fludernik narratology in context

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MONIKA FLUDERNIK Narratology in Context Originalbeitrag erschienen in: Poetics today 14 (1993), S. [729] - 761

Narratology in Context

Monika FludernikEnglish, Vienna

Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fictionand Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Ansgar NUnning, GrundzOge eines kommunikationstheoretischen ModeIlsder erzahlerischen Vermittlung: Die Funktionen der Erzahlinstanz in denRomanen George Eliots. Horizonte: Studien zu Texten und Ideen der euro-paischen Moderne 2. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1989.

Sandy Petrey, Speech Acts and Literary Theory. New York: Routledge,1990.

Vaheed K. Ramazani, The Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics ofIrony. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.

Roger Sell, ed., Literary Pragmatics. London: Routledge, 1991.

In recent years the discipline of narratology has frequently been pro-nounced "dead," irrelevant, or "out"—see, for instance, the hilariousreport on the 1990 MLA convention in the New York Times Magazine(Matthews 1991: 57). In particular, narratology's structuralist originshave increasingly come under attack, mostly for a tendency towardformalization and categorization and a lack of ideological awareness,all of which are inherent to structuralism per se (Pavel 1989). As aconsequence, narrative studies have been recently departing from theclassic formalist concerns of narratology "proper," extending into suchbordering areas as psychoanalytic criticism (Brooks 1984), deconstruc-tion (Chambers 1984), feminism (Warhol 1989), and cultural criticism

Poetics Today 14:4 (Winter 1993). Copyright © 1993 by The Porter Institute forPoetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/931$2.50.

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(Chambers 1991). At the same time, one can now observe a backlashfrom the "old guard" narratologists, who have started to revise, as wellas to reiterate, some of their earlier formalist methodologies, com-plementing the old paradigms by developing them in new directions.This trend has been apparent since the 1988 Society for the Study ofNarrative Literature (SSNL) conference in Columbus, Ohio, where asmall but vociferous group of scholars (myself among them) warnedof throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We are now confrontedwith a number of new statements by the grand old wo/men of thediscipline: Gerard Genette's Fiction et diction (1991), Seymour Chat-man's 1990 work, Coming to Terms (reviewed here), and the series ofessays in the three special issues on narratology of this journal: PoeticsToday 11:2 (Summer 1990), 11:4 (Winter 1990), and 12:3 (Fall 1991),which include work by Mieke Bal, Gerard Genette, Dorrit Cohn, F. K.Stanzel, and Meir Sternberg in addition to some excellent contribu-tions by Ruth Ronen, Marie-Laure Ryan, Thomas G. Pavel, WilliamNelles, and Uri Margolin.

In contrast to the situation in 1988, narratology today seems to bemore alive than ever, even if beset by disputes over its legitimate aimsand methods. This new lease on life seems to me to be due in nosmall measure to the still-growing influence of linguistics on narrativestudy, specifically of linguistic models that go beyond the narrowlystructuralist framework of yore. Although not all of the books dis-cussed in this review essay reflect clearly definable linguistic models,the influence of speech-act theory, discourse analysis, and pragmat-ics is readily apparent. Whereas earlier narratologists relied heavily onSaussurean and Benvenistean binary opposition (and on markedness)within static systems, the latest trends in linguistics offer paradigmsthat emphasize textual processes. Linguistic pragmatics, for instance,underscores the reader's role in the creation of a fictional world byidentifying active inferential processes and acts of imaginative projec-tion that operate according to criteria of relevance (see, e.g., Sperberand Wilson 1986, as applied in Pilkington 1991), culturally sanctionedframes and scripts (see Schank and Abelson 1977, as applied in, e.g.,Polanyi 1985), or strategies of cooperation, as described in discourseanalysis (e.g., the "politeness" of the text [Sell, pp. 208-24], Griceancooperative maxims, etc.).

The books reviewed below—a random collection of recent studieson narratives both specific and abstract, on linguistic approaches to lit-erature, and on individual writers—document both the still-increasingtendency to use linguistic paradigms in the analysis of (narrative) textsand the continuing usefulness of "traditional" narratology within cer-tain theoretical and practical limits. Although I will discuss each bookseparately (they are too different in their approaches and subject mat-

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ter to allow facile comparisons), this essay will concentrate on a numberof crucial issues that are raised in these texts. I will mainly consider twoclosely related aspects of narrative fiction: the communicative situationin narrative, and the pragmatics (in a linguistic sense) of reading.

The issue of a communicative situation in narrative is overtly ad-dressed in both Chatman's Coming to Terms and Sandy Petrey's SpeechActs and Literary Theory, but from two very different perspectives.Chatman's renewed plea for the existence of the implied author isembedded in a very traditional narratological framework, which hemodifies and reanalyzes, and can be compared more profitably withthe theoretical first part of Ansgar Niinning's book on the narratorfunction in the novels of George Eliot. Petrey's more theoretical de-liberations on the consequences of speech-act theory for the analysisof literature (with special reference to the debate between deconstruc-tionists and speech-act theorists) have little to say about narrative fic-tion and can be compared more fruitfully with the pragmatic concernsof both Vaheed Ramazani's Flaubert study and Roger Sell's edited col-lection on literary pragmatics. Where communication and pragmaticsdo connect is precisely in the effects of communication. While Chat-man and Niinning are primarily concerned with the agents of narrativecommunication, Petrey concentrates on literature as an illocutionaryspeech act that therefore has inevitable (pragmatic, if you will) effectson the reader, so he would agree with Sell in his concern for relevantcontext. One contextual phenomenon that recurs as an issue in Sell'scollection is irony, which brings Ramazani into the picture as a pointof comparison.

Niinning's interesting study of the characteristics of the narratorfunction in George Eliot's fiction is divided into two parts. Part 1 pro-poses a communicative model of narrative transmission, while part 2(chapter 3) traces the development of the narrator function fromScenes of Clerical Life through Daniel Deronda. For obvious reasons ofspace and relevance, I will concentrate here on part 1 (which willalso lead into Chatman's presentation of a roughly equivalent set ofissues). Niinning's book is based on his 1989 dissertation (Univer-sity of Cologne) and is noteworthy both for its theoretical depth andfor the importance of its insights into George Eliot's narrative art.Nevertheless, like most two-part studies of its kind, it suffers froma certain dullness (owing to a pronounced lack of examples) in thetheoretical first half and a corresponding repetitiveness and overkillin the subsequent work-by-work "application" of the theory. This isnot entirely Niinning's fault, but the consequence of a worldwideconspiracy among those who set dissertation formats, with the re-suit that dissertations are required to be as "unreaderly" as possible.Niinning's patient analysis of Eliot's novels supersedes recent accounts


of her work, such as those by Gillian Beer (1986), RosemaryClark-Beattie (1985), Suzanne Graver (1984), Barbara Hardy (1982),Karen B. Mann (1983), or K. M. Newton (1981). His study amply docu-ments the workings of an active narrator in all of Eliot's fiction andtraces the gradual depersonalization of that narrative instance. Thenarrators in Eliot's later novels also cease projecting a male persona,providing instead contradictory or ambivalent clues to the gender ofthe narrative voice. Nil nning concentrates on the development of nar-ratorial evaluation, addresses to the narratee, and the balance betweencritical and empathetic presentations of the characters in Eliot's fic-tion. A comprehensive narratological analysis of this kind has beenlong overdue, and it should certainly be the starting point for anyfurther refinements.

Nanning's theoretical part, on which I will concentrate here, pro-poses a five-level model of narrative communication: N1 (N for Niveau,i.e., "level") is the level of communication between characters withinthe fiction, which is embedded in N2 (narrator-narratee communica-tion). The N3 level is that of the hypothetical implied author, which.(deliberately not whom) Nanning prefers to call "Subjekt des Werkgan-zen" (the subject of the fiction as a whole); N3 in particular includesall of the textual paraphernalia (titles, marginalia, epigraphs, etc.) notascribable to a narrator, in addition to the full linguistic text, and it alsocovers the structural processes of temporal reordering, juxtapositionof characters, and those effects of irony that depend on incompati-bilities between levels Ni (the characters) and N2 (the narrator). Bycontrast, N4 is the locus of unreliability, the presence of which dependson a finding of incompatibility between textual norms on levels N2(the narrator's presentation) and N3 (the differing implications of thefull text). Nanning defines N4 as the communication level betweenthe "empiric author in his role as literary producer" and the "empiricreader in his role as recipient of literature" (p. 26). Finally, N5 signifiesthe level of the real author and reader in their respective social roles.

