace once said (Od. Hl.i: 2-3). In doing so, the author actually pro-duces, brings forth, in an act of creation, the voices of the narrative. On the other hand, as we have seen earlier, voicing re-produces the societal universe; seen from this angle, voices do not just depict characters: they define, and make up, the personae populating a text, in accordance with the realistic view of literature that 1 advocated above. The conflict of interest that arises here can be described as follows. On the one hand, there are certain societal conventions for what is 'good literature," for what constitutes the proper art of writing. On the other hand, we have the individual author trying to make the literary scene, to develop his or her own style, even at the risk of breaking some societally established norms and conventions. Hence, the independent, creative text producer, a.k.a. the author, is at the same time a dependent re-producer, a follower of established literary norms; in a mirror-image relation, the dependent, receptive text consumer, a.k.a. the reader, is, at the same time, an independent processor, and as such a creative participant in the literary enterprise.

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The contradiction outlined above has to do with the independence-ininterdependence of authors and readers as societal beings; it embodies their relative freedom-in-responsibility to deal with the conventions that society prescribes for a particular literary work or genre. However, such a freedom is indeed rather relative. Given the fact that norms for cultural activity are imposed by force of society's hegemonic structure, certain segments of the population will naturally be able to define, without ever having their authority questioned, what constitutes 'correct' or 'appropriate" behavior in matters of culture, including literature. From this general rule, there are no exemptions pertaining to certain spheres or complexes of behavior, such as language use: once we accept to be members of a particular societal structure, we're truly 'in\ language-wise. "Language implicates us in the lie right off, as a contemporary novelist has remarked (Mclnerney 1993: 108). Our dilemma has turned into a true dead-end, or so it seems. With regard to the literary devices and their preferred uses, discussed in the preceding chapters, such as: the proper employment of the various voice-controlling techniques; or: what it is possible for an author to have a character say; or: how a reader is supposed to disentangle and properly locate the individual voices in a narrative, the views I have developed can all be taken, on a lectio pessima, as expressions of a superordinate, hegemonic literary 'logic', to be critically examined and perhaps abolished, from a socially engaged point of view. The dilemma's social quandary seems to be solvable only through a revolutionary process. In such a suggestion for a solution, there is, of course, not much new. Every social revolution has seen, in its wake, efforts on the part of artists to create new ways of balancing and opposing the elements that make up the work of art: colors, tones, voices, images. Some revolutionary artists were fortunate enough to be given (along with their social revolution) a totally new medium in which no previous artistic directives had been established; in this connection, the efforts of Sergei M. Eisenstein to create a new, 'cinematic language' are well-known, and still highly appreciated. For Eisenstein, the 'voices of cinema' were images to be joined in succession, through "a vision that already knows", without being told, in 'real language', what is going to happen. Eisenstein's images are precisely of the kind that had not been seen earlier, and actually did not even exist, before they were tied together in the filmic 'text'.

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I can do no better here than reproduce the concise, moving, and beautiful original, of which the above formulation is but a poor paraphrase: viz., the third panel of the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes' original 'triptych' on the death of the great cinematographer in 1948:

cinema e infmito — näo se mede Näo tern passado nem futuro. Cada /magern so existe interligada A que a antecedeu e a que a sucede. cinema e a presciente antevisäo Na sucessäo de Imogens. cinema E o que näo se ve, e o que näo e Mas resulta: indizivel dimensäo. Muito bem, Eisenstein. Muito obrigado. Spasibo, tovarishch. Khorosho. ("Film is infinite — it cannot be measured It has neither past nor present. Every image only exists interconnected with the one preceding and with the one that follows. Film is the knowing preview in the chain of images. Film is that which one cannot see, is that which is not but arises: an unspeakable dimension. Well done, Eisenstein. Thank you very much. Thanks, comrade. Good work.') (Vinicius de Moraes, 'Triptico na morte de Sergei Mikhailovitch Eisenstein'. 1967: 94-95; my translation and emphasis) Notice how Vinicius de Moraes' sonnet emphasizes the very dimension of the narrative process that has occupied us throughout this chapter, and in fact, throughout the book: that of (un)speakability. While we

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should be careful not to simply equalize the two dimensions of narrative and film, like apples and oranges, there is a level on which the "'unspeakable dimension" of film can be said to contrast with language's speakability in an opposition which is much more profound than a superficial contrast between two different media. This deeper, common dimension of (un)speakability has to do with the fact that Eisenstein, in his oeuvre, did not conform to the norms and rules that were put in place by the conventions of society. As a true revolutionary, Eisenstein saw his art as part of the oppressed classes' protest against the ruling, hegemonic ideology and its notions about life and art; in this respect, he was fortunate in finding a medium like the cinema, in which such notions and conventions had not yet solidified into the rigid canons that characterize much of current film-making. Yet, at the same time, Eisenstein was a conscientious, even scrupulous artist, who certainly did not shoot at random whatever motif came into view. His legendary editing combined two apparently contradictory properties: an infinite attention to the smallest details, and a complete absorption in "[the] general miracles of matter" ([os] gerais milagres da materia; Vim'cius de Moraes, ibid: 92). For us, the question is: How do we reconcile these two seemingly conflicting tendencies, and what impact does an eventual reconciliation have on our discussion of the societal relevance of voicing? It is to be expected that an artist's consciousness of social injustice should reflect itself in a desire to do away with the structures that keep that injustice in place, in the same way that a philosopher's, or a moralist's, or a social innovator's 'raised consciousness' of social malpractices directs itself towards ending those malpractices. Through the ages, from the 'ironic' Socrates to the 'all-destroying' Kant (der alleszermalmende Kant, as his contemporaries called him), from the 'supercilious' Heraclitus (as he is said to have been) to the (as we all know) 'arrogant' Nietzsche, philosophers have all set out to liquidate what they found to be the rotten remnants of an earlier hegemony, dominating the world of our thoughts. But it was not until Marx formulated his famous 'Eleventh Thesis against Feuerbach' that such philosophical attitudes began to be translated into social practice (Marx 1961: 45). And here we meet the familiar paradox once more: Marx started his demolition of the old edifice of economic thought by making himself thoroughly familiar with the works of the classic economists and the leading philosophers of

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the day (Ricardo, Smith, the 'Young Hegelians'), letting the contradictions arise from within, so to speak, rather than attacking them from the outside. Similarly in the present book, my strategy has been to let the textual contradictions speak from the inside, by directly confronting the texts with notions such as speakability', offered in explanation of textual phenomena such as 'voice'. I have shown how these phenomena, when stripped of their conventional acceptance, serve to critically "deconstruct" their own explanations, and how they, in the process, necessarily place the matter of societal hegemony on the agenda. But how can an "unspeakable dimension" be societally relevant? Or for that matter, how can film, how can literature, how can art itself? How can we observe the artistic conventions of society and at the same time transcend them? Notice that the question here is not one of 'good' vs. 'bad' literature or art, or how to distinguish between the two. I firmly believe that some literature is better than other, and that some authors can write, while others simply can't. And I am convinced that, in order to be able to write properly, one has to learn about language and writing. In literature, as in art or life in general, there are no shortcuts. The semiotician I. A. Richards once remarked how "the widespread decline in knowledge of the language is the chief danger to poetry'" (Sebeok 1960: xii). In that "knowledge of the language", one has to include such things as the knowledge how to handle the techniques that govern the use of voice. On the other hand, if one runs too tight a ship, by imposing overly narrow definitions on notions such as voice or speakability, such restrictive practices will rule out a whole gamut of irregular speakabilities and voice uses, in particular those that Bakhtin groups together under the label of 'heteroglossia', such as irony and parody. Even the greatest artists are products of their environments; the art they produce is subject to the conventions and prejudices that are characteristic for their societies. This doesn't necessarily imply a stationary view of art as an activity in and for itself, totally determined by its own artistic purposes: I'art pour I'art, as the impressionists' warcry used to have it. On the contrary, the dynamics of artistic and social development go hand in hand. In literary production, it is the conscious use of heretic, heteroglossic techniques that is the hallmark of great authors and becomes the foundation of their innovative potential and

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success. A clash of voices (like when we knowingly speak in another('s) voice to obtain a certain effect, as in parody or irony) may then express an artistic conflict on the social or personal level, rather than figure as the signature of the inept author who unknowingly reveals his own insecurity or his character's dubious identity. Classical examples of such 'intentional clashes' are found in works from milieus that hover on the boundaries of social transition, such as the post-medieval countries of Western Europe, or Russia between the twilight of the Czars and the dawn of socialism. Bakhtin comments on the potentially subversive character of a novel such as Cervantes' Don Quijole as having an ''internally polemic orientation of 'respectable' discourse vis-ä-vis heteroglossia [which] unfolds in novelistic dialogues with Sancho, with other representatives of the heteroglot and coarse realities of life ... The internal dialogic potential embedded in respectable discourse is thus actualized and brought to the surface — in dialogues and in plot movement..." (1992a: 384). Another case are the Russian Formalists, along with their various revolutionary offshoots (such as the Opo/'az-group, of which also Roman Jakobson was a member). 143 Eisenstein, too, with his interest in creating a cinematic language belongs here, not to forget Bakhtin himself, of course, whose entire work was a continuous and distinguished comment on, and practice of, the heteroglossia he defined. The "struggle to control language", which authors such as Fairclough (I992a: 50ff) see as emblematic for the hegemonic struggle between the various social classes (or "groups", as he disarmingly calls them) is carried on in the various social contexts of education, social institutions, the media, and so on. Naturally, one of the biggest bones of contention here is the control of the written word, both in its traditional appearance as literature and in its more contemporary avatars such as the electronic media: hypertext, e-mail, internet, the 'world-wide web', and so on. In this connection, a whole new system of 'voices' has seen the light of the computer screen, complete with debates about access rights and restrictions on the content of messages, and other typical issues of control: the electronic equivalents of'speakability' and 'voices' (cf. the emerging voices of the 'smileys'; Mey 1993a: 225-226; from a legal point of view, these issues have recently been investigated by Bing 1995, I.E. Mey 1996). Also in these modern forms of communicative and other texts (is it premature to call them 'literature'?), we perceive how the dialectics of voice production and consumption manifest

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themselves in the familiar dichotomy of freedom and restriction, here concretized in the opposition between the official, 'consecrated' text as a homogeneous cultural product, representing and founded in societal hegemony, and the artistic, truly literary text as a heterogeneous blend of voices, in dialectic contrast and revolutionary opposition to the former. The voices of literature are, by their very nature, always potentially subversive; it is the task of literary pragmatics to single out and constantly reaffirm this dynamism.

Notes Introduction 1. Those practices, incidentally (and one is almost tempted to say: of course), are common to the military all over the world; in Denmark, for example, the month of March is when all the Army vehicles are out on the roads trying to cover enough mileage to make cutbacks in fuel allowance for next year uncalled for. As things go, the Navy (or Army) is probably no better or worse than other governmental institutions. To stay within my own domain, I remember how once, as incoming young chairman of linguistics, I was asked by one of my colleagues if I would countenance the purchase of G.A. Grierson's The Linguistic Survey of India, a gigantic (but somewhat dated) work in 26 volumes (Calcutta 1906ff.), for which the Departmental library had no particular use; his motivation being that it would perfectly match up with a threatening budget surplus in the book funds allotted for the expiring fiscal year. (Needless to say, the Department did not purchase that item: / Did Not Want Those Books, I could have said, in retrospect, if I ever got to be questioned by Sen. Proxmire). 2. Richard Dadd was a 19th century English painter, best known for his large work 'The Fairy-Feller's Masterstroke'. In this picture, the central figure is a man who is about to split an enormous acorn with a stroke of a murderous executioner's ax. Around him are 'fairy-tale' figures of every possible walk of life (probably representing his inmates at the psychiatric clinic of Broadmoor, where Dadd was incarcerated from 1855-1864, having murdered his father with an ax). The painting is on display in the Täte Gallery, London. 3. Deixis is what is expressed by deictics. Hence, there seems to be no need to postulate a "very clear distinction" between the two, as Fludernik (I.e.) advocates.

