The Reader's Construction of Narrative

Horst Ruthrof

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138684621
• eBook ISBN: 9781134852062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

In this book, first published in 1981, the author argues that narrative is an interaction between "the presented world and the presentational process" and attempts to define narrative from the perspective of reading. The Reader's Construction of Narrative includes chapters on narrative language, translating narrative and discusses what happens when we read a narrative text. This book will be of particular interest to students of literary theory.

Chapter 1

What happens when we read a narrative text?

Attempts at defining or describing narrative have tended to proceed ‘empirically’ by deducing the properties of the object from a large number of examples of what one generally agrees to be narratives, (1) or by describing its characteristic features by means of the tools applicable to a larger set (e.g., the tools of logic, semiotics, or linguistics) of which narrative texts are regarded as a sub-set. (2) Satisfactory as such approaches are in many respects, the former makes the unclarified assumption that narrative is an object, while the latter certainly runs the danger of discovering in the sub-set what in general terms is already known about the large set, while overlooking aspects characteristic only of the historically rooted item to be described. And although it cannot be a foregone conclusion that there are such specific characteristics, the possibility of their existence should not be denied.

For the purposes of this study I wish to describe narrative structure primarily in terms of its reception, using eclectically what help from other areas the explanations of the reading performance demand. My starting point suggests itself through the observation that our knowledge of things is intimately linked with the way in which we are able to encounter and use them. This applies most obviously to items which are not homogeneous ontologically, as are material objects such as pens or tables or non-material phenomena such as mathematical and other definitions, but ontologically heterogeneous, i.e. existing at the same time at different levels of materiality, ideality, etc. (3) A poem, for example, exists at the same time as a physical object inasmuch as it is print or sound and as a multiple, non-material construct in its linguistic relation-ships, propositional meanings, constructable image world, or interpretable, abstract overall, aesthetic, philosophical meaning.

What do we do then when we read a novel or story? Let me start with the trivial and then advance to the more complex aspects of the reading act. Let us assume that we take the physical object ‘book’ from the shelf, our minds wide open to the possible nature of its contents. As we recognize the text as that of a novel (because it is either called a novel or we know the title or we suppose that it is a novel since it is fairly long, with chapter headings, etc.) our ‘horizon of expectations’ is suddenly narrowed down to a more or less loose set of generic features. (4) It is during our reading that this set is then transformed into a cumulative list of aspects which, by the end of our first reading, make up our understanding of the work as a generic entity.

Let us further assume that we come across sentences of the following kind:

1.1 I shall only add that this character of male chastity, though doubtless as desirable and becoming in one part of the human species as in the other, is almost the only virtue which the great apologist hath not given himself for the sake of giving the example to hisreaders. (Joseph Andrews, B.I., Ch. 1)

or

1.2 No, no, there’s nothing to be gained by burdening our fabrications with impieties. (Robert Co-over, The Magic Poker)

2 I suppose he was plotting to get Paul out in the boat and play some joke on him, like pushing him in the water. (Ring Lardner, Haircut)

3 And now our case was very dismal indeed; for all saw plainly, that the sea went so high that the boat could not live, and that we should be inevitably drowned. (Daniel Defoe, ‘Robinson Crusoe’)

4 O I’m not going to think myself into glooms about that any more I wonder why he wouldn’t stay the night I felt all the time it was somebody strange he brought in instead of roving around the city meeting God knows who nightwalkers and pickpockets (James Joyce, ‘Ulysses’)

5 Already while that fever-fit of holiness lay upon him he had encountered but out of chastity had declined to penetrate disillusioning forces. (James Joyce, ‘Stephen Hero’)

6 ‘What should we drink?’ the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table. (Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants)

7 From what had it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish speech (James Joyce, The Dead)

8 You’ve been had, haven’t you, Jocko? You sad sour stew-faced sonofabitch. Really, did you read this far? (William H. Gass, Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife)

TWO SETS OF SIGNIFIEDS

As we attempt to describe what happens when we read these sentences, we note an obvious and crucial difference between our acts of consciousness directed at unmediated phenomena and those directed at the phenomena of discourse. The way in which we experience our everyday reality can be argued to be determined to a large extent by the total sedimented stock of typified knowledge which we have available at any given moment. This stock-of-knowledge-at-hand (Schutz) we may assume to be structured in terms of a quasi-spatio-temporal matrix with typified aspects of personae, acts, events, tonal and atmospheric qualities, etc., and above all an ever-changing ideological pattern which acts as an interpretative filter and umbrella giving weight and value to specific items in the matrix. (5) These observations are highly schematic and perhaps trivial. But they become increasingly complex when we apply them to our experience of discourse and especially fictional discourse.

When we read or hear a piece of discourse, the same general principles as outlined above appear to operate. But in addition they must be available ‘in duplicate’ if we are to understand fully the meaning of any speech. This means that we must be able to grasp the aspects of space, time, acts, personae, etc., and the ideological position of both the presented items and the presentational speech act. In the discourse-situations of everyday life where we grasp intuitively the social context and the way it modifies propositional meanings this usually poses no problem. In written discourse, and especially in fictional narrative where the total speech situation is highly artificial, the reader is called upon to perform complex tasks of interpretative construction before narrative meaning can be adequately established. Even in isolation, sentence 5 – ‘Already while that fever-fit of holiness lay upon him he had encountered but out of chastity had declined to penetrate disillusioning forces’ – makes sense fully only if we construct a double reality, the presented world of Stephen, his mental development and the presentational process with an authorial narrator in total control of his spatial and temporal position in relation to his protagonist, and a sympathetically omniscient and probing attitude. This has often been dealt with under such labels as ‘post of observation’ (James), point of view, ‘narrative situation’, mediation, or ‘narrative transmission’. (6) Apart from the sophistication of Stanzel’s and Chatman’s approaches, the majority of the discussions either take over traditional terms such as point of view and, without subjecting them to any careful scrutiny, endow them with a new rationale and/or simply do not distinguish precisely enough between the multiple aspects of modality which are activated in the reading process. The term point of view, for example, tacitly assumes that the condition of spatio-temporal unity which we attach to our everyday reality must also apply to fictive narrative. But what really happens when we read a narrative text is that often only the spatial locus of the act of telling is schematically determined while its temporal side remains an undetermined lacuna, or vice versa.