As one can already see from this brief summary, Nanning reshufflesthe well-established system of narrative instances made familiar to usby Gerald Prince, Chatman, and Bal. Chatman continues to adhere tothese traditional models in Coming to Terms by postulating distinctionsamong the story plane, that is, characters' communication (L1), thediscourse plane (L2), or the level of narrative transmission, the im-plied author (L3), the "career author," that is, the image of "Dickens"or "Rushdie" that one constructs from all fictional works by the author .

(L4), and the real, historical author (L5). Chatman's innovations per-tain less to the qualities of the implied author—as with Wayne Booth,these mainly amount to a locus for resolving unreliability and for situ-ating the "intentions" of the fiction as a whole; Chatrnan's particular

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contribution concerns the explicit postulation of a cinematic narrator(who shows rather than narrates) as a vehicle of narrative transmission.(I will return to Chatman's crucial L 1 /L2 distinction and its signifi-cance below.)

Nanning's schema raises some very interesting questions and prob-lems. Levels N1 and N2, which are relatively uncontroversial, are de-fined by their relation of embedding: the characters' communication isembedded in the narrator's linguistic account of the fiction. Nanninghere relies on Bal's (1981) definition of embedding, which stipulatesa homogeneity between the embedded and embedding levels (Ni andN2). Nanning thus explicitly rejects Stanzel's (and, implicitly, Chat-man's [1978] and Bal's [1985]) stipulation of ontological incompati-bility between the narrator and character levels. The characteristicof homogeneity for Ni and N2, however, seems to rely exclusivelyon their being "fictional utterances"—N3 is declared to be nonhomo-geneous. Here, Nanning seems to have been led astray by a nonsequitur: after all, titles and epigraphs are at least as fictional as anarrator's metanarrative commentary. The only homogeneity betweenNi and N2 that I can discover lies, on the contrary, in the fact ofutterance—both narrator and characters are (or can be) explicitly per-sonalized to the extent of acquiring the capacity for utterance andhence (potentially) for communication. However, utterance does notequal narration, and Bal (1985) quite correctly distinguishes betweenthe narrator as communicator and/or metanarrative commentator, onthe one hand, and the narrator as the instance of narrative transmis-sion (of the histoire), on the other. Since the characters' speech acts—unless these are narratives in their own right—are simply part of theplot, Genette is quite correct in analyzing Ni as the signified of theenunciation on the narrative level (N2). It is therefore even odder forNanning to state that direct and indirect (I) speech presentation belong to Ni, but that free indirect discourse and psycho-narration belongto level N2 (p. 28). 1

In spite of these theoretical difficulties regarding levels Ni and N2,

1. Compare, however, the standard dual-voice account a page later: "DerErzahlgegenstand `BewuBtsein der Figuren' kann erzdhltechnisch mit ver-schiedenen Verfahren dargestellt werden, von denen nur psycho-narration ein-deutig ganz dem Erzdhler zugeschrieben wird, wãhrend andere Techniken derBewuBtseinsdarstellung—etwa quoted oder narrated monologue—graduell Elementeder Figurenrede enthalten" (The narrative matter referred to as "characters' con-sciousness" can be represented by a number of different narrational techniques.Among these only psycho-narration is unambiguously referable to the narrator,while other techniques for the representation of consciousness, such as quoted ornarrated monologue, display a gradable amount of characters' language) (p. 29).There is no need to insist that psycho-narration cannot be said to belong exclusivelyto the narrator's language.


which are, pragmatically at least, uncontroversial, Nanning's modelmerits serious consideration for its formulation of levels N3 and N4.Like Chatman, Nanning asserts the existence of a narrative instanceeven in those texts lacking an explicit (overt) narrator. The Germanterm Erzahlinstanz necessarily reduces that speaker on level N2 (= S2)to the source of fictional utterances. (I will return to this point belowin connection with Chatman's cinematic narrator.) All the narrativemodels that I know of, however, collapse Nanning's N3 and N4 levelsinto the single narrative instance of the "implied author" and compa-rable categories. In Nanning's formulation N3 is derived from purelytextual criteria and comprises the system of textual norms as inferablefrom the "words of the text"; N4, on the other hand, designates theprojected interpretive inferences elicted by the text, in particular theimplied "meaning" of the text as an "argument" of the fiction. WhatN4 therefore seems to correspond to is precisely the time-honored."authors" reflected by such sentences as "In Hard Times Dickens in-veighs against the heartlessness of industrialization." It is N3 that con-stitutes a valuable refinement of the theory, although it also raises someproblems in comparison with current models. Since N3 is a purely tex-tual category, it seems to include (or project?) N2 as its signifie, whileat the same time implying N4 as its global signifii. 2 Nanning's modelmakes a neat box-within-box structure, along the lines of Chatman'sor Bal's model, impossible.

Nanning's five levels pragmatically link unreliability to the "em-pirical" author/"empirical" addressee level (N4). His model thereforemarks an important advance with regard to the workings of tex-tual inference, especially since Nanning clearly distinguishes betweeninferences drawn on the basis of the text as a whole and those madeby weighing inferences from prior textual levels (Ni through N3).Besides these theoretical innovations—which, I believe, could be im-proved on even further—Nanning is to be commended for a veryneat yet comprehensive categorization of narratorial functions on levelN2.3 The narrative instance or speaker on N2 (= S2)—much in linewith Chatman's covert versus overt narrator—can be analyzed on ascale between a narrative medium, also called a "neutral instance oftransmission" (p. 61), and an explicit (personalized) narrator. In ac-cordance with Bal's model, on which Nanning relies for his conception

2. On page 33, Nanning calls N3 a "semantic" content level of a text, which contra-dicts the textual nature of N3 as illustrated by the characteristics listed on pages37 to 39. In particular, Nanning's remarks on diverse kinds of irony and reliabilityare too condensed to be really useful. Instead, a clear characterization of N4 wouldhave been more valuable here.3. Nanning's initial characterization of narratorial properties (pp. 47-48) is lessfelicitous than his later, more extended categorization and explanation.

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of focalization, the neutral narrative medium can be correlated withexternal focalization. The narrative medium has only so-called techni-cal functions in the narrative (erziihltechnische Funktionen), whereas anexplicit narrator (S2) also has speaker functions. This scale betweenneutral and explicit narration coincides with other scales of tenden-tially graded characteristics of the narrative function (see Nanning'stable on p. 84).

I cannot dwell here on the many functions of the narrative mediumand the narrator that are explicated by Nanning—his presentationseems to be the first complete account of all the various well-known.functions.4 Suffice it to say that the neutral narrative medium's techni-cal functions basically amount to constituting the plot and charactersas well as their space and time (pp. 89-91). The explicit narrativespeaker, on the other hand, can serve a great variety of functions(pp. 91-121). These discursive functions are opposed to the neutraldiegetic ones. Where this schema of Nanning's is less satisfactory is inits failure to interrelate the various speaker functions of the narrator.Some of these are more compatible with a neutral narrative mediumthan others. In particular, certain diegetic restrictions follow from thepersonalization of a heterodiegetic narrator, though fewer than thoseaffecting a homodiegetic narrator. Nanning is apparently less con-cerned with these possibilities because he has developed the schemato account for George Eliot's fiction, where the narrator is at all timesomniscient, if not omnicommunicative (Sternberg 1978).

will now turn to Chatman's Coming to Terms, a study that departsfrom his classic Story and Discourse (Chatman 1978) in three basic di-rections. First, Chatman refines and modifies his earlier paradigm bymaking a lengthy plea for an implied-author position to be includedin the narrative communication schema. Secondly, he offers a radi-cal terminological revision of the point-of-view problematic. Thirdly,and most importantly, Chatman attempts to integrate narrative withother text types, namely, argument and description, documenting thepeculiarities of each text type in both fiction and film. Although thereare a few references to drama, Chatman's new book clearly calls for acomplementary study that would integrate this basic narrative genre.

Let me start with the more narrow narratological problems andleave the text-type theory for a transition into pragmatics later on.Chatman, after reviewing the intentionalist issue,5 defines the implied

4. Most books on narratology concentrate on only some of these, shying away froma potentially boring enumeration of all the possibilities.5. The question of authorial intention is closely linked to the postulation of theimplied author (see Juhl 1980; as well as Booth 1983 [1961] and Bronzwaer 1978).


author as the "record of textual invention," the repository of the text's"codes and conventions": "As an inscribed principle of invention andintent, the implied author is the reader's source of instruction abouthow to read the text and how to account for the selection and orderingof its components" (pp. 83-84). The implied-author position is toChatman an indispensable theoretical construct because one needsto distinguish between the "act of a producer, a real author," and"the product of that act, the text" (p. 83). Unlike the narrator, the im-plied author has "no 'voice,' " but instead "empowers others to 'speak' "(p. 85); it is a fictional "agency that does not personally tell or showbut puts into the narrator's mouth the language that tells or shows"(ibid.). Although not all texts require the projection of an impliedauthor, Chatman assumes the construct to be as firm a category as thenarrator (a narrative instance that may also exist covertly).

