Showing papers in "Narrative in 2004"

The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction

Abstract: The analyses and discussions in this article are all aimed at clarifying a question that most people don't even ask because the answer seems self-evident: "Who nar rates in first-person (or what most narratologists call homodiegetic) narrative fic tion?" My hypotheses, however, are (1) that in literary fiction, as opposed to oral narrative, one cannot be certain that it is the person referred to as "I" who speaks or narrates, and therefore that (2) we need to posit an impersonal voice of the narrative. We can observe this phenomenon whenever something is narrated that the "narrat ing-I" cannot possibly know, as happens in Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and other fictional narratives, some of which I'll examine later. To develop my hypothesis and to establish the context for my proposal about the impersonal voice, I will begin with a brief review of some contemporary discus sions of voice in literature. I will then proceed to use my proposal to examine pas sages of first-person fiction that seem difficult to explain without the concept of the impersonal voice. This examination, in turn, will lead me into a discussion of my proposal's consequences for interpretation and for our understanding of fictional worlds. Finally, I will compare my interpretations to some alternative proposals about similar textual phenomena.

What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography

Abstract: In this statement Oliver Sacks makes as bold a claim for the function of self narration in our lives as any I have ever encountered. His observation was prompted by the plight of a brain-damaged individual suffering from severe memory loss. Be cause the patient, "Mr. Thompson," could not remember who he was for more than a minute or two at most, he spent his waking hours in frenetic self-invention, seeking to construct new identities to take the place of old ones that he forgot as soon as he created them. For Sacks, Mr. Thompson's condition exposes identity's twin support ing structures, memory and narrative: what is this man without his story? I keep re turning to the nagging conundrum that Sacks proposes in his meditation on this disturbing case, a radical equivalence between narrative and identity, and I want to make another pass at its meaning in this essay, armed with insights derived from the recent work of the neurologist Antonio Damasio. Before turning to Damasio and his theories about the place of self and narrative in the structure of consciousness, how ever, I'd like to suggest the social implications of this Sacksian notion of narrative identity. "This narrative is us, our identities"?surely the notion that what we are is a story of some kind is counterintuitive and even extravagant. Don't we know that we're more than that, that Sacks can't be right? And our instinctive recoil points to an important truth: there are many modes of self and self-experience, more than could possibly be represented in the kind of self-narration Sacks refers to, more than any

Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma

Abstract: Jane Austen is generally acknowledged to be the first English novelist to make sustained use of free indirect discourse in the representation of figurai speech and thought.1 Unfortunately, however, the theory of free indirect discourse (FID) in Eng lish has not been congenial to Austen's work, often obscuring the way the technique functions in her novels.2 Two theoretical tendencies, in particular, have contributed to this confusion. First, the most influential accounts of FID in English have tended to stress the autonomy of FID representations of speech and thought and to contrast them with authoritative narrative commentary: FID is, on this account, the preemi nent technique of "objective" narration, in which the narrator supposedly withdraws or disappears in favor of impersonal figurai representation.3 Second, FID has often been characterized as innately disruptive and destabilizing?a technique that allows other voices to compete with and so undermine the monologic authority of the nar rator or the implied author.4 Whatever their relevance to later fiction, these character izations of FID are inadequate and misleading when applied to Austen's novels, which deploy FID in conjunction with a trustworthy, authoritative narrative voice and which repeatedly intertwine FID with narratorial commentary, sometimes inside of a single sentence. Indeed, much of the aesthetic pleasure in Austen's FID passages comes from subtle modulations among narrative registers, as the prose moves in and out of a complex array of voices, including that of the narrator herself. In this essay, I will examine Austen's use of FID in a series of passages from Emma, emphasizing the narrator's role in an effort to provide a more accurate picture of Austen's practice than has been available in criticism influenced by the prevailing theoretical accounts. In Emma, I will argue, FID is best seen not as a representation of autonomous figurai discourse but as a kind of narratorial mimicry, analogous to the flexible imitations of

Hemingway's Early Illness Narratives and the Lyric Dimensions of "Now I Lay Me"