Chapter 2

The state of the question 4. The followers of Pythagoras used to swear by the exact expressions of their Master. The Greek words mean: 'He [Pythagoras] has said it himself—the conlcusive argument in any philosophical discussion. 5. For better effect, Jakobson chose to speak in Latin on this occasion: "Linguista sum: nihil linguistici a me alienum puto. " 6. Under normal conditions, the use of the plural is not allowed here: an T can only speak for hinWherself. There are notable exceptions (such as that of the royal 'plural': "We, Margrethe II, Queen of the Danes, the Goths

388

Notes

and the Wends,..."), in addition to the one reportedly due to Mark Twain who, in a famous quip, once characterized a man with a live-in tapeworm as the only person legally entitled to the use of such a plural. On the 'textbook' use of 'It is evident', see below. 7. 'RST is Ehrlich's (1990) abbreviation for Banfield's notion of 'represented speech and thought'. Jahn, in an excellent review of Banfield's work, draws our attention to the fact that the seemingly innocuous conjunction 'and' in reality hides an important problem: Are speech and thought really on a par with relation to free indirect discourse? Jahn's answer is negative: "[n]othing is ever, strictly speaking, a representation of speech and thought." And Jahn continues: "The abbreviation 'RST' (which Banfield 1982 avoids) hides this difference and may even be the cause of a category error." (Jahn 1992: 349) 8. Masanori Higa, personal communication. 9. It should be noted that Fludernik, "having a decidedly literary background" (1993: 13), admits to having had certain qualms about "doing linguistics" (ibid.: xiii). Her reservations should perhaps not focus so much on 'doing linguistics', but on restricting herself (like Banfield) to one particular kind of linguistics, viz. Chomskyan transformational grammar. 10. Over-determination, if introduced or omitted by an author on purpose, may create special pragmatic effects of meaning. Elsewhere, I have discussed how the Argentine author Julio Cortazar avails himself of the morphological potential of his language, Spanish, in order to obtain a special 'garden path' effect: the reader is interpretively seduced by a clever use of the writer's literary instrumentarium (Mey 1992). 11. Ursula le Guin, in her futuristic novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), has constructed a world in which also men may become pregnant—in fact, change their gender, given the right time and occasion. In this world, a sentence like The King is pregnant would not be irregular. Le Guin also discusses the implications of this 'sea change' in human anatomic properties for the question of pronominal reference: what would be the proper gender-based pronoun for a person whose gender is unstable, or currently changing? In the context of Earth, the problem is unsolvable, or maybe even unthinkable; but on Gethen/Winter, the planet where her new world is imagined to happen, the inadequacies are not of 'the' language, but only of a particular Earth language, such as English, applied to a Gethen context. 12. This view of the active role of a seemingly passive consumer is likewise illustrated in the attitude of the Japanese, when they 'sanctify' natural phenomena such as rocks, trees, or springs by tying ropes around them, thus

Notes

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not only identifying or containing, but actively creating the divine powers that reside in nature. 13.Contemporary authors, such as John Fowles or A.S. Byatt, just like their nineteenth-century colleagues Machado de Assis or Anthony Trollope, often use apostrophe to introduce themselves into the text; 'aucior in fabultf, one could dub this technique. I will come back to this phenomenon below (chapter 7.2.3). 14.1 say 'in a way', because the author, at the end of the quoted paragraph, retracts the 'quote' by stating: No etogo vsego ne dumal Levin ['But all of this Levin did not think.'] (Tolstoy, ibid.) I will come back to the implications of this 'non-quoting' below. 15.This term, whose uneasy English appearance (Fludernik wavers between Obstination' and Obstinance'; cf. 1993: 451, where both occur on the same line!) goes back to an English translation of Ricoeur's (1985) French adaptation (obstination) of the German term Obstinanz, originally coined by Weinrich(1985: 14). In addition to the obfuscation caused by the terminological jungle that has sprung up as a result of these different translations and adaptations, the felicity of the original German choice of term is in doubt as well (Werner Winter, pers. comm.); a better equivalent might be '(interpretive) perseverance'. See Fludernik (ibid., 51, 285, 315) for details and an extensive discussion; on Obstinacy' in connection with 'voice clashing', see below, chapter 7.2.2. 16. Ehrlich (1990: 58ff., referring to Smith 1978, 1980) calls this 'temporal linking'; earlier, seminal work by Weinrich (1964) goes unmentioned. See Fludernik (1993: 51-52 and especially 200). 17. The word goes back to the Latin word fasces, meaning: the magistrate's (lictor) symbol of authority in Classical Rome, viz. a tied bunch of whipping rods with an ax stuck in, for 'discipline and punishment' (Foucault).

Chapter 3

The language question 18. The Gospel readings in Latin during Catholic Mass used to be prefaced by an expression such as: In illo tempore [dixit Jesus discipulis suis ...] 'At that time [Jesus said to his disciples ...]'. Here, a deictic such as Tune 'Then' would be too 'intimate', implying that the narrator actually had been present at the occasion.

390

Notes

Similarly, 'airlinese' expressions such as "At this time, you are requested to put on your seat belts", "Please extinguish all smoking material at this time" (rather than simply "now") must be seen as a desire on the part of the speaker (usually, an airline hostess) to distance herself (and her audience!) from the place and time of the utterance, presumably because one wants to diminish the urgency and perilous character of the situation: an actual or upcoming emergency, or a preparation for take-off or landing. 19. Most frequently, this form occurs with nouns designating symmetric body parts such as eyes, shoulders, and the like; cf. Iliad I: 104: '...osse de hol purl lampetaonti eikten 'his (two) eyes lit up like a flaming fire'; strephedinethen de hoi osse 'his (i.e. Patroklos') (two) eyes turned around' (XVI: 792); oude pote Zeus/trepsen apo krateres husmines osse phaeino 'and not once did Zeus turn away his (two) radiant eyes from the fierce battle'; ibid. 645), etc. 20. Some languages, such as Latin, actually have lexicalized this 'distal-proximal' distinction: ille both means 'away from the speaker' and 'illustrious, notable', whereas iste connotes, in addition to 'closer to speaker', a dimension of negativity: 'notorious, infamous'. 21.The metaphors involved are those of 'down' (Greek katä) and 'up' (ana), the text being imagined as, e.g., a river whose locations may be referred to as 'downstream' or 'upstream' from a particular observation point. As far as I know, the term 'cataphora' is due to Bühler (o.e.: 122). 22. Other languages, such as German or the various Scandinavian dialects, may circumvent this problem by using so called 'reflexive' pronouns for the third person (referring exclusively to the subject of the utterance), as in the Danish equivalents of the above example: Peter leb efter sin hund (i.e., Peter's own dog; reflexive 'his') vs. Peter l&b efter Hans hund (i.e., someone else's dog; non-reflexive 'his'). 23. Usually, this involves a so-called 'change of point of view'. The problems involved in such a change will be discussed in detail below (chapter 6). 24.The difference between the two Latin forms is one of 'temporal perspective' (Smith 1994: 145); the first, ordered', "is set squarely in the past", while the second, have ordered "has the perspective of the present and implies that the event is relevant to the present" (Smith ibid.). I will return to this difference below. The different Russian forms in the perfect (velel, velela) are explained by the fact that Russian, unlike English, needs to distinguish between male and female in certain verb forms (a distinction called 'grammatical gender'); for more on this distinction and how it can be employed in literary texts to obtain certain effects, see section 3.5, below.

Notes

391

Aspectual differences (such as found in Russian, but not immediately visible in the forms quoted above) will not be treated here. 25.The term 'viewing time' thus seems to correspond more or less to what Fabricius-Hansen (1989) has called Betrachtzeit for German. See Fludernik (1993: 185) for a discussion. The 'viewer perspective', as it is expressed in the use of tense, has its standardized form in so-called 'free indirect discourse'; see below, section 3.3.3.2. 26. As Fludernik insightfully remarks, "morphological tense forms have no intrinsic temporal values" (1993: 200); their only values are in their opposition to other tenses. 27.Caesar was to reform the calendar exactly two years later, by intercalating two 'leap months' between November and December of 46 B.C. This 'Julian calendar' was in effect for more than sixteen centuries, until Pope Gregory XII reformed it in 1583. The Orthodox Christian community (mainly in Russia), however, rejected this Popish reform and did not adopt the new, 'Gregorian calendar', keeping their Old Style' time until the year 1917. 28. In Latin, we have the well-known construction of indirect discourse as accusativus cum infinitivo ('accusative with infinitive'): under the influence of a verbum dicendi, the finite main verb of the 'captured' sentence is changed into an infinitive, its dependent clause verb(s) into conjunct!ve(s), while the subject's nominative is commuted into an accusative. Compare the following extract from Caesar's De hello alexandrino, LXX (A. G. Way, ed., p. 124): Caesar respondit ... [se] neque interfectis amissam vitam neque exsectis virilitatem restituere posse; quod quidem supplicium gravius morte cives Romani subissent. ['Caesar answered that it was not in his power to give back life to those who had been killed, nor their manhood to those who had been castrated; for such was the atrocity, worse than death, that had been inflicted upon Roman citizens.'] In non-captured, direct discourse, the same fragment would read, using the unshifted tenses and moods of the finite (rather than infinitive) present and the indicative perfect (rather than the 'shifted', conjunctive pluperfect: Caesar respondit: "Non [ego] possum ... restituere; ... cives Romani subierunt". [Ί cannot give back;... Roman citizens have undergone ...']. 29.Many authors (especially those following the Banfield tradition) prefer the expression 'represented speech and thought' to the more commonly accepted 'FID'. The problem with this terminology is that it collapses speech and thought into a unitary representation in FID (see Jahn 1992:

392

Notes

349); as we will see below, such a uniformity does not constitute a valid assumption for most languages. 30. In Banfield's system, this amounts to leaving the 'narrator position' unoccupied; hence, we have an 'unspeakable' ("narratorless") sentence (Banfield 1982: 185). 31.Banfield (1987) discusses what I call the Most narrator' in terms of an "empty deictic centre", that is, "the appropriate linguistic representation of the unobserved" (1987: 274), where deictics such as 'here' and 'now' need not represent a subjective consciousness or sensation, nor an objective intersection of coordinates, an origo (Bühler 1934: 102; see also Fludernik 1993: 43f.), but only a 'subjective center' without an explicit subject belonging to it. Fludernik, in her discussion of this proposal, remarks that in these cases, the subjectivity of consciousness is transferred from the narrator to the reader; hence, she wants "to argue for a reading process in which the reader takes an internal position on events (as if through a witness) rather than for a mere camera-eye" (1993: 391). What this has to say for the problem of a 'reader's voice' will be discussed in detail in chapters 8.4 and 9.2. 32. From a defective Latin verb inquam (late Latin inqueoyi say'; inquit is the third person singular indicative present: 'he/she/it says'. 33. As Jahn has remarked, the existence of cases like the above leads one to assume that there are good reasons "for calling RST a 'shifted' rather than a 'backshifted' form". (1992: 353) 34.Some have even gone as far as to proclaim Wesley a "literary heir" to Austen (thus in the publicity blurb on the back cover of my edition of A sensible life; originally a quote from a review in the U.S. newspaper Atlanta Journal & Constitution). 35. A case from Spanish has been discussed in my analysis (Mey 1992) of a short story by the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, Historia con migalas [ story with spiders'; 1985].

Chapter 4 Speakability and voice 36. The title of Banfield's book has the term 'unspeakable' in a sense that is rather different from the word's 'normal' use, as expressing either a very positive or an extremely negative emotional involvement. We have an instance of the first use, when St. Paul proclaims his thanks to the Lord for His "unspeakable gift", or refers to the "unspeakable words" that he has heard in Paradise (see II Cor. 12: 4); the second sense is common in more mundane use in utterances like 'The unspeakable horror of the scene has never since left my mind'.

Notes

393

Curiously enough, one of the the few places where the word occurs in Banfield's work is in her catchy title; in the text of the book, she uses the more neutral, sober expression "speakerless (or narratorless) sentence"; when 'unspeakable' does occur, she places the word within 'scare quotes' (thus, e.g., p. 185). 37. Following Martinet's terminology of the 'double articulation' that is characteristic of language (1949; 1955: 157-158). 38. Haberland, following Brandum-Nielsen (1953), has drawn attention to the fact that in Danish, FID is found as early as the 17th century in the writings of the Danish princess Leonora Christina (1621-1698; Haberland 1986: 232-233). 39. Fludernik (1993: 100) refers to Comrie (1986), who also calls the conditions of this Russian phenomenon "puzzling". 40. For the notion of'empty deictic center', see especially footnote 31. 41. The phenomenon by which (as in the present case) a voice 'intrudes' from one textual order into another is akin to what is often called, in a different context, 'slipping' or 'contagion'; this will be discussed in more detail below (chapter 6.2) 42. Cf. Chomsky: "a language [is] a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements; ... each sentence is representable as a finite sequence of phonemes or letters, ..." (1957: 13). Ruwet says more or less the same: "on se represente les phrases commes des successions de morphemes lexicaux (de lexemes) inclus dans un cadre de morphemes grammaticaux ..." (1967: 100) 43. This is the phenomenon described by Fludernik as 'contagion' (1993: 333ff); see chapter 6.2. Compare also the 'Uncle Charles Principle', discussed below in chapter 11.2.2.2. 44. The word 'addressivity', inasmuch as it implies a direction ('to address somebody'), is perhaps not the optimal English rendering of the Russian original, which is derived from the reflexive verb obraiit 'sja/ obrascat 'sja, lit. 'to turn oneself around to'. In Russian, the reflexive act of addressing does not take a direct object, as does the English 'to address'; Russian 'addressing' is not straight and direct, neither is it the one party's privilege only. A better translation (which I am at present unable to suggest) would incorporate both aspects, 'addressing' and 'being addressed', and thus hold for both parties in an ongoing dialogue. (See further chapter 8.1, below)

394

Notes

Chapter 5

Voice and voice management 45. See, e.g., p. 140 of Jacob 's Room: But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking—far from it, Bonamy sighed, ... 46. The form must here is not a preterit (as it could have been, had Virginia Woolf lived a century earlier), but a present tense. 47. Finnish -tar is a suffix denoting female persons. 48. A conjunctive, invenirentur, would also be allowed here, notably if one wants to stress the subjective aspect of this evaluation of Chicago's night spots, or the impossibility of finding one that is "niftier" than the Pump Room. 49. On the concept of'seduction' in the interpretation of literary texts, see Mey (1994a). (More on this notion below, chapters 8.2 and 11.2). 50. Lat. persona 'mask'; of obscure (Etruscan?) origin. There is a popular notion around according to which the word should be related to the Latin verb sonars 'sound', combined with the prefix per- 'through' (hence: a 'through-sounder' held before one's face, i.e. a mask). This kind of pseudo-etymology could suitably be attributed to that 7th century linguistic master-mind, St. Isidore of Sevilla, source of many famous antietymologies of the type Incus ['copse, sacred wood'] a non lucendo [from lucere 'be light'], or canis ['dog'] a non canendo [canere 'sing']'— because (surprise, surprise) woods are dark and dogs don't sing. 51. As Yamaguchi perceptively remarks, "there are always two ways to look at the third person narration, depending on from which side one is viewing the problem, i.e. from the author's side or the reader's." (1989: 594). From the latter's point of view, we always look for a "speaking subject"; and so, "in the act of interpreting there arises a strong desire to recover the 'effaced' narrator." In pragmatic, that is, user-oriented terms, "[a] narrative without a narrator is hardly conceivable." (ibid.: 595) 52. Tolstoy echoes here the humorous contempt of contemporary substandard belletristic writing that Jane Austen indulged in. (See, e.g., the last chapter of Nor thanger Abbey, where she ridicules one of the 'classics' in the category 'novelistic trash', the once universally applauded Grandison).

