(Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction: Literary Pragma-Stylistics 3031186893, 9783031186899

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
1 Why Ian McEwan and Literary Pragma-Stylistics?
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Approach and Methodology
1.3 Structure of the Book
1.4 Aims of the Book
References
2 Pragmatics and the Analysis of Fiction
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Politeness and Impoliteness: Key Concepts and Theories
2.2.1 Linguistic Politeness
2.2.2 Linguistic Impoliteness
2.3 (Im)politeness in Literature: An Overview
2.3.1 (Im)politeness in Old English and Middle English Literature
2.3.2 (Im)politeness in Renaissance Literature
2.3.3 (Im)politeness in the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Drama
2.3.4 (Im)politeness in Contemporary Drama and Fiction
2.4 Summary
Notes
References
3 Narrative Tradition in Fiction: A Pragma-Stylistic Approach
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Implied Author, Implied Reader and the Question of Intention
3.3 Stylistics and Fictional Analysis
3.3.1 From Russian Formalism to Stylistics, Speech Acts and Implicature
3.3.2 Stylistics and Schema Theory
3.3.3 Stylistics, Point of View and Speech and Thought Presentation
3.3.3.1 Linguistic Indicators of Viewpoint
3.3.3.2 Speech and Thought Presentation: Free Indirect Speech (FIS) and Free Indirect Thought (FIT)
3.4 Ian McEwan: The Stylistic Tradition in Fiction
3.5 Summary
Notes
References
4 Intradiegetic (Im)politeness or How the (Im)politeness Theory Is Used for Internal Characterisation
4.1 Introduction
4.2 (Im)politeness, Science and Religion in Enduring Love
4.3 Impoliteness and Immorality in Amsterdam
4.4 Atonement, (Im)politeness and Empathy
4.5 Summary
Notes
References
5 Extradiegetic (Im)politeness or How the Implied Author Communicates with the Reader
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Saturday: Terrorism and (a Lack of) Imagination
5.3 Collapsible Viewpoints and Their Consequences in Solar
5.4 Nutshell or Political Incorrectness in Utero
5.5 Summary
Notes
References
6 Conclusion
References
References
Index

Citation preview

(Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction Literary Pragma-Stylistics

Urszula Kizelbach

(Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction

Urszula Kizelbach

(Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction Literary Pragma-Stylistics

Urszula Kizelbach Department of Studies in Culture Adam Mickiewicz University Pozna´n, Poland

ISBN 978-3-031-18689-9 ISBN 978-3-031-18690-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18690-5

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Klaudia Majdowska, “KsyKsy” www.facebook.com/to.ksyksy This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I have always believed that scholarly books should be written for everybody and not just for academics who specialise in a given field. Otherwise, what is the meaning of science and humanities if only the privileged few can understand them? I would like to address this book to various types of audiences: pragmaticists, stylisticians and literary scholars, who are all, to a different degree, interested in the analysis of literary text and fiction in general. Many of my ideas for this book are the result of my processing the conversations and suggestions kindly made to me by my colleagues, who specialise in both literature and linguistics. The most inspiring influence was from Professor Joanna Maciulewicz (Adam Mickiewicz University), who devoted a lot of her time to our discussions of Ian McEwan’s novels, Solar in particular. As an expert in the eighteenth-century English novel herself, she is particularly sensitive to the matters of narration and the communication between the narrator and the reader in fiction. She has always shared her knowledge generously with me, for which I am sincerely grateful. The title for this book was inspired by Andreas H. Jucker, Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich, who jotted it down on

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my book of abstracts over coffee at the ESSE conference in Brno in 2016. We talked about the methodology of my book and how important it is to include the recent developments in pragmatics (politeness) in literary analysis. He is one of the most devoted and professional scholars I know, and I learnt a lot from him. Thank you! I would like to thank my colleague, Dr. Eric Rundquist (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), who was kind enough to read the first draft of the second chapter (pragma-stylistics and narratology) and provided me with useful references and made some critical remarks. We regularly meet at the Poetics and Linguistics Association conferences (PALA conferences), which give us a chance to talk about stylistics and literature. I have never told him that but he is a very good specialist in cognitive narratology and speech and thought presentation—he will find out about it from my book. The language of this publication was polished by my colleague Colin Phillips (Adam Mickiewicz University), who is the most reliable and efficient proofreader I know. Apart from myself, he is the other person who knows every chapter by heart. It is a true pleasure to work with him. I extend my thanks to an informal writing group formed on Zoom by my colleagues from the German academia, who invited me to their “Wintry Writers’ Group” sessions, which have taken place for a year now. We gather every day at 8 a.m. and get down to writing (articles, books, syllabi, etc.) for an hour. These sessions have motivated me to become a better scholar and, most importantly, they have given me extra strength to finish this book. I would like to thank the most hard-working team: Prof. Dr. Uwe Küchler (University of Tübingen), a specialist in English didactics and teaching who started this group; Dr. Imke Lichterfeld (University of Bonn), who is a Shakespeare scholar and who kindly invited me to this group; Gul¸sin Çiftçi, M.A. (University of Münster), who is a Ph.D. candidate specialising in American poetry; Prof. Dr. Irina Dumitrescu (University of Bonn), who specialises in Medieval English Literature and Sylee Gore, a poet and lecturer who collaborates with the University of Oxford in issuing books for learning English for professional purposes. Thank you and see you tomorrow! My heartfelt thanks go to my publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, for accepting my book proposal and giving me time to complete the

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manuscript. I would especially like to thank Cathy Scott, Executive Editor for Language and Linguistics, who was always available, answering my questions, showing me a lot of kindness and patience and making sure that I felt comfortable as an author. I also extend my thanks to Abarna Antonyraj, Assistant to the Editor, for her hard work on the technical and legal aspects of the manuscript. Any authorial shortcomings are my own responsibility. I would like to thank my anonymous reviewer appointed by Palgrave, who helped me structure my thoughts, clarify my definitions and who expertly pointed out what I did not see. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family for their support and for always believing in me. In particular, I would like to thank my husband Michał, who was the first, very patient and benevolent reader of my book. Urszula Kizelbach

Contents

1 Why Ian McEwan and Literary Pragma-Stylistics? 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Approach and Methodology 1.3 Structure of the Book 1.4 Aims of the Book References

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Pragmatics and the Analysis of Fiction 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Politeness and Impoliteness: Key Concepts and Theories 2.2.1 Linguistic Politeness 2.2.2 Linguistic Impoliteness 2.3 (Im)politeness in Literature: An Overview 2.3.1 (Im)politeness in Old English and Middle English Literature 2.3.2 (Im)politeness in Renaissance Literature 2.3.3 (Im)politeness in the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Drama

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2.3.4 (Im)politeness in Contemporary Drama and Fiction 2.4 Summary References 3

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Narrative Tradition in Fiction: A Pragma-Stylistic Approach 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Implied Author, Implied Reader and the Question of Intention 3.3 Stylistics and Fictional Analysis 3.3.1 From Russian Formalism to Stylistics, Speech Acts and Implicature 3.3.2 Stylistics and Schema Theory 3.3.3 Stylistics, Point of View and Speech and Thought Presentation 3.3.3.1 Linguistic Indicators of Viewpoint 3.3.3.2 Speech and Thought Presentation: Free Indirect Speech (FIS) and Free Indirect Thought (FIT) 3.4 Ian McEwan: The Stylistic Tradition in Fiction 3.5 Summary References Intradiegetic (Im)politeness or How the (Im)politeness Theory Is Used for Internal Characterisation 4.1 Introduction 4.2 (Im)politeness, Science and Religion in Enduring Love 4.3 Impoliteness and Immorality in Amsterdam 4.4 Atonement, (Im)politeness and Empathy 4.5 Summary References

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Extradiegetic (Im)politeness or How the Implied Author Communicates with the Reader 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Saturday: Terrorism and (a Lack of ) Imagination 5.3 Collapsible Viewpoints and Their Consequences in Solar 5.4 Nutshell or Political Incorrectness in Utero 5.5 Summary References Conclusion References

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References

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Index

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1 Why Ian McEwan and Literary Pragma-Stylistics?

1.1

Introduction

Ian McEwan needs no introduction as an author. His current standing in the literary world is that of one of the most influential British novelists since the 1970s. McEwan occupies this prestigious position in the company of Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis and Graham Swift, a group of writers who “have resuscitated the link between morality and the novel for a whole generation” (Head 2007: 2). He is perceived as “a serious thinker” (Head 2007: 2) whose oeuvre evolved from unsettling themes in his early works (First Love, Last Rites 1975, The Cement Garden 1978), through broader political and social issues (The Innocent 1990, Enduring Love 1997) to the topics of ethics and consciousness (Amsterdam 1998, Atonement 2001, Saturday 2005), ecology and science (Solar 2010, Machines Like Me 2019) and the phase of experimentation with new generic forms, such as his comic novel Nutshell (2016), a satirical rewriting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. McEwan has been known to his readers as “a master of the undetonated bomb and the slow-acting detail” (Wood 2002), permeating his stories with a feeling of anxiety and looming danger. His later narratives involve “a collision between © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 U. Kizelbach, (Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18690-5_1

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different styles and modes of presentation” (Cormack 2008: 70) characteristic of the modernist and post-modern novel. He is said to be “an invisible rather than a flamboyant stylist” (Dyer 2001) unlike Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie. Critics call his prose “aggressive” (Childs 2006: vii) and they claim that it possesses “sadomasochistic dynamics” (Childs 2006: viii) as in Amsterdam. His novel Enduring Love was hailed to be full of “gore and nastiness” (Roberts 1997) just like his fiction in general, as critics have pointed out. However, the labels attached to McEwan’s writing by literary reviews and criticism usually offer descriptions of the subjective impressions of the readers and rarely discuss the stylistic textual features of his narrative. In this book, what I want to argue is that a distinguishing pragma-stylistic feature of McEwan’s writing is the interplay of politeness and impoliteness, which work on both the intradiegetic level of the story world and on the extradiegetic level of the text’s communication with the reader.

1.2

Approach and Methodology

It can be observed that the number of pragmatics scholars interested in the study of fictional texts has increased significantly in recent years. Fiction, broadly understood as the novel, short story, drama, and fictional dialogues in TV series (see Messerli 2017) has been finally recognised as a reliable source of linguistic data and “a very complex communicative act” (Locher and Jucker 2017: 4), as has been noted in a seminal publication by Miriam Locher and Andreas Jucker titled Pragmatics of Fiction (2017). My book is a continuation of this scientific approach— analysing literary communication in fiction using pragmatic concepts and theories—known as literary pragmatics. Roger D. Sell claims that literary pragmatics “is seamlessly continuous with general pragmatics” (Sell 2000: 39) and therefore it can be considered one of the subfields of a large pragmatics discipline. Literary pragmatics expresses a strong interest in “the process of discourse between writer and recipient” (Sell 1985: 498) and it focuses on the capacity of literature to make an impact on the world or, as Sell calls it, “a literary text’s potentiality for action in the world” (Sell 1985: 499). A literary pragmaticist is then interested

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in how this impact on the real-world is “initiated in the relationship between the reader and writer” and should be keen on examining it on both intradiegetic and extradiegetic levels (Sell 1985: 499). The fact is that the majority of pragmatic studies of literary texts have been undertaken by linguists and pragmaticists rather than literary scholars and, as a natural corollary of this fact, these analyses have concentrated more on the further development of pragmatic theories than on the description of literature as such (hopefully, this will be more visible in Chapter 2, Sect. 2.2). Pragmaticists used to take advantage of fictional texts mainly as their linguistic corpora, as the source of data used to test the pragmatic theories, e.g. Speech Act Theory, Relevance Theory or Politeness Theory, or to trace the historical development of the English language. Lately, there has been a growing number of pragmatic and stylistic analyses of literary texts, with scholars being interested not only in developing linguistic theories but also in discussing the story world and internal characterisation in fictional works (see Bousfield 2007; Culpeper 2001; Kizelbach 2014; Rudanko 2006). Importantly, there are few literary pragmatic and stylistic studies examining politeness in fiction on the extradiegetic level (see Jucker 2016), or those analysing extradiegetic impoliteness (see Black 2006). Jucker looks into the politeness phenomena in two eighteenth-century English plays and he explains how they function as “educational theatre” (Jucker 2016: 110) for their audiences and thus shape “polite” society, which he calls “the politeness of the literary text” (Jucker 2016: 112). Elizabeth Black claims that an invitation to read anything may be viewed as an imposition by the reader or as a face-threatening act which violates the reader’s negative face because “we are expected to yield the floor, or give up our time, to attend to someone else” (Black 2006: 74). Black also gives an example of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and the narrator’s offensive terms of address towards the reader in Book X, such as “thou, my good reptile”, suggesting that “thou” was only used for inferiors. The narrator’s way of addressing the reader, she claims, “shows a total disregard for the reader’s positive face” (Black 2006: 75). In other words, she indicates that literary fiction can be impolite towards the reader. The aim of this book is twofold. First, I use the pragmatic theory of

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(im)politeness to describe Ian McEwan’s fiction on two levels of analysis: the intradiegetic level where (im)politeness is deployed as a tool for characterisation, and on the extradiegetic level, to describe the communication of the implied author with the implied reader in his works. It is crucial to note that extradiegetic politeness and impoliteness in fiction have not been analysed extensively so far and this is the first attempt at a comprehensive study of (im)politeness in the narration of a single author. McEwan’s fiction reveals a significant potential for expressing impolite views to the reader through the text, with all its consequences for the implied author and the reader. In this way, this study is an examination of the feasibility of impoliteness theory as a linguistic tool in the analysis of communication in fiction. Secondly, in my analysis, I pay attention to the stylistic features which are often foregrounded in McEwan’s novels, for example, free indirect speech and thought, shifting points of view and linguistic indicators of viewpoint, to show how (im)polite content (beliefs, views, ideas) is conveyed by McEwan’s characters and his narrators in fictional communication. Pointing out some key stylistic features of the texts analysed in this book serves the purpose of characterisation and helps linguistically account for often subjective judgments expressed in the critical literary reviews of McEwan’s works. Stylistics, along with pragmatics, is an important part of the methodology in this book. Stylistics uses linguistic concepts and theories (here, specifically, point of view, implicature, speech and thought presentation) to provide the readers with a more precise, linguistic description of literature. Mick Short claims that since the field of stylistics crosses the borders of literature and linguistics, stylistics sometimes resembles literary criticism or linguistics, depending on where we stand when looking at it (Short 1996: 1). Short notes that readers approach literature falling back on their intuition and so their default reading and understanding of literary texts is “implicit” (Short 1996: 3). The main goal of stylistics, however, is to relate the linguistic description of the text to its meaning and interpretation as explicitly as possible. One of the reasons for this is that in the case of doubt or disagreement over some interpretation of a given text, critics can use stylistic analysis to help them decide which meaning is the most likely and relevant. There is a difference between

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traditional practical criticism and the stylistic analysis of literature. Traditional literary criticism uses textual evidence to support its point, but its evidence often tends to be selective and is based on the critic’s intuition and subjective impressions. The stylistic analysis serves as “a logical extension of practical criticism” (Short 1996: 6) and it uses the literary text as proof in support of its argument, offering more systematic and thorough linguistic evidence. Stylisticians are keen on examining and challenging established interpretations of literature, thus falling victim to their critics who accuse them of stating the obvious. Short explains why this is the case: “This [stylistic analysis] will sometimes involve stating what you might regard as obvious or going down to a level of analysis that literary critics would be unwilling to tackle” (Short 1996: 6). The difference between literary criticism and stylistic analysis is “one of degree rather than kind” (Short 1996: 6)—both are interested in analysing literature in the most objective way possible;—nevertheless, literary analyses seem incomplete without linguistic support, and strictly linguistic analyses of fiction seem deficient and too detail-oriented, thus losing the general message of the text. Stylistics should not be confused with literary pragmatics even though it employs pragmatic insights in literary analysis, for example, interpreting deictic expressions (verbs and pronouns) or paying attention to the situational context (Black 2006: 2). The main focus of the stylistic analysis of the literary text is its linguistic description based on the textual cues in reference to grammar and vocabulary and other stylistic textual phenomena (e.g. direct speech, free indirect discourse, ideological point of view and viewpoint indicators) to be able to objectively account for the characters’ actions and motivations and the narrator’s language and style in fiction. In my analysis of McEwan’s novels, I adopt a pragma-stylistic approach (see also Black 2006; Chapman and Clark 2014; Sorlin 2016), offering a pragmatic framework of analysis—the theory of politeness and impoliteness—which is enriched by stylistic concepts and methodology used in the examination of the characters, the story world, and the description of the narrators’ discourse and their communication with the reader. The pragma-stylistic approach to the analysis of fiction should serve as an encouragement for analysts (including all: literary scholars, stylisticians and pragmaticists) to combine the results of literary criticism with

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linguistic concepts and theories, to have a greater insight into the literary text to see how this text (or its fragment) functions in a specific context, how via language it builds the relationship with the reader, and how, through the character’s speech, the character’s motivation and personality are gradually revealed to the audience. The pragma-stylistic analysis of McEwan’s works in my book is supported by literary reviews and critics’ opinions about the novels, which guided me through my analysis whenever I felt the need for such guidance.

1.3

Structure of the Book

The book is divided into two parts. Part One includes the first two theoretical chapters (Chapters 2 and 3) and it introduces key notions connected with (im)politeness, stylistics and narratology. Part Two offers a practical application of pragmatic and stylistic theories and concepts in the analysis of six novels by Ian McEwan in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 2 aims to describe the pragmatic theories of politeness and impoliteness and to demonstrate how they have been used as analytical tools in fictional analysis. The chapter focuses on a definition of politeness as the cooperativeness of the speakers in communication to preserve amicable relationships and social harmony. It also introduces the notion of “face”, which was transplanted from the field of sociology by Brown and Levinson (1987) and adapted to the field of pragmatics. Face still plays an important role in the development of politeness theory, and it is defined as the speaker’s “want” to be approved of and accepted by others (positive face) and their “want” for freedom of action and freedom from imposition (negative face). Impoliteness is defined as the lack of a cooperative attitude and the speaker’s intentional action to attack the other’s face and cause social disruption. The chapter underlines the fact that both politeness and impoliteness have undergone some changes and evolved as theories, reflecting more accurately the modern times and human interactions—in particular, the impoliteness theory, which has gone from its strategy-based view (Culpeper 1996) to a more culture-oriented approach focusing on evaluative judgments by speakers (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016). In the later section, the chapter offers

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an overview of the pragmatic study of fiction from the Middle Ages up until contemporary times. It draws attention to the fact that the majority of publications utilising (im)politeness in the analysis of literary fiction serve the aims of the linguistics field rather than literary studies, concentrating on the development of the English language or (im)politeness theory. Chapter 3 discusses a pragma-stylistic approach to narrative, which is part of the “postclassical” approach (Herman 1997), highlighting the benefits of incorporating pragmatic and stylistic concepts in narratology. It demonstrates that pragmatics and stylistics in the analysis of narrative cannot function on their own but need substantial support from the field of narratology. Some of the key narratological aspects that are inevitable in conducting the pragma-stylistic analysis of fiction are the notions of the “implied author” and “implied reader” (Booth 1961) in communication in fiction. This book follows the rhetorical model of fictional communication, that is, it sees the implied author as “the constructive agent” (Phelan 2005: 47), who created the text but who should not be confused with the real author. The chapter establishes two pragmatic definitions concerning the (implied) author-(implied) reader communication in fiction. “The politeness of the literary fiction” (or extradiegetic politeness) denotes a smooth, unhindered communication between the author and the reader, e.g. the reader’s grasping of the textual implicit cues as part of the implied author’s message; in other words, the reader’s “gut feeling” approach to the text is intrinsically characterised by politeness. “The impoliteness of the literary fiction” (or extradiegetic impoliteness) is a state of affairs when the implied author (or narrator) expresses their impolite beliefs and views to the reader through the text, which may have face-threatening consequences for the audience, e.g. moral shock or disgust, dissociation from the protagonist, feeling hurt or put out. It is connected with the text violating the reader’s ethical, social and cultural norms directly or via implication. The next section focuses on the function of stylistics in literary criticism and enumerates and briefly discusses stylistic concepts and theories used in the analysis of McEwan’s fiction, e.g. Schema Theory, Point of View Theory and linguistic indicators of viewpoint or Speech and Thought Presentation.

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They all are used alongside (im)politeness in the analytical chapters;— stylistics is especially helpful when deciding on the matters of point of view (whose point of view is presented) in the analysis. The final section of the chapter presents the state of the art of research on stylistic investigations of McEwan’s prose. His works have been discussed so far with the use of mind presentation, cognitive grammar, cognitive metaphor, multimodal discourse and point of view. It is important to note that most of these publications are articles or individual chapters in collections rather than books, apart from one (Nayebpour 2017). McEwan’s fiction has never been analysed using the (im)politeness framework. Chapter 4 implements the theory of (im)politeness and several stylistic concepts to analyse politeness and impoliteness on the intradiegetic level. It focuses on characterisation in McEwan’s three novels, Enduring Love, Amsterdam and Atonement . Through the description of the character’s speech and thoughts and behaviour, the analysis looks into the connection between impoliteness and immorality, politeness and empathy or the relations between (im)politeness, rationalism and madness. Enduring Love discusses relationship dilemmas and, among others, poor communication between a couple who are guided by different values in life: rationality, which is linked with impoliteness in the analysis, and emotions, which are connected with the polite approach. Amsterdam investigates the impoliteness and immorality of two ex-best friends, who are guided by revenge and enact euthanasia on one another in Amsterdam. Atonement largely focuses on (im)politeness and empathy and traces the inner transformation of the protagonist in the story, who turns from an impolite to a polite attitude towards other people—the analysis concentrates on the character’s point of view. Chapter 5 offers a pragma-stylistic discussion about impoliteness on the level of the text and its communication with the reader or the extradiegetic impoliteness in McEwan’s fiction, and it analyses three other novels, Saturday, Solar and Nutshell . The analysis of Saturday uses the theory of impoliteness and speech and thought presentation to demonstrate that the novel can serve as an implicit accusation of the modern reader, who can associate with the protagonist, a successful and educated man from a big city, who displays his hypocrisy by selectively choosing who to empathise with. Solar employs impoliteness theory to show how

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the narrator dissociates the reader from the protagonist, describing his unethical actions, and how the narration itself can be a face-threatening act towards the audience through the narrator’s expression of impolite beliefs and opinions about others. Finally, Nutshell , in a similar manner, conveys impolite views towards the reader, causing real offence among some readers. The homodiegetic narrator is being very critical of contemporary academia and its “snowflake” students and also about cancel culture and social media. There is evidence, in the form of critical reviews, suggesting that some readers saw the narrator as the real author’s mouthpiece, accusing him of philistinism and lack of tolerance. This, I believe, is the best example of how impoliteness in fiction can have reallife consequences for the communication between the author and the readers.

1.4

Aims of the Book

The book offers a qualitative pragma-stylistic analysis of the selected novels by Ian McEwan. It is addressed to several types of audiences, pragmaticists, stylisticians and literary scholars, showing the benefits of combining pragmatics, stylistics and narratology in the analysis of literature. The book’s objective is to provide a comprehensive study of (im)politeness on the level of the story world and the level of the implied author’s communication with the reader based on the works of a single author. It serves as a continuation of the literary pragmatics discipline, which treats the literary text as an independent object of study worthy of a thorough linguistic analysis rather than a mere source of data for linguists. I sincerely hope that my pragma-stylistic examination of McEwan’s fiction will have an impact on both literary and pragmatics fields.

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References Black, Elizabeth, Pragmatic Stylistics. (Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Linguistics). (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edn. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, [1961] 1983). Bousfield, Derek, “‘Never a Truer Word Said in Jest’: A Pragmastylistic Analysis of Impoliteness as Banter in Henry IV, Part 1.” In Contemporary Stylistics, edited by Marina Lambrou and Peter Stockwell, 209–20. (London: Continuum, 2007). Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1978] 1987). Chapman, Siobhan and Billy Clark (ed.), Pragmatic Literary Stylistics. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Childs, Peter, The Fiction of Ian McEwan. (A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism). (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Cormack, Alistair, “Postmodernism and the Ethics of Fiction in Atonement.” In Ian McEwan, edited by Sebastian Groes, 70–82. (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2008). Culpeper, Jonathan, “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness,” Journal of Pragmatics 25, no. 3 (1996): 349–67. Culpeper, Jonathan, Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2001). Dyer, Geoff, “Who’s Afraid of Influence? Atonement: A Review,” The Guardian, September 22, 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/fic tion.ianmcewan. Head, Dominic, Ian McEwan. (Contemporary British Novelists Series). (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Herman, David, “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology,” PMLA 112 (1997): 1046–59. Jucker, Andreas H., “Politeness in Eighteenth-century Drama: A Discursive Approach,” Journal of Politeness Research 12, no. 1 (2016): 95–115. Kizelbach, Urszula, The Pragmatics of Early Modern Politics: Power and Kingship in Shakespeare’s History Plays. (Amsterdam and New York: Brill, 2014). Locher, Miriam A. and Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Pragmatics of Fiction. (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017). Messerli, Thomas, “Participation Structure in Fictional Discourse: Authors, Scriptwriters, Audiences and Characters.” In Pragmatics of Fiction, edited

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by Miriam A. Locher and Andreas H. Jucker, 25–54. (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017). Nayebpour, Karam, Mind Presentation in Ian McEwan’s Fiction: Consciousness and the Presentation of Character in Amsterdam, Atonement, and On Chesil Beach. (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2017). Phelan, James, Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). Roberts, Michéle, “Split Personalities. Enduring Love by Ian McEwan,” Independent, August 29, 1997. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/bookreview-split-personalities-1247923.html. Rudanko, Juhani, “Aggravated Impoliteness and Two Types of Speaker Intention in an Episode in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens,” Journal of Pragmatics 38, no. 6 (2006): 829–41. Sell, Roger D., “Tellability and Politeness in The Miller’s Tale: First Steps in Literary Pragmatics,” English Studies 66, no. 6 (1985): 496–512. Sell, Roger D., Literature as Communication. The Foundations of Mediating Criticism. (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000). Short, Mick, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1996). Sorlin, Sandrine, Language and Manipulation in House of Cards: A PragmaStylistic Perspective. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Spencer-Oatey, Helen and Dániel. Z. Kádár, “The Bases of (Im)politeness Evaluations: Culture, the Moral Order and the East-West Debate,” East Asian Pragmatics 1, no. 1 (2016): 73–106. Wood, James, “The Trick of Truth. Atonement,” New Republic, March 25, 2002. https://newrepublic.com/article/63386/atonement-ian-mcewanfiction.

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Introduction

This chapter begins with a theoretical overview of the theory of politeness and impoliteness and its application in the analysis of literary fiction. Section 2.2. outlines the key characteristics of linguistic politeness as developed by Brown and Levinson in their seminal work Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1987). Although Brown and Levinson’s politeness has been criticised by the representatives of its future developments and has evolved into more relational approaches with time (see Sect. 2.2.1), I acknowledge the importance of the original politeness research, which has had an immense impact on the pragmatic study of fiction (see Brown and Gilman 1989; Kopytko 1995; Rudanko 1993). This section also recognises the significance of the initial impoliteness research by Culpeper titled Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness (1996), which offers a strategy-based approach to impolite human interactions and which has been extensively employed in the literary analysis (Bousfield 2007; Kizelbach 2014; Rudanko 2006; Simpson 2005). I briefly introduce the main trends and approaches in the very rapid development of impoliteness research since the 1990s (see Sect. 2.2.2). Much as there © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 U. Kizelbach, (Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18690-5_2

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are many different definitions of politeness, in this book, it is understood as the speakers’ cooperative attitude and having the interlocutor’s best interests in mind, as well as the speakers’ desire to maintain social harmony in communication. Impoliteness, conversely, is designed to intentionally attack the other’s face and cause social disruption. The latest impoliteness theory developments (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016) are connected with speakers’ value judgments about others’ behaviour, which entails that what is or seems polite to some members of a given community (culture, social or professional group) may not be evaluated as such by other members, but it may be viewed as impolite or immoral. Section 2.3 is an overview of the pragmatic and stylistic analyses of literary fiction with the use of politeness and impoliteness theory. It has been broken down into subsections including literary works representing various periods, for example, the Old English and Middle English literature (2.3.1), the Renaissance (2.3.2), the long eighteenth-century novel and drama (2.3.3) and the contemporary literature (2.3.4). The analysis ranges from purely linguistic investigations of address terms in Old English literature (Kohnen 2008; Jucker 2012) to using (im)politeness as a tool for characterisation and plot development in the Renaissance drama (Bousfield 2007; Rudanko 2006) and contemporary fiction (Chapman and Clark 2014). The study of (im)politeness in this section not only shows the usefulness of pragmatics as a methodological tool in literary analysis but also demonstrates the evolution of the politeness theory across the ages and how from its eighteenth-century understanding of politeness as manners/social etiquette it has reached its current status of a full-fledged theory of communication.

