Showing papers in "Narrative in 2003"

Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators

Abstract: Why do we fail to trust some narrators, and why do the tales other narrators tell strike us as incomplete? How do the phenomena of untrustworthy and fallible narra tion function within fictional texts, and how do readers respond to these kinds of nar ration? In this essay I will address these questions by reviewing Wayne Booth's introduction of the term unreliable narrator and his explication of unreliable narra tion as a function of irony, since this formulation remains the leading model for un reliable narration. I will then describe how Booth's text-immanent model of narrator

Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness

Abstract: Let me begin with a seemingly nonsensical question. When Peter Walsh unex pectedly comes to see Clarissa Dalloway "at eleven o'clock on the morning of the day she [is] giving a party," and, "positively trembling," asks her how she is, "taking both her hands; kissing both her hands," thinking that "she's grown older," and de ciding that he "shan't tell her anything about it. . . for she's grown older" (40), how do we know that his "trembling" is to be accounted for by his excitement at seeing his Clarissa again after all these years, and not, for instance, by his progressing Parkinson's disease? Assuming that you are a particularly good-natured reader of Mrs. Dalloway, you could patiently explain to me that if Walsh's trembling were occasioned by an illness, Woolf would tell us so. She wouldn't leave us long under the impression that Walsh's body language betrays his agitation, his joy, and his embarrassment, and that the meeting has instantaneously and miraculously brought back the old days when Clarissa and Peter had "this queer power of communicating without words" because, reflecting Walsh's "trembling," Clarissa herself is "so surprised, ... so glad, so shy, so utterly taken aback to have [him] come to her unexpectedly in the morning!" (40). Too much, you would point out, hinges on our getting the emotional undertones of the scene right for Woolf to withhold from us a crucial piece of information about Walsh's health.

Fictionality and Mimesis: Between Narrativity and Fictional Worlds

Abstract: The concept of fictionality has been undermined by developments in two distinct areas of research in recent years: on the one hand, the interdisciplinary ambitions of narrative theory have tended to conflate fictionality with a general notion of narrativity that encompasses nonfictional narrative; on the other hand, fictional worlds theory, in response to philosophical and linguistic concerns, has sought to disarm fictionality by literalizing fictional reference. Dorrit Cohn, in The Distinction of Fiction, has made a case against the former tendency in the interest of her own reassertion of a generic focus upon fiction as "nonreferential narrative," although this involves no confrontation with fictional worlds theory, which does not contest the generic integrity of fiction (12). My concern here is somewhat different, in two respects: I want to allow a little more force to those narratological perspectives that tend to merge the concept of fictionality with that of narrativity; and I want to distinguish more sharply between my own understanding of fictionality and the way it is framed by the philosophical and linguistic perspectives of fictional worlds theories. These differences arise because in my view the concept at stake is not fiction as a generic category, but fictionality as a rhetorical resource. By identifying what is excluded by the perspectives of a generalized narrativity and fictional worlds theory, I hope to make some progress toward a fuller characterization of the rhetorical nature of fictionality. This undertaking will lead me to a reconsideration of the concept of mimesis in relation to narrative fictions, from which vantage point I want to draw an analogy between "fiction" and "exercise" that I think captures something of the distinctiveness of the fictional use of narrative.

Feeling Embodied: Consciousness, Persuasion, and Jane Austen

Abstract: "I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight and a half years ago. Dare not say that man for gets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think and plan.?Have you not seen this? Can you have failed to have un derstood my wishes??I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something that overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others.?Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice in deed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in "F. W. "I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never." ?Jane Austen, Persuasion

For Want of a Better Term?: Polyphony and the Value of Music in Bakhtin and Kundera