Chapter 6 Voice in focus 53. The Russian word for 'sleep' is 50«. Cf.: / bezpodobnyj Grandison Kotoryj nam navodit son...

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'And the incomparable Grandison Who makes us fall asleep.' (Evgenij Onegin 111: ix; Pushkin 1946: 59). 54. The term focalization is originally due to Genette (1967, 1972). For a useful historical overview of the different uses of the term in its relation to 'represented speech' (Jespersen), see Bal (1985: 278-279). 55. A search of the nearest likely source for this quotation, Henry James' The Ambassadors (the work mentioned in the same breath as the above sentence) has remained without result. 56. The proper analysis of this sentence is made difficult by the fact that no context is given or indicated. If, for instance, the passage in question were to be followed by the (equally constructed) sentence: She realized for the first time that she was in love with him, then the 'resumptive' point of view of the subject of "realized" would make it plausible to hear the latter part of the first sentence as attributed to Elizabeth's inner monologue. Such a 'resumptive extension' of point of view, as one could name the phenomenon, parallels on the narrative level what earlier has been called '(syntactic, semantic, or cognitive) obstinacy' (or Obstination', as some prefer). See chapter 2.5.1; cf. also chapter 7.2.2. 57. This anti-hero's Christian name, Batavus, recalls the eponymous, quasimythical 'first' population of Holland, the Germanic tribe of the Batavi, who were the ones who resisted the Romans and forced them to conclude a non-aggression pact, thus safeguarding the country's first precarious autochthonous civilization. Appealing to this piece of romantic self-glorification in history, familiar to every Dutchman and -woman, the author additionally alludes to the perceived typical persona of the 19th century merchant class as a dry and calculating creature, whose very family name symbolizes a lack of imagination and creativity: Droogstoppel, literally meaning: 'dry-stubble', and figuratively: 'a boring, unimaginative person'. It should be added that the author himself (Multatuli, in real life Eduard Douwes Dekker) had been a colonial administrator for a number of years, before he in the end fell prey to the inhuman dialectics of colonial marketing and had to resign his position to safeguard his humanity. His alter ego, Droogstoppel, has no such problems and carries happily on, mentally reinforced by the governing Protestant ideology of the successful Dutch mercantile class. (The book has recently (1985) been turned into a successful movie, winning international acclaim under the title of Max Havelaar). 58. 'Parkin' is reincarnated as 'Mellors' in later, unexpurgated editions of Lawrence's work. (See Lawrence 1962: 287, 'Afterword' by Henry T.E. Moore).

396

Notes

59. The Russian text has the word slovo, which can be translated as 'word' (as in the Official' Bakhtin translation above) or as 'discourse' (as it is often rendered by Morson and Emerson, but not in the above quoted passage). The Danish translators of the essay in question, 'The problem of the text', have opted for the former solution, which they find to be closer to Bakhtin's original intentions (B achtin 1995: 18-19). 60. As noted earlier (footnote 44), the Russian term obrascennost' covers both aspects, whereas 'addressivity' stresses the role of the 'addressing' part. In our case, the notion of 'addressivity' should really be complemented by that of 'addressability'. 61. Cf. also Bakhtin: "The author ... speaks, as it were, through language, a language that has somehow ... become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates."(1992a:299) 62. In the case of lesser authors, the latter issue may become a problem in itself. Karl May's heroic efforts at establishing the authenticity and 'beenthere's' of his travel stories were not always successful, and his publishers (the Karl-May-Verlag in Radebeul near Dresden) had to spend tons of good old Reichsmarks on posthumous publicity campaigns in order to 'prove' that the author of the Old Shatterhand & Winnetou and Kara-benNemsi stories actually had traveled extensively both in the New World and in the Balkans, the Near Orient, and the Middle East. All this happened three quarters of a century before the issue of 'credibility' gained paramount social and political status in the universe of presidents and diplomats. 63. A useful working definition of'skaz' is provided by Steffensen, who calls it "an arbitrarily introduced narrator's telling of the plot" (1973: 47). For an elaborated illustration of the phenomenon, I refer to Banfield's insightful analysis of two content-wise parallel works by William Faulkner (the short story 'Spotted Horses' and his novel The Hamlet; Banfield 1982: 172-178). See further chapter 7.2.

Chapter 7

Voice in transition 64. Some editors, anxious to raise their pointing fingers and not leave anything to fickle fate or a dumb readership, have introduced unauthorized punctuating devices to mark off the voices. But putting quotation marks around Alfius' monologue (as e.g. is done by Colamarino & Bo, in their edition of Horace's works; 1969: 50-54) spoils the fun and is most certainly neither in the spirit of Horace nor in the tradition of the classical scribes. 65. An inquit is a verbal 'tag' of a special kind (see footnote 67, below). The term derives from a Latin 'defective' verb, that is, a verb having only a few

Notes

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forms, among these the frequently used first and third person singular forms of the present : inquam Ί (might) say' (originally perhaps a subjunctive; cf. the late Latin indicative inquio) and inquit 'he says'. Inquits will be discussed in detail in the next section. 66. The Spanish term for (theatrical and metaphorical) 'role' is, significantly, papel(literally, 'paper'). 67. A 'tag', in the original use of the word, is a label attached to some object in order to distinguish it from its surroundings (like a suitcase on an airline carrousel) and make it easier to retrieve. In the same way, sentence tags (or 'parentheticals', see above) serve as identifiers of dialogue voices. An extended use of the term is found in the so-called 'tag questions': here, the 'tag' is used to identify the corresponding expression as a question by the insertion of a repeat or a dummy verb ('do', 'have', 'be'): You 're coming to morrow, aren 'tyou? He promised to come to the lecture, didn'(he? You 're not asking me to leave, are you? 68. The case of the author appearing in the story as a character (called 'authorial intrusion') is a special one, to be discussed later (chapter 7.2.3). 69. The fact that we have "Daniel" here, in addition to "himself ("he smelled of Stephanie, of Daniel, of himself), is a case of irregular Overdetermination', sometimes called 'tracking' (see chapter 2.5.1, above). The author uses this device here in order to ward off the possible ambiguity that could have arisen had she written 'he smelled of Stephanie, of himself, where the smell could have been related to either William or Daniel. On another reading, we could indeed understand "himself to refer to the baby (Ines Signorini, pers. comm.), following the normal rules for reflexive reference in English. The fact that William's smell had already been identified and described in the previous sentence would perhaps disfavor such a reading. 70. See Fludernik 1993: 205ff. for an extensive discussion of the various conditions governing the use of the English 'independent' past progressive. 71. Here is an example of a 'captive' sentence (borrowed from Ehrlich 1990): Albert is playing tennis. This sentence, when uttered, depends on the preceding context for its temporal 'anchoring'. If one says: Something unusual is scheduled for tomorrow: Albert is playing tennis, the 'playing' is thought of as a future event. However, in: We can'(discuss the problem now: Albert is playing tennis, Albert's playing tennis is the contemporary reason for speaker's inability to discuss the problem. Taken by itself, Smith says, the sentence is "semantically incomplete"; I would rather say that it lacks the pragmatic conditions that give it its real meaning. (See Mey 1993: 8-9 for further discussion).

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Notes

72. A more dignified nomenclature for the three kinds of 'clash' could be 'voice corruption' (for 'trash'), voice confusion' (for 'mash'), and 'voice intrusion' (for 'crash'). 73. In cases like these, the author as such is not visible, but hides behind one of the characters. As a cover term for the narrative voice in this case, I will use the expression 'narrator/author', since no explicit distinction can be made here between the narrating and the authorial instances. 74. At the time of Hymie's speaking, the word 'holocaust' still was known only in its original sense. A 'holocaust', in Greek sacrificial terminology and according to the word's etymology, is an offering to the gods which is 'burnt in its entirety', nothing being set aside for use by the participants. This is in contrast to regular sacrificial practice (as described passim in Homer), in which the priest places the fatty parts of the sacrificial bull on the altar, to be devoured by the flames, while the rest is consumed by the crowd in a communal feast. The metaphorical use of the word 'holocaust' focuses on this sacrificial aspect, but fails to distinguish between a religious offering of prized animals and the Nazi-type wanton slaughtering and mass-murdering of supposedly inferior brands of humans (the Untermenschen). It requires some stretching of the imagination to represent an eleven-year old schoolboy as not only being familiar with these classical realia, but using the expression metaphorically—on top ofthat, with the historically wrong, acquired connotations, as in the case of the present-day term 'holocaust'. 75. Incidentally, Byatt is a past master in this art of evocation. I suggest that any male reader who wants to experience a birth-giving from the 'inside', immerse himself in her account of Stephanie's labor on pp. 96-100 of Still Life. 76. With regard to Velcro's introduction to the Anglo-American markets and popular consciousness, I have consulted various Oxford and Webster English dictionaries. The first and only one that makes a mention of Velcro is the 1992 Webster, Collegiate edition; those of earlier years remain significantly silent on the subject. 77. A 'bald-on-record' utterance is one that takes no precautions as to possible consequences by softening and attenuating ('mitigating') the expression. An example of a 'bald-on-record' request is a 'naked' imperative: 'Get out of here!' (For more particulars, see Brown & Levinson 1978; cf. Mey 1993a:73, 246). 78. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. 1 1 : 1 ) . 79. Fludernik (ibid.) remarks that the discovery of the principle is attested much earlier, mainly in work by authors such as Leo Spitzer, which

Notes

399

antedates Kenner by some fifty years. 80. These names are modeled on the German Ansteckung; see Fludernik (o.e.. 333-334, 359) and below, footnote 126. 81. Example given by the late Col. G.L. Lewis, warning beginning students of Turkish against indiscriminate use of slang (like "a person from the Continent" might be guilty of in a British context). Lewis was the author of the unquestionably best short reference grammar of the Turkish language, published in the disguise of a humble 'Teach Yourself book (Lewis 1958: 152). 82. Voloshinov's translators' use of the term 'speech act' is perhaps less felicitous, as it may invoke a concept and a technical term defined otherwise in another, accepted context (see Mey 1993a: 109-114). 83. The quotes above are all from Fowles (1973: 347-349). Apparently, Fowles is rather fond of this technique of forcing himself'bodily' upon the reader (not just appearing visually, Cocteau- or Hitchcock-like, in a small film vignette), since he does more or less the same in other novels, such as A Maggot (1982).

Chapter 8

The dialogic perspective 84. For a critique of the Saussurean-Jakobsonian model, see Mey 1985: 12-16 and below, chapter 12.3.1. Cf.: Also Bakhtin has criticized .. the misleading aspects of traditional diagrams of communication, the best known of which is the complex 'telegraphic' model formulated by Saussure and refined by Jakobson: Context Addresser Message Addressee Contact Code (Morson & Emerson 1990: 128). 85. Notice that the adherents to the brand of communicative studies known under the name of 'Conversation Analysis' precisely base themselves on such a model, with all the unavoidable consequences of such a choice (for a discussion, see Mey 1993a: chapter 10). 86. From the sequence Dies Irae (part of the Catholic funeral Mass, Missa pro Defunctis; see Liber Usualis Missce et Officii, Parisiis &c., Desclee & Soc., 1960, p. 1810-1813; my translation): Quantus tremor estfuturus Quandojudex es t venlurus Cuncta stride discussurus

400

Notes

("What a terror will arise When the judge is about to appear And will strictly examine everything.') 87. In the following, I will concentrate on the reader role, leaving the listeners more or less to their own devices. 88. Cf. Banfield's critique of this theoretical legerdemain: "the author is reintroduced into the text as the omnipresent voice of the narrator" (1982: 183). 89. A 'reflector' character is one that personalizes, and thus 'reflects', the authorial narrator (cf. Fludernik 1993: 390). 90. On the alienating effects of this separation, seen from a cognitive-technological point of view, see Gorayska & Mey (1995). 91. The title of Pushkin's poem, Exegi monumentum, alludes directly to the beginning words of Horace's famous ode. 92. Recent, vociferously proclaimed attitudes among certain fundamentalist believers have documented that this humane attitude by no means is universally appreciated; many a religious fanatic would happily kill the author of a 'blasphemous' or otherwise found condemnable book, 93. 'The term 'intertextuality' was originally introduced by Julia Kristeva and promulgated energetically by Tzvetan Todorov as the equivalent of the Bakhtinian 'heteroglossia', in an effort to bring Bakhtin into line with the structuralist tendencies prevalent in Europe since the 'sixties. See Kristeva (1967); Todorov (1984: 90). 94. Which is why the Russian term (priem) ostranenija, literally: 'the technique of bestrangement', often is translated as 'defamiliarization'. (The expression 'bestrangement' is used by Morson and Emerson in their insightful discussion of the Bakhtinian use of the term; 1990: 361). 95. I say: 'the English we', to remind the reader that there are languages where the expressions we translate as 'we1 not always, or prima facie, denote inclusion, but in fact may be used in the sense of Ί and he, but not you': the so-called 'exclusive' first person plural. As Werner Winter points out (pers. comm.), this option is common not only to the Polynesian languages, but also to many other language families, such as Tibeto-Burman and possibly even Proto-Indo-European.