2.2

Politeness and Impoliteness: Key Concepts and Theories

Characterising polite behaviour may be problematic because much as people generally recognise politeness when they see it, they are often faced with some sort of dilemma when asked to give examples of a polite attitude or to describe how they imagine polite behaviour. “He

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always opens doors for the ladies or helps them on with their coats”— some people say; “She speaks really well”—others say; “She’s always very helpful and obliging”—still others say. Politeness has many definitions provided by language users, which vary from “considerate” to “correct” (or socially acceptable) behaviour to more negative characteristics, such as “standoffish”, “haughty” and “insincere”. In the very same way, our understanding of “polite” language is problematic as, again, it can be described as “language which displays respect towards or consideration for others”, which is a sign of good manners, or as “hypocritical”, “distant” or a “dishonest” attitude (Watts 2003: 1–2). Importantly for the pragmatic analysis to follow, Eelen (2001) and Watts (2003) distinguish between two types of politeness, thus setting apart the common views on politeness as a part of everyday life and politeness as a linguistic theory. Politeness1 (first-order politeness) denotes the “lay interpretations” of polite behaviour or the norms and rituals peculiar to a given social group (politeness1 is socially oriented). In other words, politeness1 relies on the commonsensical idea of politeness and it is often based on stereotypical beliefs, for example, that politeness is a matter of deference and tact or that being polite is simply being nice (Watts 2003: 4). Politeness2 (second-order politeness) is a scientific conceptualisation of politeness as a social phenomenon in the form of a theory, and its function is to explain the phenomena observed as politeness1 (Eelen 2001: 45–46). In this approach, politeness becomes a theoretical construct, a technical term to describe various forms of social behaviour in general (politeness2 is theory-based). For Watts, the study of politeness2 is complete when based on politeness1 , that is when it relates to an actual social behaviour considered as polite in a given social group. In my debate on politeness in literary texts I will concentrate on politeness2 —linguistic politeness or politeness as a theory—since I want to use it as a tool for studying communication in fiction on multiple levels. I will look at polite (and impolite) language in the study of the verbal interaction between fictional characters (the intradiegetic level) and the polite and impolite communication between the implied author (or narrator) and the reader (the extradiegetic level).

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2.2.1 Linguistic Politeness Brown and Levinson (1987) had a considerable impact on the development of linguistic politeness at its initial stages. They viewed politeness as a set of strategies used for the softening of face-threatening acts (FTAs) or verbal acts1 with the potential to threaten a person’s face. Brown and Levinson’s politeness framework was oriented towards avoiding a breach in communication through a mitigating statement or “verbal repair” (Mills 2003: 58) in the form of a polite formula. Their key assumptions about the properties of interactants were that every member of society is naturally equipped with “face” and “rationality” or “consistent modes of reasoning from ends to the means that will achieve those ends” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 61). The notion of the face became central in understanding the mechanism behind the politeness theory, and from the very beginning it was associated with the English folk notions of dealing with embarrassment, as in to “lose face” or to “save face”. The term “face”, which Brown and Levinson borrowed from Goffman (1959), was thus successfully transplanted from the realm of sociology to the field of linguistics. Brown and Levinson see “face” as “something that is emotionally invested, and that can be lost, maintained, or enhanced, and must be constantly attended to in interaction”. They describe face as “the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself ”, which is made up of two related components: “positive face” and “negative face”. The “positive face” is “the positive consistent self-image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of ) claimed by interactants” and “the negative face” is “the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction”, that is, “to freedom of action and freedom from imposition”. They also define face in terms of “basic wants”, which every person knows every other person desires, and which it is in the interests of every member of society to at least partially satisfy (Brown and Levinson 1987: 61–62). In short, the “positive face” is the desire of being liked, accepted and approved of by others and the “negative face” is connected with every person’s right to non-imposition and “freedom” in action and language.

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Brown and Levinson claimed their assumptions about “face” and “rationality” to be universal and pertinent to every member of society— hence their idea of a Model Person (MP) as a prototype of human linguistic behaviour. Given these assumptions, MPs as rational agents are supposed to maintain each other’s face in interaction: the speaker maintains the hearer’s face and the hearer maintains the speaker’s face. However, there are speech acts that run contrary to the hearer’s wants and intrinsically threaten their face. Brown and Levinson called them “intrinsic” FTAs, and they established that certain types of speech acts “by default” threaten the positive face and others threaten the negative face. Acts threatening the hearer’s negative face wants to indicate that the speaker does not intend to avoid impeding the hearer’s freedom of action and they include: (a) acts that put some pressure on H so that H should do some act A (orders, requests, advice, reminders, threats, warnings, dares); (b) acts that predicate some positive future act of S towards H and in so doing put pressure on H to accept or reject them (offers, promises) and (c) acts that predicate some desire of S towards H or H’s goods, giving H reason to think that they may have to take action to protect the object of S’s desire (compliments, expressions of admiration and envy, expressions of strong emotions, for example, hatred and lust). Acts that threaten the hearer’s positive face wants to indicate that the speaker does not care about the hearer’s feelings and desires or that the speaker does not respect the hearer’s wants, and they include: (a) acts showing that S negatively evaluates or does not want H’s wants (expressions of disapproval, criticism, ridicule as well as challenges, contradictions and disagreements) and (b) acts manifesting S’s indifference or lack of care for H’s positive self-image (expressions of violent emotions that embarrass H, irreverence and mention of taboo topics, S’s boasting about good news, raising emotional or divisive topics, S’s noncooperation, for example, a disruptive interruption of H’s talk) (Brown and Levinson 1987: 65–66). They also distinguish acts that inherently threaten the speaker’s face as in the speaker’s expressing thanks, making excuses; the speaker’s constraint at accepting offers—known as acts that threaten the speaker’s negative face and the speaker’s apologising, accepting compliments, confessing/admitting guilt, self-humiliating or

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self-contradicting—recognised as acts that threaten the speaker’s positive face (Brown and Levinson 1987: 67–68). In the context of the mutual vulnerability of face, any MP as a rational agent will try to avoid doing FTAs altogether, or they will at least try to mitigate the face-threatening effects of their speech acts. What Brown and Levinson (1987: 68–70) propose is a “face-saving” view on politeness, as it distinguishes a set of strategies of redress directed at the positive and negative face of the addressee. Moreover, they sketch some general patterns of linguistic behaviour or “possible strategies for doing FTAs” which are supposed to be universally recognised and employed by speakers to avoid face-threatening acts. First, an actor (or speaker) can go on record in doing an act (A), which means that it is clear to all participants what communicative intention was involved in performing the act (i.e. there is one unambiguously attributable intention which is clearly recognised by the participants). For example, when the speaker says “I (hereby) promise to come tomorrow”, this means that they commit themselves to that future act—going on record , in this case, means promising to do so. Next, the speaker can also go off record in doing an act when they communicate their intention indirectly, that is when there is more than one attributable intention to the speaker’s words and the meaning of an utterance can be negotiated. For example, the speaker’s saying “I’m out of cash, I forgot to go to the bank today” may be an indication of the speaker’s intention to borrow some money from the hearer, but the intention is ambiguous enough to prevent the speaker from being accountable for it. In this way, they protect themselves from a potential challenge from the hearer, as in: “This is the seventeenth time you’ve asked me to lend you money”. There are many linguistic indicators of off-record strategies, such as metaphor, irony, rhetorical questions, understatement or tautologies. When the speaker does an act baldly, without redress, they do it in the most direct, unambiguous and concise way possible. In the context of politeness, such an act will be performed in the circumstances when both the speaker and the hearer agree that face concerns may be temporarily suspended in the interests of efficiency or urgency. For example, “Watch out!”—when screamed in a situation of some immediate danger will not be perceived by the hearer as an offence or imposition because it was uttered in their interests. Also,

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in offers and requests of the type: “Do sit down” or “Come in”, when the threat to the other’s face is very small, going bald without redress is justifiable and accepted, as it does not require great sacrifices on the speaker’s side and/or it is considered to be spoken for the hearer’s benefit. When, on the other hand, redressive action is involved, the speaker will try to “give face” to the hearer or counteract the potential face damage of the FTA by indicating that no such face threat was intended. One way of mitigating the face threat is positive politeness—the speaker indicates their friendly attitude and that they respect the hearer’s positive face wants by, for example, implying that they like the hearer and the FTA is not, in general, a negative evaluation of the hearer’s face. Another way of neutralising the face damage is negative politeness—the speaker indicates that their intention is not to interfere with the hearer’s freedom of action and that a minimal imposition on the hearer’s face will be involved. Finally, the least face-threatening action is avoiding the FTA or, as Brown and Levinson call it, don’t do the FTA. To follow Watts (2003: 87–88), the hierarchy of possible (super)strategies for doing FTAs is as follows: strategy 1 (without redressive action, baldly) is more face-threatening than strategies 2 (positive politeness) and 3 (negative politeness). Strategy 4 (offrecord ) is next to the least face-threatening strategy marked as 5 (don’t do the FTA). Brown and Levinson’s politeness is a strategy-based model of communication, which heavily relies on speech acts2 —fixed linguistic expressions with a declaration of the speaker’s intention to do something, e.g. requests, offers, warnings. In other words, their strategies serve as instructions for speakers on how to avoid potentially conflictive face-threatening acts. It is important to note that Brown and Levinson’s findings have been used in other approaches (see Leech’s [1983] maxim-based view on politeness) and their theory is still alive. Nevertheless, their “normbased” politeness has its critics. First, the idea of the Model Person is problematic for methodological reasons. Mills (2003: 17) claims that the main characteristic of the Model Speaker is that they are always “in control […] not subject to moods, memory loss, or seemingly irrational behaviour” and, therefore, “it is easier to predict the behaviour of such an individual and to make generalisations”. Much as the idea of a Model Person (or Model Speaker) is useful in constructing any

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linguistic theory, we have to bear in mind that its assumptions are based on projections made in ideal, laboratory-like conditions and that they may vary from an individual’s reactions in real life—individuals can be irrational, moody and forgetful. Second, the Brown and Levinson politeness framework assumes that politeness is largely communicated through traditional polite linguistic forms and strategies, attributing a given linguistic form a fixed grammatical meaning, as in the case of speech acts. The critique is provided by Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) Relevance Theory (RT) which sees human communication from a wider perspective, as a result of the individual’s cognitive processes rather than a reliance on set linguistic phrases reserved for specific situations. The Cognitive Principle of Relevance presupposes that “[h]uman cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance”, which is understood as “cognitive effort and effect” (Wilson and Sperber 2006: 610). An assumption is relevant to a person if it has positive cognitive effects, for example, improves their general knowledge of the world. In their view, the tendency to “maximise relevance” (Wilson and Sperber 2006: 611) is universal in communication, allowing us to predict and manipulate, at least to some extent, the mental states of others. Relevance theorists agree that utterances “raise expectations of relevance” (Wilson and Sperber 2006: 607), but they undermine the importance of linguistic strategies, rules and maxims in guaranteeing smooth, unobstructed communication. It is not the speakers’ adherence to the maxims or any other fixed conventions, they say, but their search for relevance that forms the main characteristic of human cognition that raises the expectations of relevance about utterances.3 By assuming the individual cognitive processing involved in social interactions, the Relevance Theory provides an alternative to Brown and Levinson’s politeness, which is focused on the speaker’s automatised choices among different linguistic forms and strategies. One more traditional, maxim-based approach worth mentioning is Geoffrey Leech’s Politeness Principle (PP), which is also pertinent to further analysis in this book. The Politeness Principle is focused on the self ’s or other’s negative face, thus preserving their broadly understood freedom in interaction. It can be formulated in a general way as follows: “Minimize (other things being equal) the expression of impolite beliefs”

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or, its positive version: “Maximize (other things being equal) the expression of polite beliefs” where polite and impolite beliefs are understood respectively as beliefs favourable or unfavourable to the hearer (Leech 1983: 81). Leech distinguishes among six maxims of politeness: (1) Tact Maxim or “Minimize cost to other [Maximize benefit to other ]”; (2) Generosity Maxim or “Minimize benefit to self [Maximize cost to self ]”; (3) Approbation Maxim or “Minimize dispraise of other [Maximize praise of other ]”; (4) Modesty Maxim or “Minimize praise of self [Maximize dispraise of self ]”; (5) Agreement Maxim or “Minimize disagreement between self and other [Maximize agreement between self and other ]”; (6) Sympathy Maxim or “Minimize antipathy between self and other [Maximize sympathy between self and other]” (Leech 1983: 132). It is important to remember that the maxims are not absolute rules guaranteeing polite behaviour and that they should be observed “up to a certain point”. Speakers who tend to universally apply a given maxim may be evaluated negatively by the audience. For example, an overuse of a submaxim “[Maximize dispraise of self ]” leads to the speaker’s selfdenigration and being judged as tedious or insincere (Leech 1983: 133). Leech offers more linguistic tools, which are useful in politeness analysis—one of them, the Irony Principle (IP), will be discussed in the analytical part of the book. The twenty-first century or “post-modern” (Terkourafi 2005: 238) approaches to politeness depart from the reliance on maxims of conversation and speech acts for effective communication and they veer towards a more contextual, discourse-oriented analysis of human interaction (see Bargiela-Chiappini 2003; Eelen 2001; Kádár and Haugh 2013; Mills 2003; Terkourafi 2005; Watts 2003). Mills argues that what the traditional politeness models, based on speech acts and maxims of conversation, fail to see is the speaker’s relationship with others. “Utterances do not only have propositional content”, she says, “[as] there are many other things happening in conversation other than relating to others and giving information: achieving long-term and short-term goals, working out those goals, trying to understand ourselves and others, enjoying ourselves, and so on” (Mills 2003: 38). For Mills, a conversation is not a ready-made product but a process during which meaning is negotiated, interpreted and worked out haphazardly, as a result of

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human interaction. Similarly, Watts claims that politeness is a dynamic linguistic phenomenon where some utterances are “open to interpretation as polite” (Watts 2003: 223–24), or impolite, depending on the context. Terkourafi (2005: 241–42) notes that since “post-modern” politeness theory is more interested in real people, their discourse and interactions, it has started to be perceived as social practice;—hence, the inclusion of politeness1 into its scope. Politeness now is understood in broad terms, as “polite behaviour” whose key distinguishing features are “social-embeddedness” and “dynamism” (Bargiela-Chiappini 2003: 1465). “Polite behaviour” is partly constructed in interaction and partly regulated by the norms and conventions accepted and agreed on by a given social group. According to Bargiela-Chiappini (2003: 1465), it is “a multifaceted social phenomenon that originates within the moral order”—a set of norms and expectations which are embedded in social actions and are open to moral judgment. In the “post-modern” approach to politeness, an analyst becomes an audience, an observer, who evaluates the situation from a different perspective than the speaker, looking not only at the language but also at prosody and gestures (multimodal aspect) (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 59–60). Politeness then emerges as an effect of the observer’s evaluation of social actions and practices which are understood by participants as accepted ways of doing and meaning certain things (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 251). In this more “ethical” (Bargiela-Chiappini 2003: 1465) and addressee-oriented politeness framework, politeness2 (scientific theory) means more than pragma-linguistic behaviour. It requires looking at all: ethical, verbal and non-verbal (if possible) aspects of communication and calls for interdisciplinary research to adequately describe and evaluate whether certain modes of linguistic behaviour are appropriate or not, following sociocultural conventions (Watts et al. 1992: 6–11). In my view, the comprehensive results of politeness analysis are possible when the “traditional” and the “post-modern” approaches are combined.

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2.2.2 Linguistic Impoliteness Politeness has many linguistic definitions4 —and it can be understood or imagined in different ways by language users—but its underlying feature is the cooperation of the participants in the conversation. Impoliteness can be adequately defined as the lack of a cooperative attitude since it may not be in the participant’s best interests to save the other’s face and so they may show little or no goodwill to display a friendly and collaborative attitude. According to Culpeper (1996: 350), impoliteness is designed to maximise confrontation in discourse and relies on the use of strategies “oriented towards attacking face, an emotionally sensitive concept of the self” to cause “social disruption”. Impolite communicators are not interested in redressing their FTAs but they purposefully attack the face of the other to cause harm. Culpeper argues that impoliteness is likely to occur when there is an imbalance of power in communication between the participants. Usually, the more powerful participant has more freedom to exercise impoliteness, which they use to reduce the chance of the less powerful speaker to retaliate with impoliteness (by denying the other’s speaking rights) or to threaten with more severe retaliation if the less powerful speaker is impolite (Culpeper 1996: 354–55). In equal-status relationships, the degree of social distance is a decisive factor—the more intimate the relationship, the greater the impoliteness—for example, husband and wife can be more aggressive towards each other than random strangers. Impoliteness may escalate in equal relationships because they “lack a default mechanism by which one participant achieves the upper hand” (Culpeper 1996: 355). In this way, an insult from the speaker may lead to a counter-insult from the hearer, thus leading to another counter-insult from the speaker and so on. Impoliteness used to be viewed as “the parasite of politeness” (Culpeper 1996: 355) as each of the politeness (super)strategies devised by Brown and Levinson was appointed its impolite counterpart, the only difference being that instead of enhancing the face, the impoliteness strategies attack it. The first (super)strategy, bald on record impoliteness, is when an FTA is performed in a clear, unambiguous manner, and concisely, in circumstances when face is not irrelevant. This strategy stands in opposition to Brown and Levinson’s bald on record , which is

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performed only when the threat to the other’s face is very small, for example, with polite orders (“Do sit down”, “Come in”). In impoliteness, bald on record is deliberate, and the speaker has a clear intention to attack the other’s face, usually in a situation when the offence will be most serious and harmful to the hearer. Next, positive impoliteness is composed of strategies to damage the positive face wants of the person addressed. Similarly, negative impoliteness employs strategies to damage the addressee’s negative face wants. Sarcasm or mock politeness is a (super)strategy when the FTA is performed with the use of politeness strategies which are obviously insincere. In short, sarcasm is a way of being politely impolite (politeness, however, remains only a “surface realisation”). Finally, the last (super)strategy withhold politeness, which corresponds with the polite strategy don’t do the FTA, is the absence of polite behaviour where it would be expected (Culpeper 1996: 356–57). As Brown and Levinson noted, “politeness has to be communicated, and the absence of communicated politeness may, ceteris paribus, be taken as the absence of a polite attitude” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 5). For example, if we fail to thank somebody for a present or favour, this might be understood by the other party as intentional impoliteness. The theory of impoliteness has evolved continuously since the 1990s and it is now more concerned with users’ perception of what is impolite in a given (cultural and social) context and less with the universal impoliteness strategies. Importantly, Culpeper (2005) laid some general theoretical foundations for impoliteness by saying what impoliteness is not. First, impoliteness is not incidental face-threatening, as this lies in the domain of politeness, e.g. the teacher’s criticism of the student’s essay is not impoliteness—offence here is only a by-product of the teacher’s action—the tutor’s goal is to help the student improve, and criticism is voiced in their best interest. Impoliteness is not unintentional as there always is an underlying intention on the speaker’s side to attack the hearer’s face (faux pas or gaffes are classified as instances of “failed politeness”). Impoliteness is not banter, as the source of offence is always “genuine impoliteness”; banter is a “surface realisation” of impoliteness or “mock impoliteness” because it is understood in certain contexts not to be true. Finally, impoliteness is not bald on record politeness (acting baldly, without redress), as in the case of emergencies (“Watch out!”) when

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the speaker has to act directly and does not show much concern for the hearer’s face because they act in the hearer’s interests (Culpeper 2005: 36–37). Culpeper proposes a new definition of impoliteness, which highlights the fact that it is constructed in the communicative exchange between the speaker and the hearer. His new definition is based on intention and recognising intention: “Impoliteness comes about when: (1) the speaker communicates face-attack intentionally, or (2) the hearer perceives and/or constructs behaviour as intentionally face-attacking, or a combination of (1) and (2)” (Culpeper 2005: 38).5 In this view, understanding impoliteness is the hearer’s responsibility, which does not come without problems. He claims that the face-attack may be intentionally communicated but it may not be recognised as such by the hearer;—or, the hearer may construct the speaker’s words as an intentional face-attack while none was intended (Culpeper 2005: 38). By proposing the new definition of impoliteness, Culpeper follows a more discursive approach, but, still, he acknowledges the importance of fixed rules of linguistic behaviour. He introduces a new strategy called offrecord impoliteness, which communicates the speaker’s impolite intention indirectly. Following this strategy, “the FTA is performed by means of an implicature but in such a way that one attributable intention clearly outweighs any others” (Culpeper 2005: 44). Culpeper gives an example from a television show Pop Idol , in which the jury selects the best future pop-star. Later in the series, when the number of contestants is down to ten, the judges can hear what the hosts are saying: Ant: Our judges have been accused of being ill-informed, opinionated and rude. Dec: We’d like to set the record straight: our judges are not ill-informed.

Dec’s reply may, at first sight, resemble off-record politeness because the fact that the judges are “opinionated and rude” is not stated, which in Culpeper’s view is “an ostensibly polite maneuver” (Culpeper 2005: 43). Also, Dec’s declared want to “set the record straight” raises expectations that he will defend the judges; however, no such thing takes place. The lack of the speaker’s expected polite denial: “our judges are not opinionated and rude” despite his promise to “set the record straight” generates a strong implicature—Dec implies that the judges in the show

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are exactly like this—rude and unfriendly. It is now difficult for Dec to deny the implicature as it is too “blatant” and the speaker does not show “a genuine attempt to avoid causing offense”. As Culpeper (2005: 44) further notes, there are scientific grounds to believe that indirect forms of impoliteness, such as off-record impoliteness, can be more offensive than direct, on-record impoliteness (see also Culpeper et al. 2003).6 The theory of impoliteness with time has taken a more discursive direction and has adopted more relational (Bousfield 2008a; SpencerOatey 2008; Terkourafi 2005, 2008) and interactional (Haugh 2007; Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016) approaches. It takes into consideration both the speaker’s and hearer’s perspectives, looks at the context of the situation, and yet it derives stable meanings from certain linguistic expressions (Culpeper and Hardaker 2017: 208). One of the latest impoliteness models proposed by Culpeper (2010) offers a set of “conventionalised impolite expressions” or “general impoliteness rules”, whose conventionalisation lies in their being used in some specific contexts, e.g. army training discourse, exploitative TV shows, traffic wardens vs. car owners in the UK (see Culpeper et al. 2003: 1545–46). Conventionalised impoliteness formulae are the effect of combining semantic impoliteness (impolite meaning is inherent in language) and pragmatic impoliteness (impoliteness is inherent in specific contexts of use). Culpeper (2010: 3238–39) argues that speakers acquire the knowledge of polite rules and polite behaviour through direct, personal experience, whereas their understanding of impoliteness behaviour comes with both direct experience and indirectly. Why? Impolite formulae are “far from marginal in terms of their psychological salience”—their “abnormality” usually draws attention, as what interlocutors expect in most contexts is politeness. Impolite expressions used in the contexts when politeness is expected are immediately “foregrounded”, that is, heavily debated in the media, political discourse, official documents and everyday chats—hence, we learn about impoliteness indirectly. Culpeper lists the most typical conventionalised impoliteness formulae, which, he claims, are driven by users’ indirect experiences, and especially the experience of metadiscourse, such as “comments, debates, and rules about impoliteness events” (Culpeper 2010: 3243). The first impoliteness formula is patronising behaviour (including condescending, belittling, ridiculing, and demeaning behaviours)

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and this includes, e.g. treating others as if they were beneath us to display power over them, making fun of others or talking loudly to those speaking a different language. Secondly, insults (including derogatory statements and implications) such as making derogatory statements about other people’s race, religion, lifestyle or asking an overweight woman when she is “due”. Pointed criticism (including expressions of disapproval and statements of fault, weakness, or disadvantage) to show that we have a very low value for someone. Next, encroachment, or infringing on the other’s personal space (literally and metaphorically), e.g. asking people how much they paid for something and being persistent about it. Exclusion (including failure to include and disassociation), e.g. talking about someone in the third person when they are standing next to us. Finally, failure to reciprocate: producing or perceiving a display of infringement of the reciprocity norm, which may include a set of conventions which we do not wish to follow, e.g. NEVER write a thank-you note (Culpeper 2010: 3240–41). These are only the most typical examples of the impoliteness formulae but their range is far wider in practical use. Additionally, Culpeper (2010: 3242–43) gives examples of more specific conventionalised impolite expressions in English, which I will employ together with the impoliteness formulae in the analysis to follow in Part Two. Impoliteness theorists are still debating the importance of intention and convention in impoliteness research. According to the latest pragmatic studies on (im)politeness (Kádár and Haugh 2013; Terkourafi 2015; Terkourafi and Kádár 2017), impoliteness is no longer viewed as a mirror reflection of politeness, but these studies note that politeness still is an important point of reference for impoliteness. Much as for Brown and Levinson politeness was a face-saving behaviour based on rationality and indirectness (strategies used rationally by speakers for face threat mitigation), Terkourafi (2015: 11) believes that politeness is a question of the conventionalised use of language (or how certain expressions become conventionalised as polite in some contexts as a result of habitual use). She illustrates her theory with an example from a basketball court. The expression “my bad” meaning “my fault” was first used in the 1970s by American basketball players as a way of apologising during the game. The very same expression was recorded to be used in the mid2000s by a professor from Princeton as a polite way of apologising to his

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students during his lecture at Harvard. This American basketball idiom was first popular with urban players of streetball and, next, it spread into mainstream communication and is now by default understood as an apology. Terkourafi claims that conventionalisation is inherently evaluative, that is when through socialisation in a given group people learn that “this is the way to do some thing” what they learn implicitly is that this is also the right way of doing this thing in a given context. In such a perspective, politeness is not “a separate message of the speaker’s utterance” but rather “a by-product of uttering the expression” and of the fact that it was evaluated positively by the speaker in this context (Terkourafi 2015: 16). In short, acting conventionally by speakers can guarantee that they will meet conventional expectations and that they will be positively evaluated by others, which is politeness. In this way, impoliteness can be viewed as a deviation from certain (linguistic) norms and standards binding in a given social group. Sticking to conventions and social rituals, however, may not always end up with a positive evaluation, since what is viewed as polite in one group/culture/community of practice may not be perceived as polite by the participants outside of this group/culture/community of practice (Terkourafi and Kádár 2017: 190). Terkourafi’s habit-based approach to (im)politeness allows for any expression to be conventionalised by speakers and be subject to inherent evaluation (Terkourafi 2015: 17) as impolite.7 Following this approach, the question of the speaker’s intention becomes a secondary matter and is overshadowed by the hearer’s evaluation of the speaker’s behaviour based on the social norms and standards binding in a given group. However, the question of intention and intentionality does not disappear from pragmatic debates on impoliteness. Intention can be understood in various ways. Locher and Watts look at intention from a first-order perspective (impoliteness1 ), as the speaker’s “private mental act […] that precede[s] and determine[s] language use” (see Culpeper 2008: 32): In a first-order approach to impoliteness, it is the interactants’ perceptions of communicators’ intentions rather than the intentions themselves that determine whether a communicative act is taken to be impolite or not. (Locher and Watts 2008: 80)

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According to Locher and Watts, the idea of the utterer’s intention to offend is present in impolite exchanges because whether a given exchange is evaluated as impolite or not depends on the hearer’s ascribing evil intentions to the speaker (regardless of the fact whether the real intention to be impolite was there or not). Additionally, Culpeper (2008: 32) claims that “interactants’ judgments are not mutually exclusive with intentions”—how people understand intention affects their evaluation of face-threatening behaviour. He gives examples from WebCorp: Will, a lesson I learned when I was a little kid was that if you think someone’s saying something that’s offensive, shocking, or out of character, have the decency and respect to ask him if he meant it. (Culpeper 2008: 32)

This only demonstrates that speakers take advantage of their perception and knowledge of intention while making judgments about others’ behaviour. Moreover, Culpeper (2008: 32, after Gibbs 1999: 76–78) reveals that research in social psychology has shown many times that aggressive behaviours were viewed as more severe and were reciprocated with a strong response when considered intentional. There are other similar views on impoliteness as a matter of the speaker’s intention, for example, García-Pastor (2008: 104) claims that impoliteness is the speaker’s “intentional communication of face aggravation or attack to the hearer, who perceives and/or constructs the speaker’s behaviour as intentionally face aggravating or attacking”. The question of intention still seems an unresolved issue in the pragmatic studies on impoliteness, especially in the discursive approach. This book adopts a mixed (traditional and discursive) approach to impoliteness, which recognises the importance of intention in initiating impolite communication in literature. Much as pragmatics scholars agree that politeness and impoliteness can be (and some say should be) discussed together, Locher and Bousfield (2008: 3) claim that “there is no solid agreement […] as to what ‘impoliteness’ actually is”. I wish to argue that the impoliteness phenomena in literary texts should adopt a multidisciplinary perspective—they should

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discuss impolite behaviour in a broader stylistic, cognitive and psychological context in relation to the traditional pragmatic notions that built this theory, e.g. face, intention, FTAs. The most recent studies on impoliteness adopt a variety of approaches, employing the more traditional, pragmatics-oriented notions of impoliteness and face (O’Driscoll 2017) and identity (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifianou 2017), impoliteness and power (Spencer-Oatey and Žegarac 2017) or impoliteness and ideology (Kienpointner and Stopfner 2017), as well as more “postmodern” views including convention and ritual, briefly discussed here (Terkourafi and Kádár 2017), emotion and cognition (Langlotz and Locher 2017), cultural variation (Sifianou and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2017), sociocultural approaches (Mills 2017) and morality (SpencerOatey and Kádár 2016). Today, impoliteness has become a matter of evaluative judgment based on speakers’ cultural expectations and their affiliation with a given group or culture. Spencer-Oatey and Kádár (2016) investigate the influence of culture on speakers’ evaluations of impoliteness behaviour, employing such psychological notions as “morality” (Haidt and Kesebir 2010), understood as “a system that regulates social life through psychological processes such as values, virtues, norms, and practices” (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016: 74). They claim that speakers’ evaluation of impoliteness is rooted in their “implicit” and shared standards of behaviour and norms known as “the moral order” (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016: 74). To be more precise, impolite judgments are made based on what psychologists (Cialdini 2012) call “injunctive norms” or “the moral rules of the group” (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016: 81). The moral rules and norms are typically based on the five universal moral foundations, which Haidt and Kesebir (2010: 822) distinguish to be: in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, harm/care, fairness/reciprocity and purity/sanctity (some of these norms will be discussed more fully in the analysis). In light of contemporary research, (im)politeness evaluations have increasingly been influenced by culture and the moral order (see Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016: 83) which function as repositories of basic values and norms for speakers.