From our previous discussion of Nanning, it should be very ap-parent that this definition of the implied author merges Nanning'slevels N3 and N4, and one can also clearly see why Chatman has topersonalize the implied author, at least terminologically—since thereader (Nanning's addressee on level N4, i.e., the "empirical" readerqua recipient of the text) constructs a source or origin of intention andinvention which can be filled only by an agency and not by a completelyabstract level of analysis. Nanning's N4 is therefore a worthwhile com-plement to Chatman's implied author because it allows the more ab-stract codes and conventions (which require no speaker or source) tobe described on a non-agency narrative level (such as Niinning's N3).I would even suggest that, for the purposes of analysis, the text in itsentirety should be represented as a theoretical level. Chatman takescare of this with his discourse level (L2), but insofar as this is sup-posed to correlate with the narrator qua fictional enunciator, thereare some problems with including titles, epigraphs, and so forth. Now,for Chatman's new model, this constitutes no real difficulty becausethe abstract-narrator concept generates the text as a whole, includ-ing a possibly overt narrator persona, just as the cinematic narratorsimply presents the film. In Nanning's schema, however, N2 is an ex-clusively communicative level of diegesis or utterance, and the "text"would therefore come to be situated between levels N2 and N3. Ulti-mately, N3 would no longer have a speaker or addressee because it isa purely abstract, reconstructed level, which would effectively disposeof the implied narratee, or implied reader. On level N4, by contrast,the addressee is the real (empirical) reader in her function as reader.Whereas the intentions and meanings of the empirical author have tobe gauged from the constructed textual implications (N3) and theirpossible inconsistencies (resolved by the active interpretive process ofthe empirical reader on level N4), the reader is, of course, an actual


agent within the reading process and a construct only from the lit-erary critic's perspective. This accords with Chatman's analysis, as heagrees that the work acquires a life of its own once it has been pro-duced, undergoing subsequent interpretive violations of its originallyintended "meaning." (That such a perspective does not sanction thecomplete neglect of the circumstances of literary production and thehistorical reactions of the text's original audience is forcefully demon-strated by Jerome McGann in his contribution to the Sell volume, alsounder review here.) Nanning's schema, therefore, is a potent responseto those critics of the implied author who have always pointed to theresiduum of authorial intentionality in the concept. Both Chatmanand Nanning also deserve commendation for integrating the actualcommunicative process in their schemas. Thus, it seems to me, the twomodels, on the level of reading, accord to a large extent even thoughthey split up the spectrum in slightly different ways and use differentterminology.

With respect to Chatman's basic story/discourse dichotomy and thepositing of a cinematic narrator, the kind of narratology that Chat-man promotes in Coming to Terms was implicit in his earlier Story andDiscourse. Discourse, in Chatman's schema, is very much a nonlinguis-tic function, inextricably bound up with the rearrangement of eventsin the course of narration and equivalent to the process of narrativetransmission in the respective narrative media. In this respect, Chat-man radically departs from positions held by Genette, Stanzel, andBal, all of whom restrict the notion of narration (and of a narrator)to linguistic narrating and hence to fiction (and, possibly, oral narra-tive). Stanzel and Genette are both very explicit about this, emphasiz-ing the verbal medium. Stanzel, reflecting the German narratologicaltradition, constitutes narrative mediation or mediacy on the opposi-tion between narrative and drama. In this framework drama becomesthe equivalent of pure mimesis, while fictional narrative is seen asan intrinsically mixed (impure) genre in which diegesis (not neces-sarily linked to a narrator-persona) dominates. (Mimetic dialogue andinterior monologue are regularly embedded in the narrative diegesis.)Although Bal includes the medium of film in her narrative model, sheis careful to define her story level as a reordering and emplotmentof the fabula, including focalization, and she reserves the third sur-face level of the text for the narration and the narrator. Like Genette,Bal therefore links narration with enunciation, leaving the question offilmic narration (i.e., of the text level in films) somewhat up in the air.

Chatman entirely reevaluates the relationship between drama andfiction, although he chooses to concentrate on film rather than thetheater. In his view, all narrative, qua an artistic form of telling a story,is presented by a narrator, even though the narration may consist en-


tirely of showing. As in Story and Discourse, Chatman therefore locatesnarrative by definition in the story/discourse dichotomy of temporalrearrangement and presentation (in whatever medium), whereas thestandard accounts link diegesis or narrative to actual (linguistic) nar-ration, without bothering to specifically define the connections withfilm or drama. The incompatibility of these two views, however, is notthe result of including drama and film—the deep structure of theseforms has been acknowledged to be narrative (i.e., plot-oriented) byall major narratologists, the crucial stumbling block, rather, is Chat-man's identifying the narrator as an intrinsic element of the discourse.The traditional argument would go something like "Of course, dramaand film are narrative genres, but only fiction has narration, die-gesis"—and then there might be some equivocation about voice-oversor lengthy stage directions. Chatman, on the other hand, asserts thatthere is narration and hence a narrator in all narrative. Since the cine-matic narrator obviously presents a series of shots, that is, "shows"rather than "tells," this stance forces Chatman to redefine diegesis as"presenting," with telling and showing as two equal and interchange-able forms of diegesis or narration.6 Secondly, Chatm.an finds himselfforced to withdraw his earlier position on non-narrated events: thepresentation of a character's actions, even in the most inconspicuouslinguistic form, no longer simulates a disguise of the narrational act;it in fact constitutes the most basic function of narrative presentation.

This restructuring of narrative levels and interdependencies hasobvious theoretical advantages since it allows Chatman to align thelevel of the surface structure's temporal dispositions (in the processesof viewing or reading the narrative) with the notion of an instanceof narration that "performs" this aesthetic presentation. However, theadvantage of these parallels and the theoretical gains of their restruc-turing are outweighed by the theoretical problems that emerge intheir wake. If only linguistic narrative has a personalized narrator-persona, then a question arises as to whether this singularity is dueto the function of telling—since film or drama cannot tell but merelyshow. However, telling is not necessarily linked to a narrator-persona,but can be equally performed by a narrative medium as impersonal asthe invisible cinematic narrator. Since telling does not require a narra-tor figure, perhaps it is the medium of language itself that invariablyproduces a teller-figure; not so: narration can be performed in lan-guage purely by means of interior monologue without a teller-figure.

6. Here Chatman comes very close to Stanzel's splitting up of mediacy into me-diation by means of a narrator versus mediation by means of a reflector character.Note, however, that Stanzel's distinction is based on linguistic narration or diegesis,of which telling and showing are subcategories.


One must therefore conclude that the narrative function, if bestowedon an agent of human or quasi-human constitution, can take only theshape of linguistic telling (or showing). If an agent performs the narra-tion, it must be linguistic due to the cognitive invariants and schematathat relate to human existence and agency. This rule also holds truefor the cinema and the theater: if there is a narrative agent, s/he tells inlanguage, and in film and drama this agent can be only an embeddedvoice-over or dramatic narrator (as in Brecht's plays or Wilder's OurTown). In the theater such a teller closely resembles a frame narratorin fiction because s/he appears on stage ( just like any of the other char-acters), but occupies a fictional world adjacent to or "above" the worldof the dramatic story (with possible overlaps in cases where this narra-tor is one of the characters of the main story). In cinema, on the otherhand, voice-over, if heterodiegetic, comes close to being a vocal frameof oral narration (telling), where the film presentation itself continuesthe narration in cinematic form and the voice-over can therefore bealigned to the preparatory narrative text that antedates the cinematicshowing: "In. . . . [date] the kingdom of France has been without a.king for several months. The nobility therefore announce that whoever wins a tournament to be held on the following holiday in Pariswill be elected king." Homodiegetic voice-over, on the other hand,with its personalized narrator-teller, is always clearly a vocal narrative.Such homodiegetic voice-over can comment both on the events andon the experiencing self, and it does so within a double-layered struc-ture of embedding in which the narrated story is presented in cinematicdiscourse (showing), but the commentary functions are reserved forthe homodiegetic narrative voice-over.