Chapter 9

The reader perspective 96. The image that springs to mind is that of the celebrated Nick Leeson, who is alleged single-handedly, from his desk in Singapore, to have caused the downfall of the respected 200-year old investment banking house of Baring's in early 1995—an exploit which earned him 6 1/2 years in the

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Singapore penitentiary. 97. The case par excellence is that of Horace, who felt certain that "neither the innumerable sequence of years nor the flight of time" would be able to destroy the "monument" he had set himself by his poetry (Odes III.xxx: 4-6). Horace's arrogant, but in the end justified, presumption of immortality (Non omnis moriar Ί shall not die entirely'; ibid.), was to be echoed literally 1,800 years later by another proud poet, Pushkin, exclaiming Net, ves 'ja ne umru 'No, I will not die wholly' (Exegi monwnentum; 1946: 37). Such self-fulfilling prophecies of eternal stardom are by no means restricted to the classics of literature. In the Smetana museum in Prague, one can admire a lock of hair, cut off by seven-year old Bedrich, and kept by him for his future museum, along with his grade school note books and other presumptive memorabilia, now also on display. The showcase has a little note instructing us that: "Already at age 7, the composer knew that one day, he was going to be a world celebrity". 98. Or, in John Locke's more modern version, If we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all languages, the names for things that fall not under our senses to have had their first rise from sensible ideas. (Locke 1959 [1690], vol. 2:5) 99. Josalba Vieira (pers. comm.) remarks that rather than 'going behind' our own presuppositions, we should try to deconstruct them by 'going inside'. 100. This locus is called 'chorema' by Brandt (1992). See below, chapter 11.2.1. 101. Brecht considers 'bestrangement' to be the defining feature of his 'epic theater'. I generalize the term, in the Russian Formalist tradition, to encompass all literary text. Cf. Morson & Emerson (1990: 360): "... bestrangement... is what makes all of literature literary." 102. Analyzing a passage of George Eliot's Middlemarch, Talbot successfully demonstrates how the author "sets up herself and the reader as likeminded people" (1995: 68), luring the reader into a trap, as it were. The trap is sprung when the reader discovers that he or she has been 'taken in' to share in the gossiping community's expectations about what is going to happen to Mr. Casaubon's attractive wife after his death. "The reader has been caught out, caught in possession of [this] 'vulgar vision'" (ibid.: 71). Another interesting instance of this 'entrapment' is found in Byatt's book Still Life (which brims with authorial invasions of the kind noted here), where the author deals a glancing blow at a famous, long deceased colleague by letting one of her characters, an ethereal Cambridge don named Raphael Faber, confess that he "dislikes George Eliot very much" (p. 309). One is allowed to speculate as to who 'really dislikes' whom here, as obviously one isn't told in any other way.

402

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103. Let this be said sine ira et studio, especially where authors are concerned whose works I admire, and to whom I owe many of the quotes in the present book. See further my 1985 book, whose title, 'Whose language?,' epitomizes the entire issue of author power vs. reader empowerment.

Chapter 10

The pragmatic perspective 104. One moose to another (the latter with a huge birthmark on his chest in the shape of a bull's eye): "Bummer of a birthmark, Hal." 105. Commenting on this passage, Morson and Emerson remark, very much to the point, that the superaddressee can be seen as "a necessary corrective to a model of communication that—unlike the model of Jürgen Habermas, to take a close competitor—refuses to deal in ideal situations of 'undistorted and non-coerced communication'" (1990: 135; for a similar view, see Mey 1987). 106. Note that while Bakhtin refers to the superaddressee by the masculine personal pronouns 'him' and 'his', Morson and Emerson constantly 'neutralize' the instance by using 'it(self)', and 'which'. Demythologization—or the ways of expressing oneself becoming more 'politically correct'? Even in literary studies, "the times they are a-changing" (Dylan). 107. 1 call this 'pseudo-quoted direct discourse' because of the occurrence of the pronoun we, rather than they, which would be the norm in 'free indirect discourse'. See the discussion above, section 3.3.4. 108. Mclnerney refrains, with a discernment not always found in authors—cf. the examples of'internal anachronism' given in chapter 7.2.1.1, above— from including the now obligatory, but in the context probably premature, reference to 'political correctness', 'PC': it's just a bit too early in the decade for that. 109. Italian popular wisdom has preserved this insight in the saying: traduttore traditore 'every translator is a traitor' [to the original]. 110. One might object that this, after all, is a fictive account. Admitted; but Garavelli uses it to demonstrate a point she had made earlier, quoting legal handbooks on civil procedure, where the 'legal report' is described in detail as no longer being identical with the oral testimony "as it has come out of the defendant's mouth", with the concomitant "loss of authenticity" (genuinitaperduta; Garavelli 1985: 79-80). 111. 1 am generalizing Irigaray's original frame of reference to comprise the entire society, not just the divisions of gender that obtain in any one of its

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segments. 112. Some would restrict this phenomenon to cases where different dialects of the same language are involved, a restriction that seems rather arbitrary. (See Hudson 1989 and my review of this work in Mey 1992b). 113. The classical theory of rhetoric gathers these efforts under the joint appellation ofcaptatio benevolentiae, 'catching the reader's goodwill'. 114. Nemo dat quod non hat, as some minor Scholastic philosophaster has it, in his own brand of Latin. 115. One is reminded of the story about the two renowned artists from antiquity, Zeuxis and Apelles, who competed for the title of 'The World's Best Painter'. Zeuxis painted fruit so deceptively that a member of the jury tried to pick a bunch of grapes off the canvas. But Apelles was greater: a bee got stuck in the still wet paint of his super-realistic flowers, trying to suck honey out of them. 116. I remember a joke from my first year of English in High School. [On the stage coach; two elderly gentleman are talking] Mr. Tombstone: Is this Wembley? Mr. Doornail: No, it's Thursday. Mr. Tombstone: So am I—let's have one! In the actual context of expectation (both interlocutors being hard of hearing), the amount of input that steered their responses was very small. Yet they managed to give what they apparently themselves felt to be satisfactory answers (witness the presumed, felicitous outcome of the conversation). 117. The notion of 'script' (in particular, the 'restaurant script') has become quite famous thanks to the pioneering work of Schank and his collaborators at the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project, 1979-1989 (see e.g. Schank & Abelson 1979; the latter work has become the standard quote when referring to 'scripts'). 118. For references, summaries, and discussion, see Mey (1993a), especially chapters 6.8.4 and 10.4.4.

Chapter 11

The voice of the text 119. The word refers to the well-known story in the Bible about how the Gileadites, under the command of Jephthah, defeated the Ephraimites and then blocked their return to Ephraim by posting guards at the only possible crossing of the Jordan river. The guards were told to ask the men approaching the passage to say the word shibboleth. Those who did not pronounce it correctly, saying sibboleth instead, were fallen upon on the spot. The story is found in the book of Judges (12: 5-6); here is the text,

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in the King James Version: And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. 120. Another irony of history is that, if we know anything at all today about the earlier stages of our own languages, it is thanks to our forbears' poor spelling abilties. For instance, we wouldn't know much about the later developments of ('Vulgar') Latin, or about the early stages of the Romance languages, but for the evidence provided by the inscriptions and graffiti surviving their 'bad' spellers. 121. By 'pseudo-addressivity', I understand the case where the addressee is only put on the scene 'pro forma', as a sounding board for the narrating character (as often in Ί-narration'). Cf. Morson & Emerson's (1990: 135) examples of'superaddressees', criticized in section 10.1.1. 122. Defined by Bakhtin as "a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized)" (1992a: 263). See also the discussion in chapter 6.2.2. 123. The term 'chorema' (Greek chorema) is aptly chosen by Brandt in accordance with the etymology of its derivee, the Greek verb choreo 'to make space for something' (cf. Liddell & Scott 1978: 2015a,b). Just as the author makes the chorema, the fictional space, the chorema is what 'makes' the literary production. 124. In Bakhtin's view (cf. Morson & Emerson 1990: 315ff), 'double-voicedness' has to do with the voices attributed to individual persons; Othervoicedness' (or heteroglossia) anchors the voices in a wider, societal context. Clearly, a voice without a firm mandate in society is not a sufficient basis for a true dialogic discourse. 125. Kenner (1978). For an extensive discussion of the principle and details on its history, see Fludernik (1993: 332-38). 126. The German narratological tradition represented by Fludernik uses the term Ansteckung (literally translated as 'infection' or 'contagion' ("as in 'infectious or contagious laughter'"), "... to describe the incorporation of figural language into the narrative" (Fludernik 1993: 334). The term Ansteckung is due to Stanzel 1984; see Fludernik, I.e., for further references. 127. See chapter 9.2.3 for the commented, full text of Austen's diatribe; cf. Mey (1994a). The fact that Austen never published Northanger Abbey in her lifetime may perhaps be interpreted as due to her frustration with her

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condition as a novelist, as expressed in the quoted passage. 128. For a detailed analysis of this text, I refer to Talbot's excellent and insightful treatment (1995: 65-71). 129. The term refers to the custom of shouting approval to a particularly appreciated actor during the performance of a kabuki play. Doing kakegoe is a highly stylized activity, and only certain things can be shouted down at the stage. (Tourists beware).

Chapter 12

The speakable text 130. The quote is from an early working paper by Bakhtin, called 'Toward a reworking of the Dostoevskij book' (Appendix II in Bakhtin 1984). Bakhtin's original Dostoyevsky book is from 1929; a new edition appeared in 1963. For details, see Morson & Emerson (1990: xviii-xix, 60). 131. The choice of a visual metaphor here is not accidental. There is an interesting parallel from the psychology of perception, offered by the Gibsonian notion of affordance, understood as the general conditions on perception built into the surrounding world. We know that something is about to occur because the context prepares us for it: when we find ourselves in the neighborhood of an airport, a distant object passing quickly through our field of vision is determined to be an airplane rather than a bird or a UFO. Since this is what the context tells us to expect, given the context's particular constraints, that's what we can 'afford' (Gibson 1979; see also below, footnote 139). 132. For a schematic representation of Jakobson's model, see chapter 8.1 (footnote 84). Other authors, like Hymes, operate with more elaborate Schemas: participants (senders, receivers, other participants), channels, codes, settings, forms, topics and comments, events (1980: 22-23). 133. This mediated perception is usually called the 'refraction' of authorial intentions (Bakhtin 1992a: 313), the simile being that of a ray of light passing through the prism of various persons and their 'languages' (Holquist 1992: 432). A similar visualization occurs in Fludernik's image of 'reflectorization' (originally due to Stanzel), in which the omniscient narrator lets his voice 'reflect off the persons and objects of the narrative. (See Fludernik 1993: 390, 395). 134. Some authors (e.g. Lucy 1993, Älvarez-Cäccamo 1996) prefer the British version of the term: 'reflexive language' (cf. 'reflexion', rather than 'reflection', in British usage). I prefer the variant 'reflective', also to avoid a conceptual conflation with 'reflexive' (as in 'reflexive

406

Notes

pronouns'). 135. Se, detfikk Fanden fordi han var dum Og ikke beregnet sitt publikum. ('So that's why the Devil didn't make sense: He forgot to include his audience.') (Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, V: iv. Hertzberg ed., p. 121; my translation) 136. "[PJhatic communion [is] a type of speech in which the ties of union are created by the mere exchange of words ... [It is not] used primarily to convey meaning" (Malinowski 1953: 315). 137. Discourse has sometimes, half jokingly, been described as that which remains when you take away the purely textual from a speech situation; similarly, some people have tried to define culture as that which remains when we close all the museums and libraries. 138. One is reminded of a linguistic parallel: compare the notions of 'the' unique grammar of a language and its idealized 'speaker/hearer'. 139. An unexpected confirmation of this view comes from a seemingly unrelated field of research, that of the psychology of perception. As has been shown in the case of vision, discussed earlier (footnote 131), seeing an object does not only depend on the eyes that see, but just as much (and perhaps even more) on what is seen, on the object that impacts on our organs of vision, letting itself be looked at in its own, particular way. The main proponent of this approach, the experimental psychologist J.J. Gibson, has coined the term 'affordance' for this observation: the viewed object affords the viewing subject a view. Hence beauty is not (only) "in the eyes of the beholder", as Keats would have us believe: the beautiful object itself somehow creates the eyes that behold it. (See Gibson 1979). 140. As to the former term, obrascennost'', the reference is to Bakhtin (1994a: 99; cf. above, chapter 8.2, and see also the discussion on the proper definition and translation of the word in footnotes 44 and 61). The term otvetstvennosf has its origin in earlier writings by Bakhtin; it is referred to by Morson and Emerson (1990: 69) as the 'underwriting' of an act of speech: "What is most important about a given act ... is the fact that I 'sign' it" (ibid.). 141. The Latin word rostrum literally means 'gnawing instrument' (cf. 'rodent'), hence (in birds): 'beak'. On the Forum Romanum, the 'floor' was called rostrum because of the big beak decorating the front of the speaker's estrade. While the word's meaning of 'floor, speaking place' has survived in English, a somewhat more authentic meaning has been kept in languages such as Portuguese and Spanish, where rostro means '(human) face'. 142. Interestingly, one of the English translations of Tolstoy's work that I have consulted, entirely misses the point of the irony by 'flattening out' the

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subtle structure of the Russian original, and subsuming everything under the syntactic head of "He felt...": "He felt that he was more deeply than ever plunged into this complicated affair, and that he could without self-conceit claim that the idea which had originated in his brain was bound to disentangle the whole difficulty, ??

(Anna Karenina, by Lyof N. Tolstoi'. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929, 2 vols. [translator anonymous]. The quote occurs in Vol. II, p. 65) 143. Opojaz' is an acronym for Obcestvo izucenija poeticeskogo jazyka ('Society for the study of the poetic language'), founded in 1916 by a group of young poets and literary critics who subscribed (more or less) to the Formalist principles.