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(Im)politeness in Literature: An Overview

The pragmatic discussion about (im)politeness extends from the field of linguistics to the field of literature. Sadly, the majority of pragmatic analyses of literary texts are not part of literary studies but they power pragmatic and stylistic research. Pragmaticists use the literary data beginning with Old English and Middle English texts, which they need either to characterise the theory in question or to provide a diachronic description of the English language. The most recent pragmatic studies of fiction (Jucker and Locher 2017) have demonstrated that linguists and pragmaticists have developed a greater appreciation of literary texts, which they no longer treat as the sources of purely linguistic data but also as works of fiction worthy of linguistic exploration and attention in their own right. Jucker and Locher (2017: 1) claim that “a pragmatic perspective opens interesting avenues of investigating both the techniques of fiction and how they pattern as well as the unique communication situation into which readers […] enter when engaging with fictional texts”. The following overview of (im)politeness in fiction and drama shows how literary texts can be employed both as sources of linguistic information for pragmaticists and how the pragmatic approach to fiction can bolster literary analysis, characterisation and plot development in literary works.8

2.3.1 (Im)politeness in Old English and Middle English Literature Kohnen (2008) and Jucker (2012) analyse the use of the Old English address terms in the Dictionary of Old English Corpus (including fictional communicative contexts) for evidence of politeness traces in Anglo-Saxon England. They ascertain the usefulness of the pragmatic notions of “face” and “facework” for the description of the early English language, and they argue that the Anglo-Saxon society was a violent society, ruled by “mutual obligation and kin loyalty” (Kohnen 2008: 142) and, therefore, considerations of “face” meant very little in comparison

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with a sense of loyalty and recognising one’s place (Jucker 2012: 177). Kohnen looks at such address terms as broþor and hlaford , noting that they were not used homogenously (e.g. broþor was used to mean “a real brother” but also “a fellow Christian”), in which case the attested use of these terms does not reflect politeness in the sense of facework but is the reflection of the fixed positions of the speakers in the hierarchical AngloSaxon world (Kohnen 2008: 143 and Jucker 2012: 178). The apparent lack of facework represented by the Old English values will be juxtaposed by the Early Modern English concern for face, with a bridge between the two in the form of “discernment politeness”, which was materialised in the medieval French term curtesie (“courteous behaviour”). Jucker discusses the use of this word by various characters in The Canterbury Tales, e.g. the Prioress (with satire) or the Miller’s Wife, and claims that the characters’ striving for courtesy and socially acceptable behaviour was viewed as politeness (Jucker 2012: 180–81). Also, under the influence of the French language, the Middle English language developed the plural pronoun ye, as an alternative to the singular pronoun you, to address a single person, as in tu/vous in French. The use of ye for deference and respect can be observed in Geoffrey Chaucer’s works (see also Jucker 2000b, 2006; Knappe and Schümann 2006). Jucker argues that it reflects “politic behaviour” (Jucker 2012: 182) rather than face-saving behaviour, as such choices only prove the speaker’s awareness of social life and their practical adherence to the required standards of appropriateness. In any way, Jucker concludes that Middle English, which can be characterised by “deference politeness”, brings us closer to Early Modern English, which is described as a positive politeness culture. Furthermore, Jucker (2000a) offers a multi-level analysis of verbal aggression, a subtype of impolite behaviour, in The Canterbury Tales in both the frame narrative and the embedded tales. Chaucer uses a rich repertoire of stylistic devices to communicate verbal aggression directly, indirectly or in an embedded and mediated way through name-calling, sexual innuendos, scatology and animal imagery. The speakers in the stories, who are the producers of verbal aggression, are shown to direct their aggressive remarks at some targets, who may at the same time be the addressees, to whom the utterance is directly spoken. Jucker notes that the characters’/targets’ reactions to verbal aggression are varied and range

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from “counter abuse to stunned silence, and from physical violence to intervention by another character” (Jucker 2000a: 369). Slanders, slurs and insults all have the function of denigrating the target, although Jucker notes that the slanders are stronger in terms of degree than the slurs. He also points out that insults in The Canterbury Tales are very personal and “nonritualistic” (Jucker 2000a: 378), which makes them difficult to classify conventionally as a single tale may be considered an insult towards the target, and thus, he offers his classification. The famous words “stynt thy clappe” spoken by the Reeve in The Miller’s Prologue are a direct insult (classified here as “direct aggression”) which he addresses at the drunken Miller, who wanted to tell a tale about a carpenter and his unfaithful wife. Jucker claims that the Miller is both the target and the addressee of the Reeve’s insult (Jucker 2000a: 379). Another interesting example is “mediated aggression”, as here one character of the tale insults another character in this tale but at the same time the narrator of the tale intentionally hurts one of the pilgrims. In The Friar’s Tale, for example, the Fiend talks to the Summoner of the tale and insults his intelligence thus: “For, brother myn, thy wit is al to bare / To understonde […]” (Jucker 2000a: 381). The characters react to insults in various ways, for example, the Cook from The Pardoner’s Tale when offended by the Manciple simply falls off his horse “for lakke of speche”. But there are many reactions of “counter-insult”, as in the case of the Reeve and the Miller—when the Miller tells a story about a carpenter, the Reeve tells an even more abusive story about a miller in return. Jucker (2000a: 387) argues that such pragma-stylistic analyses of medieval literary texts can provide some analytical categories for synchronic and diachronic studies of verbal aggression.

2.3.2 (Im)politeness in Renaissance Literature Among many pragmatic descriptions of (im)politeness in Renaissance literature, the majority of studies are, again, focused on supplementing linguistics-oriented research. Brown and Gilman (1989) in their analysis of politeness in Early Modern English look at Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello in search of examples of the colloquial

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language in the period. “[W]hy use plays? Primarily because there is nothing else”, they say (Brown and Gilman 1989: 170). They claim that the knowledge of a spontaneously produced language cannot be found in letters, and Shakespeare’s plays, with their insight into the characters’ “inner life”, can inform us about the speakers’ spontaneous lexical choices and their psychological motivation behind them, e.g. producing an FTA in an off-record or on-record manner. They note that the Politeness Theory “is a very psychological theory that cannot be tested with a speaker’s words alone”, in which case the plays are not only “a representative sample” but are “just about ideal” (Brown and Gilman 1989: 170–71). They evaluate politeness in Shakespeare as not only a matter of “civilised behaviour”, which is intent on regarding the feelings of others, (e.g. Cordelia in King Lear ) but also as “deliberate behaviour”, which is exemplified by Goneril, Regan and Edmund in the initial scene of the love contest in the play. Here, the polite speakers are focused on “advancing selfish causes” and their “deliberate behaviour” is viewed as polite since they admit their love and devotion towards King Lear, but they act “in the interests of greed, advancement and desire” (Brown and Gilman 1989: 207). They argue that Shakespeare’s language in the plays constitutes another “language” against which we can measure Brown and Levinson’s “universals” in the use of politeness. According to McIntyre and Bousfield (2017: 768), the fact that linguists have started to view drama as a reliable source of information explains why dramatic texts are included in recent studies on historical pragmatics (see Culpeper and Kytö 2010; Culpeper and Van Olmen 2018). Another representative example of the pragmatic analysis of politeness in Shakespeare is Kopytko’s (1995) social-cognitive study of four tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear ) and four comedies (The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night ). Shakespeare’s plays serve as the linguistic corpus from which he extracts some vital linguistic data about the Early Modern English language, and which helps him develop the politeness theory. Kopytko stresses the fact that: (a) dramatic texts are the best source of information on the colloquial speech of the period; (b) the psychological soliloquies in the tragedies provide the access to “the

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inner life” of the characters, which is crucial for a proper test of politeness theory and (c) the tragedies represent the full range of society in a period of high relevance to politeness theory (Kopytko 1995: 516). Based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness framework, he argues that the traditional social variables (P—power; D—social distance; R— ranking of impositions) are “inadequate” and incomplete linguistic tools to describe Shakespearean data. He expands the theory by adding new psychological variables, which describe the world of the fictional characters more thoroughly (Ap—positive affect; I—intimacy; C—cunning; Im—importance; An—negative affect) (Kopytko 1995: 515). Based on the interactional style of the English society presented in the comedies and tragedies, he develops sixteen positive politeness strategies and ten negative politeness strategies, which regulate the fictional social interactions among Shakespeare’s characters and are correlated with the social and psychological variables. His largely quantitative analysis of textual examples demonstrates that the interactional style in Shakespeare’s plays is characterised by “in-group positive politeness” (Kopytko 1995: 515) rather than negative politeness, as the latter is peculiar to the native speakers of Modern English in contemporary Great Britain (see also Jucker 2008). The politeness studies on Shakespeare’s drama continue with Rudanko’s book, Pragmatic Approaches to Shakespeare (1993), in which he discusses Othello, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens using pragmatic theories, such as conversational analysis (CA) and the cooperative principle (CP) in Othello, speech act theory in Coriolanus, and “nastiness” in Timon of Athens. In his study, Rudanko falls back on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) and Brown and Gilman’s (1989) politeness, offering an alternative to the politeness theory, which he calls “nastiness” or “adding something gratuitously to offend the hearer” (Rudanko 1993: 167). In his close analysis of Timon of Athens, he distinguishes between “positive nastiness” viewed as “affronts directed to the hearer’s positive face”, and “negative nastiness” as “verbal action encroaching upon the hearer’s want to have his freedom of action unhindered and his attention unimpeded” (Rudanko 1993: 168), which function as direct opposites of the “positive” and “negative” strategies in the politeness theory. He investigates how speech acts (requests) are turned down by the characters in the play

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and notes that requests are intrinsically face-threatening.9 In his other studies of Shakespeare, Rudanko (2006) puts forward a new strategy of impoliteness called “aggravated impoliteness”, which is “a more serious manifestation of ill will or malice than ‘mere’ impoliteness” (Rudanko 2006: 838). The main difference between “impoliteness” and “aggravated impoliteness” seems to lie in the speaker’s intent. Normally, impolite speakers use impolite behaviour to achieve some transactional goal, e.g. they want to cause social conflict or disharmony. In the case of “aggravated impoliteness”, speakers are intent on offending the other out of spite, for the sake of offending. In Timon of Athens, we can see how Timon first accepts and then rejects the Senators’ request to return to Athens and guard the city against Alcibiades: “Tell my friends, / Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree […] / that he who please / To stop affliction, let him take his haste / Come hither, ere my tree hath felt the axe, / And hang himself ” (Timon, 5.2.92–97). Rudanko (2006: 834) believes that Timon’s play with people’s expectations, his rejection of the request and his cruel advice for the Athenians to hang themselves in his tree “is almost unparalleled in harshness in Shakespeare”. Culpeper as one of the first linguistics scholars has demonstrated explicitly that the impolite behaviour of the characters in fiction “is not a marginal activity” (Culpeper 1996: 349) but it can serve characterisation aims. In his close analysis of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he shows how, using the impoliteness theory, the play’s plot develops from the state of equilibrium to the state of disequilibrium. He looks at Lady Macbeth’s famous speech “Are you a man?” (Act 4, Scene 3) in which she attacks Macbeth’s positive face through impoliteness and sarcasm after the murder of Duncan and Banquo. She employs verbal impoliteness, e.g. “What! quite unmann’d in folly?” to “goad his masculine ego” and “get him to pull himself together” (Culpeper 1996: 365). The Macbeths’ impolite behaviour proves effective as a long-term goal: it helps them conceal Duncan’s murder and establish Macbeth’s position of power in the state. It also serves as a characterising device in drama and shows Macbeth’s transformation from a vulnerable man into “a desensitised murderer” in the course of the play (Culpeper 1996: 365–66). His other studies (Culpeper 2001; Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla

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2017) highlight the role of (im)politeness as a means of fictional characterisation. Importantly, he argues that Shakespeare’s characters use politeness strategies to maintain social harmony or impoliteness strategies to create disharmony, in the same way as people do. Culpeper analyses a scene from Richard III (Act 4, Scene 2) where Buckingham reminds Richard that it is time he returned the favour (Buckingham devised a plot to kill Hastings by Richard’s order). The scene is an exemplification of using impoliteness for exercising power. In their exchange, King Richard denies Buckingham his speaking rights and makes him self-select in his conversational turns; he also interrupts and controls the topic of the conversation. Buckingham’s request: “May it please you to resolve me in my suit?” meets with Richard’s response: “Thou troublest me; I am not in the vein” (Richard III , 4.2.117–18). To further emphasise Buckingham’s subservience, Richard uses derogative terms and addresses Buckingham as “thou” (used to address commoners) whereas Buckingham uses proper titles to show deference while addressing the King (“your Highness”, “your Grace”). In Culpeper’s (2001: 177–79) view, Richard’s impoliteness implies that Buckingham is in no position to ask anything of him. Bousfield (2007) in his pragmatic analysis of 1 King Henry IV characterises a scene of a role-play between Prince Hal and Falstaff and comments on the pragmatic nature of their exchange. The scene is a meta-theatrical power play in which Falstaff plays the role of Hal’s father, King Henry IV, and Hal plays himself. In the first part of the role-play, Falstaff uses friendly banter or “mock impoliteness” (the impoliteness is not genuine) while pretending to be the King, for example, he calls Hal a “naughty varlet”, but his intention is not to offend but to strengthen his friendship with Hal (Bousfield 2007: 211). In the second part of the roleplay when they switch roles and Hal plays his father and Falstaff plays himself, Hal intentionally offends Falstaff under the guise of friendly banter, which Bousfield calls “impoliteness masked as banter” (Bousfield 2007: 211). Hal as his father puts himself in the position of power in the conversation and insults Falstaff by calling him names, e.g. “a huge bombard of sack”, “stuffed cloak bag of guts” and “roasted Manningtree ox with a pudding in his belly”. Bousfield believes that the attack on Falstaff ’s positive face is intentional and no longer “unserious” (Bousfield

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2007: 214) because it refers to Falstaff ’s vices and weaknesses as a man (a good-for-nothing drinking companion, a lazy and obese fellow). By intentionally being impolite and offending Falstaff “for real”, Hal proves that he is a changed man and that the tavern lifestyle they used to lead with Falstaff has come to an end (this will be explicitly demonstrated in 2 King Henry IV at Hal’s coronation as the king). Bousfield in his study not only characterises dramatic figures based on their linguistic behaviour but he also confirms certain facts about the impoliteness theory: (a) impoliteness behaviour characterises speakers in the position of power, who feel freer to produce “conflictive verbal FTAs” (see Bousfield 2008a: 72); (b) real impoliteness is intentional and it has a clear aim to offend the other (see Culpeper 2005: 37). Additionally, Archer and Bousfield (2010) in their analysis of King Lear use a combination of approaches, pragmatic, stylistic and corpus-based, for literary characterisation. They look at popular Early Modern themes, such as love between parents and children, sanity and madness, honour and betrayal, using the characters’ keywords and key semantic domains, as identified by the web-based tool Wmatrix. The keyness analysis isolates Lear’s and his daughters’ keywords and key domains in the opening scene when compared to the full play. In comparison with Regan and Goneril, Cordelia is the only daughter who is characterised by love, and who refuses to be insincerely polite towards her father, as is indicated by her keywords in the first scene: king, cares, daughter, thine, nothing. In contrast, Goneril speaks of love sufficiently, but her love is selfishly motivated, as demonstrated by her keywords and key domains: love, want, like, look to, will (Archer and Bousfield 2010: 189–90). This combined approach allows not only for characterising King Lear and his daughters as fictitious individuals in the play but also for finding and briefly exploring several themes from the opening scene, e.g. love, flattery, person and state, duty and erratic behaviour (Archer and Bousfield 2010: 192–93). In my book on Early Modern politics in Shakespeare, I define the notion of “the pragmatics of politics” (Kizelbach 2014: 260) as strategic, goal-oriented policy-making in Shakespeare’s history plays. I investigate fictional royal discourse based on examples of Shakespeare’s kings and politicians from the second tetralogy (King Richard II , 1 and 2 King Henry IV , King Henry V ) and King Richard III (first tetralogy), and I

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look at the relations of power in speech within the pragmatic framework of face theory (Bargiela-Chiappini 2003; Lim 1994), politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987; Kopytko 1995) and impoliteness (Bousfield 2007, 2008a; Culpeper 1996, 2005, 2011), and the sociological role theory (Goffman [1967] 2008). I offer a pragmatic analysis of the royal discourse in the context of Machiavelli’s principe nuovo and the emerging Realpolitik in Early Modern Europe. I propose a notion of “the political face” (Kizelbach 2014: 258) as the king’s reflection of his social self, displayed in public situations, and, therefore, extremely vulnerable to attack. I argue that the “political face” as a pragmatic and social phenomenon is different from an individual’s self-esteem or ego, but it depends on how much politicians care about their favourable public image. Successful politicians display a high awareness of their “political face” and, thus, can effectively manage their negotiations and try to save face in public interactions. I provide examples of effective kings, such as Henry V, who escapes public humiliation by the French Dauphin in a famous scene with tennis balls—the French offer Henry a box of tennis balls in response to his claim to the French land. Henry reacts with sarcasm or “mock politeness”, which helps him maintain selfrestraint and save face in public when he is the most disturbed (Kizelbach 2014: 251). Only later, when he gains an advantage, does he proceed to on-record impoliteness and verbal aggression (threats) to consolidate his position of power in the conversation. I also present examples of bad, ineffective kings, such as Richard II, whose crown is usurped by a nobleman, Henry Bolingbroke (later King Henry IV), simply because he confused his “political face” with his “personal” face, and because he handled all conflicts using impoliteness no matter what the cost. My pragmatic analysis shows that in Realpolitik, which was a standard manner of policy-making in sixteenth-century Europe, political survival depended on Machiavellian dissimulation and theatrical acting. In short, on-record impoliteness is not advisable for a politician, but it is rather going off-record with impoliteness that protects the politician’s face from harm and humiliation in public. My other pragma-stylistic investigation (Kizelbach 2025) supplements the research in the book. Here, I investigate the royal speech of King Henry VI (first tetralogy) and I try to linguistically account for the king’s ineffectiveness in politics. Henry VI,

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in my view, is not the New Prince from Machiavelli’s treatise, but he is a perfect example of a monarch whose honesty and moral virtues bring him to ruin. His linguistic behaviour is very predictable and focuses on politeness and avoiding impoliteness at all costs. His face-saving attitude is directed at his addressees, but never at himself, which turns out to be a useless strategy when appeasing the quarrelling lords in the Temple Garden. He regularly fails to save his “political face” from harm, believing naively that other politicians will stick to the rule of law in the same way as he does. The Machiavellian Prince would never miss a chance to attack—Henry, instead, remains passive in the face of York’s insolence (his claim to the throne) and his threats. I argue that Henry’s meekness, passivity and lack of impoliteness behaviour in volatile political contexts kill him in the play.

2.3.3 (Im)politeness in the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Drama The pragmatic studies of politeness in the eighteenth century show polite behaviour as a product of social and economic changes, such as the emergence of the middle class and the development of commerce. The British society of the time was obsessed with politeness and made references to “polite behaviour”, “polite language”, “polite education” and “polite literature” (Watts 2002: 155) in numerous publications. A specific set of social practices—polished manners or sociability in conversation— contributed to promoting correct speech and the standardisation of the English language (through publishing grammar and spelling books, see Locher 2008). In other words, “learning” and “standardisation” were the “hallmarks of politeness” in eighteenth-century Britain (Watts 2002: 167). Literary politeness was an umbrella term for “a range of stylistic and critical campaigns”, which assumed that “polite writing” is an amalgamation of “gentleman” and “scholar” (Klein 1994: 6). Beginning with John Dryden, good conversation played a special role in written discourse and was viewed as the necessary component of literary refinement (Klein 1994: 6). However, towards the end of the eighteenth century, there was a decline of politeness as a value and it was reduced to a form of

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etiquette (Fitzmaurice 2010: 88), so polite rules of conversation started to have a façade of a performance. I would like to refer my readers to a comprehensive pragmatic study by Jucker titled Politeness in the History of English (2020), which investigates the development of politeness in the English language from the Middle Ages up to the present day. The book concentrates on the pragmatic aspects of communication and uses examples of literary texts to analyse some linguistic notions, e.g. terms of address in Middle English based on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, positive and negative politeness in Early Modern English in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, or the Fox and Bartholomew Fair, or polite speech acts in the eighteenth-century (the age of politeness) based on epistolary novels. Jenny Davidson (2004) in her book on the politics of politeness in eighteenth-century literature argues that one of the effects of declining politeness was that it started to be associated with “hypocrisy”. Civility in a natural way involved some role-playing and even lying, and so insincerity or hypocrisy would often be naturalised under the epithet “good manners”. Davidson shows how thin the line dividing civility and hypocrisy in the eighteenth century can be and also how the ideal of truth starts to be problematic. She discusses the links between politeness, hypocrisy and sincerity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries based on two literary examples: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740–1741), and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). Richardson presents Pamela as a decent maiden and a respectable servant who tries to guard her safety and chastity throughout the story; however, Richardson provides many opportunities for Mr. B., his sister and friends to expose her hypocrisy and false modesty, Davidson (2004: 109) argues. She provides examples of Pamela’s deceptiveness, which is mitigated by her vulnerability, for example, the polite formulae in her letters to Mr. B. serve as exemplifications of her “ostentatious language of humility” (Davidson 2004: 119), thus revealing her hypocrisy. In Mansfield Park, Austen looks at the relationship between politeness and virtue in the character of Fanny Price, whose occasional lies are forgivable and even necessary because they are conditioned by her inferior social status. Fanny is a poor relative living with her rich cousins, and her virtue is rewarded, too, since she earns the love of Edmund Bertram thanks to her beauty and modesty. In the novel, Fanny hates putting herself forward

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and she tactfully refrains from making hasty judgments and, sometimes, from speaking at all. Her cousins view her as being “ostentatiously virtuous” (Davidson 2004: 151) but, according to Davidson (2004: 150), modesty and tact were often viewed as hypocrisy when displayed by the lower-class heroines in Austen’s fiction. Given some critics, “[t]he shade of Pamela hovers over her [Fanny’s] career” (Trilling 1955: 212). Jucker (2016) discusses politeness in two eighteenth-century plays: Richard Steele’s sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers (1722) and George Lillo’s domestic tragedy The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell (1731). In The Conscious Lovers, politeness is shown as an ideology of the upper classes and a way to social advancement. Bevil Jr. is in love with Indiana, who is an orphan, but his parents want him to marry Lucinda, a real lady. He feigns his affection for Lucinda, but this enrages his friend Myrtle who is in love with her, and so Myrtle challenges him to a duel. But, Bevil Jr. does not accept the challenge because he believes that it is improper for a gentleman to fight or fall into a rage. The London Merchant is a story about George Barnwell, an apprentice, who is seduced by a London prostitute who coaxes him into robbing her master, Thorowgood, as well as robbing and killing his rich uncle. After the murder, George is arrested and feels very guilty, and all the characters forgive him. Jucker notes that the eighteenth-century drama with its focus on politeness and civilised behaviour was an answer to the Restoration drama, which was characterised by immorality and degeneration (as a reaction to the Puritan ban on theatres). So, much as the Restoration comedy thrived on obscenity and used vulgar language, the eighteenth-century drama “propagate[d] middle-class virtues and moral values” (Jucker 2016: 108) and served as “educational theatre” (Jucker 2016: 110). Jucker notes that both plays display politeness, understood as civility, manners, and restraint on all levels: the characters remain true to themselves and protect their good name; they forgive others in the name of the moral values of the “polite” society. The plays are also “polite” towards their audiences. Steele’s play is very educational in this respect as it promotes “gentility” through the example of Bevil Jr., an exemplary gentleman (Ozoux 2002: 160). Readers are all time instructed on politeness by observing polite conversations and the polite attitude of the characters—“even the back-chat among the servants is governed by

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notions of loyalty and propriety” (Lindsay 1993: xxiv). In Lillo’s play, the moralistic and educational value can be found in the character of George Barnwell, who honourably accepts his punishment and takes responsibility for his offences. Moral guidance can be found in the play’s dedication where we learn that the tragedy is a “tale of private woe” (Lillo 1993: 265), suggesting that a tragedy may befall anyone. Jucker (2016: 112) argues that these plays present politeness on the intradiegetic level and on the extradiegetic level, which he calls “the politeness in the literary text” and “the politeness of the literary text” respectively. Intradiegetic politeness is visible in internal characterisation and in describing the relationships between the characters in the story. Extradiegetic politeness is seen in the plays’ communication with the readers and educating them through, for example, moralistic dedications, prologues and epilogues or by providing instances of politeness behaviour and polite conversations to set an example for the audience. Jucker’s observation on the “politeness in the literary text” and the “politeness of the literary text” is of great significance to my observations and analysis of (im)politeness in narrative fiction.

2.3.4 (Im)politeness in Contemporary Drama and Fiction The contemporary pragma-stylistic studies of (im)politeness in fiction and drama have an interdisciplinary character and are conducted along with Gricean pragmatics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Relevance Theory or Speech and Thought Presentation (Kizelbach 2017: 446). What is common for all these studies is that they show politeness as a linguistic means of literary characterisation. Simpson (2005) offers a stylistic analysis of Eugéne Ionesco’s play The Lesson in which he employs Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness framework (positive and negative politeness strategies) to explore the relation between language use and the social relationship between the speakers. The analysis shows how the decline of the polite attitude of the Professor is linked with his rising power and status in the conversation. At the beginning of the lesson, the Professor

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exercises what Simpson calls the “elaborate display of politeness strategies” towards his eighteen-year-old female student, which seems to be an inadequate response to “a relatively trivial imposition” (Simpson 2005: 180). For example, he displays excessive deference for being a bit late for the class: “I don’t know quite how to apologize to you for having kept you waiting” (Simpson 2005: 179). With time, however, each character starts “trading” their deference towards the other party, expressing their guilt and responsibility for every previous communicative breakdown. When the Professor displays his deference again, the Pupil counters with a similar show of deference: “Oh, no, Sir, the fault is entirely mine” (Simpson 2005: 181), which suggests that the status of the participants is now more symmetrical. In the final part of the play, the Professor’s irritation at the Pupil’s ignorance grows and his linguistic behaviour changes—his polite attitude degrades into rudeness. Previously, he mitigated all potential FTAs towards the student, and now he expresses himself baldly and without redress, using commands and threats: “Every language, Mademoiselle—note this carefully, and remember it till the day you die” or “Be quiet. Sit where you are. Don’t interrupt” (Simpson 2005: 182). In short, Simpson’s analysis demonstrates that the linguistic change from politeness to rudeness in the play reflects the reversal of roles and the power relationship between the Professor and the Pupil. The Professor, from “the less powerful interactant” (elaborate negative politeness strategies, such as hedges, apologies, deference) turns into “the more powerful interactant” (bald , non-redressive FTAs) in the exchange with the Pupil, who from an initial position of power is pushed to a subservient position as a participant whose negative face is threatened and who is “confined powerless to her chair” (Simpson 2005: 183). Warner (2014b) discusses an interesting example of communication between a German author and her readers, based on the analysis of politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987), impoliteness (Bousfield 2008a,Culpeper 2011), facework and sociality rights (Spencer-Oatey 2005, 2007). In the context of the post-unification Germany of the 1990s, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, a highly acclaimed German author and playwright of Turkish descent, was asked to write an opinion piece about the current relations of that time between Germans and minorities for Die Zeit. “I am writing something. But it is completely different

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from what you expect” (Warner 2014b: 192), she warned the editors of the paper. Indeed, her response was not an article everybody had expected but it was a literary anecdote titled Blackeye and His Donkey, which described her experiences while directing her play about Turks in Germany called Blackeye in Germany. Özdamar’s works have been classified as examples of “minor literatures” and they have been connected with the topics of migration and transnationalism, which is the reason (together with her Turkish background) why the editor chose her for the job. When the text arrived, the editors were unwilling to publish it precisely because it was a literary anecdote. Instead of writing an objective report on German–Turkish relations as a member of her ethnic group, she took the liberty of adopting a literary style and asserted her position as an author, thus indicating that the problem of Turkish immigration in Germany affects her professional work. By saying that she is writing “something different than expected”, Özdamar indicated the “horizon of expectations” she wanted her readers to share (Warner 2014b: 192). Her intentionally changed formula of the reply in the form of a literary piece was an act of “aggressive facework” and a potential FTA towards the readers of Die Zeit. Warner (2013, 2014b: 202) notes that experiential testimonies from members of ethnic minorities (or socially marginalised groups) may be viewed as FTAs by some readers, who may find themselves directly or indirectly implicated in the author’s negative feelings of exclusion or oppression; here—German readers are the representatives of the dominant, oppressing group. In this analysis, the politeness and face theory is used to explain that faulty rapport management between the author and the reader may threaten the individual or collective positive face of the reader (s), who may react antagonistically to the text (they may stop reading it or refuse to publish the content) simply because they feel uncomfortable with the genre or the content.