Abstract: In a short subsection titled "Music" in Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the character Franz experiences a minor epiphany: drifting towards sleep, he realizes he has "done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sen tences, search for formulations and amend them." A moment of dreamy deconstruc tion follows, in which his own logocentrism appears to him as fatally flawed; addiction to the word has resulted not in a clarity of signification, but in slippage: "in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand" (94). Rescue from such metaphoric losses is at hand, however, in the shape of what lies on the other side of language: "un bounded music." For Franz, floating towards sleep, music appears as "the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!" As Kundera is eager to demonstrate, a belief in music's palliative care is far from the only way of conceiving the relation between music and language; indeed, as we shall see, it is far from Kundera's own concep tion. However, it serves here as an expression of a commonly held construction, whereby music is somehow extracultural, an escape from the messy contingencies of life in the language world. Much musical and literary capital has of course been made from this transcendence trope, but in recent years it has been subject to intense scrutiny, not least from musicologists themselves. Music has been opened up for ex amination in all its textuality, its entanglement in the language that we cannot but use as we listen, respond, and disseminate. Far from dismissing the notion of music as unmediated and as offering privileged access to the rhythms of our body or the sound

Painted Readers, Narrative Regress

Abstract: As with other forms of gradually satisfied desire, with reading, too, you really have to be there. Reflection isn't enough to call up the exact contours of its gratifica- tion. Let alone representation. Least of all a fixed image. Though painting may in- duce any number of desires, it cannot convey the sequence of their quenching. All it gives, borrowing from Keats, is the feel of not to feel it. That's the thing about read- ing in painting. Even while casting its spell in absentia, it withholds the duration of its pleasure. So why bother with it so often? Why doom the canvas to such recurrent frustration? Those were my launching questions, and they've led, very slowly, to my claim here: that painted reading can recruit narrative energy even while removing it from view. The few illustrations of heatedly invested reading I had space for in my book Dear Reader didn't begin closing the distance between hunch and evidence. So it was back to the drawing board—and hence to the history of easel painting—to in- vestigate a suppressed temporal momentum in the static moment of pictured reading. Or, in other words, the bracketed narrativity of painted narrative engagement. One thing struck me as particularly clear: that in the frozen dramaturgy of painting, the modest shape of the read book, to secure thematic attention—to turn the site or scene of reading into a scenario—was usually projected at a greater scale and somehow ramified across the canvas plane. That seemed at least a promising formal hook. But what would I be likely to fish out with it from the high seas or backwaters of the scholarly archive? Though cast far and wide and left dangling for hours at a time in treatise and catalogue alike, my bait was consistently ignored. So I ended up taking it myself.

Bifurcated Narratives in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, C. K. Williams, and Denis Johnson

Abstract: Narrative innovation is a nearly ubiquitous fact of modernist poetic practice. In the context of the defining narratives of high modernism?Hart Crane's The Bridge, T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Ezra Pound's Cantos, and William Carlos Williams's Paterson?poets experimented with narrative structure to produce what Albert Gelpi calls, paraphrasing Crane, "epic[s] of modern consciousness" (406). These experi mental narratives tended to be disjointed and, influenced by cubism and other exper imental forms of visual art, attempted to represent modern consciousness itself. According to Crane, such work did not follow a linear structure but instead followed "the logic of metaphor" or, as Crane wrote in a letter about his own epic narrative, "the structure of my dreams" (qtd. in Gelpi 406,407). In the case of Pound and Eliot, the deployment of narrative fragmentation and disintegration works as an organizing strategy, a method of cubist assemblage, particularly in The Cantos and "The Waste land," that compels the reader to construct an emotional coherence out of the text's manifold discontinuities. Referring to such disjunctive narrative forms in his book Re-Forming the Nar rative, David Heyman suggests that "radical discontinuity in serious verse may well be a twentieth century invention, or at least a symbolist or postsymbolist innovation. In this context we see T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound asserting the need for complexity and concision rendered coherent by stringent controls" (164). These textual controls, both structural and stylistic, in part distance the work from the emotional claims of an autobiographical subject?a self-reflexive authorial speaker?generated within the narrative. That such a speaker would be read as the poem's actual author?the