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Name index Aeschylus 176 Abelson, Robert P. fn. 117 Agricola, Juhani 317 Allais, Alphonse 148 Älvarez-Cäccamo Celso, 298-299, 362, fn. 134 Anouilh, Jean 307 Apelles fn. 115 Aristotle 15, 16,267 Aulus Hirtius 70 Austen, Jane 74, 78, 80-81, 147, 259-260, 263, 274, 284, 308, fn. 34,52,127 Auster, Paul viii Austin, J. L. 281, 304, 345, 348, 351-352

Beethoven, Ludwig van 129,199200 Bellow, Saul 129, 174-179 Benveniste, Emile 186 Bing, Jon 384 Blake, William 250-251,318 Bloomfield, Leonard 355 Bo, Domenico fn. 64 Boileau, Nicolas 16,287 Boissier, Gaston 29 Booth, Wayne C. 243, 245 Bourdieu, Pierre xi Braga, Denise Bertoly ix Brandt, Per Aage 329-330, fn. 100, 123 Brecht, Bertolt 271, fn. 101 Bresnan, Joan A. 19

Brill, Marsh Broadbent, Donald E. 31

Brockelmann, Carl 45 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. vi, vii, 20, 38, 93-94, 108-110, 113, 135, 144, 153, 155-158, 163, 223, 226, 234-237, 239, 241, 243, 248, 251, 269-270, 282-287, 324-326, 328, 330-331, 335, 338-347, 349, 351, 354, 356, 359-360, 365, 371-374, 378, 384, fh. 59, 61, 84, 93, 94, 106,122,124,130,140 Bal, Mieke 73, 76, 128, 146, 148, 150, 152-153,243, fn. 54 Banfield, Ann 18, 25, 72, 89, 95, 103-104, 108, 126, 128, 134, 137, 144, 157, 161-162, 166, 185-186, 260, 361, 367, 369-371, fn. 7, 30, 36.63, 88 Baring's Bank fn. 96 Batavi 156, fn. 57 Baudelaire, Charles 129 Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan 93

Brown, Penelope fn. 77 Brendum-Nielsen, Johs. fn. 38 Bühler, Karl 9, 45-46, 90, 359, fn. 21,31 Byatt, A. S. ix, 101-102, 106, 182, 194-195, 202, 216-218, 222, 251, 254, 259-260, 273-274, 276, 278, 300-302,335,345, fn. 13, 75, 102 Byron, Lord 334, 339

Caesar, C. lulius 47, fn. 27,28 Calvino, Italo 289, fn. Carlsberg 309 Carnap, Rudolf 281 Carroll, Lewis 291 Cervantes Saavedra, 384 Chalhub, Samira 233 Chatman, Seymour B.

69-70, 146, 110

Miguel de

18

428

Name index

Chaucer, Geoffrey 318 Chirico, Giorgio de 227 Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre 323 Chomsky, Noam A. 17, 19, 25, 95, 104, 196, fn. 9,42 Cicero, M. Tullius 16,323 Cleary, Charles 284 Clement, Samuel \33seealso Mark Twain Cocteau, Jean fn. 83 Colamarino, Tito fn. 83 Comrie, Bernard fn. 39 Confucius 356 Cortäzar, Julio 123, fn. 10, 35 Courtenay, Bryce 190, 193, 199201

Dadd, Richard 8, fn. 2 Declerck, Renaat 71 Dickens, Charles 335 Diderot, Denis 326 Divine Voice 210 Donne, John 270, 318 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor A. 208, fh. 130 Drabble, Margaret 211 Droste-Hiilshoff, Annette von 215 Dry, Helen 22 Du Bois, John A. 32, 34 Dumas Sr., Alexandre 198 Duranti, Alessandro 371 Dylan, Bob fn. 106

Eco, Umberto 29, 148, 215, 310, 341 Ehrlich, Susan 21, 25, 30, 34, 54, 55, 57-58, 95, 98, 104, 127, 138, 157, 186-187, 305, fn. 7, 16,71

Eisenstein, Sergei M. 380-384 Eliot, George 35, 76, 214, 346, fn. 102 Ellis, BretEaston 167 Emerson, Caryl 38, 93-94, 109, 113, 153, 158, 166,208-210,235, 237, 239, 283-284, 288, 293, 326, 331, 347, 355, 358, 360, fh. 84, 94, 101, 105, 106, 121, 124, 130, 140 Emonds, Joseph A. 18-19, 95 Euripides 176

Fabricius-Hansen, Catherine fn. 25 Fairclough, Norman 279-280, 371-372,374,384 Fallaci, Oriana 47, 170-171 Faulkner, William fn. 63 Feuerbach, Ludwig 382 Fillmore, Charles 22 Flaubert, Gustave 302 Fludernik, Monika vi, vii, 10, 21, 25, 45, 65, 68-71, 73, 76, 82-83, 102-105, 108, 110, 121, 126-127, 136, 140, 157, 164, 166, 170, 179, 184-186,207, 244, 246, 248, 254, 257, 260, 335, 361, fh. 1, 9, 15, 25,26,31,39,43,70,79,80,89, 125,126 Formalists, Russian 384, fn. 101, 143 Forster, E. Morgan 331 Foucault, Michel ix, fn. 17 Fowler, Roger vii, 222 Fowles, John 214, fn. 13,83 Franco, Francisco 363 Friedrich, Paul vi Frisch, Max 239 Fupz Aakeson, Kim 177

Name index Garavelli, Bice Mortara 289, fn. 110

Garpe, Maria 372 Gates Jr., Henry Louis ('Skip') 104 Genette, Gerard 164, fn. 54 Gibson, James J. fn. 131, 139 Giora, Rachel 305 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 164165,323 Gorayska, Barbara fn. 90 Gramsci, Antonio 278, 374 Green, Georgia 68 Gregory XII, Pope Greimas, A.-J. 233 Grice, H. Paul 304 Grierson, G. A. fn. 1 Gundel, Jeanette 30, 346

Haberland, Hartmut ix, 105, 188, m. 38 Habermas, Jürgen fn. 105

Halliday, M. A. K. 143 Handwerk, Gary 369 Hasan, Ruqaiya 143 Haug, Wolfgang F. 321 Hemingway, Emest 167, 190 Heraclitus 358,382 Hinrichs, Edward 68 Hitchcock, Alfred fn. 83 . Hitler, Adolf 65 Hjelmslev, Louis 92, 282 Hoban, Russell 167-169 Holquist, Michael 113,283, fn. 133 Homer 45, 163, 213, fn. 19 Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus) 16, 29, 112, 132, 172,248,270,308, 322-323, 379, tn. 64,91, 97 Hudson, Alan fn. 112 Hymes, Dell fn. 132

429

IbnGavirol 270 Ibsen, Henrik 16, 178, fn. 135 Impressionists 383 Irigaray, Luce 291, fn. I l l Ishiguro, Kazuo 223-224,226-227 Ivanic, Roz 273 Jahn, Manfred 77, fn. 7, 29, 33 Jakobson, Roman 34, 40, 48, 233, 359, 369, 384, fn. 5, 84, 132 James, Henry fn. 55 Jameson, Frederic 282 Janks, Hilary 273 Jephtha, Judge fn. 119 Jespersen, Otto fn. 54 Johannsen, Lene Vejlbaek Johnson, Lyndon B. 44 Joyce, James vii, 167, 207, 335

Kant, Immanuel 93, 382 Kärkkäinen, Elise 33 Keats, John 146, fn. 139 Kellaway, Kate 330,334 Kenner, Hugh 207, 335, fn. 79, 125 Kidd, I. C. 5-6 Kierkegaard, S0ren 282, 288 Kim, MyungHee 31-32 Kirkeby, Per 227 Kristeva, Julia 372 Kundera, Milan 262 Kuno, Susumo 30 Kuroda, Sige-Yuki 91

Labov, William 355 Lacan, Jacques 20, 128, 282-283, 354 LaFayette, Mme Marie-Madeleine de 323

430

Name index

Lambert, Drexel Burnham 264 Larson, Gary 282, fn. 104 Lawrence, D. H. 162, fn. 58 Le Guin, Ursula fn. 11 Leeson, Nick fn. 96 Leonora Christina, Princess fn. 38 Lermontov, Mikhail Yu. 165 Lessing, Doris 152 Levinson, Stephen C. 59, 89, fn. 77 Lewis, G. L. 100, fn. 81 Lewis, Wyndham 335, fn. 284 Liddell, Henry G. fn. 123 Locke, John fn. 98 Lotman, Yuri 243, 300 Lucy, John A. fn. 134 Luke, Allan 321 Lyons, John 58

Machado de Assis 212, fn. 13 Magliozzi, Tom and Ray 10 Malinowski, Bronistaw 270, 369, fn. 136 Mansfield, Katherine 257 Marlowe, Christopher 155, 318 Martial (M. Valerius Martialis) 29 Martinet, Andre fn. 37 Marx, Karl 300, 382 May, Karl 165, fn. 62 Maynard, Senko 39, 365 Mclnerney, Jay ix, 22, 46,, 49-50, 181, 183,206,267,285,346,348, 364, 380, fn. 108 Meinke, Peter 252 Mey, Inger ix Mey, Inger Elise 384 Mey, Jacob L. 9, 30, 57, 81, 89, 109, 123, 133, 147-148, 155-156, 168, 183, 237, 242-244, 263, 267, 279, 281-282, 292, 296, 299, 309,

318-319, 355, 357-358, 384, fh. 35, 49, 71, 77, 85, 90, 105, 112, 118,127 Miller, J. Hillis 270, 287 Mininni, Giuseppe 372 Mizutani, Osamu and Nobuko 91 Montesquieu, Charles Secondat, baron de 323,326 Moore, Henry fn. 58 Moraes, Vinicius 380-382 Moron, Angel 269 Morris, Charles 281 Morselli, Guido 20 Morson, Gary S. 38, 93-95, 109, 113, 153, 158, 166,208,211,235, 237, 239, 284, 288, 293, 326, 331, 347, 355, 358, 360, fn. 84, 94, 101,121,124,130,140 Moses, Prophet 269 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 55 Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker) 155-156, fn. 57

Nestor, Monk 146 Nietzsche, Friedrich 382

Opojaz 384, fn. 143 Osten, Susanne 372

Panini 15 Paris School of Semiotics 233 Paxton, Tom 44 Petiska, Eduard 257 Petrarca, Francesco 270 Pilcher, Rosamunde 81 Pirandello, Luigi 133,329 Plato 175,239,355

Name index Plautus, T. Maccius 176 Posner, Roland 104 Postal, Paul M. 89 Potebnja, Aleksandr A. 93 Proust, Marcel 217,302 Proxmire, Wm. 4, 6, fn. 1 Prücha, Jan 30 Pushkin, Aleksandr S. 147, 248, 270, 302, 334, 339, fh. 91,97 Pythagoras 15, fn. 4

Quayle, Dan 319 Quintilian (M. Fabius Quintilianus) 16

Reichenbach, Hans 54, 59 Reinhart, Tanya 97, 305 Reisman, Karl 113 Reynolds, Mike ix Rajagopalan, Kanavilli ix Ranciere, Franfois ix Ricardo, David 382 Richards, I. A. 384 Richardson, Samuel 147,323 Riffaterre, Michel 12, 26-27, 76, 105 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 273, 323, 326 Rushdie, Salman 292 Russian Formalists 271,384 Ruwet, Nicolas fn. 42

Sacks, Harvey 363 Sapir, Edward 355 Sartre, Jean-Paul 227 Saussure, Ferdinand de

17, 92,

431

233,355-356, fh. 84 Schiller, Friedrich 176 Schank, Roger C. fn. 117 Scholes, Robert A. 148, 165, 272, 329, 340 Schreiner, Erik 101 Scipio, Q. Metellus 69 Scott, Robert fn. 123 Scott, Walter 41, 198 Searle, John R. 174,281,304 Sebeok, Thomas A. 17,383 Shakespeare, William 155, 176, 302,318 Shklovsky, Viktor B. 227, 253,271 Signorini, Ines ix, fn. 69 Silverstein, Michael 321, 340341,357 Smetana, Bedfich fn. 97 Smith, Bessie 49 Smith, Carlota 54, 57-59, 185, 269, 350, 382, fn. 24 Socrates 175,382 Solstad, Dag 277 Spitzer, Leo fn. 79 St. Eustace 168 St. Jerome 325 St. Luke 213 St. Matthew 235,291 St. Paul 235, 302, 318, 324, 326, fn. 36, 78 St. Peter 282, 302 Stael, Germaine Necker, baronne de 323 Stanzel, Karl Franz 166, 247, fn. 126, 133 Steen, Gerard Steffensen, Eigil fn. 63 Sternberg, Me'ir 21 Storm, Theodor 215

432

Name index

Talbot, Mary M. ix, 164,222, 243244, 251,254, 297, 328, 341, 345, 367,372,378, fn. 102, 128 Tennyson, Alfred 29 Theroux, Paul 187 Thucydides 30,213 Todorov, Tzvetan fn. 93 Togeby, Ole 233 Tolstoy, Lev N. viii, ix, 27, 39, 113, 135, 138, 140, 150, 152, 166, 171, 180, 204, 275, 294, 296, 298, 300, 352, 354, 357, 375, 379, fh. 52, 142 Toolan, Michael J. vii, 189 Trollope, Anthony 214, fn. 13 Trubetzkoy, Nicholas Prince 48 Tsur, Reuven 266-267 Tuwim, Julian 340 Twain, Mark 133, 190, fn. 6

Van Gogh, Vincent 250 Vieira, Josalba fn. 99 Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro) 132 Voloshinov, Valentin N. 93, 145, 166, 208-209, 236-237, 330-332, 341,fn.82 Voltaire, Fran9ois-Marie Arouet de 326

Wagner, Richard 113,209 Wallace, Catherine 272-273, 279 Waugh, Evelyn 228 Weinrich, Harald 68, 98, 121, 186, fn. 15 Weiss, Peter 82 Welty, Eudora 173 Wesley, Mary viii, ix, 60, 67, 8081,209, 330, fh. 34

Wiesel, Eli 193 Wilden, Anthony 282 Wille, Niels Erik 233 Winter, Werner 234, fn. 15, 95 Woolf, Virginia 38, 42, 75-78, 106-107,114,119, 138, 179,203, 245-247, 250, 331, 336, 342, 360-36 l,fh. 45,46 Wörishöffer, Carl 198 Wortham, Stanton E. F. 47

Xenophon 146

Yamaguchi, Haruhiko v, 76, fh, 51 Young Hegelians 382 Young Socialist League 278 Yudhisthira, King 227

