Eloquent Reticence

Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative

Leona Toker

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813188171
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

The importance of the ethics of form in literature has only recently gained broad recognition and has thus far been explored mainly from the position of moral philosophy and critical theory. Leona Toker develops a narratological approach to the subject, based on studying "reticence" in works of fiction.

Reticence consists in narrative techniques through which writers create information gaps that build interest, enhance tension, and control the reader's comprehension of theme, character, and event. Using novels by Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Conrad, Forster, and Faulkner, Toker demonstrates how the withholding of information affects readers' attitudes, stimulates their reassessment, and leads to a self-critical reorientation—and how such manipulation of attention has specific ethical and aesthetic significance.

Drawing on descriptive poetics, reader-response criticism, and information theory, Toker marks the parallel situations of the characters in the fiction she analyzes and of the readers who encounter it, and presents a novel approach to the issue of first and repeated readings. The inquiry into the twofold role of the reader opens the discussion of narrative techniques to ethical issues.

Through her analysis of silences in representative works Toker makes a meaningful contribution to modern narrative study and offers new insights into a number of familiar novels. This well informed, sensitive, and judicious study will appeal to scholars interested in narrative theory and ethical criticism and to students of Faulkner and of the classical English novel.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

speak silence with thy glimmering eyes

—Blake, “To the Evening Star”

By all means place the “how” above the
“what” but do not let it be confused with
the “so what.”

—Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

In information theory the absence of a message is a message in its own right; in politics reticences and omissions are clues of major significance; in personal relationships evasions are signs more loaded than words. Silence speaks: “Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge” (Psalms 19:2); silence, as in Blake’s “To the Evening Star,” is also spoken. In poetry silence can speak, technically, through pauses, obscure images, tropes, and other channels of psychedelic appeal. In the novel, the most voluble heteroglot genre,¹ it speaks through manipulative informational gaps. The present book is devoted to the study of the rhetoric of such gaps in seven eloquently reticent novels.

Russian formalism, French structuralism, and American narratology have developed precision tools for the rhetorical and structural analysis of prose fiction. The makers and the users of these tools have, however, always been aware that descriptive analysis begs questions of the “so what” type and is insufficient as an end in itself rather than as a means to other ends such as thematic analysis, semiotics of culture, metaphysical inquiry, study of the force and self-reflexivity of language, study of reader response, and numerous unclassifiable insights into individual texts. The method developed below relates descriptive analysis, through the discussion of audience response, to the inquiry into what in recent critical conversation has been called “the ethics of form.” It stops short of probing the ethical theory worked out in individual novels but maps a narratological avenue of approach to it.

As is now widely recognized, ethical concerns are not merely a matter of issues raised in the content of literary works or of authors’ proclaimed or implied attitudes. In the case of what John Gardner regards as genuinely moral fiction, philosophical issues are explored and attitudes tested and refined not prior to but during and through the work of imagination (fiction is a “mode of thought”²), and the narrative, in its turn, creates conditions for a specific moral-intellectual experience of the reader. These conditions are shaped not only by the content but also by genre features, style, narrative techniques—whatever is commonly associated with “form.” The formal features of a work therefore have an ethical significance.

The ethics of literary form is one of the central concerns of Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness. Nussbaum believes that an author’s choice of genre and style is not “content neutral”;³ she demonstrates this on the material of Greek tragedies, Plato’s dialogues, and Aristotle’s treatises. The formal issues that her study deals with, from the philosophical vantage point, are mainly genre features, choice of metaphors, and framing. Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep approaches ethical problematics from the positions of critical theory and focuses on the significance of figurative language, the ethics of instrumental “weapon” metaphors, and mythopoeic macro-metaphors as well as on questions of scope and balance.⁴ By contrast, Meir Sternberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative proceeds, as my study does, from narratological positions. Sternberg shows the role of a wide range of narrative techniques in promoting the single overall ethical tendency of the text through the “drama of knowledge” in which the Old Testament engages the reader.⁵ My book examines a smaller set of narrative techniques, yet in a way that opens up to discussions of the different kinds of moral-intellectual experiences in which seven classical novels involve the audience. The passage from rhetorical analysis to such discussions is, as noted above, via the effects of the techniques in question on the dynamics of audience response.