Exploring the Great Divide: High and Low, Left and Right

Abstract: notions of high and low are filled by more concrete descriptive terms. Con sider, for example, the following table: high low good bad (Wimsatt) avant-garde kitsch (Greenberg) tension (private) communication (mass) (T?te) classic romantic (Babbitt, Hulme) serious light (Adorno/Horkheimer) representation entertainment (Luk?cs) I have arranged the table not from left to right, but from the most abstract and ex treme to the most nuanced and complex, which as it happens goes from America to Europe as well. Only the latter two formulations allow any virtue at all to the term on the right, and only the last (Luk?cs) sees the union of the two sides as both possible and desirable. But even Luk?cs gives priority to the term on the left, seeing enter tainment and suspense as something that representation once had but lost. For Adorno and Horkheimer, mixing the two modes is all too possible and the result is deplorable. For most of the others, a mixture is neither possible nor desirable. But the question had been in the air since at least 1914. An illuminating exchange of views on this very matter may be found in the correspondence of Max Beerbohm and Virginia Woolf. When Woolf 's famous polemic on behalf of modernist writing, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," was published, Beerbohm responded with what a perceptive critic has called "preemptive senescence" (Danson 22): "In your novels you are so hard on us common readers. You seem to forget us and to think only of your theme and your method. Your novels beat me?black and blue. I retire howling, aching, sore; full, moreover, of an acute sense of disgrace. I return later, I re-submit myself to the dis cipline. No use: I am carried out half-dead" {Letters 165). "You certainly are very like your father," he says, turning himself into a contemporary of Leslie Stephen? and lending Woolf a kind of Victorian severity as well. In fairness to her, of course, we should note that in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" Woolf herself had emphasized the need for the reader and the writer to share certain values, both social and aes thetic. In that essay she took James Joyce and T. S. Eliot to task, respectively, for in decency and obscurity. We may find her wrong on both counts, if we choose, but we should also find food for thought in the way she poses the problem of Joyce and Eliot. She sees it as a function of an unfortunate social gap between the modernist or "Georgian" writer and the readers she addresses directly in this essay and in her own fiction: "It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on your part, these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and emasculate the books which should be the healthy offspring of a close and equal alliance between us" (118). What Woolf means by "professional airs and graces" may be glossed by her earlier comment on the experience of reading T. S. Eliot's poetry: "I think that Mr. Eliot has written some of the loveliest single lines in modern poetry. But how intol erant he is for the old usages and politenesses of society?respect for the weak, con sideration for the dull. As I sun myself upon the intense and ravishing beauty of one This content downloaded from 157.55.39.55 on Tue, 23 Aug 2016 05:02:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Reconsidering Modernism's Great Divide 255 of his lines, and reflect that I must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so on from line to line, like an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess, for the old decorums, and envy the indolence of my ancestors who, instead of spinning madly through mid-air, dreamt quietly in the shade with a book" (116). Woolf is clearly seeking in this essay?as she sought in writing her own fiction?for a compromise between the avant-gardist ambitions of modernism and the traditional pleasures that earlier literature had offered its readers. It is both ironic and amusing, then, for Beerbohm to appear in the guise of one of those ancestors, putting her in the place where she had put Eliot?as one who is hard on "common readers"?just two years after her collection of reviews and essays called The Common Reader (which Beerbohm admired) had appeared, in which she observed in her concluding essay that "Mr. Beerbohm, in his way, is perfect, but it is not a big way" (240). Woolf, in her persona as a common reader, kept hoping for what she called, in the closing phrase of her book, "the masterpiece to come" (246)?and it is clear that, for her, the masterpiece, when it came, would be "big." Acutely aware of the Great Divide, Woolf seems to be trying to position herself on both sides of it?as an uncommon writer for common readers?while Beerbohm was saying, in effect, "No, Virginia, you are entirely uncommon as a writer of fic tion." For the purposes of our present inquiry, however, what may be most important is the way Woolf shared the feeling of Luk?cs that modern writing need not and should not abandon the pleasures provided by the great Victorian novelists. For Luk?cs, of course, Woolf represented that inward turn to subjectivity he called "de scription" as opposed to "narration," and of which he disapproved. But Woolf tried repeatedly to cross the divide from the modern or uncommon side and reach those common readers, succeeding often enough to lead a committed modernist critic like Hugh Kenner to deny Woolf 's writing a spot in the modernist canon. Beginning from the position shared (however uneasily) by Woolf and Luk?cs, I want to make some suggestions for rethinking the divide: 1. As literary historians, we need to read or re-read texts on both sides of the Great Divide with our ingrained modernist presuppositions held aside or bracketed to the best of our best ability, paying particular attention to uncan onized works and writers. 2. As keepers of the modernist canon, we should consider works that are not in the high canon but that have survived and remained in print or other media, asking what virtues may have kept them alive and what we may learn from them. It is entirely possible, I want to suggest, that those fictions of entertainment and suspense considered trivial by virtually all our critics may repay more serious reading and study with surprising rewards. It is possible that the Great Divide itself has been mainly a device of modernist artists and critics, a mirage of modernism, if you will, and that the light works of entertainment that have survived these modernist critiques and are still reaching audiences today should now be given their chance. Let us take a good look at the fictions of adventure, suspense, fantasy, romance, and comedy written during the modernist period (and their equivalents in other textual modes of production) and see what we can learn from them. To re This content downloaded from 157.55.39.55 on Tue, 23 Aug 2016 05:02:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Some Antinomies of Narrative Temporality: A Response to Dan Shen