Abstract: I want to begin with a claim so basic it scarcely needs to be made: Heming way's early stories?those of In Our Time and Men Without Women?are full of sick and injured characters, from the laboring woman of "Indian Camp" to bullfighter Manuel Garcia Maera, drowning from pneumonia in "A Banal Story"; from boyish Nick with his shin barked, his eye banged, and his heart broken to war-wounded Nick, propped bleeding against a church wall or working his damaged leg every af ternoon at the hospital or lying awake at night in a state that can only be called post traumatic stress. There are more ill bodies than sexual ones in these stories, more characters in attitudes of suffering than in virtually any other state, of body or soul. There is Ole Andreson stretched on his bed in "The Killers" and Jack Brennan "all busted inside" at the end of "Fifty Grand"; there is William Campbell, concealed by a self-made shroud and talking through his rising nausea in "A Pursuit Race," and Joe Butler's father, "white and gone" by the side of the track in "My Old Man." There are boys holding their heads in their hands as though they were sick in one bar after another, and of course there is Nick himself, laid low in war. Treatment of ill ness also figures importantly in the development of plot and character. Doctoring is one way Nick knows his father. Like hunting?with which it is elided under the sign of the pocket knife and the arrowhead?it signifies power, responsibility, unsenti mentality, even a "necessary" cruelty. Doctoring is the turf, if not terrain, of Nick's parents' conflict?he's a doctor, she's a Christian Scientist?where medicine's claims to power are always vitally at stake. Through recurrent stories of illness and suffering, Hemingway marks several transformations. In the stories of Nick's boyhood, Nick believes that illness belongs to, even stigmatizes, the racially and socially other?the Indians in states of pneu

The Presence of Allegory: The Case of Philip Roth's American Pastoral

Abstract: The concept of allegory poses some particularly perplexing problems for the lit erary critic, not the least of which is definitional. Is it a trope, a mode, or a genre? And/or is it hermeneutic in nature rather than compositional?a way of reading, in other words? Wrestling with such ontological issues has become a de facto prerequi site for any extended discussion of the term.1 Once the critic has settled on a stipula tive definition, the theorizing and application begin. This is a perfectly reasonable way to proceed, but the yield of such an approach is necessarily bounded by the def initional stipulations. In other words, the results never seem wholly satisfying, even if they are edifying. In this essay I propose a way of rereading allegory that can move us past some of the problems of definition that now seem to inhere in the term. In order to do such a rereading, I will resist engaging in the definitional debates outlined above and instead focus on the structure of allegory, a structure that cuts across all of the various conceptions of the term. I will, in short, analyze allegory as narrative. The congruence of allegory and narrative is obvious in cases of narrative allegories?allegorical stories or narratives, in other words. Gay Clifford, for exam ple, claims that literary allegory "is distinguished by its reliance on structured narra tive" (14). Speaking to the now well-rehearsed distinction between allegory and symbol, Clifford goes on to argue that "It would be ridiculous to say that symbolism is impossible without narrative: of allegory it would be true" (14). Narrative is es sential for allegory because allegory entails "some form of controlled or directed process" (15), and narrative is the vehicle through which such a process is both rep resented and structured. The idea of process clearly invokes concepts connected to narrative, concepts such as plot and temporal progression. It is not surprising, then, that Clifford understands allegory as a "kinetic" mode.

The Yellow Mask, the Black Robe, and the Woman in White: Wilkie Collins, Anti-Catholic Discourse, and the Sensation Novel