This brings me to the next point: Because cinematic narrationcannot tell but only show, it is deprived of certain narratorial func-tions, such as commentary, evaluation, explanation, or address to an(extradiegetic) narratee. The narrative functions that can (easily) bereplicated by showing are the basic diegetic ones (Nanning's "erzdhl-technische Funktionen") as well as the rnetadiegetic, self-referentialfunctions. The latter are discussed with great perspicacity in Chat-man's tenth chapter, where he analyzes the film adaptation of TheFrench Lieutenant's Woman. Some of the commentary functions that aremissing from filmic narrative can be recuperated by screen commen-tary in the form of printed text on the screen (a feature borrowedfrom silent film) and, of course, by cinematic voice-over. The functionof address, necessarily linked to a "voice" (language) and a speaker,cannot, however, be replicated cinematically. I would suggest, there-fore, that if narration is necessarily linked to a narrator (cinematic orotherwise), the term "narrator" makes sense only if this instance canbe personalized and if there is a possible narratee. Chatman's model,


it seems to me, would gain much from a relegation of the speakerfunction to fiction, or linguistic narrative, thus allowing the basic trans-missive function to be defined as a deep-structural characteristic ofnarrative in general. It needs to be noted, however, that such a re-writing would—contrary to Chatman's reevaluation of his earlier non-narrated events—locate the specifically narrative (fictional) utteranceexclusively in a personalized narrative agent and relegate the simplepresentation of the story (in whatever medium) to a "lower" discourselevel. One would then end up with the Genettean model of a separateplane of enunciation (with which Bal concurs), although the simplepresentation of events would then perhaps have to be excluded fromthe level of enunciation. That such a course creates even more prob-lems if one has a narrator of the Tom Jones kind will be apparent: Howcould one possibly separate his enunciation from the narrational func-tion? As long as one postulates the existence of narrational instancesand narrational levels, such conundrums are inevitable.

As already hinted, Chatman's model also causes some serious prob-lems for the communicative function of (deep-structural) discourse.There is no problem with a separate narrational level where the enun-ciative process requires an (at least potential) addressee, but theresimply cannot be a required narratee for discourse in just any medium.Things work much better, of course, on the implied reader/impliednarrator level. Nanning's decision to have no communicative structureon his N3 level (the "work as a whole") very aptly reflects the needto dispose of communication when no personalized narrative agentis implied. Bal (1985) is probably the most consistent and convincinghere: narration (in the linguistic medium) goes on the top level, withfocalization already determined on the lower, story (Chatman's dis-course) plane. Chatman sometimes seems to imply a similar point ofview, but nowhere clarifies what precisely happens between discourseand the actual text.

Chatman's narratological refinements of focalization have alreadybeen published in an earlier article in this journal (Chatman 1986).In Coming to Terms, Chatman proposes to replace Genette's distinctionof "who speaks" and "who sees" by the terms slant and filter (p. 144),respectively. If, as is frequently claimed, in certain passages the nar-rator "sees" through the eyes of a character, then we have the case ofa filter, naming the "much wider range of mental activity experiencedby characters in the story world—perceptions, cognitions, attitudes,emotions, memories, fantasies, and the like" (p. 143). On the otherhand, "it makes no sense to say that a story is told 'through' the nar-rator's perceptions since he/she/it is precisely narrating, which is notan act of perception but of presentation or representation, of trans-mitting story events and existents through words or images" (p. 142).


Chatrnan therefore proposes the term slant to "name the narrator'sattitudes and other mental nuances appropriate to the report functionof discourse" (p. 143). Slant therefore equals Nanning's perspective—a borrowing from Pfister (1988 [1977]). A filter—the presentation bythe narrator of characters' thoughts, perceptions, or feelings—has tobe distinguished from what Chatman, somewhat misleadingly, callsa center. A center is roughly equivalent to a character of central im-portance, but the term does not imply that one gains access to thischaracter's psyche.7 Chatman's center cannot, therefore, be equatedwith a Jamesian center of consciousness.

Contrary to Chatman's definition, his later uses of the term slantdo not seem to apply merely to ideological perspective, but also toexternal focalization. Consider, for instance, the following statement:"Camera-eye narration, then, is simply slant without filtration andwithout narrator's commentary" (p. 149). This seems to imply thatslant in connection with the filter function results in psycho-narration.(from the narrator's external perspective), whereas consistent filtra-tion without slant corresponds to reflector narrative, the Jamesiancenter-of-consciousness technique. Chatman very usefully goes on todistinguish between unreliable narrators and fallible filters. One needsto note that fallibility in a filter (i.e., the character's psychologicalattitudes) can become narratologically "unreliable" only if unaccom-panied by a corrective narrative slant. While the narrator can thusexpose the character's fallibility explicitly, the narrator's own unreli-ability can only be implied since it involves the level of implied authorand narratee (p. 153).

These distinctions come to fruition in Chatman's discussion of cine-matic slant and filtering. Here, the cinematic narrator's presenta-tion is ruled by the camera's perceptual slant, whereas a character'sperceptions and sometimes feelings can be implied by a number ofwell-known cinematic techniques (pp. 157-60). Although one mightquibble over Chatman's proposed terminology and wish for some addi-tional explication, his distinctions are extremely useful, particularly indiscussing film.

I now finally turn to Chatman's new integration of narrative with atheory of text types, which deserves special attention. Chatman pos-tulates that there are three types of texts, arguments (i.e., argumenta-tive prose), descriptions, and narratives. Each of these types can occurin mixed forms, with arguments using narrative and description, de-scriptions using narrative (as in character sketches), and, of course,narratives using both description (to establish the existants) and argu-ment (narratorial commentary). Argument correlates with suasion,

7. Chatman also proposes the term interest-focus for minor characters.


description with a presentation of the properties of things, narrativewith action and actants and the formal discourse/story distinction. Inhis final chapter, Chatman returns to the textual functions of suchtext types, arguing that the rhetoric of narrative has both an aestheticand an argumentative side: narrative rhetoric attempts to convince theimplied reader (Niinning's empirical addressee) to "accept the formof the work," and it also "argues" for a "certain view of how thingsare in the real world" (p. 203). Neither of these rhetorical functionsis necessarily served by argument (as a text type), but rather by theimplied author's imaginative use of codes and narrative conventions.

Chatman's tripartite text-type theory allows for a neat recuperationof narrative and other text types as speech acts between the (implied?)author and his audience—and here Niinning's empirical author andreader would definitely be valuable theoretical assets. The suggested.text types reorganize the traditional genres into quite different com-partments and particularly invalidate the fiction/nonfiction boundaryas a text-type criterion. Thus guidebook directions can be pure de-scription (with subsidiary narrative, not arguments), while some poetry(e.g., "Ozymandias") is an argument (sic transit gloria mundi) in de-scriptive form (p. 10). History in this schema would, I suppose, benonfictional narrative within a largely argumentative framework. Theliterary genre that one misses most in this model is poetry. Accordingto Chatman's model, it would always have to be either argumenta-tive (e.g., La Fontaine's Fables [pp. 11-12]), descriptive, or narrative.Presumably, poetry can always be interpreted as (philosophical) medi-tation and hence argument, but this solution is far less satisfactory forpoetry than for the other genres. Furthermore, the category of de-scription seems to be much less constitutive of traditional genres thaneither argument or narrative, and the examples provided for pure de-scription can be reduced to an implicit argumentative macro-context.A guidebook itinerary is, after all, a proposal to do one's sightseeing ina certain way. Even more importantly, Chatman's schema—obviouslycreated for written texts—entirely skirts the issue of naturally occur-ring (oral) conversation, in which argument, description, and narrativeconstitute only some of the possible discursive units or speech acts.Chatman, of course, does not use the term "speech act" or identify histext types with speech acts. Yet if spoken discourse is to be included ina general text theory such as his—and I believe that it must be—thenthe theory would have to account for the communicative and phaticfunctions of discourse.

These conundrums are very similar to the problems faced by speech-act theory once the constative or assertive utterance is integrated.within a system of speech acts. Constative utterances (indirectly?) per-form a number of interactional moves, such as those of explanation,


excuse, rebuttal, denial, refusal, exemplification, agreement, and soforth. With description in particular, the question that then arises iswhether, like affirmative sentences, they should not be regarded assurface-level phenomena employed for a variety of illocutionary pur-poses. One might argue that description conveys information aboutthe properties and situation of existants to the same extent that nar-rative conveys information about their action.

It is true, of course, that Chatman did not conceive of his texttypes as speech acts, so the deliberations above are primarily meantto suggest some directions for further theorizing. Whatever possibleamendments one might make to the text-type categories proposedhere, Chatman's attempt to conceptualize narration as one text typeamong others has the enormous advantage of allowing the rhetoricalsuasion of narrative to be fruitfully compared to the rhetorical strate-gies of argument in other text types, and this comparison convincinglyrescues narrative from its customary vacuum of nonreferential irrele-vance.