2.4

Summary

The above account has done no more than scratch the surface of the vast amount of scholarly research into the politeness theory and its representations in literary pragmatics studies. Politeness has undergone

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far-reaching changes since the seminal work by Brown and Levinson (1987). It has evolved from a strategy-based model reliant on speech acts to its “post-modern” (Terkourafi 2005: 238) version, which concentrates on the context and the speaker’s relationship with the interlocutors. “Polite behaviour” today is understood broadly as a dynamic, socially embedded interaction, whose characteristic feature is the cooperative attitude of every member of a social group. That is why, we look at politeness today not only as a type of pragma-linguistic behaviour but also we recognise its novel aspects, such as the speaker’s conforming to ethical, moral, social and cultural norms within the group. Similarly, the chapter has introduced some key notions and trends in the development of the impoliteness theory. Impoliteness owes a lot to its first proponent (Culpeper 1996), who has laid general foundations for the theory by saying what impoliteness is not (Culpeper 2005): impoliteness is not incidental face-threatening; impoliteness is not unintentional; impoliteness is not banter; impoliteness is not bald on-record politeness (acting baldly in emergency cases). The chapter has signalled that intentionality is one of the key characteristics of impolite behaviour, as an offence is usually a purposefully planned action and is rarely accidental. It has also highlighted a new strategy by Culpeper (2005) called off-record impoliteness, involving the speaker communicating their intention indirectly to the hearer, which may lead to even more offence than overt impoliteness. The chapter has sketched the most recent trends in the impoliteness theory and underlined its multidisciplinary nature, among others, impoliteness and face (O’Driscoll 2017) and identity (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifianou 2017), impoliteness and power studies (Spencer-Oatey and Žegarac 2017), impoliteness and emotions and cognition (Langlotz and Locher 2017), cultural variation (Sifianou and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2017) or impoliteness and sociocultural approaches (Mills 2017). It is important to remember that today impolite behaviour is a question of evaluative judgments relying on the speakers’ cultural expectations and their adherence to a given social group. Spencer-Oatey and Kádár (2016: 74) note that the evaluation of impoliteness is rooted in speakers’ “implicit” standards and norms understood as “the moral order”.

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The majority of critical works discussing (im)politeness in literature have been written by pragmaticists rather than literary scholars, as has been pointed out in the literature overview section. This section has tried to demonstrate that literary fiction has mostly been used as a source of linguistic information for pragmaticists but, in the same way, pragmatic research could be useful in describing the plot and characterisation in literary works. It has exemplified how Old English and Middle English texts can be employed to study address terms in the English language and how, based on literature, pragmaticists evaluated Early Modern English as a positive politeness culture (Jucker 2012). Numerous pragmatic studies of the Renaissance texts have also been linguistics-oriented and focused on developing the (im)politeness theory. Brown and Gilman (1989) investigated four of Shakespeare’s tragedies for colloquial expressions, and Kopytko (1995) in his social-cognitive analysis examined Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies to find out about the colloquial speech of the period and used the soliloquies from the tragedies to develop new politeness strategies, thus expanding Brown and Levinson’s (1987) framework. Rudanko (1993) in his pragmatic analysis of Timon of Athens invented the strategies of “positive” and “negative nastiness” as a counterbalance to “positive” and “negative politeness”. Similarly, Culpeper (1996) used Macbeth as an exemplification of his impoliteness strategies. The descriptions of politeness in the eighteenth-century novel view it as a product of social and economic changes (the development of commerce and the rise of the middle class). Here, Davidson (2004) discusses Samuel Richardson’s and Jane Austen’s novels and notes that their works show declining politeness, which was perceived as modesty and tact and was eventually associated with hypocrisy. Finally, contemporary studies of fiction and drama are keener on using (im)politeness for characterisation. Simpson’s (2005) analysis of Ionesco’s play The Lesson employs Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness to describe the social relationships between its characters, the Professor and the Student. We should bear in mind that contemporary pragmatic (and stylistic) studies of (im)politeness are more likely to adopt a multidisciplinary approach, combining politeness and impoliteness with, among others, Critical Discourse Analysis, Relevance Theory and Speech and Thought Presentation.

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Notes 1. By “act” they mean “what is intended to be done by a verbal or nonverbal communication” and they also note that one or more “speech acts” can be assigned to a single utterance (Brown and Levinson 1987: 65). 2. Searle (1969: 16–17) perceives language as a “rule-governed intentional behavior”, and speaking a language is for him performing different actions called speech acts, for example, asking questions, giving commands, making promises, which are performed according to certain linguistic rules. Searle’s speech act theory views language as action, and he gives five main kinds of action that a speaker performs while uttering something (five types of utterance): (1) representatives which commit S to the truth of the expressed proposition, for example, asserting, concluding; (2) directives which are attempts by S to get H to do something, for example, requesting, questioning; (3) commissives which commit S to some future action, such as promising, offering, threatening; (4) expressives which express a given psychological state of S, for instance thanking, welcoming, congratulating; (5) declarations which effect immediate changes in the institutional state of affairs relying on extra-linguistic institutions, for example, declaring war, christening, excommunicating (see also Levinson 1983: 240). 3. Wilson and Sperber (2006: 607–8) define “relevance” as “a potential property not only of utterances and other observable phenomena, but of thoughts, memories and conclusions of inferences”. The Relevance Theory assumes that both external stimuli and internal representations which provide some input to the cognitive process can be relevant to a person. An input is a sight, a sound, an utterance or a memory; it is relevant to an individual when it connects with the background information available to a person to draw relevant conclusions about something, for example, by confirming a suspicion, answering a question one had in mind, settling a doubt. The input is relevant if, processed in a context, it leads to a positive cognitive effect, such as a true conclusion. 4. Leech (1980: 19) views politeness as “strategic conflict avoidance […] measured in terms of the degree of effort put into the avoidance of a conflict situation”. Kasper (1990: 194) claims that communication is a “fundamentally dangerous and antagonistic endeavor” and he sees the role of politeness as a set of strategies used to “defuse the danger and to minimalise the antagonism”. Fraser (1990: 233) says that “[p]oliteness is a state that one expects to exist in every conversation; participants

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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note not that someone is being polite—this is the norm—but rather that the speaker is violating the [conversational contract]”. Finally, for Arndt and Janney (1985: 282), politeness is “interpersonal supportiveness”; and Watts (2003: 15) associates politeness with “cooperative social interaction and displaying consideration for others”, which he considers to be universal characteristics for human societies. In a similar manner, Bousfield (2008a: 72) sees impoliteness as an intentional behaviour of the speaker to cause harm and attack the hearer’s face: “Impoliteness constitutes the communication of intentionally gratuitous and conflictive verbal face-threatening acts which are purposefully delivered: (1) unmitigated […], and /or (ii) with deliberate aggression […]”. Culpeper et al. (2003) propose a simpler division of the impoliteness superstrategies: (1) On-record impoliteness—strategies designed to explicitly attack the face of the hearer; (2) Off-record impoliteness—strategies where the threat to the hearer’s face is conveyed indirectly by way of an implicature and can be cancelled or denied but where “one attributable intention clearly outweighs any others” given the context in which it occurs. Sarcasm and Witholding politeness where it is expected also fall into the category off-record impoliteness (Bousfield 2008b: 138). This, in my opinion, poses a serious definition problem for understanding both politeness and impoliteness. If any expression can be conventionalised by speakers, then the same expression can be evaluated either positively or negatively depending on whether it has become an accepted habit in a given group in a particular context or not. This subchapter (2.3) is an updated and extended version of the author’s chapter in an edited collection, which was published as the following work: Kizelbach, Urszula, 14. “(Im)politeness in Fiction”. In Pragmatics of Fiction, edited by Miriam A. Locher and Andreas H. Jucker, 425–454. (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017). doi: https://doi.org/ 10.1515/9783110431094. The author would like to thank De Gruyter Mouton for their permission to republish her research in this book. The issue of intrinsically face-threatening speech acts is complicated, as some scholars note that no speech act is intrinsically face-threatening, and that, generally speaking, the connection between FTAs and speech acts is “very loose” (O’Driscoll 2007: 259–60). I want to say that speech acts can be identified with face threatening acts, but I agree that this is a sensitive matter and the interpretation heavily depends on the context of the utterance.

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Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 287–322. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Leech, Geoffrey N., Explorations in Semantics and Pragmatics. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1980). Leech, Geoffrey N., Principles of Pragmatics. (London: Longman, 1983). Levinson, Steven C., Pragmatics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Lillo, George, “The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell.” In The Beggar’s Opera and Other Eighteenth-Century Plays, edited by David W. Lindsay, 259–326. (London: J. M. Dent, 1993). Lim, Tae-Seop, “Facework and Interpersonal Relationships.” In The Challenge of Facework: Cross-Cultural and Interpersonal Issues, edited by Stella TingToomey, 209–29. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994). Lindsay, David W., “Introduction.” In The Beggar’s Opera and Other EighteenthCentury Plays, edited by David W. Lindsay, xxi–xxxii (London: J. M. Dent, 1993). Locher, Miriam A., “The Rise of Prescriptive Grammars in the 18th Century.” In Standards and Norms in the English Language, edited by Miriam A. Locher and Jürg Strässler, 127–47. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008). Locher, Miriam A. and Derek Bousfield, “Introduction: Impoliteness and Power in Language.” In Impoliteness in Language: Studies on Its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice, edited by Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher, 1–16. (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008). Locher, Miriam A. and Richard J. Watts, “Relational Work and Impoliteness: Negotiating Norms of Linguistic Behaviour.” In Impoliteness in Language: Studies on Its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice, edited by Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher, 77–100. (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008). McIntyre, Dan and Derek Bousfield, “(Im)politeness in Fictional Texts.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 759–83. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Mills, Sara, Gender and Politeness. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Mills, Sara, “Sociocultural Approaches to (Im)politeness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Impoliteness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 41–60. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). O’Driscoll, Jim, “What’s in an FTA? Reflections on a Chance Meeting with Claudine,” Journal of Politeness Research 3, no. 2 (2007): 243–68.

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O’Driscoll, Jim, “Face and (Im)politeness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Impoliteness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 89–118. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Ozoux, Mireille, “Lecture de The Conscious Lovers de Richard Steele (1728): Sémantique et Èthique, le Concept de ‘Gentility’ Repris et Revisité,” Etudes Epistémè 2 (2002): 159–99. Rudanko, Juhani, Pragmatic Approaches to Shakespeare: Essays on Othello, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993). Rudanko, Juhani, “Aggravated Impoliteness and Two Types of Speaker Intention in an Episode in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens,” Journal of Pragmatics 38, no. 6 (2006): 829–41. Searle, John, Speech Acts. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, edited by Kenneth Muir. (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2001). Shakespeare, William, King Henry IV, Part 1, edited by David Scott Kastan. (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2002). Shakespeare, William, King Richard III , edited by Anthony Hammond. (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2006). Shakespeare, William, Timon of Athens, edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton. (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2008). Sifianou, Maria and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, “(Im)politeness and Cultural Variation.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Impoliteness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 571–99. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Simpson, Paul, “Politeness Phenomena in Ionesco’s The Lesson.” In Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics, edited by Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson, 169–92. (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Spencer-Oatey, Helen, “(Im)politeness, Face and Perceptions of Rapport: Unpackaging Their Bases and Interrelationships,” Journal of Politeness Research 1, no. 1 (2005): 95–119. Spencer-Oatey, Helen, “Theories of Identity and the Analysis of Face,” Journal of Pragmatics 39, no. 4 (2007): 639–56. Spencer-Oatey, Helen (ed.), Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Continuum, 2008). Spencer-Oatey, Helen and Dániel Z. Kádár, “The Bases of (Im)politeness Evaluations: Culture, the Moral Order and the East-West Debate,” East Asian Pragmatics 1, no. 1 (2016): 73–106.

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Spencer-Oatey, Helen and Vladimir Žegarac, “Power, Solidarity and (Im)politeness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Impoliteness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 119–41. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Sperber, Dan and Deidre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Terkourafi, Marina, “Beyond the Micro-Level in Politeness Research,” Journal of Politeness Research 1, no. 2 (2005): 237–62. Terkourafi, Marina, “Towards a Unified Theory of Politeness, Impoliteness, and Rudeness.” In Impoliteness in Language: Studies on Its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice, edited by Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher, 45–74. (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008). Terkourafi, Marina, “Conventionalization: A New Agenda for Im/politeness Research,” Journal of Pragmatics 86 (2015): 11–18. Terkourafi, Marina and Dániel Z. Kádár, “Convention and Ritual (Im)politeness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Impoliteness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 171–95. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Trilling, Lionel, The Opposing Self . (New York: Viking, 1955). Warner, Chantelle, The Pragmatics of Literary Testimony: Authenticity Effects in German Social Autobiographies. (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics). (New York: Routledge, 2013). Warner, Chantelle, “Literature as Discourse and Dialogue: Rapport Management (Facework) in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s ‘Blackeye and His Donkey’.” In Pragmatic Literary Stylistics, edited by Siobhan Chapman and Billy Clark, 192–209. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014b). Watts, Richard J., “From Polite Language to Educated Language. The Reemergence of an Ideology.” In Alternative Histories of English, edited by Richard J. Watts and Peter Trudgill, 155–72. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Watts, Richard J., Politeness: Key Topics in Sociolinguistics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Watts, Richard J., Sachiko Ide and Konrad Ehlich, “Introduction.” In Politeness in Language: Studies in Its History, Theory and Practice, edited by Richard J. Watts and Konrad Ehlich, 1–20. (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992). Wilson, Deidre and Dan Sperber, “Relevance Theory.” In The Handbook of Pragmatics, edited by Lawrence R. Horn and Gregory Ward, 607–32. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).

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Introduction

This chapter discusses the benefits of combining narratology with pragmatics and stylistics and presents traditional notions and theories from literary studies as viewed from a literary pragmatic perspective. The book adopts a “postclassical” approach in its analysis of narrative fiction and serves as an extension (not a rejection) of “classical” narratology, which is in line with Herman’s (1997) understanding of “postclassical”. The pragmatic approach to narratology functions as yet another manifestation of the “postclassical” narratological tradition, together with feminist, postcolonial, post-modern or ethno-social approaches to narrative (Prince 2008: 119). “Postclassical” narratology is interested in a series of relations between the narrative structure and content and their interaction with the knowledge of the real-world; it also looks at narrative as a process, that is, how a given narrative can function in a specific context or how its means of expression can trigger the receiver’s response. Classical narratology, due to its “formalist” character, is focused on “what narratives have in common and what enables them to differ narratively from © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 U. Kizelbach, (Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18690-5_3

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one another” (Prince 2008: 116). The pragmatic approach in narratological analysis sets the discussion about McEwan’s fiction in a real-life context, explaining how impoliteness can influence both the reader’s understanding of the story and the implied author’s messages hidden in the text. Stylistics serves as a validation of the textual cues and certain conclusions drawn based on these cues and presents them as empirically grounded findings rather than the analyst’s subjective impressions. Recent studies on the pragmatics of fiction stress the fact that in the pragmatic approach to fictional communication, “fiction” is understood in broad terms, for example, as metacinematic discourse, dramatic dialogue and narrative (see Bednarek 2017; Dynel 2011; Messerli 2017). In pragmatics, there are two basic levels of fictional communication: (1) author/producer—audience level, forming a link with an actual world; (2) inter-character talk, a fictional/embedded level, which depends on the primary communication between the producer and the audience (Messerli 2017: 33). The communicative relationship between the author/writer and the reader/critic/audience is implied in the writer’s text and is empirically accessible through textual analysis (Hess Lüttich 1991: 234). Pragmatics then focuses on “the communicative aspects of the language of fiction” (Jucker and Locher 2017: 2) and looks at the fictional communication on the levels of both the story (intradiegetic level) and the level of the communication between the creator of the text and its recipient (extradiegetic level). The first Sect. (3.2) offers a discussion on the definition of the author and reader in fiction, relying on the notions developed by literary criticism. Importantly, in this section, I establish the pragmastylistic definition of polite and impolite communication in fiction on the extradiegetic level, that is, the communication between the implied author and implied reader. The second Sect. (3.3) recognises the value of stylistics as an analytical tool in the analysis of literature, for example, point of view, schema theory, implicature or linguistic indicators of viewpoint, which will be employed in the analytical part of this book. Finally, the last Sect. (3.4) introduces and describes different stylistic studies of Ian McEwan’s works. The stylistic overview of McEwan’s fiction in this chapter shows the richness of stylistic approaches and theories serving the purpose of literary characterisation.

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Implied Author, Implied Reader and the Question of Intention

The literary speech situation presupposes the existence of the speaker who addresses some kind of an audience, which further presupposes certain commitments that the creator of the work and its receiver may have towards one another. The fact that the speaker has an audience has its pragmatic consequences in literary communication. According to Mary Louise Pratt, in natural (oral) narratives, the speaker/storyteller imposes on the audience an obligation to listen, an obligation which the audience does not have to accept. In the same way, the request to narrate can be easily turned down by the interlocutors in the conversation, by saying, for example, “You have already told me so” (Pratt 1977: 104). In literary narratives, the consequences for the speaker/author are more damaging, as the speaker cannot correct their “unintentional failures” (Pratt 1977: 159) because there is no turn-taking, which is a result of “the nonparticipant audience role” (Pratt 1977: 114) in fiction. Pratt believes that the author’s “authority” in a literary work is not enough to “put him in the clear with the reader” (Pratt 1977: 115). Much as readers knowingly and willingly enter the literary speech situation by starting to read a book, they still constitute the audience who expect that the writer will make their reading experience worthwhile and who believe that they have the right to judge this author’s work (Pratt 1977: 114). The pragmatics of literary communication presupposes that the literary text is a linguistic phenomenon, like a “tellable”1 (Pratt 1977: 74) speech act, which has an impact on the real-world outside of fiction. The pragmatic discussion about the relationship between the author and reader in fictional communication makes us wonder about the degree of distance between the author, the(ir) text and the reader. The figure of the real author is well established in narratological discourse in the guise of the “implied author” (Booth 1961 : 74), although the extent to which the “implied author” has a status of a real person is disputed: when the “implied author” embodies the “intentions” of the text, they are conceived of as a real person; when described as the text-as-a-whole, or the implied meaning of the text, the “implied

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author” becomes a rather vague construct with no human features (Fludernik 2009: 14). The choice of the best definition is hard, especially if analysts care to investigate to what extent authors express their own opinions under the guise of the “implied author” in the novel. Wayne C. Booth claims that the “implied author” is the author’s “second self ” (Booth 1961 : 73) and “an ideal, literary, created version of the real man” (Booth 1961 : 75), who assumes the knowledge or (mental, moral, social) predispositions of their readers (Leech and Short 2007: 209). The “implied author” is responsible for what we read, as they consciously or unconsciously make stylistic and textual choices—every literary work is then a product of its creator’s choice and process of evaluation. Importantly, besides creating one’s image in fiction, the author creates another image of his reader: “he makes his reader, as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement” (Booth 1961 : 138). In short, the “implied reader” is a “hypothetical personage” who shares with the author the same background knowledge, presuppositions, sympathies and standards of what is good or bad, right or wrong (Leech and Short 2007: 209). Monika Fludernik (2009: 26) notes that the “implied reader is constructed by the critic who predicates a particular reader response to the work”, in other words, the author must assume such a reader to exist. Thus, the real reader may perceive the “implied reader” as an “ideal reader” or “the perfectly insightful reader who understands the writer” (Selden et al. 2005: 48), but they may not necessarily assume this role. Booth gives a key condition for the reader’s enjoyment of fiction—it is when the author’s “second self” and the reader’s “self” coincide. “Classical”2 narratologists and literary theorists make it very clear that the implied author cannot be associated with the real author of the literary work. They perceive the implied author as a strictly textual feature with no human agency involved. Seymour Chatman (1978) views the implied author as “a structural principle” as opposed to the real author, who is “a certain historical figure whom we may or may not admire morally, politically or personally” (Chatman 1978: 149). He argues that the same “real” author may presuppose various implied authors for different narratives that s/he writes. Similarly, the implied reader is not the flesh-and-blood person who reads the book but it is

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the audience presupposed by a given narrative (Chatman 1978: 150). Importantly, just as the narrator may or may not ally themselves with the implied author, the implied reader may or may not ally themselves with the narratee (Chatman 1978: 150). Also, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2005) subscribes to the view that the implied author is “a construct based on the text” rather than the real author’s “personified consciousness” (Rimmon-Kenan 2005: 90) or their “second self ” (Booth 1961 : 73). She denies the implied author all anthropomorphic features and a superior status or higher moral standards in comparison with the status of the real author’s “self”. She claims that the implied author and the real author “need not be, and in fact are often not, identical” (RimmonKenan 2005: 89) as the flesh-and-blood author may express in their work ideas and beliefs which are very different from the ideas and beliefs they have in real life; additionally, the real author may embody different ideas and beliefs in different works. “Thus while the flesh-and-blood author is subject to the vicissitudes of real life, the implied author of a particular work is conceived as a stable entity, ideally consistent with itself within the work” (Rimmon-Kenan 2005: 90). Much as RimmonKenan believes that the concept of the implied author is important in, for example, determining the reader’s attitude to an unreliable narrator,3 it cannot be treated as an independent “speaker” or a “voice” in the narrative but remains “a set of implicit norms” (Rimmon-Kenan 2005: 91). Here, I would like to come back to Booth’s understanding of the “implied author” as the writer’s “second self ”, which he explains using the example of his conversation with Saul Bellow. Some decades ago Saul Bellow dramatized wonderfully the importance of authorial masking, when I asked him, ‘What’re you up to these days?’ He said ‘Oh, I’m just spending four hours each day revising a novel, to be called Herzog.’ ‘What does that amount to, spending four hours every day revising a novel?’ ‘Oh, I’m just wiping out those parts of my self that I don’t like.’ (Booth 2005: 77)4

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In opposition to Rimmon-Kenan, Booth believes in the author’s “second self ” and how it is created through fiction by metaphorically “wiping out” the less favourite parts of the author’s actual “self”. He asserts the superiority of the “implied author” over the flesh-and-blood author using other examples from poetry, such as Sylvia Plath’s poems. He claims that Plath is an “FBP [flesh-and-blood person] With [the] Largest Collection of Contradictory IAs [implied authors]” (Booth 2005: 80) since in her poems she was trying to create a better version of herself or “that superior ‘self’ […] that will know how to deal with being not just a woman but – too often – a miserable woman” (Booth 2005: 81). Even in her latest poems about her approaching suicide (Edge) she implied an author who was creatively alive but in the meantime was contemplating death. The poetic, creative self of Sylvia Plath was another literary mask “that was torn off each morning as soon as the children awoke” (Booth 2005: 83). The debate on whether the “implied” self in literature is superior or inferior in comparison to the “real” author’s self is not the concern of this book, although Booth notes that “the IAs are usually far superior to the everyday lives, the FBPs” (Booth 2005: 78). Booth compares the authorial creation of “implied authors” to “constructive” or “destructive role-playing” (Booth 2005: 77).5 The “literary masking” (Booth 2005: 78) of the kind of Bellow’s or Plath’s is most of all indicative of their implied authors’ “sincerity” to the real author’s self, which is characteristic of every “great work” because “the only sincere moments of his [the author’s] life may have been lived as he wrote his novel” (Booth 1961 : 75). Every judgment of the author’s character or their moral values is “tentative”. But, following Booth (2005: 78), I agree that “[w]hen seriously engaged authors grant us their works, the FBP has created an IA who aspires, consciously or unconsciously, for our critical joining”. Booth’s definition presupposes a continuity between the flesh-and-blood author and the implied author insisting, at the same time, that the real author and the textual author are not the same things, which is precisely the view that this book adopts. James Phelan in his rhetorical approach ascribes even more power to the figure of the implied author, declaring that they are not a “product of the text” but “the agent responsible for bringing the text into existence” (Phelan 2005: 45). It is the implied author who as “the constructive

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agent of the text builds into that text explicit and tacit assumptions and signals for the hypothetical ideal audience, the audience that flesh-andblood readers seek to become” (Phelan 2005: 47). His definition assumes that there are “two human agents” in the model of fictional communication—the real author and the implied author—where the implied author belongs to the extradiegetic plain (outside textual level) of this communication (Phelan 2005: 47). His idea of the implied author leaves more space for the authorial intention which he understands as “textual phenomena” and claims that they are a vital component of interpretation, even though authorial intention does not constitute the main determiner of the text’s meaning (Phelan 2005: 47). Despite the more humanised status of the implied author and their increased ideological and ethical influence on the text as its creator, Phelan still asserts that the textual author is not the real author figure. He makes a differentiation into “the implied X” and “the flesh-and-blood X” (Phelan 2005: 49), where “X” stands for an(y) author’s last name. By way of exemplification, Phelan discusses the implied author’s role in creating an unreliable narrator, Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and demonstrates how “the implied Ishiguro” uses character narration to cause the reader to make inferences and use their own ethical standards in the face of the lack of the author’s ethical standpoint. In “Weymouth”, when Stevens sees off Miss Kenton to the bus, they have a climactic exchange. Kenton admits that she is still in love with him but his withdrawn reaction (“We must each of us, as you point out, be grateful for what we do have”) leaves her no choice but to go back to her husband, “her eyes [being] filled with tears”. Phelan notes that there is a conflict between Stevens’s narration and his speech: as narrator, he tells the authorial audience more than he says to Miss Kenton—the reader knows that he suffers inside but he never lets her know that he loves her. The reader is not sure of Ishiguro’s ethical stand on the situation; on the one hand, the reader expects Stevens to choose personal “dignity” over “honest expression of feeling” (Phelan 2005: 58), but on the other hand, the implied Ishiguro supplies the scene with Miss Kenton’s point of view and the genuine “motives of her speech” (Phelan 2005: 57), thus leaving the flesh-and-blood reader in a quandary as to the ethics of Stevens’s action and the author’s own ethical standpoint. The implied Ishiguro’s

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inconclusive signals in the text indicate that the flesh-and-blood Ishiguro wants us to disambiguate the scene on our own, using our ethical norms. The real author renders the scene ambiguous on purpose and by inviting the readers’ ethics to find a response to Stevens’s behaviour he turns his novel into “an ethical act of the highest order” (Phelan 2005: 65). In my pragma-stylistic investigation of McEwan’s novels, I follow the rhetorical approach, which assumes the implied author to be an anthropomorphised6 entity, “the constructive agent” (Phelan 2005: 47) responsible for creating the text, who is yet not equivalent to the real author figure. In this approach, the implied author belongs to the extratextual level of fictional communication and, as the text’s producer, s/he equips the text with a range of assumptions, intentions and textual cues for the reader to recognise. My understanding of communication in fiction is very close to a pragmatic model of human communication. In pragmatics, it is understood that speakers express their intentions verbally and non-verbally and hearers are supposed to recognise or attribute those intentions to the speakers. According to Tomasello et al. (2005: 676), the intention is a “plan of action the organism chooses and commits itself to in pursuit of a goal. An intention thus includes both a means (action plan) as well as a goal”. I want to argue that every literary text has its intention which has to be inferred by the reader based on the stylistic indicators within the text which point at, for example, the narrator’s attitude and their view of the characters or the implied author’s general ideological or ethical viewpoint. To put it in pragmatic terms, textual stylistics is an important “action plan” or “means” of conveying the implied author’s intention. The pragmatic “goal” of fictional communication is the reader’s recognition of the message and the text’s intention through textual linguistic cues. It is important to indicate that intentionality is not only a property of mental states but also of linguistic expressions (Haugh and Jaszczolt 2012: 92). This idea was originally proposed by Herbert Paul Grice in his Theory of Implicature, introduced in 1967 during his lectures at Harvard. Grice’s theory of implicature explains how communication can be achieved without conventional means for expressing the intended message, namely how interactants communicate through inferences, which he calls implicatures. Grice claims that there is a set of

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assumptions that guide the conduct of conversation as well as some general principles that underlie the efficient and cooperative use of language. These principles express a general Co-operative Principle (CP) which states: “make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (Grice 1975: 45). CP is composed of 4 maxims of conversation (Grice 1975: 49): The Maxim of Quality try to make your contribution one that is true, specifically: i. do not say what you believe to be false ii. do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence The Maxim of Quantity i. make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange ii. do not make your contribution more informative than is required The Maxim of Relevance make your contributions relevant The Maxim of Manner be perspicuous, and specifically: i. ii. iii. iv.

avoid obscurity avoid ambiguity be brief be orderly.