Abstract: Summarizing the Gothic history of sensationalism, Patrick Brantlinger traces a movement from the religious to the secular: "By a kind of metaphoric sleight of hand, the Gothic romance has managed to make secular mystery seem like a version of religious mystery." By the time of sensationalism, Brantlinger argues, there is "not even a quasi-religious content" (32). Without claiming that sensation novels are, as such, religious, I nonetheless want to suggest that anti-Catholicism can provide those masks, cloaks, and mysteries, ready-made, as it were.1 One way to achieve the sleight of hand by which the secular takes on a religious aura is by brandishing the narrative vestments and vestiges inherited from the Gothic. The secularized mysteries of sensationalism re-placed religion in another sense as well. In an 1863 Quarterly Review article deploring sensationalism, John Murray complained that "A class of literature has grown up around us, usurping in many re spects, intentionally or unintentionally, a portion of the preacher's office, playing no inconsiderable part in moulding the minds and forming the habits and tastes of its generation; and doing so principally, we had almost said exclusively, by 'preaching to the nerves' " instead of to judgment, as preachers should do (252). "To think of pointing a moral by stimulants of this kind," Murray pronounces, "is like holding a religous service in a gin-palace" (262). While Murray mentions a few sensation nov els that deal directly with religious subjects (e.g., Charles Maurice Davies's Philip Paternoster: A Tractarian Love Story), his larger point is that religious discourse in forms the sensation novel less as content and more as form. The rhetorical persua sions of the pulpit are now displaced onto the pages of the sensation novel, and,

Ambiguity and Historicism: Interpreting Confessions of a Thug

Abstract: One of the sensations of the 1839 London literary season was a three-volume novel, published in plain brown boards by the respected house of Richard Bentley and written by a previously unknown writer, the self-styled "Captain" Philip Mead ows Taylor.1 Entitled Confessions of a Thug, this novel purported to be the transcript of an actual Indian murderer's confession, as dictated to an unnamed English narra tor. As we will see, the novel does not precisely specify the relationship between this narrator, who seems to be a servant of a large administrative organization like the East India Company, and the author, who was employed, as the title page proclaims, "in the service of H. H. The Nizam" of Hyderabad.2 The novel capitalized on a series of revelations about the secret Indian religious society known variously as Thuggee, Thagi, and Phansigar. This organization had first attracted attention in England in 1836, when William H. Sleeman, an officer in the Company, published an exhaustive guide to Ramaseeana, the "peculiar language of the Thugs." Widespread English no tice of Sleeman's Calcutta-published book had to await its first review, which ap peared in the Edinburgh Review in early 1837, and the publication in that same year of Edward Thornton's Illustrations of the History and Practice of the Thugs, which was largely taken from Sleeman's book.3 By the time Taylor's novel hit the book stalls, then, the public was already fascinated by this mysterious Indian organization, and they embraced the novel with an ardor that surprised its author. "I found my book, The Confessions,' had been received with much greater interest and success than I had ever ventured to hope for," Taylor recalled, "and not only did the London papers and periodicals take it up, but the provincial press teemed with flattering re views and long extracts from it. It was curious to hear people wondering over the

Talking Narrative: A Conversation with David Antin

Abstract: David Antin, avant-garde poet and critic, visited the Ohio State University campus in Columbus on 15-16 October 2002 with his wife, the performance artist Eleanor Antin. Their visit was sponsored by the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, and the College of Humanities. Among the events of the Antins ' visit was a conversation between David Antin and members of the Ohio State faculty, including Jon Erickson (English), Ann Hamilton (Art), Bruce Heiden (Latin and Greek), Rick Livingston (Comparative Studies), Michael Mercil (Art), and Amy Shuman (English). Dan Boord (Theatre) introduced Antin, and Brian McHale (English) moderated the conversation. The transcript was prepared by Anita Bratcher.

Ethical Engagements over Time: Reading and Rereading David Copperfield and Wuthering Heights

Abstract: There have been many reasons offered for the (re)turn to ethical issues in liter ary criticism and theory (and, indeed, in the humanities generally) since the late 1980s and early 1990s?for example, the need to get beyond the brilliant but, in the judgment of many, limited insights of deconstruction; or the opportunity to build on the underlying ethical appeals of politically engaged critical approaches such as fem inism and critical race theory; or the general move to interdisciplinarity that helped make philosopher Martha Nussbaum's case for narrative as a site for ethical inquiry such an appealing one. In this essay, however, I want both to advance a different case for the ethical turn in narrative studies and to consider some of its consequences as I reflect on how my ethical relation to two narratives in the British tradition has developed over time. The case is simply that, for multiple reasons, including but not limited to the ones mentioned above, the academy has shown a readiness to acknowledge explicitly what it had often previously acknowledged implicitly?namely, that narratives, like our lives, in general are saturated with ethical considerations. The validity of this as sertion rests on the fact that stories constitute one of human beings' primal strategies for organizing into meaningful patterns the otherwise overwhelming data of the world. World-data comes to human beings basically disorganized, self-contradictory, and chaotic. It is useless to us in its raw state. We can only use data when it is pat terned, and while human beings employ many strategies for imposing pattern on the world's chaotic data?scientific hypotheses, religious interpretations, social conven tions, social science studies, historical analysis, intellectual concepts, philosophical inquiries, and so on?it is stories more than any other strategy?specifically, it is sto ries' ethical visions?that pattern the world into meaningful shapes.