I am now ready to take up the second focus of this review, that is,(narrative) pragmatics. As I emphasized above, Niinning and Chat-man, by their respective stipulations of the empirical author/readerand the theory of text types, have broken away from a purely formal-ist narrative analysis and moved toward one oriented by the readingprocess, the real-world effects of the text, and the consideration ofliterature as a social act. Sandy Petrey's Speech Acts and Literary Theory,while coming from an entirely different perspective, covers some ofthe same ground and implicitly suggests further developments alongsimilar lines.

Petrey's handy volume is eminently lucid and readable. It providesan excellent introduction to the J. L. Austin of How to Do Things withWords (Austin 1980 [1955]: pt. I), then applies the Austinian speech-actmodel to literature (ibid.: pt. 2), and finally addresses the deconstruc-tionist criticism of John Searle by showing how Austinian literary criti-cism, which Petrey holds to be the genuine, unadulterated model ofspeech-act theory, could in large measure accord with deconstruction-ist tenets as well as where, and why, there are also some irreconcilablepresuppositions in those two theoretical universes.

Austin's great discovery, according to Petrey, was the fact that onecan do things by merely saying, or uttering, certain words. This dis-covery—originally formulated in the constative/performative di-chotomy—was later complemented by the almost deconstructionistdemonstration that constative utterances are themselves intrinsicallyperformative, that is, also speech acts. Petrey situates Austin betweentwo extremist views on language. According to the first, language con-


sists just of (or in?) words. Several grammatical models, from Ben-veniste's to Jerrold Katz's, are discussed in this context. The secondview described by Petrey sees language as mere action (or perlocu-tion). Austin's stroke of genius, according to Petrey, was his creativefunctional alignment of locution with perlocution on the basis of a setof conventions linking the two, an alignment that produced the nowfamiliar concepts of illocution and felicity conditions.

Petrey has a tougher nut to crack when he tries to sell Austin'sspeech-act theory as a literary-critical methodology. In order to putAustin to such a use, one must deconstruct his pronouncements onliterary language (which—as is well known—he characterizes as "non-serious," "parasitic," and an "etiolation" of language [ibid.: 22]). Austinhimself has suggested that the "abnormality" of literature could beregarded as a convention, and Petrey proposes, for instance, that onecould then understand commands in poetry (e.g., "Go and catch afalling star") as an invitation to interpret such utterances (p. 52). Sinceliterary texts become what collectivities make of them (p. 65), literaturecan be said to have illocutionary force. The example given here isthe debacle over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, which, by Westernconventions, reads as a literary utterance, but by an entirely differentset of conventions reads as blasphemy. Illocutionary force in such acontext thus becomes fundamentally and intrinsically dependent oncontextually or culturally determined conventions and demonstrablyindependent of authorial intent. (The issue of intentionality is dis-cussed more fully in Petrey's analysis of Searle's position in chapter 4.)Writing, like speaking, therefore "performs" (p. 56).

Petrey then backtracks to discuss various adaptations of speech-act theory. In Richard Ohmann's (1971b) "Speech Acts and the Defi-nition of Literature," for example, literature is presented as "quasi-speech acts" in which fictional personae pretend to refer to a real world,but do not actually refer. Ohmann suggests that literature's illocution-ary force can be interpreted as mimetic—an explanation that may workfor realist narrative or drama, but seems singularly unsuited to poetry.Ohmann (1973) extends this viewpoint in "Literature as Act" fromindividual sentences as quasi-speech acts to the global speech act of aliterary work, which "participate[s] in the imaginative construction ofthe world" (ibid. : 107).

Mary Louise Pratt (1977), on the other hand, attempts to erase thedifference between literary and nonliterary language, a move that nec-essarily renders literature without its illocutionary force. For Pratt,literature is to be understood as part of a social convention and ascomparable to quasi-speech acts in nonliterary language. However,Pratt then ends up locating the literary speech act that occurs betweenauthor and reader as equivalent to any other act of communication, a


theoretically untenable position with regard to the intentional fallacyexposed earlier by Petrey. More important still, at this point Petreymakes by far the most significant comment of the book:

One speech-act insight is that, because language performs its users' col-lective engagement with each other, looking at language means looking atwhat words are doing with, for, and to human beings. That insight does not,however, force all forms of communication into the model supplied by oral exchangesbetween two individuals in the same space. That literature does indeed "takeplace in a context" need not lead to the assumption that its context is thesame as those that put speaker and audience in one another's presence.(P. 77 [my emphasis])

This statement implies that written texts can be speech acts, that isto say, conventionally ordered effects produced by (written language)between writer and audience, without at the same time necessarily in-volving such communication as occurs in face-to-face conversation..Unfortunately, Petrey never elaborates on this crucial insight in re-lation to literary texts. He does, however, make the very importantpoint that any kind of written communication is necessarily removedfrom direct authorial control since the text will be read according tothe conventions of its audiences, not those of its production. Hence, inwriting, "the speaker-hearer model breaks down even though speech-act theory does not" (p. 78). Petrey then moves on to consider theuse of poetic language to create an illusion of a specifically "poetic"language that is different from ordinary usage (the "Poetic LanguageFallacy" in Pratt's model), reinterpreting this illusion as the intendedeffect of the "Poetic Language Convention" (p. 80). It is thereforewithin the conventional speech act of literature (representation) thatindividual literary speech acts acquire (rather than lose) illocutionaryforce when used felicitously in accordance with literary conventions(p. 79).

These suggestions constitute an immense advance over earlier pro-posals on how to apply speech-act analysis to literature. Petrey's con-cern here is with the text as a whole. Although what he says abouttextual effects and conventions can only be applauded, there are never-theless some interesting inconsistencies in his application. Like Pratt,Petrey jumps from the literary sentence to the literary utterance, that is,to text. This move was linked in Pratt's account to the explicit compari-son of conversational "turns," in which narratives are said to constituteone such "turn." Such an approach works very well for conversationalnarrative—although one would have to disregard the listener's en-couraging or appreciative phatic contributions; the model does not,however, work as well for poetry, novels, or drama since even duringa dramatic performance in the presence of an audience, no standardface-to-face communication can be said to take place. Petrey says as


much, but fails to draw the obvious conclusions. If communication isnot the basic model for literary speech acts, how does one justify ap-plying speech-act theory to it? The problem, as far as I can see, is notthe result of using the performative convention to characterize liter-ary reading processes—there can be no doubt that a published pieceof writing constitutes an act that becomes interpretable only withinspecific societal conventions; rather, what is at issue here is whetherone can extrapolate from speech-act theory that concentrates on utter-ances of very minor length (a few sentences at most) to complete texts,which—if one follows Petrey's "communication fallacy" to its logicalconclusion—are, precisely, not utterances. This conundrum may beresponsible for the fact that most successful applications of speech-act theory to literary texts have been made in the realm of drama orfictional dialogue, where characters' utterances—like characters' psy-ches in one method of psychoanalytic literary criticism—can be prof-itably subjected to discourse-analytical investigation. Petrey presentsStanley Fish's (1980) essay "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle"as an example of such a successful application of speech-act theoryto literature. Fish's interpretation of Coriolanus underlines the infe-licity of Coriolanus's noninteractive locutions, which therefore fail toacquire the necessary illocutionary force. By contrast, Shoshana Fel-man's (1983) Austinian reading of Don juan's cavalier disregard forpromises, which attempts to combine speech-act theory with Lacanianpsychoanalytic literary criticism, is severely criticized by Petrey for itsfailure to account for conventions and for its regressive reinstatementof the constative I performative dichotomy.

Petrey redefines global literary communication in terms of audi-ences' readings, which operate according to conventions. Where thisbecomes questionable is in the comparison of the whole text witha speech act, a comparison that derives from the "turn"-equals-textequivalence mentioned above. More recent analyses in the linguisticstudy of conversation suggest that conversational strategies cannot bedescribed in terms of sentences or "turns." All speech-act analysts,including Grice (who is unaccountably missing from Petrey's study),use sentences for their examples, but actual speech acts may spanseveral sentences, even including an entire turn. Moreover, sentencesare syntactic units of the langue, and actual conversation has to be di-vided into tone units, idea units, or similar unconventional categories. 8

8. Discourse analysis, in its close observation of actual conversational output, hashad to invent a new unit of parole. Wallace Chafe (1979) calls these idea units,and Jan Svartvik proposes, for instance, in the English corpus of conversation(Svartvik and Quirk 1979), tone units. Jan W. F. Mulder and other collaborators inthe Freiburg project on sentential ("sententielle") analysis (organized by ProfessorHerbert Pilch) have devised even more specific models (Halford 1989; Halfordand Pilch 1990).