Abstract: I admire Dan Shen's work very much, in particular the analytical precision with which she reexamines issues that many earlier scholars had assumed to be unobjec tionable; we find these qualities once again in her article "Defense and Challenge: Reflections on the Relation between Story and Discourse," in the October 2002 issue of Narrative. I would now like to offer a few clarifications and restatements concern ing the positions that I have advanced on the topic of narrative time that are dis cussed in her essay. For me, the most significant example analyzed by Shen is the contradictory chronology of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In this play, two inter nally consistent yet mutually incompatible chronologies are set forth. Shen is correct in asserting that "this does not seem to present any real problem for the story-dis course distinction" (229). The point I am trying to make here is not that we cannot reconstitute a story (histoire) from the text (r?cit), but that such an operation pro duces a story with two different chronologies, and thus a dual story. This is most ev ident when we ask precisely what happened on the day before the Duke's wedding. There will be different answers depending on which timeline is traced backward. The same is true of novels in which time elapses differently for the protagonist than for the other characters, such as Virginia Woolf 's Orlando. Again, this problematizes or compromises Genette's conception of temporal order, the study of which is to compare the "order of succession of events of the story and the . . . order of their arrangement in the narrative" (35). Sometimes, there is more than one such order.

What Do Temporal Antinomies Do to the Story-Discourse Distinction?: A Reply to Brian Richardson's Response

Abstract: Brian Richardson's essays on the challenge that temporal antinomies present to the story-discourse distinction are insightful and thought-provoking. In "Defense and Challenge: Reflections on the Relation Between Story and Discourse," I dis- cussed Richardson's "'Time is out of Joint'" and "Denarration in Fiction" and ar- gued that temporal antinomies do not always present a real problem to the distinction in question. In his response to my essay, Richardson offers a further consideration of the issue, one that allows me to clarify some parts of my argument. Richardson's response can be classified into three parts, the first of which fo- cuses on "the contradictory chronology" of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (234). In that play, four days pass in the human city, while, at the same time, one night passes in the fairies' wood a few miles away. In "'Time is out of Joint,'" Richardson used this case to illustrate plays that "resist or even preclude" the dis- tinction "between the order of a story's events and the order in which they appear in the narrative" (299). In his response, Richardson agrees with me on the point that we can reconstitute a story from the text, but he still asserts that such a "dual" story with two different chronologies "problematizes or compromises Genette's conception of temporal order" (234). Now, first of all, it should be noted that what we are facing is