I speak of “audience” rather than “reader response” because the latter term has become too loaded.⁶ It frequently suggests against-the-grain readings of texts from the point of view of different interest groups. The term “audience response” does not presuppose an analogy with the theatrical framework, yet such an analogy is not entirely out of place.

Indeed, when Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin makes his way, long after the curtain has risen, to his seat in the theatre (stepping, rather unethically, on people’s feet), the audience, “breathing criticism, is ready to applaud an entrechat, hiss Phaedra, Cleopatra, call out Moëna—for the purpose merely of being heard.”⁷ “Breathing criticism” is Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of the original “breathing liberty.” Most literary study is the liberties that we take with texts—within limits. My self-imposed restrictions here exclude the anre rem ideological scrutiny: a temporary submission to the sway of the text is held to be in order before one reasserts one’s freedom. Rhetorical analysis focuses only on the response that the texts “foresee,” though its task often lies in determining the very limits of its field of inquiry.

“Audience response” may be viewed as one part of this wide field. It consists in our automatic estimation of the completeness or incompleteness of the information available at any given moment of reading and our attempts to correlate the presented and the assimilated data, to arrange and rearrange the material, extrapolate, make gap-filling conjectures, form and adjust expectations. It entails the emotions aroused by our own information-processing performance rather than the vicarious emotions aroused by the experience of the characters.

Hence this study is not primarily concerned either with the text’s appeal to vicarious emotions (what D.H. Harding calls “feeling with” the characters) or with the text’s influence on our subliminal moral evaluations (what Harding calls “feeling for” the characters⁸)—which is not to deny the importance of both. These aspects of response are here considered only insofar as they are affected by ways in which the stream of ludic information (the “make-believe” or “play information,” like “play money” in the Monopoly game) is monitored in the text.

In the ideal absence of what information theory calls “noise,” audience response could, in principle, approximate the common denominator of sundry individual readings. In practice, however, its intensity varies in inverse proportion to the individual reader’s ability to respond to a greater number of textual irritants simultaneously and to experience moments of disinterested aesthetic contemplation that temporarily silences the wish to pursue the mysteries of the plot.

In some novels the elements of audience response are analogous, or parallel, to elements of the characters’ experience. Thwarting of a character’s ambitions can be reenacted—often in a different part of the novel—by our frustration at being denied the information we want; a character’s obsessive hope can be reenacted by an intensification of our suspense caused by an enigma. In Nabokov’s Pnin, for instance, there is an abrupt shift from the story of Victor Wind’s visit with Pnin to a much later episode in which Victor does not participate. Our vivid interest in the Pnin-Victor friendship is not satisfied (the relationship develops away from the limelight): this frustration, as it turns out, reenacts Pnin’s own eventual disappointment when Victor is suddenly summoned away.

As the subject of the novel narrows down from a record of multiple experience (picaresque novel) to an analytic account of a single human situation, parallel experience gains importance. By placing us in an intellectual predicament analogous to that of the characters, parallel experience can turn into a direct means of conveying to us the specific emotional climate of the novel’s world, without the mediation of overt didactics, fictional brainstorms, or “vicarious” emotion. Yet it can perform a variety of other functions as well. In some works, in most of Conrad’s novels, for instance, analogies between the “dramas of knowledge” in which the reader and the characters find themselves involved reduce the importance of the differences between them in other spheres of experience; as a result, cognitive issues are privileged and to a large extent universalized. In other works, for example, in the stories of Varlam Shalamov, who is known (insufficiently) to the English speaking public as the author of Kolyma Tales and Graphite,⁹ such analogies further emphasize the difference between the reader’s situation and that of the Gulag prisoners described; as a result, a warning is issued against hastily judging the characters according to conventional norms. In some works, of course, parallel experience has no special significance—in detective fiction, for example, our reenactment of a Dr. Watson’s gropings is a means rather than the end or even a byproduct of mystification.