Fludernik Narratology 747

There also exists no definition of "speech act" that would allow anuncontroversial categorization of a given conversation into individualspeech acts except—maybe--on a sentence-by-sentence basis. If, assome have suggested (see, e.g., Ducrot 1984), the linguistic analysisof utterances should be separated from their speech-act performance,then larger units of, say, argumentation, counter-argumentation, re-buttal, exemplification, persuasion, self-presentation, insinuation, notto mention phatic agreement, bolstering the interlocutor's self-esteem,and whatnot, might come into focus. It is unclear in the classic versionof speech-act theory how one would deal with such issues, whether onthe level of indirect speech acts or with respect to speech acts on asuprasegmental level. It is quite a different matter to talk about prom-ises voiced by a variety of simple utterances than it is to discuss a textwhich tells a story, stimulating the reader to construct an imaginaryworld. And what about the thematic and ideological concerns raisedby the story or its telling, or the text's task of entertaining the readerand providing some aesthetic satisfaction? Although positing such acollection of suprasegmental speech acts within the literary productas a whole goes a long way toward justifying such an application ofspeech-act theory, it in no way justifies identifying the text as one (andonly one) speech act.

Such deliberations do not invalidate the relevance of conventionalinterpretive strategies for analyzing literary texts in terms of Grice'smaxims or Sperber and Wilson's relevancy conditions. Those theo-ries are, in fact, much more promising models for an application toliterature since they see language production and processing as a con-tinuing interactive process rather than as one global act. The questionof literary communication, which is equally raised by the Gricean model,can also be handled in much more suitable terms. In individual speechacts, as outlined by Austin and Searle, the emphasis always falls onthe transmission of some sort of information (e.g., about the speaker'sintention), or on the attempt to elicit a response, or on the speechact's even changing the current state of affairs. Play, pretense, delib-erate insincerity, and the like—as Petrey notes, too—can then onlybe handled as performative flaws. Within a cooperative, relevance-oriented approach, on the other hand, one can consider such casesas conventionally accepted strategies of the language game, and oneneed not even strip literature of all communicative features; part ofthe game can be the implicit and explicit handling of ideas and othertruly referential matters. Such a view also moves more easily fromsmaller to larger, and from nonfictional to fictional, texts since the co-operative principles or conventions can change according to a text'slength, genre, and degree of fictionality as well as in accordance withnarrative level. For example, there are interesting differences in theavailable choices for violating maxims of cooperation between the nar-


rator and the (implied) author. As Pratt (1977: chap. 5) has noted, theimplied author can only flout maxims (i.e., violate one maxim in theinterests of another), whereas the narrator can be unreliable and cantherefore actually violate maxims without any possible recuperationby way of flouting. Although this is what Petrey suggests on the basisof speech-act theory, it is hard to see how these desirable results couldbe achieved on the basis of Austinian theory without making a majorargumentative leap of the kind that I have noted.

Before moving on to Roger Sell's Literary Pragmatics, a few words aredue on the remainder of Petrey's book. The problems with a speech-act analysis of literature become most striking when Petrey attempts toapply that theory to fiction and poetry. His discussion of realist fiction(most of chapter 7) is organized around Balzac's 1830 work, Adieu, andcovers Pierre Gascar's realist and Shoshana Felman's ideological read-ings of that novel (Gascar 1974; Felman 1975). The debate centers onthe issues of historically accurate representation—literature as history(Gascar)—and the textual properties of intertextuality and the fail-ure to achieve reference (Felman). In Adieu the protagonist, Philippe,attempts to recreate the traumatic historical scene during which hisbeloved Stephanie had lost her mind, but overly successful realism hasfatal consequences when Stephanie suffers a repetition of her traumaand dies. Philippe's cure was too radical and killed the patient. Petreypraises Felman's debunking of the illusion of realism, but notes thehistorical situatedness of literary convention and therefore of the liter-ary speech act of realism: "Language performs in history even thoughit deconstructs itself outside it" (p. 128).

Petrey also briefly considers Whitman's Leaves of Grass, but, curi-ously, fails to mention any text-internal speaker function. AlthoughPetrey's phrasing is admittedly careful, the text's illocutionary forceis nowhere attributed to a fictional speaker (created by Whitman) butalways to—apparently—the "empirical" author. Thus, Petrey refersto "Whitman's performative lines" and declares that "Whitman's re-markable illocutionary lexicon effects the same democratic spirit heobsessively extols" (p. 112). The latter claim suggests that Petrey ishere referring to an illocutionary act by Whitman and not to that ofa fictional speaker—after all, the anaphoric he can only be coherentlylinked to the antecedent NP Whitman. With respect to the Balzac novel,the absence of any discussion of literary communication strikes me aseven more baffling, and it is here that Nanning's and Chatman's booksprovide an important corrective to Petrey's literary applications. Inparticular, Petrey's speech-act theory seems to coincide with commu-nication on Nanning's N4 level, that is, the communication betweenthe empirical author and the empirical reader, since Petrey's analy-sis concerns itself with the literary opus in its totality (that is to say,


with what Niinning calls his N3 level). Intrafictional communication,on the other hand, definitely reflects a different kind of communica-tion, or—indeed—different kinds of communicative models. One can-not possibly ignore the narrator-narratee communication, modeled di-rectly on the everyday communicational system, nor does Petrey offerany insights on the vexed "narratorless narrative" question, wherethe issue of fictional communication becomes even more critical. Ir-respective of the positing of a narrator for texts without a distinctnarrator-persona—always a theoretical conundrum in the absence ofan agreed-upon definition of "narrator"—intrafictional communica-tion invariably and demonstrably occurs whenever the text has such afictionalized narrator-persona. Speech-act theoretical rejections of thenarrator are noted by Chatman in Coming to Terms, and he has alsopreviously analyzed the speech acts ancillary to narration (Chatman1978: 164-66). It seems obvious to me that this is the place to startwith a speech-act theory of fiction, and one can only hope to see somefuture efforts made in this direction.

In his last two chapters, Petrey arbitrates among Derrida, Searle,and Austin, demonstrating that while deconstruction deliberately ig-nores (social) context, Austin can be faulted for ignoring the iterabilityof the performative act as one of its constitutive features. In particu-lar, Petrey points out how Derrida never really concerns himself withillocution (he is more interested in the signifying process that results inlocution), and how the felicity of speech acts, namely, successful illocu-tion, does not figure in his debate with Searle. Petrey's analysis here isa highly commendable attempt to demonstrate that the arguments onboth sides of this famous debate fall flat, each party being concernedwith the reverse side of the same coin. For Searle (and Austin), lan-guage produces perlocutionary effects (such as reference) by meansof illocutionary force (granted by convention); Derrida, on the otherhand, examines the conditions under which such effects and forcescan be initiated in the first place, in the study of signification processeswhich result in locutions. Without locutions there can be no speechacts, but—as Petrey correctly insists—locutions are also never used out-side a system of conventional utterances—a system that, most of thetime, ensures successful speech acts as well as (I would add) less con-ventionally circumscribed, multiple interpretations of complex writtenlanguage acts.

If Petrey used a global method to apply speech-act theory to litera-ture, Roger Sell's collected volume of papers from a 1988 confer-ence in Abo, Finland (at Sell's own university), presents a numberof very different approaches, both theoretical (Engler, Enkvist, Hess-Liittich, Pilkington, Schaar, Sell, Steen, Van Peer) and practical (Stern-


berg, Ben-Porat, McGann, Verdonk, Watts). Literary Pragmatics in-cludes quite a few excellent contributions, among which GerardSteen's piece on metaphor and Ziva Ben-Porat's analysis of Jerusa-lem cliches in Ivrit poetry probably take pride of place. I will dis-cuss the general methodology advocated in the volume, pointing outcomparable tendencies elsewhere and briefly addressing one or twoexamples.

Within linguistics, pragmatics is that area of language study whichconcentrates on the uses, rather than the formal properties, of lan-guage qua Saussurean parole. Although such an orientation wouldseem to take as its analytical starting point the everyday language thatwe all speak, which—according to Chomsky—is performatively inade-quate to the rigorous standards of linguistic competence, there has actu-ally been a tendency in pragmatics to look for system-related proper-ties of utterances, an orientation that has resulted in the adumbrationof a langue of utterance. (Such a study of the systemic properties ofthe parole has already been proposed by Josef Vachek [1964] and, ofcourse, correlates well with Louis Hjelmslev's concept of the "form"—here the "form" of the parole.) Pragmatics spans a very broad spectrumof linguistic phenomena, some of which overlap with such affiliateddisciplines as sociolinguistics and discourse analysis (for the standardintroduction to pragmatics, see Levinson 1983). One major concernof pragmatics has always been the context of the utterance, that is,the effects of the communicative situation on the formal and semanticproperties of language. For example, Peter Cole's two edited volumesof essays on pragmatics (Cole 1978, 1981) include pieces on reference,deixis, presupposition, inference and implicature, irony, and specificproblems, such as the uses of (and presuppositions activated by) thelexeme almost. In addition to these more formal approaches, many re-cent studies on tense and aspect locate themselves in pragmatics (e.g.,Hopper 1982), and the Journal of Pragmatics offers yet another rangeof methods and applications.