In other words, to communicate in a maximally efficient and cooperative way speakers should use the maxims: speak sincerely, provide sufficient information and speak relevantly and clearly. Grice does not see the maxims as some arbitrary conventions but he rather looks at them as the “rational means for conducting co-operative exchanges” (Grice 1975: 49). Much as in Grice’s view sticking to the maxims fosters smooth communication, flouting the maxims does not exclude successful communicative exchange. According to Grice, the ostentatious breaking of the maxims can help communicators read between the lines. For

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instance, let us imagine that speakers A and B have just come out of the theatre, and A asks B about his impressions (example from Short 1996: 244): A: Did you like the play? B: I thought the costumes were nice.

Speaker B overtly violates the Maxim of Relevance (his answer is irrelevant) as he does not directly answer A’s question about whether he liked the play. B’s answer indirectly suggests that he was dissatisfied with the play, which A can easily infer from the lack of relevance—instead of talking about the play speaker B comments on the costumes, which he found “nice”. The kind of message where the hearer can easily infer the unstated meaning of the speaker is called conversational implicature. This is one of many ways of showing how linguistic expressions can reveal the speaker’s true intention. Importantly, intentions are “located” in the individuals’ minds and interactions (Haugh and Jaszczolt 2012: 109) and they are inevitably linked with inference. Haugh and Jaszczolt (2012: 111) claim that if we ban intentions from pragmatics, there will be a need to replace this “theoretical tool” with “default rules of inference” or with some such solutions. This book argues that politeness and, in particular, impoliteness serve as important theoretical tools in describing the communication between the text and the reader in literary fiction. Booth (1961) laid the foundations for our understanding of the role of the implied author, who acts as an agent responsible for the plotline and for making the textual stylistic choices and who assumes the knowledge and mental and moral predispositions of their readers. Booth claimed that even the effects of deliberate confusion require “a nearly complete union of the narrator and reader in a common endeavor, with the author silent and invisible but implicitly concurring, perhaps even sharing his narrator’s plight” (Booth 1961 : 300). He calls this “a secret communion of the author and reader” (Booth 1961 : 300)—an ideal tacit communication (or good rapport) between these two participants of fictional communication. I want to call this ideal communicative situation “the politeness of the literary fiction” because it is based on the cooperation of the text with its interpreter

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and the sharing of norms, beliefs and values by both the implied author and the implied reader. I agree with Sell, who claims that “the politeness dimension of literary texts is what we respond to first of all, in a kind of gut feeling” (Sell 1991: 222). In my understanding, extradiegetic politeness in literature is a default state of affairs, which is based on unhindered communication and the reader’s successful deciphering of various stylistic hints and cues that are part of the implied author’s message. Sell argues that all interaction operates within politeness parameters and he believes that “[c]o-operativeness […] is intrinsically polite” (Sell 1991: 215). In other words, the reader’s “gut feeling” response to the text is intrinsically characterised by politeness, but it is the implied author’s intention that determines the polite or impolite quality of literary communication. Linguistic impoliteness has been adequately defined as the lack of a cooperative attitude between the participants of the communicative exchange. I want to argue that impoliteness in fiction occurs at two levels: the level of the text (intradiegetic impoliteness) and the level of the implied author-reader communication—extradiegetic impoliteness or, as I wish to call it, “the impoliteness of the literary fiction”. Intradiegetic impoliteness is part of the story world and it is usually manifested by some characters expressing impolite beliefs or professing negative opinions about other characters in the narrative. The impolite communication between the characters on the story level demonstrates how the impoliteness theory can contribute to the fictional characterisation and plot development in the literary text. Extradiegetic impoliteness is when the implied author expresses their impolite beliefs through narration, which may have potential face-threatening consequences for the reader, such as moral shock, dissociation from the protagonist, feeling hurt or put out. The state of affairs in which the narrator violates the reader’s “moral order” (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016: 74), their ethical standards and moral norms and expectations through conveying impolite beliefs directly or via implication I want to call “the impoliteness of the literary fiction”. Broadly speaking, extradiegetic impoliteness reflects impediments in the narrator-reader axis of communication in fiction and it stands in direct opposition to the ideal situation of the “secret communion” as outlined by Booth (1961).

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Stylistics and Fictional Analysis

Shen (2005) in his chapter for A Companion to Narrative Theory (2005) by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz asks a vital question about the connection between stylistics and narratology and “what they can do for each other”. He explains why stylistics as a field of study has not had much impact on narratologists and he gives three reasons for it: (1) narratologists’ (un)conscious “exclusion of language”; (2) the linguistic technicalities in stylistics; (3) the fact that although stylistics has flourished in Britain, its development has been somewhat limited in America, where the majority of narratologists of the English-speaking world are based (Shen 2005: 141). He also notes that a stylistic analysis of prose fiction, which focuses on the use of language, is very different from the narratological analysis of prose fiction, which has departed from “the poetic analytical tradition” and zoomed in on the connection between story events and how they are rearranged (Shen 2005: 139). As a direct result of this difference, the notions of discourse and style can be conflated or misrepresented in both fields. It is important to say that the term discourse is about the mode(s) of presentation that exceed(s) pure linguistics7 whereas style is more specifically connected with linguistic choices (Shen 2005: 136). For example, Short (1996) aptly discusses the function of stylistics in his analysis of Wilfred Owen’s war poem Anthem for Doomed Youth. The poem’s original title was Anthem for Dead Youth, but Owen decided to eventually replace “dead youth” with a parallel structure “doomed youth”. Short claims that the stylistic change in the poem’s title may not seem to be very significant at first glance but it utterly changes the tone of this funeral anthem. “Doomed”, Short argues, is better for two reasons. First, parallelism with “youth” brings out more strongly the contrast between the hopeful youth and their imminent death during the war. Secondly, “dead youth” means that the young men are already dead and is thus less dramatic; “doomed youth” presupposes that they are not yet dead but it suggests that they are bound to die soon, which makes the tone more “horrific” (Short 1996: 69–70). Short demonstrates that at the base of every stylistic analysis of literature are the author’s linguistic choices, which have a considerable impact on the meaning, style and reception of a literary work.

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Pragmatic stylistics was crystalising in the 1970s with the first editions of the Journal of Pragmatics and Pratt’s seminal publication Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977). Various works on pragmatics, such as Stephen Levinson’s Pragmatics (1983) or Geoffrey Leech’s Principles of Pragmatics (1983) were also concerned with poetics and literary linguistics, which is evident in their discussion of, for example, metaphor, the then-emerging field. Warner (2014a: 363) notes that Leech’s preoccupation with stylistics predated his interest in pragmatics and literary pragmatics as can be seen in one of his early monographs A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969); together with Short, he co-authored a seminal work in stylistics Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, whose first edition was issued in 1981, and whose early and updated research is extensively used in this book. Stylistics and literary pragmatics have one important thing in common. Sell said that the first aim of a literary pragmaticist is to “‘demythologise the concept of literature’ (Sell 1985: 498) as an agentless conveyor of truths and to reveal the processes of discourse between writer and recipient” (Warner 2014a: 363);—stylistics is focused on the very same goal. In recent years stylistics flourished as an independent field, uniting scholars from various disciplines (linguists, pragmaticists, literature) whose main platform of communication is PALA (the Poetics and Linguistics Association). PALA was established in 1980 (with Mick Short as its founding father) and it holds annual international conferences today. It has its ambassadors who promote teaching stylistics and stylistics-based research at the universities in most countries in Europe, the United States and Asia. In the twenty-first century, the reputation of stylistics grew from a mere practical approach to literature to an independent theory. Its aim from the beginning was to demonstrate how linguistic features of a literary work contribute to its many meanings and the variety of effects it may have on readers. Contrary to poetics, it does not treat literary language as a “special case” but analyses it like any other type of discourse, e.g. the language of advertisements, political speeches and expository prose;—thus, stylistics is not limited to analysing literature only (Barry 2009: 197). The stylistic analysis differs from traditional close reading because it provides a scientific commentary on linguistic

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technicalities and is often based on quantifiable data which is applied systematically in literary analysis. Close readers analyse literary texts in isolation from everyday language and treat them as “art objects” (Barry 2009: 201) with their own language rules; their reading is more “impressionistic, intuitive and randomised” (Barry 2009: 201)—their outcomes tend to be based on the interpreter’s hunch and are usually described in lay person’s terms.8 Stylisticians are eager to examine established interpretations of works of literature performed by literary critics and are interested in explaining what are the rules and procedures that readers intuitively know and implement while reading literary texts. As aforementioned, Short claims that stylistics is a “logical extension” (Short 1996: 6) of practical criticism. Barry (2009: 205) notes that stylisticians try to establish general points about how literary meanings are created by asking “more general questions about how literature works”. The study of style in fiction in this book is the combination of both pragmatic and stylistic research known as pragma-stylistics. Much as stylistics is oriented towards discussing and describing textual effects, pragmatics with its focus on the speaker (and the situational context) investigates the speaker’s (writer’s) linguistic choices and how their selection impacts communication with the recipient (reader). My understanding of pragma-stylistics is close to Leo Hicky’s (1993) views. Hicky, a pragmatics scholar, claims that pragmatics is inherent in stylistic research and that the two fields have been moving closer together in recent years (see also Warner 2014a: 363). He claims that “a student of style will be interested primarily in those features or aspects of a text, written or spoken, which are not imposed by the grammar of the language or by the semantic content, that is, by the information to be conveyed, but are selected by the speaker (and we use the term speaker to include writer) for other reasons” (Hicky 1993: 573). Having this in mind, a pragma-stylistics scholar is interested in these “other reasons” that motivate stylistic choices in the text, taking into consideration “desired effects, communicative qualities, and the context or situation of the speaker and reader” (Warner 2014a: 363). Chantelle Warner believes that stylistic research has traditionally been concerned with literary works more than with other textual genres and that it has

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enriched the field of pragmatics by “pushing scholars to account for relatively long and complex acts of verbal communication” (Warner 2014a: 363). Pragma-stylistic research emphasises the fact that stylistics needs a pragmatic perspective to help stylisticians better understand how style intertwines with various contexts of use and how readers perceive it. Below there are only selected pragmatic concepts and theories which can be combined with stylistics for the benefit of the pragma-stylistic analysis of fiction presented in this book. But, it is important to say that stylistics has been successfully combined with many other research fields apart from pragmatics, e.g. rhetoric and poetics, pedagogy, drama and performance, feminist studies, corpus linguistics and translation which are all adequately represented in The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics (2014) edited by Michael Burke and The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics (2016b) edited by Violeta Sotirova.

3.3.1 From Russian Formalism to Stylistics, Speech Acts and Implicature Modern stylistics owes a lot to Russian Formalism both in terms of its theoretical stand on the definition of literature and as far as some key stylistic concepts are concerned, for instance, foregrounding and deviation 9 derive from the Formalists’ study of literary language. Russian Formalists were the advocates of the study of a literary form over content and focused on analysing the “literariness” (Eichenbaum 2002: 36) of literary works, which they understood as the intrinsic quality of language that makes a literary work stand out from other types of speech. Formalists aimed to make literature an object of scientific study and “to create an autonomous discipline of literary studies based on the specific properties of literary material” (Eichenbaum 2002: 4). Sotirova notes that the notion of “literariness” led to the development of a new discipline of stylistics (which Formalists called poetics) and which presupposed that “literature could not be defined in any other way but by its linguistic make-up” (Sotirova 2016a: 4). She also notes that until this day stylistics’

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main concern is the study of literary language, as is evidenced by contemporary stylisticians, who present their critical views of literary criticism devoid of linguistic analysis: Literary criticism has settled recently into a paradigm which is improper and marginalising. […] literary scholarship has become an arid landscape of cultural history. Contexts and biographies, influences and allusions, multiple edited textual variants of literary works and their place in social history have become the focus of concern. […] engagement with text, textuality and texture has largely disappeared from the profession. […] Rational thought, discipline, systematicity, clarity of expression, transparency of argument, evidentiality and analytical knowledge have become the preserve of the few. (Stockwell 2009: 1)

Putting language first has always been the core of stylistic analysis, which can be further traced back to Roman Jakobson’s idea of “poetic language”, which stands in opposition to “practical language” (Eichenbaum 2002: 8). Jakobson defined “poetic language” as an “organized violence committed on ordinary speech” (Eagleton 1996: 2) in terms of syntax and rhythm, semantics (poetry activates secondary meanings of words, which normally disrupts everyday communication) and sound texture (phonic aspects of ordinary speech are foregrounded because of poetic devices that impede pronunciation). In the Formalist understanding, poetic language was superior to ordinary language because it contributed to literariness, making a literary work a special case of communication. However, stylisticians dissociated themselves from such an approach, believing that this division was “misconstrued” and argued that “[l]iterariness […] is not a quality of a text, rather it is a concept belonging to a specific genre” and that it involves “contextual (social and cultural) aspects” (Jeffries and McIntyre 2010: 2). Also, Pratt in her pragmatic study of language and fiction criticised the Formalists’ attempt at making the distinction between poetic and ordinary language because this has created many misconceptions about the relation between literature and other forms of language. She noted:

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What makes the poetic language doctrine most suspect is the fact that although its disciples claim empirical support for the poetic/nonpoetic opposition, they in fact have never tested their assumptions about nonliterary discourse against real, “ordinary language” data, and indeed have felt no need to do so. (Pratt 1977: xii)

We can see that even though stylistics borrows concepts and approaches from Formalist theory, its focus is on more pragmatic aspects of (literary) communication. The modern stylistic theory has it that “form is central to the understanding of content—or in its extreme version that form is content” (Sotirova 2016a: 5–6). Stylisticians support the idea that literature is not a special case of communication but it very much resembles human communication. Bousfield claims that what fictional characters say and how “is susceptible to, and analysable by, some of the same models and methods which are applicable to naturally occurring, real-life or day-to-day interactive language use” (Bousfield 2014: 119). He claims that one of the most efficient pragmatic methods used for fictional characterisation is speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969/1979). Austin’s theory views language as action and argues that words “do” things, that is, when uttered, “they change the world in however small a way” (Bousfield 2014: 122). Austin classified all utterances into constatives (the proposition-bearing statements) and performatives (utterances which are not subject to truth-value considerations because they no longer “say” but “do” things). The original constative/performative division was later replaced by the idea that all sentences have a certain executive force, and the three types of acts were distinguished: a locutionary act —producing a meaningful utterance according to the rules of grammar and phonetics; an illocutionary act — the act performed in saying something, for example, naming a ship as in “I name this ship Victoria”; a perlocutionary act —the act performed “by means of ” saying something, for example, warning, convincing or irritating the interlocutor (Austin 1962: 98–101). Searle consistently systematised Austin’s work and came up with a further division of speech acts into representatives, assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declaratives (Searle 1979: 12–15). Searle also argued that for

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communication to run smoothly, speakers have to fulfil the so-called felicity conditions. These are: (1) propositional content conditions, which are imposed by the illocutionary force of an utterance, for example, when apologising, the speaker cannot successfully apologise for something they are not responsible for; (2) preparatory conditions, which require that the speaker is authorised to perform a given act (they are experienced or acclaimed by others to do an act, as in naming a ship); (3) sincerity conditions, which require that the speaker means what they say or believes it to be true (for example, congratulating someone and feeling genuinely happy for that person); (4) essential conditions, which demand that a commitment once given should be affirmed in the future (Searle and Vanderveken 1989: 16–18). The fulfilment of the conditions guarantees a “felicitous” exchange, but the rules of pragmatics state that speakers can still produce illocutionary meaning beyond their locutionary utterances, which happens when the felicity conditions are violated. The dichotomy between what was meant (an illocution) and what was said (a locution) can be explained by referring to Grice’s maxims of conversation (see Sect. 3.1). It can be discussed in terms of “indirectness” or, more specifically, as “pragmatic inferencing”. Bousfield claims that understanding what was meant beyond what was said lies at the heart of Grice’s Cooperative Principle, which tries to explicate why speakers often do not say what they mean but their interlocutors are still able to understand the implied message (Bousfield 2014: 125). He also notes that “no speaker ever produces all their utterances in direct accordance with these maxims” (Bousfield 2014: 126) and that Grice also understood that speakers intentionally break one or more maxims to communicate unspoken meaning that needs to be inferred by the hearer. There are two main ways of intentional transgressing of the maxims, which leads to conveying extra illocutionary meaning. (1) Flouting a maxim is an overt and intentional breaking of a maxim by the speaker, which is designed to be noticed by the hearer and generates conversational implicature—extra (illocutionary) meaning that the hearer knows they have to interpret and work out for themselves. (2) Violating a maxim is the covert nonobservance of the maxim by the speaker, which means that the hearer is not aware that the maxim has been broken, but the speaker intends to mislead the hearer by, for example, lying (violating the maxim of quality)

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or changing the topic of a conversation (violating the Maxim of Relation), as explained by Grice (1975: 49). Marina Lambrou (2014) demonstrates how Grice’s CP can be used for fictional characterisation. She analyses a conversation between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Benneth in Pride and Prejudice when Lady Catherine visits Elizabeth unexpectedly late at night to make sure that the poor, underprivileged girl has no intention of marrying her rich nephew, Mr. Darcy. Lambrou claims that in this conversation Elizabeth flouts the maxims and refuses to cooperate with the other speaker to indicate her standpoint and avoid humiliation: Lady Catherine de Bourgh: “Has he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?” Elizabeth Bennet: “Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible.” […] Lady Catherine de Bourgh: “You are then resolved to have him?” Elizabeth Bennet: “I have said no such thing. I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me”. (Pride and Prejudice, 329; 332)

Elizabeth gives “dispreferred answers” (Lambrou 2014: 145) to Lady Catherine’s very direct questions. She says that in the first extract the usually polite Elizabeth flouts the Maxim of Relation as instead of giving a “yes” or “no” answer she is not being relevant and does not answer the question (“Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible”). In the second example, Elizabeth breaks the Maxims of Quantity, Relation and Manner as she says more than is expected of her, she is not being relevant and is not being brief. Lambrou argues that Elizabeth’s replies confirm the character’s “outspokenness, intelligence and verbal skills” (Lambrou 2014: 146) as well as unveil her true feelings for Darcy. This exchange demonstrates that it is not in Elizabeth’s best interest to comply with conversational maxims and “tacitly agree to cooperate” (Lambrou 2014: 146) with another speaker even though Lady Catherine is her senior

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and a representative of a higher social rank. There are some contexts in which speakers may not wish to cooperate and they flout or violate conversational maxims to arrive at certain effects.

3.3.2 Stylistics and Schema Theory Readers’ understanding of literature and their reactions to texts are very much conditioned by their life experience and their schematic knowledge of the world. A “schema”, known otherwise as a “frame”, “script” or “scenario” derives from psychology and artificial intelligence and is a “cognitive structure” which fosters our comprehension of “generic entities, events and situations, and in so doing helps to scaffold our mental understanding of the world” (Emmott et al. 2014: 268). In other words, schemas are background assumptions we make about particular situations about which we know either from previous experience or because we have read (or heard) about them. Short makes an analogy with a filing cabinet, stating that when we come across a reference to a familiar situation, we access the relevant “file” which represents “an organised inventory of all the sorts of thing related to that situation”, and he claims that “[t]hese schemas get updated from time to time, as new information comes to hand” (Short 1996: 227). For example, a person who has never been a university student will not have a lecture schema, that is, they will have no default knowledge of how to conduct oneself at a lecture or what lectures are for. Of course, they may possess some knowledge from books or films, but the lecture schema established on the basis of reading fiction may vary from an original experience of being a student. Short also notes that readers bring along their schemas to texts, but one person’s schemas may not be identical to another person’s schemas. As a result, the same text can generate different effects for readers, for example, its meaning can be shared by some readers but it can also be misunderstood by other readers (Short 1996: 231). By way of illustration, I want to present a fragment from Willy Russell’s play Educating Rita. It is a conversation between a university lecturer (Frank) and a hairdresser (Rita), who wants to expand her knowledge of English literature and is admitted as a student at the Open University (example from Short 1996: 229–30).

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The humour of the play depends on triggering the university schema by the reader: Frank looks up and then returns to the papers as Rita goes to hang her coat on the door hooks. Rita: (Noticing the picture) That’s a nice picture, isn’t it? (She goes up to it) Frank: Erm—yes, I suppose it is—nice […] Rita: (studying the picture) It’s very erotic. Frank: (looking up) Actually I don’t think I’ve looked at it for about ten years, but yes, I suppose it is. Rita: There’s no suppose about it. Look at those tits. He coughs and goes back to looking for the admission paper Is it supposed to be erotic? I mean when he painted it do y’ think he wanted to turn people on? Frank: Erm—probably. Rita: I’ll bet he did y’know. Y’ don’t paint pictures like that just so that people can admire the brush strokes, do y’? Frank: (giving a short laugh) No—no—you’re probably right. Rita: This was the pornography of its day, wasn’t it? It’s sort of like Men Only, isn’t it? But in those days they had to pretend it wasn’t erotic so they made it religious, didn’t they? Do you think it’s erotic? Frank: (taking a look) I think it’s very beautiful. Rita: I didn’t ask y’ if it was beautiful. (Educating Rita, Act 1, Scene 1)

Short (1996: 230) claims that Rita’s conduct towards her tutor clashes with our university schema. The reader expects that the student will show moderation, good manners and respect towards the teacher, whereas she intimidates him and takes over the topic of this conversation. Rita is asking bold questions (“do y’ think he wanted to turn people on?”) and she is making inappropriate comments about the picture (“Look at those tits” or “This was the pornography of its day, wasn’t it?”). This is not the kind of behaviour the reader expects from someone in the role of a student. When Frank answers the embarrassing question about whether he thinks the picture is erotic by saying that he finds it beautiful, the

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student suggests that his answer is irrelevant and she comes back to her original question: “I didn’t ask y’ if it was beautiful”. The source of comedy in this scene is Rita’s numerous gaffes which result from her lack of experience of being a student. Rita as a character lacks the university schema—she can follow no scenario of what it is like to be a student because she has no default knowledge of it. Readers familiar with the schema of the university will most likely find this excerpt funny and entertaining because it will be easier for them to correctly interpret the scene. Readers’ interpretation of the literary text is aided not only by their schematic knowledge of the world but also by their ability to recognise the pragmatic clues provided by the (con)text. One of them is the ability to make inferences based on recognising the flouting and violating of conversational maxims (see Sect. 3.3.1). Inferences, as was indicated previously, are background assumptions based on conversational rules and behaviours that speakers follow. Readers infer the meaning between the lines also through presuppositions or specific assumptions of rather precise matters embedded inside sentences (Short 1996: 225). In a pragmatic understanding, assumption and presupposition are not the same things even though they are often used interchangeably. Assumptions are the more general observations and background expectations people have, which are based on their previous life experience or their knowledge of literature and culture. Presuppositions are very precise assumptions which are connected to particular utterances (speech) and sentences (text) but what is assumed by them is never explicitly stated. Short (1996: 225) explains how presupposition is different from assumption and schema using this example: “Three of John’s children are in hospital”. The sentence presupposes that John has at least four children, and it is the kind of knowledge that could not be gained due to a person’s schematic knowledge of the world. The presupposition has to be extracted from this sentence based on its syntax, semantics and maybe even other linguistic cues. However, if some more general assumptions are made about John’s children, for example, they lie in hospital beds, they must be ill, or they are taken care of by doctors and nurses in hospital, then such assumptions are part of the interpreter’s general schematic knowledge (most people have similar ideas connected with

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hospital and being in hospital, especially if they have happened to be patients). Literary texts greatly stimulate the reader’s inferencing abilities, but we have to remember that inferencing unstated meaning is always a combination of stylistics and pragmatics (using schematic knowledge, extracting presuppositions and recognising how maxims are broken in communication). Schema theory has been extensively used in narratology, for instance, story schemata are defined as the readers’ knowledge of the general structure of stories (see Emmott et al. 2014: 270). What is more interesting from an analytical point of view, though, is how authors play with their readers’ schemas and how these are broken in fiction for various interpretative effects. I want to present a few examples of how this can be done (examples are taken from Emmott et al. 2014: 274–80). First, schemas can be employed as a means of internal characterisation by showing the character’s assumption-making process and, in this particular case, how the character is jumping to conclusions. The excerpt comes from Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife—we observe a woman making the right inferences about some items she sees in the bathroom cabinet in the house of the man she has been sleeping with: And then I notice that there are two toothbrushes in the white porcelain toothbrush holder. I open the medicine cabinet. Razors, shaving cream, Listerine, Tylenol, aftershave, a blue marble, a toothpick, deodorant on the top shelf. Hand lotion, tampons, a diaphragm case, deodorant, lipstick, a bottle of multivitamins, a tube of spermicide on the bottom shelf. The lipstick is a very dark red. I stand there, holding the lipstick. I feel a little sick. I wonder what she looks like, what her name is. I wonder how long they’ve been going out. (The Time Traveler’s Wife, 21)

Based on the schematic knowledge of the world and male–female relationships, the reader makes the same inferences as the female character in the story. The tampons, the diaphragm case, the lipstick—all these items break the schema expectations about the contents of a man’s cabinet. Both the reader and the character draw conclusions based on

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their schemas concerning female items in a man’s bathroom: (1) the man is in a relationship; (2) the woman who discovers these items in his bathroom is not special, it is just a love affair. The moment the inference is made, the reader understands the character’s emotional reaction to the lipstick (“I feel sick”). The lack of any reference to a female name but a mere personal pronoun she (“I wonder what she looks like”) inevitably leads to the sad conclusion that this character is not the only woman in the man’s life. Writers depend on their readers to make inferences and they reveal their characters’ assumption-making processes to show how the characters think. Here, inferencing on the reader’s part is not only “the backdrop to reading about certain events” but also a reflection of how the inference-making process takes place and how it is activated by fiction (Emmott et al. 2014: 274–75). Another special effect achieved with the use of cross-cultural schemas in fiction is building dystopian perspectives on culture and gender. The genre of political allegories can radically change the reader’s way of thinking or, in stylistic terms, foster schema refreshment. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a text that may have this effect on readers (Emmott et al. 2014: 279). In an excerpt below, the central character and narrator Offred (here still unnamed) is a sexual slave living in a patriarchal and totalitarian Republic of Gilead with no privileges or access to education. Her only role in this alternative world is bearing children. She is made to wear a long red penitential outfit and has her face partly covered. She is watching a group of tourists who are dressed differently than herself: [The tourists] look around, bright-eyed, cocking their heads to one side like robins, their very cheerfulness aggressive, and I can’t help staring. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen skirts that short on women. The skirts reach just below the knee and the legs come out from beneath them, nearly naked in their thin stockings, blatant, the high-heeled shoes with their straps attached to the feet like delicate instruments of torture. The women teeter on their spiked feet as if on stilts, but off balance; their backs arch at the waist, thrusting the buttocks out. Their heads are uncovered and their hair too is exposed, in all its darkness and sexuality. They wear lipstick, red, outlining the dark cavities of their mouths, like scrawls on a washroom wall, of the time below.