Obscured Beginnings in Personal Narratives of Sexual Jealousy and Trauma

Abstract: As long ago as Aristotle a well-constructed narrative was defined as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. And yet, not all narratives conform to this norm. There are those that don't by virtue of the incompetence of their performers. But there are also those that don't by virtue of the fact that their would-be performers do not have access to the full range of experience that a complete mimetic narrative pur ports to represent. In what follows I am particularly interested in exploring personal experience narratives with imperfect beginnings, imperfect not because their per formers do not know how to craft a well-told story but because they are not able, for one reason or another, to adequately retrieve the moment in which their narratives have their inception. I am interested, in other words, in narrators who?unlike their omniscient third-person counterparts?lack essential information and who thus are doomed to produce a type of narrative that I identify as "flawed" because of the nar rator's awareness of and preoccupation with an originary event that the narrator strives to envelop within her story but that lies beyond her narratival grasp. I turn first to narratives derived from the experience of sexual jealousy and proceed from there to a discussion of narratives of trauma. I conclude by generalizing about the role of secrets in the construction of stories. What I hope to demonstrate is that some of the most interesting stories are those that allude to obscured beginnings and that are thus destined thereafter to approach their subjects in a manner that can best be described, to invoke Emily Dickinson, as necessarily "aslant the truth."

"I've Found Him!": Diagnostic Narrative in The DSM-IV Casebook

Abstract: On admission to the psychiatric hospital, Louise sat with her hands tightly clasped in her lap and avoided looking at the doctor who interviewed her. She answered questions readily and did not appear suspicious or guarded, but her affect was shallow. She denied depressed mood, delusions, or hallucinations. However, her answers became increasingly idiosyncratic and irrelevant as the interview progressed. In response to a question about her strange cooking habits, she replied that she did not wish to discuss recent events in Russia. When discussing her decline in functioning, she said, "There's more of a take off mechanism when you're younger." Asked about ideas of reference, she said, "I doubt it's true, but if one knows the writers involved, it could be an element that would be directed in a comical way." Her answers were interspersed with the mantra, "I'm safe. I'm safe." ?The DSM-IV Casebook

Methods and Evidence in Psychonarratology and the Theory of the Narrator: Reply to Diengott

Abstract: We welcome this opportunity to reply to Nilli Diengott’s review of our book, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. While she has identified a number of regrettable misstatements in the book and has raised a number of interesting arguments concerning our hypotheses about readers’ representations, it also appears that there are a number of aspects of our methodology and conceptual analysis that may not have been understood. We hope that the present reply will promote a better understanding of our approach in order to foster productive debate. Although Diengott’s review concentrates on our treatment of the narrator, according to our analysis of her comments, there are really three levels of concerns. First and most importantly, there are issues pertaining to methodology, primarily having to do with the distinction between textual features and reader constructions and how these concepts manifest themselves in empirical research. Second, there are objections to our hypotheses concerning the reader’s representation and processing of the narrator. These are crucial concerns since our analysis of the narrator is fundamental to the theoretical developments throughout the book. Finally, there are questions concerning the analysis of “transparency” and its relationship to identification. In what follows, we discuss each of these concerns in turn. We then comment on a few other, more miscellaneous points raised in the review.