Zeuxis fn. 115 Zumwalt, Elmo 5 Zweig, Ron 193

Subject index absence 254 acceptance, passive 275 accomplice, author's 346, 348 accusative with infinitive 100, 187, fn.28 act cooperative 368 mental 354 potential 301 pragmatic 307 actant 330 activity 239 identifying 254 by listener 346-347 re-creating 295 Adam 156,270,288 authorial 327 Biblical 328 adapt 209 see also borrowing addressability 169, 234, 325, 325, fn. 60 see also addressivity addressed 366 see also addressee addressee 163, 239, 241, fn. 121 imaginary 297 addressing 135, 237 act of fn. 44 direct 30 addressivity 109, 135, 163, 166, 234, 237, 239, 255, 366, 373-374, fn.44 pseudo- 324-325 adjacency 112 see also conversation analysis adjectives 311 adopt 213 see also borrowing adult books 35 adverbials of time 217 adverbs 43 mitigating 121

advertising 309, 345 affordance (Gibson) fn. 131, 139 airlinese fn. 18 alienation 253-256,269,271 allusion 249,251,345 'already said' 251 anachronism see also voice, voice trash external 194 internal 197, fn 108 analeptic 121 anaphora 49, 333, fn 21 see also cataphora suspended 51 anaphoric 266 reference 224 anchor point (RT) 56 anchoring 169 in context 350, 371 in reality 210,299 societal 351,369,378 announced 204 voice shift 114, 182 annunciation-cum-response 271 Ansteckung 166, fn 80, 126 see also contagion, infectiousness answerability 238, 248, 373-374 see also responsibility anteriority, true 185 Antigua 113 aorist 185 apostrophizing 29, 212, 245, 255, 260, 274, 324, 342 self-apostrophizing FID 258 appropriateness 274, 279, 299, 370, 374, 380 Aramaic 291 aspect 82 auctor infabula 79, 211, fn 13 audience 133 captive 274 conditional 270

434

Subject index

participation by 15 authenticity, loss of fn 202 author 15, 147, 180, 202, 211,215, 235, 249, 274-275, 294, 309, 340, 341,346,367,379 as author 219 hegemony of 144 as instance 110, 342 as narrator 219, 277, 334, 341 see also author/narrator omnipotence of 278 author's accomplice 346, 348 authority 293 creative activity 296 distancing 339 frustrations 218 immortality fn 102 involvement 243 qualities 239 voice 164 author/narrator 194, 197, 215, 338,341,344 uncoupling 278 authorial 338 decree 278 FID 80 hectoring 222 intentions, refraction of see also refraction authorial intrusion 21, 212, 220, 273, 276, 329, 335, 339 see also voice crash invasion fn 102, see also authorial intrusion, voice crash magic 274 manipulation 221 meta-statement 217 privilege 244 retraction 339 un-timing 217 wake-up call 227 authority 282-284

authors 133, 135, 137, 197-198, 214-216,328-329,369 authorship 327 automatic writing 289 (non-)autonomous 328

backdrop 312 backshifting 65-66, 72, 75-77, 80, 185, 187 'bald-on-record' 196, fn. 77 Benetton 309 bespoken 251 bestrangement 227, 253, 271, fn. 94 see also defamiliarization Betrachtzeit fn. 25 see also viewing time Bildungsroman 190 biological 257 birthmark 282 Black English Vernacular 355 Bloomsbury 250 bokmäl 293 book burnings 292 borrowing 209, 220, 222, 337, 346 Bosnian 297 'budgetese' 6

canonical 265 Canterbury Tales 243 captatio benevolentiae fn. 113 see also rhetoric captive audience 274 sentences 185 capture 72, 109 Car Talk 10 cataphora 124, fn. 21 see also anaphora catechism 239

Subject index centrifugal 355-356 centripetal 355-357 change of voice 151 see also voice change character 148, 188,278,294 Onstage' 260 invasion of 166-167 voice 182,208 zone 113 characters 133,197-198,239,329 chorema (Brandt) 329-330, 332, 338, 360, fh. 100, 123 see also fictional space generalized 334 chronotope 226 Church Slavonic Old 45 South 298 clashing voices 101,160,328-331, 383 see also voice clash clash 108, 145,360 class 160 social 162,388 class-bound 371 class-dependent 318 co-authoring 138 co-create 128,145,250,312,330 co-telling 243 co-text see cotext code 360 displacement 299 switching 299-299 cognitive 33, 240 obstination 34, 184 see also perseverance structures 266 coherence 305, 35 textual 34 cohesion 97-98,305,351 collaboration 137,148,328,348 process of 145 textual 145

435

collective superaddressee 327 colonial 292 colonized 153 commodity 321 esthetics 321 'common currency' 302 communication 91,233,270,321, 369 model 40, 233, (Jakobson's) fn. 84 -by-decoding 369 undistorted (Habermas) fn. 105 communicative dyad 233 intent 19 communion 369 phatic 360, fn. 136 competent 267,296, 306,312 reader 31, 186,216, 260, 265-266, 341 complement clauses 72 component 357 computer 384 literacy 318 human (inter)action 303 concordance of tenses 104 see also consecutio temporum conditional 65, 76-77 conditions 370 attached 160,282 of language use 297 hidden 160 of the text 260 societal 155,270 conflict 329,370 of information 226 conjunction 100-101 conjunctive see also subjunctive connotation 357 consciousness 271,362,366 center of 184 contextual 34

436

Subject index

double 347-348 first 330 linguistic 302 perceiving 246 reflective 361 raised 257, 382 reader 346 second 330 social 375 story-external 254 subjective fn. 31 consecutio temporum 58, 69, 77, 104, 185 see also sequence of consistency 224, 312 inner 189 constitutive 284,361,370 constraints 241 contextual fn. 131 impossible 226 in reception 270 constructing 364 context 364 discourse 327 consumers 368 consumption 271 contact function (Jakobson) 360 contagion 166-167, 208, fn. 43, 126 see also Ansteckung, infectiousness content 119, 121, 125, 136 context 7, 35, 59, 98-99, 109, 235, 239, 308, 312, 328-330, 341, 350, 359-362, 364, 369-373,375, 377 creation of 361 of discourse 202 of expectation fn. 116 local 143 of occurrence 321 of society 134,281 suitable 94 contextual(ized) 269 boundaries 332

co-dependency 303 coercion 40,219,303 collaboration 134 conditions 127 ground 354 innuendo 299 space 333-334 continuity 311 contract 165 control 373-374 of floor 374 of language 384 by society 379 ofspeakability 373 textual 329 of voice 380 conventions 379 conversation analysis 112, 167, 373, fn. 85 conversational behavior 239 routine 305 turns 112 cooperation 127, 134-135, 145, 165-166, 216,239,327,348,368 creative 266 intrinsic 367 reader 30,296,313 cooperative aspect 243 effort 300 principle 239 copula 140 correctness 282, 296 political 53,256,355 in spelling 356, 374 cotext 7, 36, 328 courtroom 287 creation unlimited 267 power of 364 creative spark 271 understanding 39 creatures of society 242

Subject index credibility 155,209 critical language awareness 283 Crusoe, Robinson 7 Czech 30,256-257

Danish 176-177 Dano-Norwegian 256 dash 180 dative, understood 22 dativus affectivus see ethicus dativus ethicus 22, 30 dead letter 248 deconstruction 241,267,288,383 defamiliarization 253, 271 see also bestrangement deictic 66, 107 center 45, 107, 182 imagined 65 field 45-46 empty fn. 31 perspective 184 reference, local 58 reorientation 71 deictics 113, 174, 311 reminder 29, 346 shifting 138 subjective 184 tell-tale 175 deixis 9, 43, 98 narrative 122 regular 122 demonstratives 45 see also demonstrative pronouns demythologization fn. 106 denotation 354 deontic 125 dialect 318, 340, fn. 112 national 292 eye-dialect 167, 170,200 super- 167

stigmatized 299 dialectic 202, 204-205, 210, 327, 378-379 opposition 366 process 144 situation 40 reinforcement 372 dialectics 265, 329, 362, 384 dialogic 367 of voice 357 existential 366 dialogic 109, 233, 270, 288, 330,351,366,370 character of language 158 compact 270-271 dialectics 367 discourse 143 frame 240 interaction 235,251,346 interchange 324 orientation of discourse 158 relationship 269 space 270 dialogue 109, 127, 145, 153, 183, 234-241, 273, 329, 351, 370 broken 113 and dialectics 349 inner 261 irreversible character of 239 of languages 360,378 of life 352 micro- 288 textual 354,367,370 diatext 372 dictionaries 4 Dies Irae fn. 86 diglossia 292, fn. 112 direct question 102 see also question disclaimer 295 discourse 18, 136, 241, 297,

437

214,

327,

178, 360,

327,

438

Subject index

360, 378, fn. 137 analysis 99 as real 295 see also realistic discourse class-bound 371 dialogic orientation of 158 direct discourse (DD) 73, 100,

120, 126-127, 142,207-208,221 'internal' 139 anticipated 208 pseudo-quoted 286, fn. 107 reported 102 'disowning' the 217 double-voiced 378 equal 371 feminist 257 fictional 295 free indirect (FID) 18, 25, 72, 97, 102, 119, 125-127, 136, 142, 157, 174-175, 182, 185, 188, 203-208, 220, 244,251, 258, fn 7, 25, 29 self-apostrophizing 258 unfinished 120 indirect 73,75, 101 reported 102-103 narrator-less 137 naturalized 273 novelistic 223, 333 'quasi-direct' 208 reader-oriented 222 referentiality of 33 reported 101-102, 111 simulation of 290 sotto voce quoted 118 subject-less 137 universe of 134,227,295 univocal 276 discursive conditions 202 distal 43, 45, 47, fn. 20 see also proximal 'doing being' 363 dominance see hegemonic

double articulation fn. 37 double entendre 249 double-bind 282 double-voicedness 20, 108-109, 173, 210, 334, 378, 382, fn. 124 see also other-voicedness, voice, voicing downshifting 174 see also shift, voice change doxology 349 dual voice hypothesis 110-111 see also double-voicedness, voice, voicing

e-mail 384 E-node 19 economic activities 367 'edufication' 321 emblem 319 empowerment 372 English 27, 37, 48, 53-54, 76, 82, 100-101, 123, 139, 169-170, 185, 207, 257-259, 293, 311, fn. 70, 76,95,142 Black English Vernacular 355 fifteenth-century 104 Midland dialect of 162 Nuclear English 168 South African 193 'engulfing' 207 see also voice mashing Enlightenment 326 entailment 341-343 entrapment (reader) fn. 102 see also setting up epistle 329 epistolary novel 329 esce ne skazannoe 251 see also 'not yet said' essential messiness 241

Subject index event time (ET) 54-56, 62-63, 197 see also time remembered 62 true 62 exchange value 321 exclusive 345 see also inclusive pronoun 347, fn. 95 expressive value 162 Extended Standard Version 95 see also transformational grammar external 254 anachronism 194 see also voice clash, voice trash authority 290 position 246, 248 extralinguistic see linguistic extrinsic 367 (Indo-)European 122 eye-dialect 167, 170,200

factual information 266 faith fn. 78 familiarity 253,271 fasces fn. 17 feminist 372 discourse 257 fiction 270, 290, 296, 330, 368 work of 270 fictional perimeter 354 space 148, 165 170, 242,248, 270, 296, 309, 329, 338, 352, 360 see also chorema discourse 295 fictitious reality 188 fictive truth 197 FID see discourse, free indirect Finnish 123,317, fn. 47 floor 373-374 control of 374

439

flow of narration 220 focalization 152, 227, fn. 54 focusing, previous 124 formulaic expressions 308 frame 33, 215 see also script free indirect discourse (FID) see discourse, free indirect free speech 287 freedom 380 French 129, 167, 185, 256, 294, 296, 376 fundamentalists fn. 92 future 77 inner monologue 203 knowledge 197 twist 77

galego 362 see also Galician Galician 298-299,362 gamelan 241 garden paths 30 gender 45 genre 326 secondary 325 travelogue 164 German 82, 164, 256-257, fn. 22 Germanic 123 gnomic 125,219 present 278 grammar 161, 319 generative 241 see also transformational grammar transformational 96, 126 grammatica tyrannus 282 grammatical 162,319 correctness 318 rules 257,318 subject 89,92 Grandison fn. 50 Great Book of Nature 327

440

Subject index

Greek, Classical 30, 45, 215, 317318, 322, 324, fn. 19,74, 123 ground common 330, 344 contextual 269 'questioning the ground' (Miller) 287

hate letters 343 hearer 137,233 hearer/reader 134 Hebrew 45 hegemonic authority 375 dominance 278 hegemony 279,330,341,374 of harmony 375 in ideology 382 of language 156 of literary'logic' 380 struggle for 384 heterodiegetic 164 see also homodiegetic heteroglossia 153, 157-159, 161, 223, 326-328, 331, 339, 370, 373-374,378, 383-384 special 2237 heteroglossic 334 heteroglot 355 hicceitas 271 hidden 188 'code' 287 conditions 160 divisions 318 inequalities 372 presuppositions 278 voice change 377 Hindi 298 historical conditions 297 history of

literature 241 of writing 317 holistic (time) 59 see also time, tense Holocaust 193, fn. 74 homodiegetic 164, 166-167, 190, 224 see also I-person, 1-voice Hupty Dumpty 350

Ί for the purpose of action' 166 Ί for the purpose of narration' 166 I-narration fn. 121 I-person 165, 180, 189 I-voice 213,258,326 Iceland 298 ideological 158,287,371 content 278 illocutionary 308 see also speech act immigrants 239 immortality (author) fn. 97 imparfait 185 imperative 89 'naked' fn. 77 imperfect 62-63, 66 impersonal 219,256-257,260 implicit 248-247 character 247 authorial voice 344 implied 269-270 author 212,243 reader 109, 248-251, 272-274, 296-297 user 299 inclusive pronoun 255, 259, 345 see also exclusive inclusivity, faked 23 inconsistency 194, 198, 230 see also narrative (n)