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I stop walking. Ofglen stops beside me and I know that she cannot take her eyes off these women. We are fascinated but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this. Then I think: I used to dress like that. That was freedom. Westernized , they used to call it. (The Handmaid’s Tale, 38–39)

To correctly interpret this fragment, the readers have to be familiar with the schematic knowledge of Western women’s attire, which has been defamiliarised here through the focaliser’s (I-narrator’s) eyes (Emmott et al. 2014: 279). Offred’s alternative perspective on female clothes is indicated by value-laden adjectives (“aggressive”, “naked”, “blatant”, “repelled”, “dark” and “undressed”), which show her lack of understanding, shock and disgust that women can dress like this. Simultaneously, the reader infers how many limitations she must come across as a woman in Gilead and how unhappy her life must be. The colour red (“red lipstick”) and the reference to robins (an allusion to cheerful, touristy behaviour) as well as her mentioning of high heels as “delicate instruments of torture” and low-level literacy as in “scrawls on a washroom wall” offer the readers many ideas on the fate of women in oppressive states and their life under authoritarian regimes (Emmott et al. 2014: 279). The literary text is believed to be schema refreshing because it encourages the reader to “update, change, or transform their existing schemata” (Emmott et al. 2014: 273);—here by presenting an alternative viewpoint through focalisation, which undeniably clashes with most readers’ “westernised” views on female fashion. Emmott et al. (2014: 279–80) underline the fact that schema theory “is a core theory in stylistics since it has been used to explain a broad range of phenomena including the essential elements of text processing, genre distinctions, fictional world construction, and an extensive list of special effects including defamiliarization”.

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3.3.3 Stylistics, Point of View and Speech and Thought Presentation It is hard not to agree with McIntyre (2004: 140) when he claims that literary critics, narratologists and linguists who analyse fictional texts have been used to discussing points of view in fiction in strictly narratological terms. However, fictional narratives with their heavy focus on the telling mode (diegesis) are also a form of communication, involving a speaker (narrator or character) and an addressee (reader or narratee). To follow Short, the “narrative viewpoint, to be properly understood, needs […] to be situated within a broader account of viewpoint in language and communication” (Short 1999: 313), as a point of view is generally present in many uses of language, for example, written and spoken, literary and non-literary (McIntyre 2004: 140). In narratological studies of English-speaking circles, it is common to talk about point of view in terms of the narrative perspective to make a distinction between an internal and external perspective or the reflector mode and narrator mode respectively. The internal perspective offers “a view from within” or a restricted point of view based on a particular character’s knowledge and subjective perceptions; the character whose single perspective is provided in the story is known as the reflector figure. The external perspective is an “outside (and unrestricted) view of the fictional world”, which coincides with the omniscient narrator’s perspective. The external perspective can be also referred to as the extradiegetic level of the narrative and the internal perspective functions as the diegetic level of the story (Fludernik 2009: 37). In addition, Gérard Genette (1980) introduced a new premise in the theory of point of view—a distinction between the narrative mode (“who sees”) and voice (“who speaks”), which are closely connected to focalisation (Genette 1980: 106). Zero focalisation resembles authorial narration—the narrator is above the world of action and knows more than the characters, s/he can see into the characters’ minds or change locations; it is associated with the unrestricted point of view, as in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Internal focalisation is restricted to a single character’s perspective (that of the narrator’s or the character’s); the author can use one narrator/focaliser to tell a story or multiple

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focalisers to enable the reader to interpret the story from many perspectives, as in Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. In the external focalisation, the narrator is outside the characters’ consciousness and the focaliser’s view (narrator’s or the character’s) is limited to external facts only—the narrator focuses on visible, external aspects of events and characters in the narrative and does not impart any information as to characters’ thoughts or feelings, but merely relates physically ascertainable facts to the reader, as in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (Genette 1980: 189–94 and Fludernik 2009: 38). There are four types of points of view, devised by Boris Uspensky (1973), whose taxonomy is still in use in the contemporary narratological studies of fiction. Neary in her stylistic discussion of point of view recalls Uspensky’s classification and confirms that “point of view can operate on a number of different planes” (Neary 2014: 176), such as spatial, temporal, ideological and psychological. The spatial point of view is the narrator’s viewing position and it can be defined in its most literal sense—it describes the spatial location of the narrator (Uspensky 1973: 57–58). It has a close connection with film and the visual arts because it refers to the “‘camera angle’ adopted by a text” (Neary 2014: 177), for example, a bird’s-eye-view perspective or a close-up-like perception offered by the narrator. The temporal point of view concerns the flow of time as it is perceived by the narrator; it is “the impression which a reader gains of events moving rapidly or slowly, in a continuous chain or isolated segments” (see Fowler 1996: 127). Among the temporal viewpoint techniques, we can distinguish prolepsis (flashforwards), analepsis (flashbacks) and narrative gaps. The ideological point of view is how the text conveys some ideological beliefs through the character, the narrator or the author, though these beliefs need not be condoned by the author (Uspensky 1973: 11–12). Ideology is present at least to some level in all texts through the depiction of a particular type of the story world and the choice of the genre, as well as it is represented in the linguistic layer of the text (Neary 2014: 177). Finally, the psychological point of view indicates how a narrative can be filtered through a single character’s or narrator’s consciousness or perception (Uspensky 1973: 83–84). Let us consider Neary’s (2014: 177) scenario of two friends sitting in a room and describing the colour of the carpet—much as one of them

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describes the carpet as “blue”, the other one calls it “cerulean blue”. Both statements, Neary claims, are equally true, and the differences in labelling the colour of the carpet stem from the fact that each of the two persons in the room is a separate individual with differing sets of attitudes, values and knowledge systems. Importantly, the depictions of the spatial and temporal point of view can be analysed as the representations of the character’s (or narrator’s) psychological viewpoint as this character’s knowledge, views and beliefs will have an impact on their understanding and thus their representation of the spatio-temporal point of view. Neary (2014: 178) also notes that different types of points of view can be adequately described in fiction employing stylistic techniques such as linguistic indicators of viewpoint and speech and thought presentation.

3.3.3.1 Linguistic Indicators of Viewpoint As was argued above, point of view is an integral part of discourse relations in the novel, as every story is always told from a certain perspective: the narrator’s, the character’s or both. But, it is vital to pay attention to some “small-scale linguistic choices” (Short 1996: 263) made by authors to help them control the point of view in the narrative. Short (1996: 264–86) enumerates eight linguistic devices which are indicative of the manipulation of viewpoint in fiction. These include: (a) schema-oriented language—participants’ background knowledge and expectations influencing their different viewpoints on the same situation, which they activate to understand this situation; reader’s schemas would then be the different expectations they bring along to understand a story; (b) valueladen expressions—the narrator chooses how to describe a given object or character, using words (adjectives) which are evaluative in nature and give readers an idea about the narrator’s approach, for example, their approval or lack of approval; (c) given vs. new information—indicates how information is “packaged” by the speaker and points at the level of familiarity of the speaker with the subject (and often employs the distinction between indefinite and definite articles for introducing new and given information respectively); (d) indicators of a particular character’s thoughts and perceptions—achieved by the choice of either

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the verbs relating to perception/cognition (“see”, “think”, “imagine”) or to factivity (“believe”, “pretend”), which shows the truth status of a given situation and the speaker’s recognition of it; (e) deixis—pointing expressions (“this”, “that”, “here”, “there”), which indicate the speaker’s closeness or distance from their world; (f ) social deixis—titles, terms of address, which indicate the speaker’s closeness or remoteness towards other characters; (g) sequencing and organisation of actions and events to indicate viewpoint—including deictic expressions and verbs of cognition; (h) ideological viewpoint—the way in which indicators can be combined “interpretatively”; this is less connected with the speaker’s spatial and temporal location and more with their “mind-set” or “outlook on the world” as an individual. Linguistic indicators of viewpoint will be presented on specific examples in the analytical part of the book.

3.3.3.2 Speech and Thought Presentation: Free Indirect Speech (FIS) and Free Indirect Thought (FIT) FIS and FIT (also known as FID or “free indirect discourse”) function as essential stylistic devices in fictional analysis. Free indirect speech is a mode of expression in the third-person narration in fiction, in which the narrator provides the narratee with a direct representation of their character’s words and opinions using indirect speech (IS), which, however, is devoid of a reporting clause of the kind: “She said that” (IS) or “She thought that” (IT). To afford more clarity, let us consider the following examples (Short 1996: 286), which show what grammatical and stylistic processes take place when direct speech (DS) is transformed into indirect speech (IS). The very same processes occur when direct thought (DT) is expressed in terms of indirect thought (IT). DS (Direct Speech) → IS (Indirect Speech) A. “Oh, Oliver please clear up this mess you have just made!” Ermintude demanded. (DS) B. Ermintude demanded that Oliver should clear up the mess he had just made. (IS)

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DT (Direct Thought) → IT (Indirect Thought) C. She wondered, “Why do these types always pick out me to ask? Hell!”. (DT) D. She wondered why those types always picked out her to ask. (IT) In sentence B, which is expressed in indirect speech (IS), the reported clause (“that Oliver should clear up the mess he had just made”) is subordinated to the reporting clause (“Ermintude demanded that”). The same situation is for the reported clause in indirect thought (IT) in sentence D: the reported clause (“why those types always picked out her to ask”) is in a subordinate position to the reporting clause (“She wondered why”). All colourful expressions and interjections by the direct speaker from DS (or thinker from DT) as in sentence C (“Hell!”) do not naturally carry over into an indirect speech or indirect thought version. Quotation marks indicating the reported clause are also gone in IT and IS. Often, the markers of time, place or deictic markers of distance change in indirect speech to reflect the narrator’s perspective. For example, the phrase “this mess” from sentence A in the direct speech was neutralised into “the mess” in indirect speech;—in other words, the speaker’s perspective in A is closer than the reporting agent’s perspective in B. In the same way, the phrase “these types” from sentence C becomes “those types” in D to indicate that the reporting agent is further from the deictic centre of events than the original speaker. Tenses are backshifted in IS and IT, that is, in the indirect speech and thought account the tense needs to be consistent with the tense of the reporting clause, as in B: “Ermintude demanded that Oliver should clear up the mess he had just made”. Finally, no inversion is present in questions reported in the indirect speech or indirect thought mode as in D (“She wondered why those types always picked out her to ask”)—with no question mark following. Short (1996: 306) notes that free indirect speech (FIS) has certain grammatical characteristics of indirect speech (IS) but it still retains the “production flavour” of the original speech through stylistic and deictic properties. In this way, the sentence expressed in FIS in the narrator’s account will resemble indirect speech, but it will not retain the reporting clause and it will, on many occasions, preserve the deictic expressions

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from the originally reported clause (DS). In the following sentence from Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, the reporting agent uses the deixis of the originally produced utterance in direct speech: “this year” instead of “that year”—as would be expected from the typical IS account (Short 1996: 308): Bar said that he was told (as everyone is told, though who tells them and why will forever remain a mystery) that there was to be no wall fruit this year. (Little Dorrit, 562)

In the same way, the free indirect thought (FIT) account in fiction is a combination of indirect thought and direct thought deictic markers. Short gives an example from a Julian Barnes novel: It was a provocation, that’s what it was, thought the Colonel. Here he was on his deathbed, preparing for oblivion, and she sits over there reading Parson Noah’s latest pamphlet. (A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, 143)

The reported clauses in the first sentence and the first half of the second sentence are in FIT as they combine both IT and DT features (Short 1996: 315); the tense has not been changed either (“and she sits over there”). Thanks to FIT, the reader feels closer to the character and sympathises with his viewpoint, or, at least, is more likely to understand it. The free indirect discourse allows the narrator to shape and manipulate the reader’s view of their character. For example, the free indirect mode was extensively used by Jane Austen in Emma. Austen’s heroine, Emma Woodhouse, when seen “from the outside” (Booth 1961 : 245), presented to the reader by a reliable narrator via direct and indirect speech, seems an unpleasant character—wealthy and bored, she is looking for entertainment and involves herself in the business of meddling and matchmaking. The reader’s attitude changes when they view the world through Emma’s own eyes; in the novel, she reports on her own experience as a kind of narrator, in the third person, which is

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how Jane Austen maintains sympathy for her character despite Emma’s faults (Booth 1961 : 245–46). Booth says: […] any sustained inside view, of whatever depth, temporarily turns the character whose mind is shown into a narrator; inside views are thus subject to variations in all of the qualities we have described above [the level of distance from the reader and characters, privilege of obtaining an inside view of another character], and most importantly in the degree of unreliability. Generally speaking, the deeper our [readers’] plunge, the more unreliability we will accept without loss of sympathy. (Booth 1961 : 164)

Free indirect speech in fiction can be used to convey the character’s “inside views” (Booth 1961 : 164) and their worldview, which will always be subjective because the character is always limited by their point of view. The “inside views” of a single character conveyed through free indirect speech enable the narrator to recount the character’s words and retain some idiomatic qualities of the character’s speech at the same time. Louise Flavin notes that free indirect speech is used to “create the effect of heightened feelings” and “intensify” or “dramatize the character’s words”, which cannot be achieved through a direct speech where the character’s words stand on their own, without the narrator’s modifications (Flavin 1991: 51). By choosing the free indirect discourse for Emma’s speech and thoughts that describe her failures of perception, Austen distances herself from her heroine emotionally, morally and intellectually. Through free indirect speech and thought, the narrator can guide the reader’s response to the character and shape the level of the reader’s sympathy for this character. Short (1996: 315) claims that FIT and FIS can have markedly different effects on narration. Free indirect thought makes us feel closer to the character and sympathise with their views because we find ourselves inside their head as they think. Free indirect speech creates a more distancing effect between the character and the narratee and can be used by the narrator as “a vehicle for irony” (Short 1996: 315). Both FIS and FIT can be employed to analyse fictional communication on the intradiegetic and extradiegetic levels, which I demonstrate in Chapters 4 and 5.

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Ian McEwan: The Stylistic Tradition in Fiction

McEwan’s works have been given a lot of critical attention in the field of literary studies (see Childs 2006; Dobrogoszcz 2018; Head 2007; Malcolm 2002; Ryan 1994; Wells 2010). The linguistic analyses of McEwan’s fiction adopt a stylistic perspective or, to be more precise, a cognitive stylistic approach, which lies at the interface of cognitive science, linguistics and literary studies. McEwan’s characters and the plot in his novels are usually discussed within the framework of the theory of mind style, metaphor and cognitive grammar. The cognitive approach adopted by stylisticians can be reflected in the literary analyses of his fiction. Psychological and moral problems in McEwans’ early works have been discussed by many literary scholars, such as Kiernan Ryan, who claimed that McEwan’s secret as a writer lies in his “stylish morbidity” and in his “elegant detachment with which he chronicled acts of sexual abuse, sadistic torment and pure insanity” (Ryan 1994: 2). Dobrogoszcz in his psychoanalytical study of McEwan’s oeuvre highlighted the fact that not only in his early works did the novelist offer “introspective examinations of the human psyche” but also in the two last decades of the twentieth century he created protagonists who are “well-balanced but internally perturbed” (Dobrogoszcz 2018: 4). In general, literary scholars and critics agree that McEwan’s readers have to be engaged in an ethical debate with the author (Dobrogoszcz 2018: 2 and Head 2007: 2), and this requires putting oneself in the shoes of the characters and understanding their state of mind. Rocío Montoro in her stylistic analysis of Enduring Love, the novel and the film, demonstrates how stylistics can shed light on the way multimodal discourse functions and how including multimodal formats can “refine” (Montoro 2011: 69) stylistic frameworks and models. Mind style is a textual phenomenon used to describe the fictional mind’s psychological and cognitive makeup. In her study of the novel, Montoro relies on Fowler’s (1996) verbal representations of mind style, such as the character’s vocabulary or syntactic structures, which build up “the ideational structure of the text” that serves as the linguistic projection of the workings of fictional minds: “the world-view of an author, or a narrator, or a

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character” (Fowler 1996: 214). She looks at the novel’s plot and the main character of Joe Rose who, after the balloon incident, develops “a posttraumatic mind style” (Montoro 2011: 70), which results in his changed behaviour and way of thinking. Montoro argues that his transformation is marked by “the state of constant confusion [and] uncertainty” (Montoro 2011: 72), which is linguistically expressed through epistemic modality indicating a low level of confidence, and can be conveyed through modal verbs, e.g. “could”, “may”, “must”, and through modal technical verbs, e.g. “think”, “suppose”, “believe”. Jed Parry, a stranger whose life path crosses with that of Joe’s due to the accident, develops an unhealthy obsession with Joe, which is described as erotomania or de Clérambault syndrome (delusional or paranoid behaviour, which results from an individual’s belief that another person is infatuated with them). Montoro notes that Jed’s paranoia lacks epistemic quality (the degree of the speaker’s certainty about the truthfulness of their words), which is replaced by his use of “evaluative adjectives”, “verbs of knowledge” and the so-called verba sentiendi (words denoting feelings, thoughts and perceptions, which indicate the speaker’s subjective point of view). In Montoro’s view, they all emphasise the personal and biased position of the speaker, especially in Parry’s letters to Rose, which show Jed’s conviction that Joe loves him through his use of, e.g. “I feel happiness, the blessedness of love”, or evaluative adjective “strange” alongside verbs of knowledge, such as “knew” and “recognised” (Montoro 2011: 73–74). In the second part of her analysis, Montoro looks at what she calls “cinematic mind style indicators” (Montoro 2011: 81) as part of the multimodal realisations of mind style, and how gestures can encode mind style in the film. The iconicity of Parry’s gestures, enhanced via close-ups or his stalking behaviour, which is portrayed differently in the novel and the film, highlights “the suffocating presence” (Montoro 2011: 81) of Parry and his harassment of Joe. Montoro’s analysis of the film medium supports the theory that stylistic phenomena, such as mind style, can be manifested in formats other than the written format. Marco Caracciolo’s analysis of McEwan’s Saturday discusses internally focalised narration in terms of phenomenological metaphors based on Semino and Swindlehurst’s (1996) approach to metaphor and mind style. He argues that metaphorical language plays a role in readers’ engagement

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with fiction; specifically that it may evoke the reader’s empathy towards the character. He claims that phenomenological metaphors convey to readers “the qualitative ‘feel’ of characters’ experiences” (Caracciolo 2013: 60) and, thus, sustain the readers’ illusion of experiencing the story world through the consciousness of a fictional character. In other words, the metaphors invite the reader to take on the focalising agent’s experiential perspective and worldview; they create an illusion that the reader has “an almost unmediated access to the conscious experience of the focalising character” (Caracciolo 2013: 61). Henry Perowne, the protagonist in the novel, creates a mental simulation of his perspective through metaphors, which allows the reader to intercept his point of view and put themselves in his shoes. Caracciolo (2013: 62) notes that events in the story are interwoven with the character’s sensations and memories, and range from post-9/11 world politics to his precarious imaginings and thoughts on life and death. Henry’s phenomenological metaphors resemble similes because they are likely to involve a comparison, that is, they share the same basic cognitive mechanism known as cross-domain mapping or a mapping between two conceptual domains (Caracciolo 2013: 62). For example, at the end of Saturday, Henry comes back in his memories to the past day and his encounter with Baxter; his internally focalised narration abounds in the phenomenological metaphors which are combined with the character’s sensations. The passage describing Henry’s exhaustion produces a sensation of motion which, in turn, leads to the simile: he is turning “like the Eye” (a reference to the Ferris wheel on the south bank of the Thames). The cross-domain mapping here is a comparison of the character’s physical sensation to a symbolic and culturally loaded image of the wheel, a symbol of the passage of time. Also, Henry’s enjoyment of the view at the highest point of the Ferris wheel further develops the simile and presents the wheel as the Earth, “thrusting the character forward into a new day” (Caracciolo 2013: 71). The metaphor of the wheel provides a novel perspective on the target domain (Henry’s physical sensation) and conveys his state of mind—Henry’s “quiet confidence in front of forces that seem to tower above any human being’s efforts” (Caracciolo 2013: 71). This study shows how phenomenological metaphors can connect the character’s present mental state and his background of experiences and values. Moreover, they invite the reader

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not only to imagine the “pre-verbal experience of characters” (which is usually achieved through metaphorical language) but also to adopt the characters’ “epistemological and axiological perspective on the world”, with high chances of evoking the reader’s sympathy through engagement with the character “at a higher level” (Caracciolo 2013: 72). Karam Nayebpour in his book Mind Presentation in Ian McEwan’s Fiction employs concepts and theories from cognitive narratology based on Palmer (2004) to discuss the presentation of consciousness in Amsterdam, Atonement and On Chesil Beach. He claims that the central narrative concern in McEwan’s novels is “the characters’ mental functioning” (Nayebpour 2017: 26), which he describes using mind representation. The characters’ fictional minds for Nayebpour are the product of the stylistic analysis on both the level of the story and the discourse level of the narrative (Nayebpour 2017: 39–40). In his postclassical approach to the study of narrative, he often uses speech and thought presentation and the concepts of “intermental” (society-oriented) and “intramental” (individual-oriented) thought. For example, he claims that the key mental characteristic of the thirteen-year-old focaliser Briony in Atonement is her “intramental” thought that predominates over the “intermental” minds of others (Cecilia, Robbie), as Briony wants to impose mental order on her surroundings. “It was Robbie, wasn’t it?”, says Briony when she convinces herself that it was Robbie she saw “raping” her cousin Lola. Briony’s autonomy and her “intramental”, selforiented perception lead her to think that it was him she saw that night, although she was never sure of it (Nayebpour 2017: 219). According to Nayebpour, the invented story of Robbie and Cecilia is Briony’s attempt at “restor[ing] the disrupted intermental bond between them”, and her whole writing project is “an attempt to find atonement” (Nayebpour 2017: 181). Nayebpour’s analysis demonstrates that the world of adult characters is “intermental”, for example, Emily, who understands it all; whereas the world of children is “intramental”, as they go against the real-world order, for example, Briony, who tends to reconstruct/rewrite the same scene following her own perceptions. Importantly, judging by the focalising character of Briony, we can say that “intermentality is a learnable character trait” (Nayebpour 2017: 181) since, with time and

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experience, the seventy-seven-year-old narrator Briony puts “intermentality” first (Nayebpour 2017: 177–78) when she decides to confess her dilemmas as a human being and author of fiction to the reader. In his analysis of Amsterdam, Nayebpour shows a reverse pattern, which is a passage from “intermental” to “intramental” minds. The novel is a story of two friends, an eminent composer Clive Linley, and a well-known newspaper editor Vernon Halliday, who form a mutual euthanasia pact in case of the other’s terminal illness. Their disagreements over the issues they share destroy their social lives and lead to a disintegration of their old friendship which, in turn, leads to double murder—they poison each other in Amsterdam. According to Nayebpour, the destruction of their relationship is caused by Clive’s and Vernon’s “different moral understandings besides their intermental as well as intramental preferences” (Nayebpour 2017: 93). First, they disagree about Vernon’s decision to publish Joe Garmony’s transvestite photos with Molly, a former lover of them both, in Vernon’s newspaper The Judge. “We’ll continue to give him a hard time”—are Vernon’s words reflecting his self-interested desire for revenge on a politician, who also slept with Molly. Vernon disguises his “intentional intramentality” and “egocentrism” (Nayebpour 2017: 152) under the pretext of preventing Garmony, the indecent and pervert politician, from running for the ruling party’s leadership. Vernon’s “intramentality shows itself ” (Nayebpour 2017: 158) fully in his newspaper’s publishing of the discrediting photographs, which not only ends Garmony’s political career but also destroys Vernon’s reputation as an editor. Nayebpour provides examples in a free indirect discourse that reveal Vernon’s subjectivity while making decisions in the name of public interest, and his “intramental perceptions regardless of the feelings of others” (Nayebpour 2017: 174). Another bone of contention is Clive’s indifferent (according to Vernon) reaction to a fight between a woman and a man at the lake, which was later identified as the Lakeland rape. Clive avoids doing what is right and convinces himself that what he sees is only a row between lovers and that intervening is not his business. Also, he believes that it is his duty as a composer to finish his new musical piece, and his walk at the lake is the time to be used wisely—he should be looking for inspiration instead of distractions. Here also we can notice Clive’s “intramental propensities” (Nayebpour

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2017: 114) embedded in his consciousness, which harms the character’s professional career and his friendship with Vernon. The analysis of On Chesil Beach captures the mental functioning of the characters of Edward and Florence through free indirect thought and qualia. Nayebpour follows Herman’s argument about fiction writing and claims that “a narrative is impossible without representation of experientiality, even if for minimum degrees” (Nayebpour 2017: 85). He uses qualia, a concept from the philosophy of mind, which is an impression of the real experience in fiction, or “what it feels like” to be a given character. Herman defines qualia as “felt, subjective properties of mental states” (Herman 2009: 143) or “states of felt, subjective (or firstperson) awareness attendant upon consciousness” (Herman 2009: 145), which are experienced by the reader and are the necessary condition of narrative fiction. Nayebpour claims that the characters’ conflicts in the novel are close to the readers’ real-world knowledge and experience (Nayebpour 2017: 229); it is through qualia and free indirect thought in the embedded narratives that readers have direct access to the fictional minds and know “what it feels like” to be Edward or Florence. Edward Mayhew is an affectionate graduate student of history and Florence Ponting is a gifted violinist, whose married life ends in a disaster before it starts. Due to their different backgrounds, family lives or preconceptions about love and sex, they are unable to consummate their marriage on their wedding night. Nayebpour calls this story “a narrative of unfortunate misreadings” (Nayebpour 2017: 225) and explains how Edward and Florence’s “intermental unit” (Nayebpour 2017: 225) is broken by each character’s “(un)conscious and egoistical pursu[ing] their own intramental thoughts and plans” (Nayebpour 2017: 226). Nayebpour tries to answer the question “Who is to blame?” in stylistic terms, looking at inferences, presuppositions and the point of view of both characters in the story. He believes that Edward is less keen on maintaining his “intermental” relationship with Florence because of his “patriarchal mind” which forces him to pursue his sexual desires (Nayebpour 2017: 275). Florence takes more trouble understanding Edward and chooses not to offend him “to help their delicate intermental activity to go on” (Nayebpour 2017: 296). Still, her internal conflict between love and sex seems too hard to handle: “Where he merely suffered conventional

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first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness” (On Chesil Beach, 7). Nayebpour’s study of McEwan demonstrates how cognitive narratology can establish a link between narrative (a story), mind (or consciousness) and narrativity. Harrison in her book Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction uses concepts from Langacker’s (2008) Cognitive Grammar Theory (CG) to discuss, among others, some representative examples of British and American novels, for instance, Enduring Love by Ian McEwan or The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. She employs various stylistic theories, such as Text World Theory (TWT), Schema Theory and Deictic Shift Theory, which all operate within the cognitive grammar framework. In her analysis of contemporary fiction, she looks at how the same situation can be conceived and portrayed in alternate ways in the story via “construal operations” or “types of focal adjustments instantiated through particular linguistic cues” (Harrison 2017: 15). Construal serves as an organising frame for her cognitive-linguistic analysis of literature and, according to the cognitive grammar approach, there are four classes of construal phenomena, or how the text draws the reader’s attention to significant meanings through its lexis, grammar and syntax. First, linguistic constructions can show varying levels of specificity, that is, how detailed or how vague a description is. For example, a progression from more “schematic” to more specific lexical choices (e.g. thing > object > book > picture book > the brightly coloured graphic novel ) is described as elaboration. Focusing is based on selecting specific conceptual content or foregrounding and backgrounding certain elements of description. The operation of prominence works similarly to metonymy as it involves profiling—the conceptualiser’s attention is drawn to the “base” of the conceptual content through the “substructure”, e.g. when the utterance mentions a “page” or “spine” of the book, it simultaneously provides a reference to the object (book). Finally, perspective refers to the narrator or focaliser of the scene, connecting the viewer with the scene being viewed (Harrison 2017: 15). In the cognitive grammar framework, the idea of perspective is explained through grounding, a “semantic function” that positions the ground of a linguistic construction through explicitly signposted deictic markers, tense, modality (overt grounding ) or through a less explicit linguistic description (covert grounding ). In

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other words, it situates the speaker and the hearer, or writer and reader, within a particular viewing arrangement and establishes how they “are in some way connected to an expression” (see Bennett 2014: 35; Harrison 2017: 16). Grounding may also indicate the importance of either the conceptualiser or the object of conceptualisation through varying levels of subjectivity and objectivity of linguistic constructions (Harrison 2017: 17). Action chains in CG refer to archetypal roles or grammatical relationships in a sentence that result from the selection of a particular verb. To use Langacker’s metaphor of a billiards ball game, verbs in a sentence, similarly to billiard balls, possess “energy”, which can be transferred from one entity (verb) to the next. The displacement of energy through verb choices activates an action chain in language. The archetypal roles discussed by Harrison include, for example, an agent, the subject in the sentence, which is an energy source, and an object, which undergoes a change of state and is referred to as an energy sink. Some roles are an inherent source of kinetic energy in the sentence (agent, mover ) and others need a transfer of energy from another entity (experiencer, patient ) (Harrison 2017: 18–19). Harrison uses grounding and action chains to characterise the narration and point of view in one of the most pivotal scenes in Enduring Love, the moment of the balloon accident. She notes that despite the extradiegetic narrator’s adoption of an objective perspective, Joe’s account of the “event” is mediated through a subjective filter. His intradiegetic (subjective) point of view in the narrative is “consistently profiled through grounding mechanisms” (Harrison 2017: 36). Her analysis is not that concerned with the reader’s alignment with the narrator, but it focuses on the text’s structure and how McEwan’s language stylistically reflects the impressions of urgency, dynamicity and pace. The passage from the novel shows two text world platforms: the platform grounded in Joe’s present in which he is narrating the story (TW1) and the platform set in the past, which indicates the time of the accident (TW2). The text world of the first platform suggests that some time has passed between the speaker’s present ground and the time of the balloon accident, which gives time for the speaker’s “obsessive re-examination” of what happened. TW2 forms the attentional focus of the passage, but the experience is outside of the immediate scope of the conceptualiser. Much as the events