What are the possible connections between pragmatics and litera-ture? This is a question faced squarely in Sell's introduction to thevolume and subsequently elaborated in the first essay (an excellenttheoretical statement by Nils Enkvist, to whom the book is dedicated)and by the contributions of Richard J. Watts, Adrian Pilkington, BalzEngler, and E. W. B. Hess-Liittich. These essays view the pragmatic ap-proach to literature as superseding the formalist paradigm, in whichlinguistics was used descriptively to define the literary properties ofthe text. Literary pragmatics, by contrast, holds that the quality ofliterariness is not an essential property of a text, but a dynamic attribu-tion effect circumscribed by the conventions under which members ofa specific culture operate when reading, interpreting, or talking about


literature. Whereas prior linguistic analyses of literature on the for-malist model had emphasized the self-sufficiency of the literary workof art, pragmatics brings the real author and the real reader into viewagain, so some rethinking of the intentional and affective fallacies be-comes necessary. Literary pragmatics also claims to combine linguisticsand literature as true partners of roughly equal status, whereas formalist literary criticism either treated linguistics as a handmaiden tothe literary project or allowed linguistics to usurp literary concerns.

Despite the initial disappointments over the results of using linguis-tics to explicate literature—from the famous Fowler/Bateson debate(Bateson 1966a, 1966b, 1967, 1968; Fowler 1967, 1968; cf. Fowler1977, 1979), through the various analyses of "Les Chats" (Jakobson and Levi-Strauss 1962; Riffaterre 1966; Posner 1982; see alsoWerth 1976), and on up to the New Stylistics and its failings (see Mair1985)—linguistic approaches to literature have continued to flourishunabated, and with increasingly attractive results. This breakthroughis largely due to recent developments within linguistics itself. The ex-clusively formalist phonological or syntactic models that played such aprominent role in early "applications" to literature were particularlyill-suited to literary investigation, especially when rigidly employedas a ruling methodology. With the advent of discourse analysis andpragmatics, a much less cumbersome terminology and a wide rangeof pluralistic methods and approaches became available, which couldbe adapted to practically all levels of the literary text—sentences,paragraphs, the narrator's presentation, or the characters' interaction.In the wake of Grice's formulations and textual studies on cohesion.,coherence, presupposition, and relevance,9 the suprasegmental strate-gies of both (creative) writing and textual processing (reading/lis-tening comprehension) could be described in a linguistic frameworkthat helped to demonstrate how texts rhetorically manipulate theirreadings by implying specific presuppositions, establishing topics, orflouting cooperative maxims. As Sell argues in his introduction, suchanalyses restore the reader's status as more than a purely theoreti-cal "implied instance" of ideal qualities. Within a linguistic theoreticalframework, inference and implicature can become normative conven-tions of a pragmatic langue that determines the actual utterance (ortext), and such a system of pragmatic conventions can be interposedbetween the linguistic medium, on the one hand, and the preprogram-med responses and interpretations of the actual reader, on the other.

Nils Enkvist, for instance ("On the Interpretability of Texts in Gen-eral and of Literary Texts in Particular"), proposes the notion of inter-

9. M. A. K. Halliday and Ruquaiya Hasan's (1976) lucid volume has been highlyinfluential.


pretability and supplements it with contextual acceptability—or appro-priateness (p. 7)—to include the more specific cultural norms of certaincontexts. Interpretability relies in turn on intelligibility (i.e., the recog-nition of phonological, lexical, and morphemo-syntactic structures),comprehensibility (i.e., the assignment of meaning), and intelligibilityproper, which incorporates the utterance/text into a scenario, or a.state of affairs within which an utterance "makes sense" (ibid.). Inter-pretability is highly useful as a concept for language in general sinceit makes explicit what many syntacticians have implicitly presupposedwhen asking people to evaluate the acceptability of constructed sen-tences: sentences that are acceptable allow for the construction of a.possible context within which their utterance would make sense. Inter-pretability also readily explains our ability to make sense of exchangesonly when we are aware of the topic under discussion—much overheard conversation remains completely opaque unless one is informedof the relevant topic, and even written instructions can be downrightunreadable without an accompanying diagram or a topic heading toguide the uninitiated. Or think of having to "translate" a legal docu-ment in which many words just don't make sense on a literal level, butonly if one knows the jargon or is privy to the relevant circumstances.

Knowing how to relate a situation to the text and to create a situa-tion from a text requires a continual see-sawing that comes very closeto the processing that Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson (1977)have analyzed within what is now called frame theory. Within ordinarylanguage use, Enkvist proposes, the situations evoked by a text will beof manageable proportions—if there is ambiguity, only a few alterna-tive interpretations will be possible, and the overt context will usuallymake one, and only one, relevant. If ambiguity persists, attempts aremade to resolve it: "When you said. . . did you mean to imply. . . ?"In literature, on the other hand, several noncontradictory interpre-tations may be equally appropriate and relevant in the circumstances(see also Pilkington, pp. 53-59), and (obviously) one cannot simply askthe writer (or the narrator!) to clarify.

Pragmatics has also rescued a historical engagement with literaturefrom its present-day irrelevance and promises some very interestingstructural observations as well. The effect of aesthetic pleasure derivedfrom reading, for example, can be seen as the result of a process ofmatching and recognition, or as the result of unexpected turns, therepetition of the known, and so forth (Enkvist, p. 25). Other prag-matic projects include the investigation of the politeness levels of texts(cf. Sell's essay in this volume and earlier works by him), a textuallevel that also correlates with textual opacity and the concomitant chal-lenge to the reader's interpretive persistence and ingenuity. Literarypragmatics has already established itself as a separate field of inquiry

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(Hickey 1989; Sell 1991) and promises to contribute a number ofincisive insights on the workings of literary texts.

I will conclude by briefly touching on some of the applications ofthese pragmatic models to literary texts. Meir Sternberg's "How In-direct Discourse Means: Syntax, Semantics, Poetics, Pragmatics" de-livers one more shrewd assessment of the recontextualizing features ofnarrative quotation in addition to his earlier articles (Sternberg 1982a,1982b). With his well-known agility, Sternberg keeps his balance onthe tightrope between form and function, between opaque and trans-parent readings of the indirect. He discusses the conventional impli-cations drawn from the syntactic forms available to the quoter andprovides some new counterexamples to Ann Banfield's (1982) claimsabout indirect discourse.

Gerard Steen's excellent "Understanding Metaphor in Literature:Towards an Empirical Study" provides some surprising insights intothe workings of metaphor. Metaphor identification is apparently "de-pendent on both the reader's actions and his attitudes and knowledge"(p. 115). On the basis of Tanya Reinhart's (1976) distinction betweenfocus and vehicle interpretation in metaphor, in which literary meta-phors are said to have a tendency toward explicit vehicle interpreta-tion, Steen suggests that such vehicle prominence may in fact constitutea cue for explicit metaphor interpretation, whereas focus-centered,metaphor is not perceived as metaphorical. Thus metaphorical read-ing can be linked to the mediations of interpretive communities andthe reading attitudes they propose. Steen bases his observations on theresults of the empirical study of literature 10 initiated by S. J. Schmidt(1980, 1982a, 1982b) and outlines some experiments that could en-rich the results already available from a number of empirical studiesanalyzing metaphor interpretation.' 1

I will conclude with what I believe to be the best essay of the volume(regrettably skipping other valuable contributions, such as JeromeMcGann's interesting discussion of the publishing circumstances ofByron's "Fare Thee Well"). Ziva Ben-Porat's "Two-Way Pragmatics:From Word to Text and Back" analyzes the characterization of "Jeru-salem the City" in nineteenth-century (Eastern) European Hebrewliterature and its adaptation to the historical facts of twentieth-centuryimmigration to Israel, that is, the confrontation between the mythic de-scription of Jerusalem and the reality of the twentieth-century place.Although some very limited modifications of the symbolic "canon"

10. This is very confusingly abbreviated as ESL, an acronym generally used for"English as a Second Language."11. Another study along these lines is that of Willie van Peer (1984), who analyzesthe empirical validity of the poetics of deviation.


can be shown to occur in contemporary poetry, these are quantita-tively negligible in comparison with the continued evocation of themesthat are quite inappropriate to the present experience. Thus, NaomiShemer's "Jerusalem the Golden" introduces the environmental ingre-dients of clear mountain air and the scent of pine trees to the represen-tational components, but these have little historical (allegorical) signifi-cance. On the other hand, cisterns and the marketplace (absent fromthe classical paradigm) are introduced not in the interests of realism(i.e., representation)—the marketplace is "empty" and the wells are"dry"—but in order to replace the ruined walls and destroyed palacesof the canon (p. 150). Even Byron's "Jerusalem" becomes affected intranslation by the powerful concepts of the traditional paradigm.