While in example 5 the temporal and spatial locus of narrating remains vague, it becomes increasingly well defined as we read the total work. Then we are able to construct, beyond the shifting, quasi-physical position of the speaker, a narrating persona or at least a voice with spiecific acts of telling, foreshadowing, pre-interpreting, concealing and revealing, a persona that is dependent on certain events (authorial arrangements beyond his control), with tonal and atmospheric qualities and, most important, a partly stated and, by way of transformations, largely inferred ideological characterization. If this is so, it suggests that the grid of expectations which we must have available in order to be able to activate fully the potential of narrative discourse can be schematized as shown in Table 1.1.

TABLE 1.1

	Presentational process	Presented world
Time	temporal locus of narrating	presented world’s temporal matrix
Space	spatial locus of narrating	world’s spatial matrix
Personae	kinds of narrators, narrator ‘personality’	personae ‘characters’
Acts	acts of telling, lying, describing, reporting, foreshadowing, etc.	physical and mental acts: movement, discourse, thought
Events	author’s arrangements beyond the narrator’s control	non-human events
Tonal aspects	narrator’s attitude to reader and presented world (benevolent, cynical)	personae’s attitudes to themselves and one another and to rest of presented world
Atmospheric aspects	qualities we attach to narrator and acts of telling	e.g., gloomy, idyllic etc.
Ideological patterns	narrator’s overall abstractable ideological stance and commitment	ideological identification of total world presented
All references to reader, whether stated or implied, should be seen as part of the presentational process, since they all foreground the acts of mediation rather than items of the projected world. A column closely attached to presentational process and listing the potential properties of stated and implied readers could certainly improve the grid. (7)

Whenever we encounter discourse, this double schema acts as a formally empty horizon of expectations within which the experience of any specific discourse is possible. The basic assertion here is that reading narrative is the construction of first a twofold set of propositional meanings and through them the construction of a double vision: on the one hand, the vision of what could be seen, heard, imagined or, in terms of the filmic medium, what could be projected and enacted on a screen; and, on the other, that vision which allows the former to come into existence, the quasi-reality of the presentational process. Two asides must be made here which will be given more attention later. In staged drama one side of the scheme, the process, is transformed into material aspects such as curtains or movement on the stage, or the actual production of such items of the dramatic sub-text as ‘enthusiastically’, or ‘with sword drawn’. By contrast, in what one tends to describe as highly lyrical poetry the two sides of process and world appear to be deliberately fused into one homogeneous expression of a state of mind. Narrative, no matter which side is emphasized, lives from the distinction of and interplay between presentational process and presented world.

(a) Examples 1 to 4: first-person statements

1.1 In the first example a quasi-author narrator who is standing outside the presented world is telling us that he is giving us further information, linking aspects of the world with his own personality.

1.2 Here the same type of narrator apologizes or pretends to apologize for information which slipped in, but should not have been provided. By referring to the story as to ‘our fabrications’ he makes the reader an accomplice to the blasphemy or prank, depending on whether we construct the narrator’s attitude as sincere or ironical.

2 In this case the first-person narrator is part of the presented world. The phrase ‘I suppose’ characterizes him as a peripheral narrator with limited access to vital information, while such further dues as ‘some joke’ and ‘like pushing him’ urge the reader to envisage a narrator who is not merely at a spatiotemporal disadvantage, but one whose interpretative faculties are similarly restricted. In this case the time gap indicated by the past tense cannot be said to mark the difference between the ‘narrating self’ (the barber telling the story to a customer) and the ‘experiencing self’, since the narrator could not him-self have observed the world he presents. (8)

3 In example 3 the phrases ‘our case … we should be … drowned’ identifies the narrator as being inside the presented world and at the heart of the recorded events. By contrast with example 2, the past tense establishes the time gap between the narrating self (the old Crusoe) and the experiencing self (the young Crusoe on the ship). Little more can be said without speculation about the presentational process except that we are aware that the narrator must have survived to tell the tale and that the reader can tentatively infer a personality of rich experience; further perhaps, that the kind of personality the narrator must be is the result to a large extent of the very experiences to which the reader is giving imaginative shape as he is reading on. As a result, the cumulative view of the total narrative process assumes a complexity towards the end of the novel not unlike the complexity of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 What Happens When We Read a Narrative Text?
• 2 Presentational Process and ‘Narrative Transgression’
• 3 Narrative Language
• 4 Narrative Stratification and the Dialectic of Reading
• 5 Ladders of Fictionality
• 6 Bracketed World and Reader Construction in the Modern Short Story
• 7 Narrative Strands: Presented and Presentational
• 8 Acts of Narrating: Transformations of Presentational Control
• 9 Parodic Narrative
• 10 Narrative and the Form-Content Metaphor
• 11 Translating Narrative
• 12 Fictional Modality: A Challenge to Linguistics
• Notes
• Index