Physiology, Gender, and Feeling: On Cheering Up

Abstract: Kay, you summarize my argument beautifully. What's more, you brilliantly tease out the philosophical underpinnings of my project's refusal to buy into the Cartesian mind/body split, and you remind me of questions grounded in feminist epistemology that got me interested in my topic in the first place. For me, the point of feminism has always been to ask "what difference does gender make?" in how we see, feel, know, and are known. This question overlaps in fascinating ways with the question "what difference does biological sex make?" but, as your response makes clear, the answers will not necessarily be the same. When I consider the gendered experience of an upper-middle-class woman au thor in the 1850s, for example, I am always more interested in the effects upon her of culture than those of physiology. I think about the impact on her work of such mat ters as the lack of formal higher education for women, the conflicts between the pe riod's definitions of "professional" and "female," or the prejudice against women writers endemic among her reviewers. In this respect my practice does not depart from a second-wave historicist feminism. But I also think more viscerally about the body of the woman who faced those social circumstances. I focus on what it would feel like to compress one's ribs daily in the leather and whalebone of a corset, to stand in the middle of the eight-to-ten-foot circumference of a crinoline, inclining one's head, perhaps, or extending one's hand to another person, but moving always in a strictly delimited version of what we might call "personal space." I am more

Some Problems with the Concept of the Narrator in Bortolussi and Dixon's Psychonarratology

Abstract: An important recent contribution to the study of narrative and, specifically, lit erary narrative, is Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon's Psychonarratology: Founda tions for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. The authors combine insight and intuitions from narratology ("classical" and later developments) with research methodology from discourse and cognitive processing of narrative in order to give an "empirical turn," and push, to the study of narrative. Bortolussi and Dixon's main contention is that literary response involves real readers' constructions, as opposed to "ideal" or "virtual" readers (i.e., undifferentiated, globalized constructs of read ers) in narratology, and that real readers create their constructions from objective features in the text. The main emphasis throughout the whole book is on the distinc tion between features, "anything in the text that can be objectively identified," and constructions, "events and representations in the minds of readers" (28). The authors suggest that features may be identified in texts according to several criteria as being "objective, precise, stable, relevant, and tractable" (38), and they explain what each criterion means. As such, features are manipulable for purposes of research on real readers and also, by implication, there are constraints on readers' constructions from them?in other words, "there is a text" in Bortolussi and Dixon's class and "not everything goes."

Redefining Intimacy: Carver and Conversation

Abstract: Raymond Carver's short story "Intimacy," a poignant exploration of the rela tionship between an ex-husband and ex-wife, paints for the reader a picture of this ex-couple's rocky history and their current estrangement. The ex-husband narrator, a relatively well-known writer of fiction, arrives unannounced at his ex-wife's home, and she lets him in. While this scene is ordinary enough, Carver's telling of the story is unique. The story itself consists largely of dialogue; there is precious little in the way of action, setting, or exposition. In comparison to most fiction, the proportions of this dialogue are highly skewed: the ex-wife unequivocally dominates the story's conversation, and the ex-husband initially appears to be a victim of her verbal abuse. Accompanying the distorted dialogue, the dearth of concrete objects gives "Inti macy" an empty, vague atmosphere in which readers get few details with which to kindle their imaginations. Carver crafts "Intimacy" by mapping out the ways in which deep, detailed knowledge of someone leads to enduring intimacy while at the same time it causes that intimacy to be kicked, dissected, strewn about, and gathered up again. To under stand how "Intimacy" enacts this (de)/(re)construction, we take an interdisciplinary analytical approach: the relationship and interaction between the ex-husband and the ex-wife is best understood through a confluence of linguistic discourse theory, con versation analysis, and narrative theory.1 The "conversation" between the narrator and narratee contains the one between the ex-husband and ex-wife; the homodiegetic narrator, in spinning this tale, develops a narratological intimacy with an unnamed

Generosity and the Ghosts of Poor Laws Passed

Abstract: Nothing in nature can be more disgusting than a parish pay-table ... nor in na ture can anything be more beautiful than the mild complacency of benevolence, hastening to the humble cottage to relieve the wants of industry and virtue, to feed the hungry, to cloath the naked, and to sooth the sorrows of the widow with her tender orphans; nothing can be more pleasing unless it be their sparkling eyes, their bursting tears, and their uplifted hands, the artless expressions of un feigned gratitude for unexpected favours. ?Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a well-wisher to mankind