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described are “outside the ground” of the narrator, Joe “re-imagine[s]” and “re-experience[s]” the scene via different viewing platforms, which he creates through deictic shifts in perspective. Joe mixes the points of view belonging to different deictic centres, for example, he moves from the first-person narration to the bird’s-eye view perspective (“through the eyes of the buzzard we had watched earlier”), to Clarissa’s perspective (she “was well-placed as an observer”), to multiple agents (“What were we running toward?”). Joe’s “re-experiencing” of the event suggests that his perspective remains either “explicitly on-stage” (Joe speaks from his grounded position in TW1) or “implicit[ly] and more off-stage” (other viewpoints presented within TW2). The discussed passage is said to outline “an egocentric viewing arrangement” (Langacker 1987: 488–89; Harrison 2017: 37). Also, we can see a variation of “force intensity” of the archetypal roles in the passage: the high energy verbs (“running”, “racing”, “sprinting”) are distributed among the experiencer roles, which are many. The agents shift from being focused on the first-person (“I was running”) to identifying a collective agent (“five men running silently”), zooming in on two agents, Jed Parry and Clarissa, to finally focusing on a first-person plural agent (“We were running toward a catastrophe”). However, the forceful action chains conflict with Joe’s metaphorical language, which creates “a sense of conceptual remoteness” between Joe and his description (Harrison 2017: 46). For example, he refers to the “aftermath” of an incident as a “growth”, thus opening up two metaphorical dominions: medicine and farming, as in “The aftermath, the second crop, the growth promoted by that first cut in May” (Harrison 2017: 42). Finally, grounding predications in the passage tend to shift from more specific to less specific/indefinite, as in the event > the fall > a balloon > a catastrophe (Harrison 2017: 45). Harrison notes that varying levels of specificity and shift in perspective are, on the one hand, supposed to show Joe as an objective, scientific narrator, but, on the other hand, they reveal his attitude (“obsessive re-examination” of the scene). This, together with his metaphorical language permeating the passage indicates that “subjective construal is inevitable” in fiction (Harrison 2017: 47). Louise Nuttall analyses fictional representations of real experience and the “authenticity effects” of the Second World War in Atonement using

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Langacker’s (2008) cognitive grammar framework and Fowler’s (1996) theory of mind style. She classifies the terms “real” and “authentic” as perceived qualities or readerly impressions of texts and investigates how the text’s stylistics (mind style) can evoke such impressions in the readers. She claims that “authenticity effects” in fiction “contribute to the persuasive and emotional power of narratives for readers” (Nuttall 2019: 22). Based on readers’ responses to the novel, Nuttall argues that the linguistic choices which characterise Robbie Turner’s mind style in Part Two of the novel contribute to conflicting impressions of realism and authenticity during first and second readings (Nuttall 2019: 221). On the one hand, the “immediacy” of Robbie’s war experience and the narrative focus on the speed and intensity of successive impressions passing through his mind lead the reader into experiencing the trauma of war alongside this character. “Immediacy” heightens the sense of realism in the fictional soldier’s mind style. Certain linguistic patterns invite the reader to focus attention “narrowly on events through time”, for example, the conceptual import of the progressive (“were not reaching”, “was advancing”, “rattling”, “hitting”) together with references to specific portions of time (“precisely at the moment”, “seconds before”) can restrict the narrative perspective and zoom in on Robbie’s intensity of experience (Nuttall 2019: 224). On the other hand, certain syntactic choices and “delayed lexicalisation” in Robbie’s account (e.g. his construal of the enemy plane) reflect his slow processing of the experience, thus contributing to a “dreamlike” or “detached” quality of the narrative (Nuttall 2019: 225– 26). Robbie’s psychological trauma and his physical deterioration are construed in a more objective, “detached” way through the use of thirdperson pronouns and the third-person witness account, as in: “It was his mind. […] the humdrum element that held him where he was in his own story, faded from his view, abandoning him to a waking dream” (Nuttall 2019: 228). Importantly, Nuttall notes that McEwan’s novel undercuts its authenticity: the impression of the first-hand experience of war viewed through the focalising character’s consciousness at first reading gives way to an alternative attribution of this construal to the narrator’s or even the author’s mind style at second reading through Briony’s third-person reconstruction. In this way, the novel asks vital questions about the ethics and legitimacy of war narration. Much as Briony’s account of Robbie’s

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time at war is legitimised (as a civilian participant in the war), the implied author’s fully fictional account is less credible or legitimised. Still, Nuttall (2019: 231) claims that McEwan’s fictional adaptation of unpublished letters of soldiers and nurses from the Imperial War Museum can be seen as giving voice to numerous individuals who experienced the war and, thus, carries legitimacy.

3.5

Summary

The chapter has defined key narratological notions of an “implied author” and “implied reader”, which will be employed to characterise fictional communication in McEwan’s works. It has highlighted the fact that neither the “implied author” nor the “implied reader” has a status of a real person and each notion should be understood in terms of a construct. Much as the implied author can be considered the author’s “second self ” (Booth 1961 : 73)—after all, the implied author is the agent who created the text and is responsible for what we read, we should not confuse the implied author with the real author’s figure. Similarly, the implied reader is a type of reader who will have a particular response to the writer’s work, it is the kind of reader whose existence is assumed by the author. The chapter offers a pragma-stylistic perspective on author-reader communication in fiction. When the author and the reader share the same values and ethical norms and when their communication is based on cooperation, this state of affairs is called “the politeness of the literary fiction”. However, when the author violates the reader’s moral norms and ethical standards directly or through implication, and their fiction acts as a potential face threat to its addressee, this situation is called “the impoliteness of the literary fiction”. McEwan’s fiction displays significant potential for extradiegetic impoliteness, which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. The theoretical discussion in this chapter leads to an introduction to pragmatic stylistics, which originated in the 1970s and which owes a lot to some important publications in this field (see Leech 1983; Leech and Short 1981; Pratt 1977). A brief history of stylistics studies has been presented based on Sotirova (2016a), who has noted that stylistics as

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a discipline borrowed concepts from the Russian Formalists but it has developed a far less formalist view of the literary language. For stylisticians, the language of literature should be described using the same linguistic methodologies and approaches as an everyday language, such as the speech act theory or Grice’s maxims of conversation. The later part of the chapter outlines the main stylistic theories used in the analysis, for example, Schema Theory, Point of View Theory and Speech and Thought Presentation. As noted at the end of this chapter, stylisticians have been interested in describing McEwan’s fiction mostly using the cognitive approach to aid literary characterisation. For example, Montoro (2011) utilises the theory of mind style and multimodality for her description of the protagonist in Enduring Love. Caracciolo (2013) discusses focalisation and point of view in Saturday based on the theory of mind style and metaphor. Nayebpour (2017) analyses Amsterdam, Atonement and On Chesil Beach employing cognitive narratology (mind representation) and the free indirect style to account for the characters’ motifs and behaviour (I use Nayebpour’s stylistic analysis in my discussion of Atonement in Chapter 4). Harrison (2017) employs cognitive grammar and point of view theory to characterise the narration in the most crucial scenes in Enduring Love. Nuttall (2019) describes the fictional representation of the real experience of the Second World War in Atonement utilising the cognitive grammar approach and mind style theory. Importantly, neither politeness nor impoliteness theory has ever been used to discuss McEwan’s fiction in terms of language or characterisation. The aim of Part Two is to provide a more comprehensive pragma-stylistic study of his selected novels using (im)politeness on both intradiegetic and extradiegetic levels of analysis.

Notes 1. See Labov (1972: 370). A speech act approach to literature gave analysts a possibility of integrating literary discourse into the same model of language as all other communicative activities by people (Pratt 1977: 88–89). Both Ohmann (1971) and Pratt (1977) laid foundations for a context-dependent theory of literature.

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2. Fludernik (2005: 37) classifies narrative approaches into the so-called “classical narratology”, represented by, e.g. Gerard Prince (1973), Gérard Genette (1972, 1983) or Seymour Chatman (1978, 1986), and a “more progressive approach”, which is represented by the possible worlds theory and media-technology based approaches (Marie-Laure Ryan 1991), the cognitive and cultural studies approach (Ansgar Nünning 1997, 2000), linguistics and conversational analysis (David Herman 1995, 2002), the organicist and historical approach (Monika Fludernik 1996) or the extension of rhetoric and ethics (Wayne C. Booth 1961, 2005; James Phelan 1996). 3. Rimmon-Kenan shares Booth’s (1961) theory, which connects the unreliable narrator with the figure of the implied author. This happens when the reader has the impression that the implied author is communicating with them “behind the first-person narrator’s back”, that is, every time the reader discovers that the narrator is purposefully presented as lacking in credibility. In other words, the reader suspects that the first-person narrator is unreliable because they assume that the implied author holds conflictive views to those held by the first-person narrator (see Fludernik 2009: 27). 4. When asked about autobiographical elements in Herzog, Bellow did not confirm that the book was his autobiography; he only noted that it is hard to give an account of one’s life in fiction. “If you’re asking me if I owned a house in the country and whether my wife kicked me out, etc., I don’t know that that sort of thing is really relevant. I mean, it’s a curiosity about reality which is impure, let’s put it that way. Let’s both be bigger than that” (Cronin and Siegel 1995: 99). 5. “In every corner of our lives, whenever we speak or write, we imply a version of our character that we know is quite different from many other selves that are exhibited in our flesh-and-blood world. Sometimes the created versions of our selves are superior to the selves we live with day by day; sometimes they turn out to be lamentably inferior to the selves we present, or hope to present, on other occasions. A major challenge to all of us is thus to distinguish between beneficial and harmful masking. And that challenge is especially strong in literary criticism” (Booth 2005: 77). 6. The convention of relating to the implied author and other participants of fictional communication in anthropomorphic terms comes from the fact that “they are conceived [by readers] of not as persons but as if they were persons” (O’Neill 1994: 109). Another argument in defence of that

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convention comes from Nelles, who believes that the fictional characters’ using the human language for communication is a good enough justification for anthropomorphisation (Nelles 1997: 13). See also Maziarczyk (2017: 141). 7. Classical narratologists tend to view discourse as the novel’s structure and its narrative expression rather than strictly language. For example, Chatman (1978) views discourse very broadly and includes in it the exponents such as: point of view, free indirect style, type of narration (e.g. overt vs. covert narrators). Genette (1980) sees discourse as narrative order with three categories: tense (the relationship between story time and discourse time); mood (forms of narrative representation) and voice (or how the act of narrating is part of the narrative). Shen (2005: 140) rightly notes that the relation between the grammatical “mood” and narratological “mood” (narrative distance and focalisation) is nothing but metaphorical. The same is with the notion of “voice” (levels and types of narration) in narratology vs. the grammatical category of the active and passive voice—no connection whatsoever. 8. Peter Barry in Beginning Theory claims: “Stylistics makes greater claims to scientific objectivity than does close reading, stressing that its methods and procedures can be learned and applied by all. Hence, its aim is partly the ‘demystification’ of both literature and criticism. Thus, in relation to literature it aims to show […] the continuity between literary language and other forms of written communication. In the case of criticism, it aims to provide a set of procedures which are openly accessible to all, in contrast to the tendency within close reading to stress the need for the critic to develop ‘tact’ and ‘sensitivity’ towards the literary text and avoid spelling out a method or procedure to be followed” (Barry 2009: 202). 9. Stylistics is interested in foregrounded features of texts, that is, parts of text which the writer (consciously or subconsciously) indicates to be important for the reader’s understanding. Short claims that readers often see deviation in the text (parts of the text that stand out because of the syntax, poetry-like rhythm or lexical peculiarities, e.g. neologisms) as its foregrounded feature and interpret these accordingly. He also says that readers react subconsciously to textual deviation (Short 1996: 36–37).

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4 Intradiegetic (Im)politeness or How the (Im)politeness Theory Is Used for Internal Characterisation

4.1

Introduction

Recent years have shown that the analysis of (im)politeness in fiction has been largely conducted by stylisticians (McIntyre and Bousfield 2017: 770) who try to demonstrate how the theory contributes to the development of the plotline and characterisation (see Bousfield 2007; Kizelbach 2014; Simpson 2005)—there are, of course, similar (im)politeness studies produced by pragmaticists (see Culpeper 2001; Jucker 2016). Chapter 2 (Sect. 2.2) of the present book introduced a brief overview of both qualitative and quantitative analyses of (im)politeness in literary fiction conducted by pragmatics and stylistics scholars. This chapter continues the pragma-stylistic approach to (im)politeness in fiction by providing a qualitative analysis of three novels by Ian McEwan to demonstrate how the theory of politeness and impoliteness can be used as a linguistic tool for literary characterisation. This analysis has been inspired by Culpeper’s pragmatic analysis of impoliteness for characterisation in the 1992 film Scent of a Woman, directed by Martin Brest (a re-make of an Italian film Profumo di Donna, 1974). The plot is set in the US and it tells the story of two characters: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 U. Kizelbach, (Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18690-5_4

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Charlie Simms is a student at a prestigious school but, coming from a poor family, he is supported by student aid; the Colonel is an embittered Vietnam War veteran, who lost his sight during the war and requires care, which he finds very hard to accept. Instead of going home for Thanksgiving, Charlie applies for the job of a carer from a job advertisement to financially relieve his family and earn some money—the advertisement was posted by the Colonel’s relatives and Charlie becomes his carer. Straight from the beginning, the Colonel’s behaviour leaves much to be desired, as he is being offensive to the boy and calls him an “idiot” and a “moron” (Culpeper 2001: 256) in their very first meeting. Charlie’s attitude is very polite: he uses the titles “Mister” and “Sir” and tries not to interrupt the veteran as he speaks. This changes, however, when Charlie discovers that the Colonel wants to shoot himself in a hotel room during their trip to New York. To convince the man to put the gun down, Charlie shouts to the Colonel: “You say I’m through, you’re right, I’m through. We’re both through. It’s all over. So let’s get on with it, let’s fucking do it. Let’s fucking […] pull the trigger […] you miserable blind motherfucker” (Culpeper 2001: 260). Culpeper employs impoliteness to show how Charlie evolves as a character—from a proverbial “nice guy”, who might even be thought of as passive or “spineless”, he turns into a real man, full of integrity, who gets the gun and brings about a change in the Colonel (Culpeper 2001: 260–61). Impoliteness characterises the dynamics of the relationship between the characters and, more importantly, it highlights the transformation of the main character Charlie Simms. Similarly, McIntyre and Bousfield (2017: 775–80) use (im)politeness to characterise a scene from the US sitcom Friends, showing how the impolite behaviour of the characters moves the action forward. The following chapter concentrates on the novels Enduring Love, Amsterdam and Atonement and aims at analysing (im)politeness on the (intradiegetic) level of the story, or as is proposed by the chapter’s title, the (im)politeness for characterisation. Through describing the characters’ speech and behaviour, I point out the relationship between impoliteness and immorality, politeness and empathy and the relations between (im)politeness, rationalism and madness. I include both the more traditional, strategy-based approaches to (im)politeness (Leech

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1983; Culpeper 1996, 2010, 2011) as well as more recent approaches to politeness (Terkourafi 2012) and impoliteness, perceived as a social practice and thus subject to speakers’ value judgments (Haugh and Kádár 2017; Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016), or impoliteness viewed as a social ritual (Kádár and Márquez-Reiter 2015). Importantly, the pragmastylistic study of fiction is incomplete without literary research, and therefore my analysis of the novels is complemented by critical literary remarks and book reviews.

4.2

(Im)politeness, Science and Religion in Enduring Love

Enduring Love is described in various terms, such as a “romantic thriller” (Ryan 2007: 53), a “psychiatric case study” (Birkerts 1998: 7), or a “macabre story of obsession and suspense” (Childs 2007: 31) but what all these reviewers’ labels have in common is that they reflect the novel’s claustrophobic atmosphere and its sense of menacing emotional insanity. The story offers one of the most dramatic beginnings in English literature and depicts a weird ballooning incident, which has far-reaching, equally dramatic consequences for the people involved in it. The protagonist evaluates it in retrospect: “So much followed from this incident, so much branching and subdivision began in those early moments, such pathways of love and hatred blazed from this starting position […]” (Enduring Love, 24). Joe Rose and his lifelong partner Clarissa Mellon are picnicking in the Chilterns and as soon as they lay the blanket on the grass and Joe is about to open the bottle of Daumas Gassac, they can hear a man shouting and clinging to the ropes of a large gas balloon with a boy inside a basket at the balloon’s base. Joe and several other men, including the boy’s grandfather, field labourers and some random people, run to the rescue, they hang on to the ropes to stop the basket from being tossed around by the wind. When the balloon goes higher up into the air, most of the men let go of the ropes apart from John Logan, a family doctor from Oxford. Logan stays glued to the rope and fails to jump to the ground—he only releases the rope when the balloon is very high and he falls, dying instantly. As it will turn out later, he will be the

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only fatal victim of this incident; the boy came to his senses and found the valve that released the gas thus bringing it down onto the ground. As the coroner’s inquest proved later, the balloon’s pilot James Gadd, who was also the boy’s grandfather, breached all basic safety procedures and it was all his fault. The real drama, however, begins for Joe when he exchanges glances with Jed Parry, an accidental eyewitness who takes part in the failed rescue attempt. Jed is a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed man living on inheritance in Hampstead, and it remains a mystery how he finds himself in the same park on the day of the accident. This brief chance encounter is enough for Jed to fall in love with Joe and turn his personal life into a living hell. It seems to Parry that Joe fell in love with him first and so he starts stalking and harassing him: he calls Joe in the night, writes him love letters, confronts him at his doorstep or stands across the street watching his windows in anticipation of a secret sign. His phone calls are full of cryptic, scary messages: “Joe, God’s love will seek you out”. […] “I know you’re there, I can see you. I know you’re listening […]” (Enduring Love, 66–67). Jed Parry suffers from a psychosis known as de Clérambault’s syndrome or “pure erotomania” where a patient, usually a woman, believes that a person of higher social status is in love with them. Patients with de Clérambault’s syndrome have little or no contact with the object of their deluded desire but they strongly believe that the object will never be happy without them and that “the relationship is universally acknowledged” (Rot 2008: 13–14). We are presented with the story from Joe’s first-person narration perspective, which is occasionally interrupted by Jed’s letters and by Clarissa’s inner thoughts. Joe is a rationalist, a science journalist by trade and his narrative is characterised by a common-sense approach and analytical thinking. As the narrator in this story, he attempts to develop a scientific view of whatever happened, and it is he who figures out Parry’s illness. Still, much as he strives at objectivity, the “constriction” of his narrative renders it unreliable: “As a scientist he simply can’t deviate from the facts of the case. But this suggests that his point of view is limited and that there may be more to the story than he can see” (Lehmann-Haupt 1998: 11). Jed’s point of view is entirely different, it is imbued with religious veneration and obsessive love for Joe. As is characteristic of Jed’s mental condition,

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he is stuck in his world and sees only one version of the story—he is “incarcerated in a narrative of his own devising” (Randall 2007: 59). Impoliteness in the novel is connected with the difference in perspective. Joe as a highly rational man who believes in the power of reason has problems understanding points of view other than his own. He, therefore, enters into a direct clash with Jed’s emotional, illogical narration. His impolite attitude in the novel fits in well with Culpeper’s (2010) definition of impoliteness: Impoliteness is a negative attitude towards specific behaviours occurring in specific contexts. […] Situated behaviours are viewed negatively when they conflict with how one expects them to be, how one wants them to be and/or how one thinks they ought to be. Such behaviours always have or are presumed to have emotional consequences for at least one participant, that is, they cause or are presumed to cause offence. Various factors can exacerbate how offensive an impolite behaviour is taken to be, including for example whether one understands a behaviour to be strongly intentional or not. (Culpeper 2010: 3233)

As regards Logan’s tragic death, Joe is the key source of information and it is over Logan’s corpse that he experiences his first more intimate encounter with Parry. When he runs towards Logan to check if he is still alive, he sees Parry leaning and then kneeling over the man’s dead body, and soon he receives a proposition to join in the prayer. To Joe, this idea is absurd and it makes him feel uncomfortable: ‘It’s something we can do together?’ he said as he looked about for a suitable place on the ground. The wild thought came to me that he was proposing some form of gross indecency with a corpse. He was lowering himself, and with a look was inviting me to join him. Then I got it. He was on his knees. ‘What we could do,’ he said with a seriousness which warned against mockery, ‘is to pray together?’ Before I could object, which for the moment was impossible because I was speechless, Parry added, ‘I know it’s difficult. But you’ll find it helps. At times like this, you know, it really does help.’

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I took a step away from both Logan and Parry. I was embarrassed, and my first thought was not to offend a true believer. (Enduring Love, 25)

Joe may not have had a plan for how one should behave while standing over a cadaver following a tragic fall, but what Parry suggested was not something he would have had in mind. Standing still and waiting for the police was a more reasonable option than praying. Therefore, when Parry is about to kneel Joe assumes the worst and expects some sort of “gross indecency with a corpse”. The moment Joe realises what is about to happen, he (physically) dissociates himself from Jed and this bizarre situation: “I took a step away from both Logan and Parry”. According to Culpeper (1996: 357), dissociation from the other is a positive impoliteness strategy designed to damage the other’s positive face, and it is manifested by “deny[ing] association or common ground with the other”, for example, “avoid[ing] sitting together”. Even if Joe’s action is spontaneous, he moves away to signal that praying together is a strange proposition, which makes him feel embarrassed. Parry pursues with positive politeness requests: “It’s something we can do together?” or “What we could do […] is to pray together? […] you’ll find it helps”. Positive politeness is normally used by the speaker to indicate that they want the same as their addressee; that they wish to satisfy their interlocutor’s positive face wants, such as appreciation, feeling liked, respected, or simply the other’s want to feel better. The potential face threat of an act is minimised in this case by the speaker’s assurance that they want at least some of the hearer’s wants, for example, “that S considers H to be in important respects ‘the same’ as he” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 70). Parry creates an impression of a speaker who wants his hearer’s wants and claims that they are alike but, due to his illness, his seemingly polite requests become hostile face threatening acts because they are obsessively and uncontrollably repeated. According to Brown and Levinson (1987: 73), positive politeness precedes negative politeness in the continuum of FTA “danger” because the efficiency of the speaker’s redresses to the hearer is entirely vulnerable to the hearer’s concurrence with the speaker’s assumption that s/he is acting in the hearer’s best interests. Such is the nature of the clash between Jed’s polite requests and Joe’s

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impolite reaction—Parry believes that Joe needs prayer and Joe rejects his insane proposal and perceives it as an FTA. No wonder that later in the scene Parry’s imposing politeness: “I think you have a special need for prayer?” (Enduring Love, 25) starts getting on Joe’s nerves and turns his embarrassment into irritation: “Thanks, but no” (Enduring Love, 25). Joe interrupts Jed’s religious harangue, excusing his leaving and taking a further step back, which Jed perceives as discourteous: “OK fine. Please, just have the courtesy to tell me this. […] Why don’t you take a chance on it [praying]?” (Enduring Love, 26). Joe’s reaction is no longer evasive and he decides it is about time he told the man the truth: “Because, my friend, no one’s listening. There’s no one up there” (Enduring Love, 26). The narrator speaks to Jed as if he was a child, who needs to be instructed about basic facts of life (God does not exist) and he breaks it down to him from a superior position: “I decided he ought to know the truth” (Enduring Love, 26). Joe’s attitude towards Jed is patronising and condescending and it “produces […] a display of power” (Culpeper 2010: 3240). Jed’s love and devotion for God is funny and weird, and Joe talks about it sarcastically, for example, when he sees police officers heading in their direction he feels relieved to be delivered from “the radiating power of Jed Parry’s love and pity” (Enduring Love, 27). Later on, Joe “narrativizes” Jed’s prayer as comedy to Clarissa, as was noted by Palmer (2009: 295), as in: “I told the prayer story as comedy and made Clarissa laugh” (Enduring Love, 30). Politeness and impoliteness function as important characterising devices in the novel and, in Jed’s case, they reflect his mood swings as part of his illness. Jed’s paranoia is initially manifested by the polite content of his letters to Joe (chapters 11, 16, 23 and Appendix II) and, eventually, it culminates in impoliteness and violence in the restaurant scene. First come the polite letters. Jed, who is enclosed in his sick narrative, projects a certain reality where Joe is sending him secret signals, which is indicative of de Clérambault’s symptoms. In his first love letter, Parry humbles himself in front of Joe and admits how much it means to him that they have met and how happy their chance encounter has made him: Dear Joe, I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. […] I know I owe you an apology—and that word is too small. I stand

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before you naked, defenceless, dependent on your mercy, begging your forgiveness. For you knew our love from the very beginning. You recognised in that glance that passed between us, up there on the hill after he fell, all the charge and power and blessedness of love, while I was dull and stupid, denying it, trying to protect myself from it, trying to pretend that it wasn’t happening, that it couldn’t happen like this, and I ignored what you were telling me with your eyes and your every gesture. I thought it was enough to follow you down the hill and suggest that we pray together. You were right to be angry with me for not seeing what you had already seen. What had happened was so obvious. Why did I refuse to acknowledge it? You must have thought me so insensitive, such a moron. You were right to turn from me and walk away. Even now, when I bring to mind that moment when you started back up the hill and I remember the stoop of your shoulders, the heaviness in your stride that spoke of rejection, I groan aloud at my behaviour. What an idiot! I could have lost us what we have. Joe, in the name of God, please forgive me. (Enduring Love, 93–94)

Parry is referring to their encounter at Logan’s cadaver when their eyes met for a millisecond. His letter makes good use of the Politeness Principle (PP) between the so-called self and other as part of interpersonal rhetoric. The PP is constituted of six maxims (see Sect. 2.1), some of which are pertinent to this fragment. For example, the Generosity Maxim states: “Minimize benefit to self [Maximize cost to self ]” (Leech 1983: 133) and, as a “self-centred” (Leech 1983: 133) maxim, it emphasises the figure of the self (speaker) who renounces benefit for the sake of the other (hearer). The reader learns that it is Jed who owes an apology to Joe for refusing to acknowledge his affection the first time they met, the word “apology” even being “too small” to express it. In his delusions, Jed gives all the credit to Joe: it was Joe who first spotted a glimmer of affection in their gaze. Jed accuses himself of being “dull and stupid”, “insensitive” and “a moron” for not seeing this. He begs Joe for forgiveness for what he sees to be an inexcusable error on his part. Also, to re-establish contact with Joe, Parry employs the Modesty Maxim, which has it: “Minimize praise of self [Maximize dispraise of self ]”. In practice, speakers exercising (or manipulating) politeness in this way should

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fail to agree with another’s the commendation of oneself; understating one’s achievements or self-dispraise are some other possible patterns of linguistic behaviour (Leech 1983: 136) to reach a communicative goal. Once again, Jed dispraises himself and says that he is “an idiot” who “could have lost us what we have”. Joe, in his view, “was right […] to go away” after Jed proposed the prayer over the cadaver and was “right to be angry” with Jed for his ignorance about their obvious emotional connection. “I stand before you naked, defenceless, dependent on your mercy”, says Parry, humiliating himself before Joe to emphasise the other’s superior position: “For you knew our love from the very beginning”. The letter sticks to the general rule of the Politeness Principle and maximises the praise of Joe, who is not only very intelligent but also sensitive in Jed’s eyes. Needless to say, Jed’s letters have a different effect from the intended one—with every new letter Joe is becoming more and more upset, which has an impact on both his career and personal life. In these letters, politeness goes hand in hand with insanity, as can be recognised from Jed’s weird observations and his memories as a stalker. For example, Jed repeatedly reminds Joe of the signs he leaves him, which are solely the figments of his imagination. Joe learns from one of the letters that Jed was observing his apartment one evening and watched him leave the house and brush the top of the hedge with his hand; when Joe went away, Jed went up to the hedge and fingered the leaves that Joe had touched. He describes a sensation, a burning in his fingers, and this is when he realises that Joe had given him a sign: “Then I got it. You had touched them in a certain way, in a pattern that spelled a simple message. Did you really think I would miss it, Joe! So simple, so clever, so loving” (Enduring Love, 96). The letters are accompanied by harassment and threats—Joe once finds Jed following him on the street while jogging. Parry’s frustration is growing because his love object keeps sending him secret signals, such as drawing and pulling back the curtains, and then ignores him. On that day, Jed loses patience and starts running after Joe, sobbing and shouting at him in turns: ‘When are you going to leave me alone? You’ve got me. I can’t do anything. Why don’t you admit what you’re doing? Why do you keep