Parallel experience is of the greatest interest when it is isomorphic with a novel’s themes—a theme here being understood not as a semantic field that accommodates multiple recurrent motifs but as a latent statement that can be regarded as the organizing principle of the work. However, though the reader may be aware of the mental operations performed in piecing together the data of the text, he or she seldom registers the analogy between these operations and the experience of the characters: parallel experience is not among the notions that underlie our reading conventions. My references to it are meant to be consciousness-raising: I believe that analysis of parallel experience can be a useful interpretive strategy, a way of thinking that can yield new insights into familiar texts. Accordingly, the seven “reticent” novels discussed have been chosen because they bring into bold relief tendencies that also appear, in a less salient form, in numerous other works.

The reticence in question is not to be measured against the plenitude of extratextual reality. It consists not in the presumed inadequacy of the mimetic model provided by the text but in the suppression of information concerning the model itself, the fictional world whose spatial and causal-temporal relationships constitute the so-called fabula of a novel. I shall attempt to show how gaps in the fabula information open upon mirrors that the novels hold up to the audience.

What, then, are the gaps in the fabula information?

The term fabula was first used by Russian formalist critics of the turn of the century. It refers to the sum total of fictional events in their chronological and logical order and may be understood to include all the available circumstances and details of those events. The counterpart of the fabula is the sjuzhet, the sequence in which the fictional events are presented in the narrative. In a broader sense, the sjuzhet is the totality of devices and techniques used in the telling of the story.¹⁰ The audience is supposed to reconstruct the fabula from the sjuzhet in the process of reading.

Reconstruct or construct? Post-formalist critical positions deny the preexistence of the fabula¹¹ and reject the possibility of “extracting” a meaning from the signs on the page¹² or even of separating the “brute facts” of the texts (including grammatical, metrical, or phonetic features) from systems of interpretation.¹³ Strictly speaking, the sjuzhet is the immediate given; the fabula is an abstraction from the sjuzhet rather than the material to which the latter gives form;¹⁴ and the fictional narrative imitates rather than constitutes the flow of information. Its sentences do not present accounts of fictional events but create the facts that they purport to communicate.¹⁵ Thus any sentence in a fictional narrative is a performative speech act, an act which, like “I name this ship Queen Elizabeth” or “I apologize,” is made possible by a verbal formulation that describes that which it performs.¹⁶

This act, however, properly “takes place” only when it is perceived, or “concretized,” by a comprehending reader. The text may be regarded as containing not so much information as instructions for the reader, instructions as to how the fabula should be built and what attitude should be taken to its different parts.¹⁷ Even when the reader has the impression of being engaged in a dialogue with the narrator or novelist (in, for instance, Fielding’s Tom Jones), narrative units can still be interpreted not as the novelist’s contribution to this dialogue but as “instructions” for the reader to conjure up the interlocutor in his or her imagination.

The instructions can never be exhaustive: a text cannot present all the humanly perceptible features of an object described or all the details of an action. It is always characterized by a degree of indeterminacy, but when it presents a sufficient number of features (instructions) to cause instant pattern recognition, the missing details are supplied by the reader’s imagination.¹⁸ This cooperation of the reader with the text is automatic and instantaneous. It is indeterminate and idiosyncratic but does not constitute a misreading so long as it does not conflict with the “instructions” of the text. This is what distinguishes blanks, or spots of indeterminacy, practically infinite in any text, from definite and relatively infrequent informational gaps—bearing in mind that in some narratives there are camouflaged gaps perceived as blanks on the first reading. However incomplete the instructions presented by the text to the audience may be, in the case of mere blanks they contain sufficient data for pattern recognition. In the case of gaps, on the other hand, the information offered by the text is felt to be incomplete: it does not immediately congeal into a definite matrix-pattern. The figure in the carpet is then expected to stabilize at later textual junctures when the gaps are at least partly closed; the closure of the gaps is expected to select a single pattern from a number of latent ones between which we hesitate in the absence of clinching clues.

Thus, a touch of indeterminacy is perceived as an informational gap only when the reader expects the content of the missing information to be of some consequence. For instance, in Dickens’s Hard Times, we are never told exactly how Sissy’s father dies after he runs away from the circus, and yet we are well aware of what the sad end of the indigent old alcoholic would be like; we also feel that the novelist appeals to this awareness. The concrete details of old Jupe’s death have no further influence on the characters, the themes, or the action of the novel; nor does this blank turn into a gap in retrospect, as so often happens with inoffensive-looking blanks in detective novels. By contrast, whe...