Subject index independence 329 -in-interdependence 379 indexical expression 65, 302, 344 indexicality 326, 340, 357, 363 indexing potential 357 indigenous culture 292 indirect discourse 72-73, 101 see also discourse, oratio obliqua speech 140, 187 question 102-103 Indo-European 45, 122 Proto- fn. 95 inequality 371-375 inertia 31 see also obstinacy infectiousness 208, 335, 341 see also contagion, Ansteckung inner voice 120, 136, 203, 286, 352 see also voice inquits 75, 174, 180, 182, 308, fn. 65 see also parentheticals interaction 235, 268 of voices 327 engaged 239 interlanguage 296 interlocutor 366 internal anachronism 194 dialogicity 64, 109 position (reader's) 246, 248-249, 254, fn. 31 internet 326,384 interpretive 33, 350 obstinacy 33, 184 perseverance 184, 204-205 interruption 216, 273 intertextuality 372, fn. 93 introductory verbs 179 see also inquits, parentheticals, tags intrusion 129, 225, 339, see also voice invasive 168

441

addressivity 169 invisible 270 hand 289 scaffolding 243 space 259-260 'invoicing' 295 IQ 319 irony 209, 339-340, 375-376, 378, 383 manipulation by 378 Italian 256 italics 285

'Jacob's room' 334 Japanese 23, 30, 89, 365 Judgment Day 237 junk bonds 264

kabuki 347, fn. 129 kakegoe 347, fn. 129 Kilroy 198 knotespräk 293 knowledge 268

labor (birth) fn. 75 power 239language 307 act, see speech act advertising 305 'chains' of 299 control of 373 cinematic 380 dependency on 210 hegemony of 156 institutional 305 (meta-) 361

442

Subject index

paradox of 362 'prison-house' of 282 (non-)refiective 361-362 reforms 256,297 struggle 297 see also Norwegian, knctespräk, suffespräk unitary 161, 355 use 92,281,299,362 vernacular 1668 langue 92,355 primacy of 357 Latin 38, 45, 54, 66, 69, 71, 77, 100-101, 187,292,318,326 law 289 lector infabula 29, 144, 148, 202, 310 legal 384 fiction 290 instance 285 proceedings 235 legalese 51 see also legal fiction letter-writing 247,325 letters 322,326 pastoral 326 linguistic 157, 161-162,266 consciousness 302 cleansing 298 extra-linguistic 162,351 fallacy 104 manipulation 257 norms 296 over-determination 27, fn. \0see also tracking pragmatics 7 rules 105,358 solutions 162 standards 318 superaddressee 293 linguistics 17,108,241,355,370 only 157 linguists 351 listener (to message) 242, 346

literacy 317 literary 271 criticism 241,263 discourse 136 interpretation 26 pragmatics 12,368,378,385 production 234 sciences 357 seduction 334, fn. 49 text 7,233 universe 159,237 re-ordering 159 (re-)creating the 294 literature 154,248,320,329 good vs. bad 379 history of 241 study of 17 Lithuanian 45 localization 162,227 locution 308 see also speech act

magic 322 Mahäbhärata 227 management of voices 145,159 manipulation 275, 298-300, 334, 340,343-345 authorial 221 efforts at 280 ironic 378 linguistic 257 markedness 48 market place 367 mass education 321 meaning dynamic 351 generic 257 static 351 media, electronic 388 Mediterranean 324 message 233, 369

Subject index sender of 346 listener 242, 346 verbal 359 meta-comment 221 authorial 221 metalinguistic 283-284, 354, 358, 361,373 clues 355 function 360 metalingvistika see metalinguistic metaphor 253, 264 metapragmatic 244 metonym 253 space 332 microdialogue 288 minimal framework 47 minority 362 Mis s a pro Defunct is fn. 86 mitigation 121 modality 76, 82, 125 see also modal adverb monologic 369 monument 248, fn. 97 morphology 108,140,157,305 overkill 123 mortal immortality 248 multi-voicedness 108 multivocality 158, 164, 366, 369, 378

nadadresat 163, 283 see also superaddressee "Name of the Father1 283 name-dropping 198 names fn. 98 see also sensible ideas narration 95, 109-110,217 process of 149 psycho- 108, 139, 141, 197,208210,212,229,361 strained 154

443

successful 136 time 220 narrative (n) 134, 154, 165 appropriate 344 creation of 349 derailed 222 effective 344 empty center of 260, fn. 31 inconsistency in 198,202,230 neutral 248 polarity of 220 shift 78 subjectivity in 89, 312 narrative (a) authority 110 categories 163 communication 367 context 202, 243, 296, 379 discourse 249 floor 186 forcing 226 housekeeping 345 instance 128, 214, 244 see also narrator/author interpretation 355 omnipotence 141 paradox 295 past 278 personae 297 process 149 report 221 scene 209 set-up 367 situation 128 sub-contexts 168 support 272 time 59 non-time 217 universe 154, 167, 188,242 voice 73,84, 121, 134, 152, 180, 251,367 web 148

444

Subject index

narrativity 148, 186 narrator/narratrix 101, 189, 198, 211, 337, 341 see also narrative instance author/narrator 192, 208, fn. 12 dignity of 110 effaced see lost narrator excursions 217 graffiti 198 intrusion of 80 see also authorial intrusion, voice trash lost narrator 74, 137, fn. 31, 51 narrator-less discourse 137 omnipotence of 120 omniscience of 205,220,225,276 voice of 117, 119, 129, 182 see also narrative voice Nazi fn. 74 negation 254 negotiation 330 New Criticism 241,263,271,370 non-autonomous 328 non-reflective 362 non-speakability 374 non-standard forms 355 norm 160,291 normalization 291 Norwegian 53,256,297,319 knotespräk 293 nynorsk 293,319 Old Norse 298 riksmäl 293 samnorsk 293 suffespräk 278,293 'not yet said' 38, 109,250-251 noun (phrase) 37, 311 novel 'novelness' 271 discourse in 227, 333 polemic character 384 see also subversive prose, novelistic 328

trash fn. 52 novelists lady 259 rights of 339 number 45

objective view 263 obrascennosf 109, 135, 234, fn. 140 see also addressivity obstinacy 121, 311, fn. 56 see also obstination, perseverance interpretative 33, 187 reader 30 obstination 33, 98, 121, 184 see also perseverance cognitive 34, 187 syntactic 125 ogovorennyj 251 see bespoken Old Style Calendar fn. 27 omnipotence 242, 244, 278 omniscience 205, 220, 225, 242, 244, 276 selective 278 oral dialogue 179 messages 324 storyteller 241 testimony fn. 110 oratio obliqua 72, 101 see also indirect discourse orchestration 153, 159 meaning of 326 origo fn. 31 orkeslrovka see orchestration orthography see also spelling debates on 318 pragmatics of 319 ostranenija, priem 253, 271, fn. 94 see also bestrangement otherness, objective 328

Subject index other-voicedness 328, 331-333, fn. 124 see also heteroglossia, double-voicedness otvetstvennost' 235, fn. 140 see also answerability, responsibility overdeterm i ned 13 8 overpopulated see populated owned 160 ownership of language 164 see also stewardship of utterance 235

pair parts 112 see also conversation analysis parentheticals 713, 117, 138, 181, 205, 219, 308, 362 see also inquits, introductory verbs, tags parody 160, 209, 293, 335, 340, 378, 383 parole 93,355 parsing 266 participation 30, 352, 365 particles 102 passe simple 185 past (tense) 221 future 76 lazy past tense 68 narrative 278 perfect 185 preterit 62-63, 67-68, 79 progressive 185 independent fn. 70 simple 185 Pegasus 281 penmanship 318 Pepper, Mrs. 179 per-ception 263 perfect 70, fn. 28 periods, literary 268 perseverance 311 see also

445

obsitnacy, obstination, inertia interpretive 184, 204-205 person 45^46, 160, 256 see also pronoun first 46, 163, 165,223 FID 80 narrative 47 plural 345 singular 345 'skaz'-I 190 voice 169 'I-person' 167, 180, 192 second 46, 163, 170, 256-257, 260 narratives 47 'second person' (Bakhtin) 286 third 45, 163 'third person' (Bakhtin) 283 persona 133, 160,367,379 dramatis 134 narrative 297 perspective 63-64, 145, 147, 149 deictic 184 shift in 75 temporal fn. 24 phatic 360, fn. \7>6 see also communion philology 15 phonemes 92 picture 300 'plugging'textual gaps 312 pluperfect 62-67, fn. 23 plus-value 321 podgotovlennaja rec 330 see also prepared for, polotovary poetic function 358 license 328 point of view 20,34,45^7,52,59, 113,145,152,163, 185,243,369 resumptive fn. 56 polemic 384

446

Subject index

polotovary 331 Polynesian (languages) fn. 95 polyphony 112,237,241 populated 157,243,246 over-populated 157 Portuguese 299, 362 possible world 262, 299 postmodernism 241 potential act 301 power 250, 273, 283, 298, 372 labor 239 lack of 277 in words 308 structures 329 pragmatic 98, 107, 110, 127-128, 137, 143-144, 161-162, 177, 185-186, 244, 278, 283-284, 288, 291,296-297,303-304 acceptability 224 act 127, 137,305,308,345 of reading 354 cooperation in 312 inappropriateness 97 markers 76 presupposition 110 readability 144 pragmatics 99, 105, 278, 355, 368 of'letters' 321 of literature 294 of orthography 319 pre-conditioned 249 pre-set 312,340 discourse 330 prejudice 318 prepared-for 331 prescriptive bigotry 280 present 69, 108, fn. 46 gnomic 278 'presumed innocence' 163 presuppositions 271,305,345-346, 348,373, fn. 99 hidden 278

pragmatic 111 textual 346 preterit 62,66,77, 108, fn. 46 historic 185 past 63-64, 67-68, 79 reminiscing 74 simple 74 true 67 priming 208 see also borrowing principle 239 of dialogue 239 of inertia 31 of polyvalence 27,76, 105 Uncle Charles 207, fn. 79 pro-active 39, 251 produce 351 meaning 300 pro-duce 379 producer 372 product 272 promise 308 pronominal reference 333 twist 214 pronouns 43, 45^7, 96, 122-123, 176,311,342,345 assignment 143 demonstrative 217 exclusive 344, fn. 95 inclusive 255, 259, 345 masculine fn. 106 possessive 256 reflexive 124, 187, 256, fn. 22 prose, novelistic 328 proximal 43, 44, 47 pseudo-addressivity 324-325, fn. 121 see also addressability pseudo-etymology fn. 50 pseudo-quoted discourse fn. 107 see also discourse psychology 351 psycho-narration 108, 139, 141, 194,205-206,208,225,361

Subject index punctuation, unauthorized fn. 64 see also typographical devices puns 249

'questioning the ground' 270 questions 345 direct 102 free indirect 102 tag fn. 67 quotation marks 117,182 quotative 100 quoted 100 discourse 119

Raamattu 317 racism 318 Rahmenerzählung 215 see also story-within-story raznorecie 328 re-cognition 240 readability 135, 144,312,330 pragmatic 354 reader 28,37. 128, 135, 137, 146147, 164, 206, 216, 222, 235, 242, 258-259, 294-296, 309, 328-329, 367,379 answerability 248 see also responsibility captivation of 30 competence 296,306,312 complicity 296 creativity 30 edification 189 involvement 243,261 individual 272 intuitive 127, 137 obstinacy of 30 real 297

447

role of 260,262,341 perspective 276 position of 260 external 248 setting up of 311, 346 silenced 277 taking up by 346, 351 visible space for 257 voice 253, 272, 278 reader/hearer 134 reader-oriented discourse 222 readerly self-determination 269 (co-)creativity 250 view 21620 readership 345 'body-snatching' of 226 -at-large 260 reading 305, 309 art of 165 pragmatic act of 354 see also pragmatic act subject 312 realtime 218,225 realistic 379 fiction 189 reality 165 Realwissenschaft 265 reception 372 constraints on 241 as re-ception 263 reciprocal infectiousness 166, 208 see also Ansteckung reference 31, 41, 97, 124, 311, 326, 357, 359 anaphoric 224 pronominal 333 temporal 58

time(RT) 55,58,64 referential 305,361,360 ambiguities 278 connotation 121 linking 98

448

Subject index

referring expressions 138 reflective vs. reflexive fn . 134 language 361-362 reflector (Stanzel) 247, fn. 89 reflexive act of addressing fn. 44 see also addressivity language see reflective pronoun 124, 187, 256, fn. 22 refraction (Bakhtin) 159, 355 relative 374 attraction 131 speakability 373 relevance societal 382 textual 106 reminder deictic 30, 346 reported 331, 364 discourse 100-102 direct 102 indirect 102, 1 1 1 indirect question 102-103 narrative 221 subjectivity in 73-74, 83 speech 158, 187, 288, 299, 333, 360,364 indirect 142 inner 142 speech and thought 175 represented (world) distortion 231,268 represented (mind) speech 82, fn. 54 speech and thought (RST) 23, 175,361 see also FID speech or thought (RST) 180, 185, fn. 33 see also FID thought 82,220 responsibility 235-237, 344, 349 see also answerability rhetoric fn. 113 rhyming 155

role 134, 175 of reader 260,262,341 Roman 324 forum fn. 141 roman ä lettres 323 Romance languages 82, 123, fn. 120 romantic 198 rostrum (Lat.), rostra (Span./Port.) fn. 141 rules 361,362 of grammar 318 rewrite 127 Russian 54, 104, 139-140, 142, 180,234,238,376 Old 317,322 Ryder (character) 223-228

S-node 19 Sanskrit 45, 298 Savings & Loan Scandal 264 Scandinavian dialects fn. 22 scene 150 Scholastic 16 script 105, 303, fn. 117 see also frame restaurant fn. 117 seduction 109, 134,278 semantic 305 see also meaning Semitic 45 sender (of message) 346 see also listener sensible ideas (Locke) fn. 98 sentence 35,92, 126, 134,369 captive 188, fn. 28, 71 speakable 94 sequence of tenses 58, 66, 69, 140, 186 see also consecutio temporum Serbo-Croat 298