Ben-Porat supplements her analysis with results from empirical ex-periments on associational reflexes among both adults and school chil-dren. At issue were people's associations with the autumn season. Inreality, there is no observable seasonal difference between Jerusalem'sautumn and winter, and fall—if conceptualized as an experience--represents relief from the summer heat and a consequent reawaken-ing of nature. Yet in Ivrit poetry the European experience of autumnas the dying of nature, as the season of harvest, with its literary asso-ciations of "sweet sadness" (pp. 154-55), persists. Hebrew poets notonly developed linguistic ways of distinguishing between autumn andwinter, they also took over the European literary paradigm accordingto which autumn signifies sadness and decay. Thus the poplar, whichdoes not grow in Israel, nevertheless flourishes in Israeli poetry asan image of autumnal sadness (p. 155), and adults have been foundto associate the season with these poetic topoi. The most frequentassociation with autumn is the withering of leaves, followed by winds,clouds, sadness, migrating birds, mists, parting, shorter days, and,much less frequently, the high holidays, apples, and citrus fruit—associations that would correspond to the physical reality of autumnin Israel today. Children, on the other hand, associate autumn withlargely realistic items and events, such as the flowers called "squills,"coolness, the Jewish high holidays, the beginning of the school year,the first rain, wigtails (birds that winter in Israel), withering leaves,clouds, cotton fields, apple picking, and citrus fruit. However, eventhe children's most frequent association with autumn—squills—turnsout to be a literary allusion, since squills occur in a common rhymedmaxim which every child learns in kindergarten and which pairsautumn and squills. Their principal association therefore relies on amnemonic collocation of literary origin (pp. 156-57). The link be-tween literature and life could not be closer.

Vaheed K. Ramazani's Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics of Ironycan also be regarded here as another variation on the pragmatic analy-


sis of literature. This is not a study of free indirect discourse as such.,and the formal definition of the mode is clearly inadequate by linguis-tic standards. (The bibliography fails to list any studies of FID otherthan the most traditional ones. In fact, Ramazani's manuscript seemsto have been completed as early as 1985, and he has therefore missedsome interesting recent contributions to narratology, among themBal's [1985] Narratology.) Ramazani's slim volume is less concernedwith the formal delimitation of free indirect discourse than with itsuses in Flaubert's Madame Bovary and L'Education sentimentale. This isalso a study of irony, and although Ramazani offers little in the wayof precise definition, he nevertheless makes some remarkably goodpoints about Flaubertian irony. Thus he notes that although Emma isthe victim of Flaubert's (i.e., the implied author's) irony, the object ofirony is not Emma, but rather the kind of romantic cliché that rulesher life; additionally, Ramazani proposes that besides being the victimof irony, Emma also functions as the medium through which that ironyattains its object in the novel (pp. 2-3). Such formulations strike me asdecidedly superior to most explanations of irony on the basis of contra-diction alone, and they could be profitably refined by integration withthe triangular models proposed by Ross Chambers (1989) and W.-D.Stempel (1976). Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni's (1976, 1977, 1980)concept of irony signals, which Ramazani discusses at length (pp. 28–30), is intelligently supplemented here by a more contextual, genre-related frame of reference, but the very clear parallels between thestatus of her irony signals in the co-text and the signals of free indirectdiscourse in that co(n)text unfortunately remain unaddressed—oneof the consequences of Ramazani's lack of interest in the form of freeindirect discourse.

Ramazani is at his best in chapters 3 and 4, where the functions offree indirect discourse are closely related to the properties of Flau-bertian style and irony, as described in Jonathan Culler's (1974) andNaomi Schor and Henry F. Majewski's (1985) books on Flaubert. Inparticular, Ramazani manages to bring literary, pragmatic, and philo-sophical concepts to bear on the unique place of free indirect discoursewithin narrative, as the following passages show:

The free indirect mode therefore inscribes its reversible pretense of em-pathy within an overarching metairony [sic] of narration and reading. Thehierarchy of reflector and narrator, subjective and objective, necessarilysubsists at the level of corrective irony. But in foregrounding both a unifor-mity of registers and a disparity of ideologies, the disembodied voice of thefree indirect mode also gives rise to textual self-consciousness, or romanticirony. (P. 115)

Thus, it is in the free indirect mode that romantic irony best objectifiesthe dissonance between meaning and experience. .. . Ultimately, Flaubert'sresponse to this fall into language will be to fully embrace the alienating


materiality of words—not to lower poetry, but to raise the positivity ofspeech to its highest power. The poetic qualities of Flaubert's overdeter-mined style are potentially most perceptible when irony in the free in-direct mode dramatizes the autonomy of the signifier. Reading becomes a.dialectic between radically agonistic readings, an esthetic pantheism alter-nating between mimesis and metaphoricity, culture and nature, self andself-destruction. (Pp. 130-31)

It is in the linking of irony with textuality that Ramazani comesclosest to a pragmatic approach to literature, and yet, at the same time,the deconstructionist tenor of his remarks seems to conflict unresolv-ably with the spirit of literary pragmatics. Ramazani therefore returnsus to Petrey's comparison between Derrida and Searle, and one can seethat Ramazani is obviously much more interested in language textureand a text-internal reading strategy than in actual readers, histori-cal or generic influences, or a precise linguistic description of literarytexts. Nevertheless, in his study of irony, of romantic cliche and sty-listic infelicity, Ramazani is addressing issues that equally concern themore empirically minded literary pragmaticists, who are grapplingwith them in a more down-to-earth, commonsensical manner. If Flau-bertian irony remains elusive—with a verigeance—this is due less toany lack of awareness of the pragmatic parameters than to Rama-zani's resistance to the rigorous empirical tools of narratology and/orlinguistics.

Since I have covered a number of widely disparate topics, some re-capitulation may be in order at this point. I have grouped this selectionof recent publications according to two related topics, communicationand applications of pragmatics to literary texts. Since questions ofdeixis and the context of utterances are central to linguistic pragmat-ics, the issue of communication can be regarded as subsidiary withinthe general pragmatic frame. However, as I tried to explain in the firstpart of this article, communication in literature occurs on various tex-tual and nontextual levels. Moreover, one cannot simply lump all ofthese communicative processes within a single general model of face-to-face communication that takes linguistic enunciation or the patternof information transmittal between a sender and a receiver as its para-digmatic frame. Communication in narrative, for instance, can neitherbe reduced to the level of intrafictional dialogue, or the dynamicsof the narrator-narratee relationship, nor be entirely identified with a"reader-response" model in its standard accounts. Speech-act theory,a linguistic precursor of pragmatics, can help to clarify the rhetoricaland macrostructural qualities of literary "communication," and Chat-man's groundbreaking application of such an analysis to literary andcinematic narrative should stimulate more extended analyses in the


same direction. On the text-internal, microstructural level, however,such speech-act theoretical concerns lose their relevance and need tobe replaced with more traditional narratological models, models thatwill also have to reflect further consideration of the mimetic status ofnarratological concepts of communication.

Literary pragmatics, on the other hand, may become a valuable allyof narratology precisely in the murky circumference of narratologyproper, in the area of generic, diachronic, empirical framing withinwhich texts operate. Seemingly antipragmatic approaches to litera-ture, such as textualist antihistorical readings in the manner of decon-struction, can in fact be recuperated within a literary pragmatics tothe extent that such readings operate within generic conventions, and.one possibility for reading is to read in a textualist manner. A prag-matic analysis of literature therefore allows one to accommodate theempirical effects of deconstructionist readings rather than excludingall contextualizing frames for this common activity.

I trust that this presentation of recent work in narratology and itsapplications has left the reader with the measured optimism that Imyself feel. The introduction of pragmatics into literary studies seemsto promise excellent opportunities for a fruitful dialogue between anumber of related disciplines. I have additionally suggested that moreconventional narratological frameworks will continue to be of greatpractical use and that they can profit immeasurably from the prag-matic shift within linguistics and literary study. In contrast to othercurrent evaluations of the narratological climate, mine would forecastless invariably rainy weather than "partly cloudy" conditions. Like allsuch forecasts, this may prove overly optimistic, but we won't knowuntil the next report is in.

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