Subject index setting up (reader) 307, 309, 311, 346, 348, 354, fn. 102 see also taking up, entrapment sex 256 biological vs. social 257 see also gender sharing 57 shibboleth 206,319 shift 145, fn. 28 (tense) 105, 108, 120 backshifting 65-66, 72, 75-77, 80,185,187 downshifting 174 forward shifting 77 (voice) 114 see also voice change shifters 34, 45, 174 see also deictics silenced 277 simple past 174 situation 304,350,379 implicature 105 Skaz 166, 190 super- 167 k Skaz'-l 190 slang 209 slipping fn. 41 see also contagion slovo 360 see also discourse 'smileys' 379 social see also societal classes 384 consciousness 371 dialects 278 diversity 370 engagement 380 groups 156 see also society identity 293 languages 156 revolution 380 sex 257 universe 249 socialization 321

449

societal see also society, social class 160 background 272 conditions 153,272 context 303, 350 conventions 379 empowerment 303 hegemony 329 producers 272 relevance 382 strength 372 universe re-produce the 379 society 291,302 authorities 286 class 160 dominating forces of 273, 365, 378 framework 329-330 perspective 263, 372 power in 278 struggle for 383 socio-ideological 159 languages 355 sociolinguistic 157 hegemony 278 orchestration 157 sociology 351 space conceptual 265 contextual 330-332 dialogic 270 fictional 149, 167, 172, 242, 248, 270, 296, 309, 329, 338, 352, 360 see also chorema interactive 327 invisible 257-258 metonymical 332 reader's visible 257 textual 338 time and 230 working 270

450

Subject index

Spanish 123, 299, 362, fri. 35, 66, 141 speakability 95, 108, 126, 128, 134, 137, 144, 202, 312, 330, 349, 369-374, 375-376, 378,383-384 controlled 374 different 376 faked 376 non-speakability 378 relative 373 speakable sentence 94 speaker 47,369 ideal 19 voice 134 world of 210 speaker/hearer, ideal (Chomsky) fn. 138 speakerless fn. 36 see also empty deictic center, lost narrator speaking conditions 94 speech 144 act 71, 174, 209, 281, 300-305, 309,312-309 communication 367 primary 325 correct 319 direct 175 interference 208 recorded 174 reported 102-103, 158, 176, 187, 288,299, 360,364 direct/indirect 102 represented 82, fn. 54 time (ST) 55, 57 zone 113 spelling, bad (inscriptions) fn. 120 bees 319 see also orthography spräkstrid 297 see also language struggle, Norwegian (non-)standard forms 355 stage 270 directions 222

image 133 stewardship 238 see also ownership still lifes 300 story 133, 145, 153, 190 anticipated 109 -external consciousness 254 -inside-the-story 141, 348 see also Rahmenerzählung storyline 67, 80, 185, 194, 226 story-teller 198,241 structural 140,269 see also syntactic structuralist 241,355, fn 93 linguistics 92 stylistics 241 variation 300 subject 311 continuity of 33 grammatical 89, 91 speaking 89, 312, fn. 51 syntactic 100 subjective deictics 184 see also deictics, deixis subjectless sentence 89 subjectivity 72-73, 82 in reporting 73-74, 83 in narrative 89, 312 subjunctive 82 subsuming 203 of the text 105 subversive 273, 385 see also polemic superaddressee 163, 283, 285-289, fn. 106, 119 collective 327 linguistic 293 surfaces 252 Swedish 123,372 syntactic inertia 33, 203 obstination 33, 125 shift 378

Subject index structure 96 subject 99 syntax 19,94,97, 107, 157 impasse of 99 system, language 92 see also langue

tag question fn. 67 tags 179, fn. 67 see also parentheticals taking up (reader) 346 see also setting up 'talking heads' 233,240 Talmudic 321 tense 34,54,82, 185,278 adjustment 77 change 68 system unmarked 71 tenses concordance of 104 see also consecutio temporum, sequence of tenses individual see respective entries (past, present, etc.) sequence of 58, 66, 69, 140, 186 see also concordance of tenses, consecutio temporum Texas cowboy speech 187 text 322, 350, 352, 370 as text 370 creation and re-creation 244 criticism 263-265 as instance 354 interpretation 15 meaning of 267 prior 251 production and consumption 144,251,267,350-351 reconstruction 263

451

sources outside of 372 universe of 30 voice of the 127, 327, 333, 336335,341,347-346,349,371 work 269,297 'textbook war'(Norway) 319 textual acrobatics 218 authority 375 coherence 34 collaboration 148 contradictions 383 control 329 dialogue 354, 367, 370 event 347 extra-textual reality 217 gaps 312 hegemony 371 implications 309 presuppositions 346 relevance 105 scene 328 space 338 tricks 340 textus 38 theater, epic (Brecht) fn. 101 thinking, verbs of 139 see verba sentiendi Tibeto-Burman (languages) fn. 95 time 59 adverbialsof 58, 184 announcing 56 central time (of utterance) 59 event time (ET) 55-56, 63-64, 197 remembered 63 true 62 Most time' 217 point of 54 perspective fn. 24 real 222,230 reference 54, 58, 63

452

Subject index

and space 226 speech time (ST) 54, 56 viewing time (VT) 59, 63, 67, 72 tonality 113 tracking 32, fn. 69 see also overdetermination transcendental 94 transformational grammar 96, 126 transformation, root 95, 127 transition see also voice change point 188 smooth 204 translation 290, fn. 109 travelogue (genre) 164 truth 156, 164 Turkish 100 turn, conversational 112 typographical devices 180, 138 see also dash, italics, punctuation, quotation marks

unannounced 119 see also voice change Uncle Charles Principle 207, fn. 79 'unconscious consensus' 375 understanding 134,267 creative 39 responsive 325 unit 357, 371 see also component universe of discourse 134,227,295 distorted 231 literary 159,237 (re-)ordering 159 (re-)creating the 294 narrative 154, 167, 191,242 societal re-produce the 383 of things 327 of voices 327-328

unsaid 312 unspeakability 381 see also speakability unspeakable 19, 74, fn. 36 dimension 383 sentence 89, 118 Untermensch fn. 74 unvocality see unvoicing unvoicing 228 Urdu 298 user, language 282 implied 299 perspective of 382 restrictions 282 ut finale 69 utterance 35, 92, 97, 134, 346, 366, 375 inter-individual character of 109 joint proprietorship of 240 uze skazannoe 251 see also 'already said'

value-free 291,318 variation, stylistic 303 veil (hidden reality) 299 velcro fn. 76 ventriloquate fn. 61 see also ventriloquize ventriloquize 164,382 verb see also modality, tense modal 76, 125 verba declarandi 176 verba dicendi 71, 114, 117, 138, 182,185-187 verba sentiendi 117, 122, 182, 185 verbal modes of expression 300 vernacular (language) 166 versatile 266,296,306,312 reader 166,247,266, versatility 266-267,295

Subject index viewer perspective 65, 72 time 60 see viewing time viewing time (VT) 59,63,74 vignette 333 vision, psychology of fn. 139 vocal ity 112, 159,366 vocalization 148,159,188,202,227 voice 20, 47, 59, 64-65, 95, 98, 109, 126-127, 136, 147-150, 160, 244, 261, 270-272, 277-278, 294-295, 328,366, 378,382- 383 attribution 151, 165, 180 author's 164,339 change 120, 151, 175, 186 hidden 381 smooth 208 unannounced 119, 181 character's 182,208,335 clash 81, 99, 101, 160-161, 189, 223, 226, 273, 327-328, 341, 374, 376, 380 intentional 384 confusion fn. 72 see also voice trash control 380 corruption fn. 72 see also voice trash crash 216 see also authorial intrusion, voice intrusion default 180 deprivation 228 dissimulation 376 distancing 375 double 383 see also doublevoicedness, other-voicedness first person 163 see also first person harmony 160 inner 120, 136,207,286,352 interference 129 intrusion 212 fn. 72 see also voice crash

453

management 117, 121, 128, 145, 159 mash 207,209-210 narrator's 155, 180, 200, 219, 278, 341,344,383-384 'engulfing' 211 other-voicedness fn. 124 see also heteroglossia, double-voicedness overlay 210 ownership 162,235 by language 164 placement 295 proper, lack of 277 reader's 253, 274, 278 reporting 331 speaking 172,270 spoken 152 third 287 trash 197,209 visual 194 utterer's 97 voices 108,133,140, 144, 157, 159, 215,272-273,323,369,375 alternating 112, 179 (non-)autonomous 341 different 223, 378 dominant 273 framework of 114 interacting 327 narrative 152, 197, 200, 219, 281, 341,344,367,379 pooling of 280 population of 237 of cinema 380 of society 287 voicing 134, 137, 145, 188, 210, 256,328,371 authentic 204 contradictory 226 differences 374 double 376 see also doublevoicedness

454

Subject index

West Greenlandic 100 'Whose language?' 237, fn. 103 'Whose voice?' 161, 215 see voice ownership word 145,360 order 311 ownership 235 wording 366 World War 11 193 world-wide web 384 writer 241 written accent 318 texts 320 word 324

Yale Artificial Intelligence Project fn. 117

zero-point 58 Zuwendung 234

Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs Edited by Werner Winter Mouton de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 75 Tense and Aspect in Discourse. Edited by Co Vet and Carl Vetters. 1994. 76 Wolfgang U. Dressier and Lavinia M. Barbaresi, Morphopragmatics. Diminutives and Intensifies in Italian, German, and Other Languages. 1994. 77 Language Contact and Change in the Austronesian World. Edited by Tom Dutton and Darreil T. Tryon. 1994. 78 On Languages and Language. The Presidential Adresses of the 1991 Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Edited by Werner Winter. 1995. 79 Medieval Dialectology. Edited by Jacek Fisiak. 1995. 80 Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vjacheslav V. Ivanov, Indo-European and IndoEuropeans. A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and Proto-Culture. 1995. 81 Linguistic Change under Contact Conditions. Edited by Jacek Fisiak. 1995. 82 Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World. Edited by John R. Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury. 1995. 83 Insights in Germanic Linguistics I: Methodology in Transition. Edited by Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr. 1995. 84 Meaning as Explanation. Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory. Edited by Ellen Contini-Morava and Barbara S. Goldberg. 1995. 85 Autolexical Theory. Ideas and Methods. Edited by Eric Schiller, Elisa Steinberg and Barbara Need. 1996. 86 Creole Languages and Language Acquisition. Edited by Herman Wekker. 1996. 87 Peter Harder, Functional Semantics. A Theory of Meaning, Structure and Tense in English. 1996. 88 Language Contact in the Arctic. Northern Pidgins and Contact Languages. Edited by Ernst H. Jahr and Ingvild Broch. 1996. 89 A Bibliography on Writing and Written Language. Edited by Konrad Ehlich, Florian Coulmas and Gabriele Graefen. Compiled by Gabriele Graefen and Carl W. Wendland, in collaboration with Georg F. Meier and Reinhard Wenk. 1996. 90 Historical, Indo-European, and Lexicographical Studies. A Festschrift for Ladislav Zgusta on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday. Edited by Hans H. Hock. 1997. 91 Henning Andersen, Reconstructing Prehistorical Dialects. Initial Vowels in Slavic and Baltic. 1996. 92 Natural Phonology. The State of the Art. Edited by Bernhard Hurch and Richard A. Rhodes. 1996.

93 Hans H. Hock and Brian D. Joseph, Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship. An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics. 1996. 94 Insights in Germanic Linguistics II: Classic and Contemporary. Edited by Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr. 1997. 95 Seiichi Suzuki, The Metrical Organization of Beowulf. Prototype and Isomorphism. 1996. 96 Linguistic Reconstruction and Typology. Edited by Jacek Fisiak. 1997. 97 Advances in Morphology. Edited by Wolfgang U. Dressler, Martin Prinzhorn and John R. Rennison. 1997. 98 Language Change and Functional Explanations. Edited by Jadranka Gvozdanovic. 1997. 99 Modality in Germanic Languages. Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Toril Swan and Olaf J. Westvik. 1997. 100 Language and its Ecology. Essays in Memory ofEinar Haugen. Edited by Stig Eliasson and Ernst H. Jahr. 1997. 101 Language History and Linguistic Modelling. A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th Birthday. Edited by Raymond Hickey and Stanislaw Puppel. 1997. 102 Robert S. Bauer and Paul K. Benedict, Modern Cantonese Phonology. 1997. 103 Studies in Middle English Linguistics. Edited by Jacek Fisiak. 1997. 104 Culture and Styles of Academic Discourse. Edited by Anna Duszak. 1997. 105 New Approaches to Chinese Word Formation. Morphology, Phonology and the Lexicon in Modern and Ancient Chinese. Edited by Jerome L. Packard. 1997. 106 Codeswitching Worldwide. Edited by Rodolfo Jacobson. 1997. 107 Salish Languages and Linguistics. Edited by Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins and M. Dale Kinkade. 1997. 108 The Life of Language. Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright. Edited by Jane H. Hill, P. J. Mistry and Lyle Campbell. 1997. 109 English Historical Linguistics and Philology in Japan. Edited by Jacek Fisiak and Akio Oizumi. 1998. 110 Marta Harasowska, Morphophonemic Variability, Productivity, and Change. The Case ofRusyn. 1998. 111 James Dickins, Extended Axiomatic Linguistics. 1998. 112 Advances in English Historical Linguistics. Edited by Jacek Fisiak and Marcin Krygier. 1998. 113 Fragments of the Tocharian A Maitreyasamiti-Nätaka of the Xinjiang Museum, China. Transliterated, translated and annotated by Ji Xianling, in collaboration with Werner Winter and Georges-Jean Pinault. 1998. 114 Language Change. Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics. Edited by Ernst HäkonJahr. 1998. 115 Jacob L. Mey, When Voices Clash. A Study in Literary Pragmatics. 1998.