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pretending that you don’t know what I’m talking about? And then the signals Joe. Why d’you keep on?’ […] He uttered his words at a screech, on a repetitive rising note, as though a forlorn zoo bird had become approximately human. ‘What do you want? You love me and you want to destroy me. You pretend it’s not happening. Nothing happening! You fuck! You’re playing […] torturing me […] giving me all your fucking little secret signals to keep me coming towards you. I know what you want, you fuck. You fuck! You think I don’t? You want to take me away from […]’ I lost his words to a housesized removal truck. ‘[…] and you think you can take me away from him [God]. But you’ll come to me. In the end. You’ll come to him too because you’ll have to. You fuck, you’ll beg for mercy, you’ll crawl on your stomach […]’ (Enduring Love, 91)

Every encounter with Jed is a face-challenging situation for Joe. Harassment and stalking constitute a serious encroachment on Joe’s freedom and, thus, a violation of his negative face in the public space. Parry’s emotional imbalance is now expressed via impoliteness through insults. Tedeschi and Felson claim that “insults” and “reproaches” are the types of social behaviour that can cause social harm and do “damage to the social identity of target persons and [lead to] a lowering of their power or status” (Tedeschi and Felson 1994: 171). Parry in his nervous fits employs “conventionalised insults”, which are part of what Culpeper labels as “conventionalised impoliteness formulae” (Culpeper 2011: 205). His impolite attitude is characterised by personalised negative vocatives, especially the phrase “You fuck!” which he angrily repeats several times. Another conventionalised impoliteness strategy is asking challenging and unpalatable questions, which makes the target feel confused and uncomfortable. Such questions (and/or presuppositions) are often difficult to answer because of their vague, rhetorical nature, for example: “why do you make my life impossible?” or “which lie are you telling me?” (Culpeper 2010: 3242). The whole first paragraph of the excerpt above is full of such challenging questions, which Joe leaves unanswered: “Why don’t you admit what you’re doing?” and “Why do you keep pretending that you don’t know what I’m talking about?” or “And then the signals Joe. Why d’you keep on?”. Finally, the stalker articulates veiled threats:

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“But you’ll come to me. In the end” or “You fuck, you’ll beg for mercy, you’ll crawl on your stomach”. Culpeper classifies threats as a negative impoliteness strategy, based on the agent’s “instill[ing] a belief that action detrimental to the other will occur” (Culpeper 1996: 358). The truth about impoliteness, as mentioned before, is that it revolves around the speaker’s intention to offend the other. The complication, however, is that the face-attack may be intentionally communicated but it may not be recognised as such by the hearer;—or, the hearer may construct the speaker’s words as an intentional face-attack while none was intended (Culpeper 2005: 38). Parry’s impoliteness is a problematic case because of his health condition. De Clérambault’s syndrome involves persistent delusional disorders thus implying that the patient does not have full control over his actions and words. Joe’s reaction to this particular act of impoliteness fits into the definition of impoliteness by Culpeper: the face attack was intentionally communicated but it was not recognised as impoliteness by the target. Despite the feelings of “hostility” and “revulsion”, Joe feels sorry for Jed rather than offended: “Seeing him stuck there, raving, I felt relieved it wasn’t me, much as I do when I see a drunk or schizophrenic conducting the traffic. I also thought that his condition was so extreme, his framing of reality so distorted that he couldn’t harm me. He needed help, though not from me” (Enduring Love, 91–92). Jed’s madness is expressed through both politeness and impoliteness, reflecting his uncontrolled mood swings and paranoid behaviours, the culmination of which is exhibited in the restaurant and later on in Joe’s apartment, where he threatens Clarissa with a knife. First, Jed hires two killers who are supposed to shoot Joe in the restaurant at lunch. During a celebratory get-together with Clarissa and her godfather, Professor Jocelyn Kale, suddenly, two intruders enter the room and shoot at a man sitting at the nearby table, Colin Tapp. When Tapp is smacked against the wall and his daughter faints, Joe realises that the intruder is pointing his gun at him now, but he is saved by a man who eats alone and who jumps up just in time to tilt the shooter’s extended arm so that the second bullet is fired into the wall. To his amazement and horror, Joe notices that his saviour is Jed and that the bullet was meant for him: “Our two tables—their composition, the numbers, the sexes, the relative ages. How had Parry known? It was a mistake. It was a contract, and it had been

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bungled. It should have been me” (Enduring Love, 173). On the next day, Joe receives a call from Jed who is in his house with Clarissa, whom he keeps hostage. Equipped with a handgun, Joe is getting back to his apartment only to discover that Parry had been holding a knife against her cheek. The incident in Joe’s house is a combination of begging for mercy and bravado. Jed keeps threatening Joe: “Don’t come any closer. I told Clarissa not to move” (Enduring Love, 209). Then he asks for forgiveness: “Please, forgive me, Joe, for what I did yesterday, for what I tried to do” (Enduring Love, 212). Parry seems to understand that their “relationship” is over and he admits that the hiring of the murderers was “insanity” (Enduring Love, 213). The moment Joe observes that Clarissa is in danger, he takes out his gun and fires it at Jed, who drops the knife and falls on the floor with a shattered elbow. There is no forgiveness: “How can I forgive you when you are mad?” (Enduring Love, 213), asks Joe. Jed resorts to physical aggression in the restaurant (hiring the murderers to kill Joe) and in Joe’s apartment (threatening Clarissa with a knife). Bousfield (2008a) directly links aggression with impoliteness although he notes that the definition is broad, it depends on the situational context and the field of study (pragmatics, sociology, and psychology offer different definitions of aggression). From a pragmatic standpoint, verbal aggression is understood as a face threat “exacerbated, ‘boosted’, or maximised in some way to heighten the face damage inflicted” (Bousfield 2008a: 72). Jed’s physical aggression towards Clarissa and Joe is closer to Hydén’s definition, which is concerned with Social Work theories. Hydén (1995) distinguishes between two types of aggression: verbal aggression and physical violence. Verbal aggression is characteristic of dysfunctional interpersonal relationships and it is seen as “a verbal act which has the intent (or perceived intent) to symbolically hurt or to threaten to hurt another” (Hydén 1995: 55–56). Physical violence “refers to an act that has the intent (or perceived intent) of causing physical harm to another” (Hydén 1995: 56). In her view, the notion of “violence” is “a tactic of reaching a certain goal” (Hydén 1995: 56). Bousfield additionally notes that violence can be used to maintain or attain power, or as a conflict tactic, and he claims that the concept of violence should be extended to verbal aggression. He

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believes that verbal aggression rarely occurs “solely for its own sake” but that it is “instrumental” as it can be employed as a conflict tactic and/or a way of attaining or maintaining power in a specific context (Bousfield 2008a: 76). Jed’s aggression at Joe’s place is indicative of both verbal violence when he threatens Clarissa, and physical violence when he holds the knife at her cheek. For Parry, violent behaviour serves the aim of “reaching a certain goal” (Hydén 1995: 56), which is to convert Joe and teach him a lesson. In his sick mind, Joe had to be punished for teasing and then avoiding him and for turning away from God. For a psychotic individual like him, Joe needed to suffer just like Jed did, hence the idea of murdering him in the restaurant. Still, the process of punishing would not be complete without Joe sacrificing his love, Clarissa, who turned out the other unwilling victim of a jealous madman. Clarissa and Joe love each other but they come from two different worlds. She is a Keats scholar, who is obsessed with Romantic literature and has been searching for Keats’s unpublished letters to his lover Fanny Brawne. Joe is a proponent of neo-Darwinism, evolutionary psychology and genetics and gets profit from writing articles with a neo-Darwinian slant. For example, he writes about the disappearance of storytelling in post-Darwinian science: “I wanted to write about the death of anecdote and narrative in science, my idea being that Darwin’s generation was the last to permit itself the luxury of storytelling in published articles” (Enduring Love, 41). Greenberg claims that Clarissa and Joe represent opposing worldviews, those of literature and science, nature and culture, emotion and reason (Greenberg 2007: 96), which is well reflected in their conversation about an infant’s smile. Joe tells Clarissa about a zoologist’s article on human emotions and their biological basis, arguing that an infant’s smile is a social signal that can be scientifically explained and, according to studies, is manifested in the same way by the !Kung San babies of the Kalahari and American children living in Manhattan alike. Joe believes what the article says—a smile is “a social releaser, an inborn and relatively invariant signal that mediates a basic social relationship” (Enduring Love, 70), but Clarissa does not agree because for her, the understanding of the infant’s smile lies in the parent’s heart, and the infant’s smile is never the same. Joe notes with criticism:

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I told her I thought she had spent too much time lately in the company of John Keats. A genius no doubt, but an obscurantist too who had thought science was robbing the world of wonder, when the opposite was the case. If we value a baby’s smile, why not contemplate its source? Are we to say that all infants enjoy a secret joke? Or that God reaches down and tickles them? Or, least implausibly, because they learn smiling from their mothers? But then, deaf-blind babies smile too. That smile must be hard-wired, and for good evolutionary reasons. Clarissa said that I had not understood her. There was nothing wrong in analysing the bits, but it was easy to lose sight of the whole. I agreed. The work of synthesis was crucial. Clarissa said I still did not understand her, she was talking about love. I said I was too, and how babies who could not yet speak got more of it for themselves. She said no, I still didn’t understand. There we had left it. No hard feelings. We had had this conversation in different forms on many occasions. What we were really talking about this time was the absence of babies from our lives. (Enduring Love, 71)

She does not approve of Joe’s rational approach, which to her is “the new fundamentalism” (Enduring Love, 70). Much as he wishes to understand the scientific causes behind a child’s smile, she sees no need for “understanding” this, because it is a natural human feature, an expression of love and warmth. Joe criticises her for being too engrossed with Keats who clouded her judgement and she believes that Joe is an opportunist who takes advantage of science when it pays off: “Twenty years ago you and your friends were all socialists and you blamed the environment for everyone’s hard luck. Now you’ve got us trapped in our genes, and there’s a reason for everything!” (Enduring Love, 70). Clarissa’s use of social deixis in this short fragment indicates her feeling of estrangement. When referring to the past, she says “you and your friends”, the reader has the impression that Joe has had his friends who were never their friends, and that Clarissa in some way has always been left apart. Now, twenty years later, she still feels that she does not belong in his world, saying: “Now, you’ve got us trapped in our genes”. Again, the reader senses that there are two antagonistic groups “us” vs. “them” or “you (Joe) have got us (Clarissa) trapped in our genes”. This is how she linguistically indicates her remoteness from Joe. Greenberg (2007: 97)

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believes that Joe’s neo-Darwinian discourse leaves no room for values and Clarissa’s world revolves around values—she has devoted her time and research to an impossible undertaking of finding out the (potential) secret love letters by Keats to his lover. Their different worldviews clash bitterly when Jed appears in Joe’s life. Clarissa cannot believe the seriousness of the situation—she dismisses his stories about stalking and harassment as unserious. Initially, when Jed only makes odd phone calls, Clarissa thinks this is a misunderstanding and suggests inviting him over for tea to talk about what happened (the balloon incident). With time, she becomes even more incredulous and thinks it is Joe who needs help: “Don’t you realise you’ve got a problem? […] Joe!” She shouted. “You say he’s outside, but when I go out there’s no one. No one, Joe” (Enduring Love, 148). Dealing with his rational analysis of the stalker’s behaviour leads to what she sees as Joe’s paranoia, which makes them grow apart: We were hardly at war, but everything between us was stalled. We were like armies facing each other across a maze of trenches. We were immobilised. The only movement was that of silent accusations rippling over our heads like standards. To her I was manic, perversely obsessed, and worst of all, the thieving invader of her private space. As far as I was concerned she was disloyal, unsupportive in this time of crisis, and irrationally suspicious. There were no rows, or even skirmishes, as though we sensed that a confrontation might blow us apart. We remained on tight speaking terms, we small-talked about work and exchanged messages about shopping, cooking and household repairs. Clarissa left the house every weekday to give seminars and lectures and do battle with the management. I wrote a long and dull review of five books on consciousness. (Enduring Love, 139)

The difference in points of view and approach (empathetic Clarissa vs. rational Joe) leads to mutual accusations and partial dissolution of their relationship. What follows is Joe’s pointed criticism of Clarissa as being “disloyal”, “unsupportive” and “irrationally suspicious”. Pointed criticism includes expressions of disapproval and statements of fault, weakness or disadvantage; it is based on the speaker’s “producing or perceiving

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a display of low values for some target” (Culpeper 2010: 3241), which involves an attack on the interlocutor’s positive face. Another impolite approach is exclusion—the speaker’s failure to include the other and dissociation from the other (Culpeper 2010: 3241). Joe recognises that despite not being at war with his partner, they no longer act together because everything between them is “stalled”. He says, “We were immobilised” when lying in bed with her, and he compares them to two armies that face each other “across a maze of trenches”, which suggests distance and stumbling blocks in their relationship. One time, while doing research on Darwin in the London Library, Joe in his thoughts belittles and offends the library’s management who, in his view, were not competent enough to organise the science section: The science collection here was derisory. The assumption appeared to be that the world could be sufficiently understood through fictions, histories and biographies. Did the scientific illiterates who ran this place, and who dared call themselves educated people, really believe that literature was the greatest intellectual achievement of our civilisation? (Enduring Love, 42)

Joe’s insulting remarks are not directed at the library employees, the “scientific illiterates” themselves but at the very notion of literature and the humanities. His rational perspective on the world makes him superior to those meddling with literary studies; neo-Darwinism gives him an insight into the nature of things and it is science, not literature that is “the greatest intellectual achievement of our civilisation”. Joe admits that his “inner rant” (Enduring Love, 42) on the library employees was not directed at them but was an effect of “apprehension” (Enduring Love, 43). His impoliteness was fired at Clarissa, a literary scholar, who thinks in terms of “fictions” and her professional life and research focus on “histories” and “biographies”, in particular on Keats’s biography. He is irritated by the poor scientific library collection in the same way as he is irritated by Clarissa and her non-scientific point of view. Greenberg (2007: 96) notes that Joe looks at the world from a perspective of a sociobiologist, making Darwinian genealogies for unscientific phenomena such as religion or amnesia whereas Clarissa perceives “the whole project” of

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neo-Darwinism as “rationalism gone berserk” (Enduring Love, 70). The idea behind the novel is that of an impoliteness or a “conflict” (Greenberg 2007: 96) between emotional and rational points of view and an “antagonist[ic]” (Greenberg 2007: 96) relationship between science and literature.

4.3

Impoliteness and Immorality in Amsterdam

Classified as a “psychological novel” (Malcolm 2002: 192), or rather as a novella because of its size, Amsterdam strikes moral cords with a story of two friends swearing to each other that if one of them were to fall ill and lose his sanity, the other would take care of the situation and arrange for a euthanasia procedure in Amsterdam. They enter into this pact soon after the funeral of their mutual friend and lover, Molly Lane, who died a helpless death after losing her mind as a result of a sudden illness. The story ends with a tragic twist—the two exfriends perform euthanasia on each other out of spite. Malcolm notes that Amsterdam “is anything but benign and optimistic. It is a dark and sour account of contemporary Britain” (Malcolm 2002: 189). Childs says that the novella is an “exquisite social satire and moral fable” (Childs 2006: 118). It depicts the life and feeble friendship of two members of an elite London society: Clive Linley, a composer working on the Millennial Symphony, and Vernon Halliday, a chief editor of a broadsheet newspaper called The Judge. Back in the 1970s, Clive was considered a “throwback” (Amsterdam, 21) and the popular opinion was that, along with McCarthy and Schubert, he could write good music. On the verge of the year 2000, he still enjoys an established reputation—his Millennial Symphony was commissioned by the government to celebrate the new Millenium—but he experiences artistic unrest and has problems sticking to deadlines. Clive imagines himself as a subject of a documentary about a distinguished artist who is extremely tired but satisfied because he sacrificed himself to create a piece of art. He consumes large doses of alcohol awaiting the symphony’s “awesome finale” (Amsterdam, 79); however, it is only an illusion of greatness (Popiel 2017: 90). Vernon,

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on the other hand, lives a life of an entrepreneur who takes quick and uncompromising editorial decisions every day to keep his paper afloat. One such decision will cost him his career when he chooses to publish compromising photos of the British Foreign Secretary. I want to demonstrate how the immoral choices of the characters in McEwan’s story are inevitably linked with impoliteness and characterisation, according to the latest (im)politeness theory developments (see Kádár and Haugh 2013; Kádár and Márquez-Reiter 2015; Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016). Recent approaches to the politeness theory view it as a social practice, which entails that the understanding of polite behaviour lies in the evaluations of social actions and meanings by persons positioned in a given social space and time. Kádár and Haugh claim that politeness is a social practice because it involves value judgments that implicitly refer to a moral order—“a set of expectancies through which social actions and meanings are recognisable as such, and consequently are inevitably open to moral evaluations” (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 6). Much as polite and impolite behaviours have become a matter of evaluation, they are closely related to cultural norms and expectations (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016: 74). Belonging to a given culture gives its individuals the moral right to judge and evaluate the world around them. The cultural norms and expectations are “seen but unnoticed” and they influence our assessments of what constitutes polite and impolite behaviour (Haugh and Kádár 2017: 605). The idea of culture is key to analysing (im)politeness in intercultural encounters but it is important to note that the traditional notion of culture has been undermined by the latest impoliteness theory developments. The current understanding of culture is multilayered (involves various social groupings) and multifaceted (includes recurrent ways of doing, evaluating and perceiving at all levels of social life). Culture is now viewed as any set of persons who can be categorised as having some kind of association through “shared beliefs, values and practices, that is, shared ways of doing things as well as shared ways of interpreting or thinking about things in the world” (Haugh and Kádár 2017: 604). Amsterdam can serve as an exemplification of this new approach to (im)politeness since its protagonists violate social rituals or the cultural conventions in their society, thus violating the moral order of their social and professional groups.

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According to recent (im)politeness studies, it is the property of being conventional rather than the property of being indirect that influences speakers’ judgments about polite or impolite behaviour (Terkourafi and Kádár 2017: 182). Terkourafi (2012) understood politeness as conventionalisation, as a relationship between an expression, a speaker and a context: an expression is conventionalised in a certain context for a speaker when used frequently enough in that context to achieve a certain illocutionary goal to that speaker’s experience (see Terkourafi and Kádár 2017: 182). Thus, abiding by conventions or conventional behaviour can be argued as part of a polite attitude. Lewis (1969) offers one of the first, rigid theoretical definitions of convention. He claims that a regularity (R) in the behaviour of members of a population (P) when they are agents in a recurrent situation (S) is a convention if and only if: “1) everyone conforms to R; 2) everyone expects everyone else to conform to R; 3) everyone prefers to conform to R on condition that the others do, since S is a coordination problem and uniform conformity to R is a proper coordination equilibrium of S” (Lewis 1969: 42). In other words, social convention can be a solution to recurring problems with maintaining the equilibrium. Hence, it works similarly to the Politeness Principle, whose aim is “to maintain the social equilibrium and the friendly relations which enable us to assume that our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place” (Leech 1983: 82). Conventional behaviour arises out of the speaker’s “rational calculation of payoffs” (Terkourafi and Kádár 2017: 175) and, in the perfect world, as established by Lewis, everyone follows the convention without exception.1 The definition of convention adopted in this book is in line with more recent developments in the (im)politeness theory. First, conventions are normative, that is by acting in a conventional way interactants meet conventional expectations of the audience and their conduct is in effect positively evaluated. Secondly, convention is usually carried out for the benefit of interactants rather than the audience, with minimal constraints on the context, and it can be performed by all interactants and not just by some chosen, ratified group members (Terkourafi and Kádár 2017: 171–72). By way of comparison, social rituals have often been represented as “normative ‘etiquette’” (Kádár 2013: 179) and, therefore, they are also associated with politeness. Regarding the modern relational approach to ritual, social ritual

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practices are considered “socially normative”, that is, they are part of social norms, unlike in-group rituals, which count as normative only within chosen relational networks (Terkourafi and Kádár 2017: 185). Much as social rituals may differ over time and survive for generations, in-group ritual practices have a shorter lifespan and cease to exist when their relational network stops existing (Kádár 2013: 90–100). It is important to say that in some cultures, for example, Japanese and Arab, social rituals count as normative in a larger number of interactional contexts than in other cultures, for example, English and Hungarian. Kádár also draws attention to the fact that social ritual practices in a given culture reflect this culture’s “dominating ideologies” (Kádár 2013: 179) and that “it is likely that in certain cultures social rituals are ideologically more significant than in others” (Kádár 2013: 180). I want to argue that impoliteness, or the individuals’ perception/evaluation of others’ behaviour as impolite, arises out of violating and infringing on social conventions and rituals by interactants. Clive Linley in Amsterdam violates the moral order by not sticking to a social ritual of intervention (Kádár and Márquez-Reiter 2015) for utterly selfish reasons. While hiking in the Lake District in search of inspiration to finish the symphony, he becomes an accidental witness to an assault on a woman. His first impression is that he is looking at a quarrel between conflicted lovers, like in a theatre rehearsal, but it soon turns out that the woman does not know her assailant, that she is screaming and trying to protect herself. Clive’s initial thought is conveyed to the reader via the third-person singular narration with an element of direct thought (DT): “Whatever they were about, Clive’s immediate thought was as clear as a neon sign: I am not here” (Amsterdam, 85). As the mutual scuffle between the two strangers continues, Clive’s motives change from fear to cool calculation: The woman took two quick paces into the water, then changed her mind. As she turned back, the man made another attempt to take her arm. All this time they were talking, arguing, but the sound of their voices reached Clive only intermittently. He lay on his tilted slab, pencil between his fingers, notebook in his other hand, and sighed. Was he really going to intervene? He imagined running down there. The point at which he

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reached them was when the possibilities would branch: the man might run off; the woman would be grateful, and together they could descend to the main road by Seatoller. Even this least probable of outcomes would destroy his fragile inspiration. […] Their fate, his fate. The jewel, the melody. Its momentousness pressed upon him. So much depended on it; the symphony, the celebration, his reputation, the lamented century’s ode to joy. […] On level ground he hurried back along the way he had come and then dropped down along the western side of the ridge in a long arc of detour. Twenty minutes later he found a flat-topped rock to use as a table and stood hunched over his scribble. There was almost nothing there now. He was trying to call it back, but his concentration was being broken by another voice, the insistent, interior voice of self-justification: whatever it might have involved—violence, or the threat of violence, or his embarrassed apologies, or, ultimately, a statement to the police if he had approached the couple, a pivotal moment in his career would have been destroyed. The melody could not have survived the psychic flurry. Given the width of the ridge and the numerous paths that crossed it, how easily he could have missed them. It was as if he weren’t there. He wasn’t there. He was in his music. His fate, their fate, separate paths. It was not his business. This was his business, and it wasn’t easy, and he wasn’t asking for anyone’s help. (Amsterdam, 86, 87–89)

The situation Clive finds himself in is an instance of bystander intervention, which is a ritual action in a socio-pragmatic understanding. Ritual acts such as bystander intervention take place when a bystander decides to intervene and stop an act of injustice, which is performed in the public domain. For example, a bystander can interrupt a scene of verbal abuse on the street to protect the victim; importantly, the intervener’s reaction and words are believed to be spoken on behalf of the public and the intervener is free to recruit others to help. The social expectation in such situations is that the bystander (or anyone who witnesses an act of violence) will try to intervene and terminate a wrongful act (by calling the police or by personal intervention). Bystander intervention is supposed to restore the equilibrium and common normative values within a given relational network or a bigger social group. As a ritual act, it manifests outspokenness in a dramatic

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situation when a random person goes against “the committer of a seemingly immoral action” (Kádár and Márquez-Reiter 2015: 240). The bystander’s reaction is triggered by their moral evaluation of the ongoing act of violence. Before taking an action, interveners pass moral judgments based on their intuition and emotions, as well as on their culture, personal background and their psyche (Kádár and Márquez-Reiter 2015: 241). In this way, bystander intervention is closely connected with morality and the intervener’s sense of “right” and “wrong”. Clive Linley consciously violates the ritual of bystander intervention— he decides to wait it out, changes location and convinces himself that helping a distressed woman is not “his business”. The passages in the free indirect thought reveal his self-centred, egoistic motives: “Was he really going to intervene?” (hesitation and unwillingness to help). His decision not to react is well thought over, he objectively assesses the pros and cons of the potential intervention: “the man might run off; the woman would be grateful”, which he considers the least possible scenario. At any rate, Clive thinks that any outcome, positive or negative, “would destroy his fragile inspiration”. He only remembers how important the symphony is and how much he can gain by finally finishing the musical piece: “So much depended on it; the symphony, the celebration, his reputation”. Once again, he goes over all possible outcomes of the intervention in his head and concludes that “whatever it might have involved—violence, or the threat of violence, or his embarrassed apologies, or, ultimately, a statement to the police” are not worthy of destroying his career. At a critical moment, when his moral integrity is tested, Clive fails to stick to the norms of social behaviour. Kádár and Márquez-Reiter (2015: 242) claim that much as bystander intervention can be considered impolite behaviour (after all, the intervener is a stranger who pries into other people’s private affairs), the bystander sacrifices “social oughts” (respecting others’ right to privacy) for “moral oughts” (reinstating morally appropriate behaviour) because they feel that this is the right thing to do. Clive’s failure to react to an act of injustice was called “moral shabbiness” (Malcolm 2002: 194), a representative moral feature of his generation: most probably, without affluent parents, he has made his way into the world and, comfortably, into the ranks of the British establishment. When it turns out later that Clive was passively

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watching the notorious Lakeland rapist in action, Vernon wants him to go to the police and identify the man. Yet, again, Clive does not want to disturb his peace of mind and he does not accept the fact that reporting to the police is, as Vernon puts it, his “moral duty” (Amsterdam, 119).— “I’m in the final stages of finishing a symphony”, he says, and Vernon shouts: —“No you’re not, dammit. You’re in bed” (Amsterdam, 119). Clive and Vernon’s friendship is full of ups and downs and, as we learn from the book’s finale, it will not stand the test of time. Clive always “assumes the moral high ground” (Head 2007: 152) and is the first to point out to Vernon that he finds his actions morally detestable. Eventually, their friendship is wrecked by Vernon’s scheme to destroy the political career of the foreign secretary Julian Garmony. The politician shows up at Molly’s funeral because, as it turns out, he was also her lover. They both hate Garmony for Molly and for what he represents: “an unexceptional stall of xenophobic and punitive opinions” (Amsterdam, 13). Julian Garmony poses as a respectable conservative statesman with a nuclear family who aspires to the position of the PM. During his affair with Molly, they organised photo sessions where he dressed as a woman, wearing false breasts and putting make-up on his face. In an act of revenge, Molly’s husband handles the embarrassing photos of Garmony to Vernon, asking for their publication. Clive opposes the idea, he thinks that publishing the compromising photos of cross-dressed Garmony is “crapping on Molly’s grave” (Amsterdam, 119). Vernon’s position is more complicated—he is the editor of the paper with declining circulation numbers. He runs his newspaper in an entrepreneurial manner, reminding his staff at morning editorial briefings that, apart from the real news, they are also interested in whatever sells well: “If we’re going to save this paper […] you’re all going to have to get your hands dirty” (Amsterdam, 33). Vernon’s editorial decision fuels the tension around Garmony; he announces to the public that The Judge owns secret discrediting photos of their top conservative politician, who does not look so conservative at all “in a plain three-quarter length dress, posing catwalk style” (Amsterdam, 69). Vernon did try to be impartial about this and explained to himself that exposing a hypocritical politician was the moral duty of a respectable paper, especially that The Judge still enjoyed the reputation of a decent and fighting paper, monitoring

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the corrupt government that had been in power for too long. However, his self-interest prevails over genuine intentions: Then he studied the second and third [photo] again, seeing them fully now and feeling waves of distinct responses: astonishment first, followed by a wild inward hilarity. Suppressing it gave him a sense of levitating from his chair. Next he experienced ponderous responsibility—or was it power? A man’s life, or at least his career, was in his hands. And who could tell, perhaps Vernon was in a position to change the country’s future for the better. And his paper’s circulation. […] Besides, in Vernon’s life lately there was so much to think about, so much of the real world that thrilled, that mere fantasy could hardly compete. What he had said, what he would say, how it went down, the next move, the unravelling consequences of success […]. In the accumulating momentum of the week, practically every hour had revealed to Vernon new aspects of his powers and potential, and as his gifts for persuasion and planning began to produce results, he felt large and benign, a little ruthless, perhaps, but ultimately good, capable of standing alone against the current, seeing over the heads of his contemporaries, knowing that he was about to shape the destiny of his country and that he could bear the responsibility. More than bear—he needed this weight, his gifts needed the weight that no one else could shoulder. (Amsterdam, 56, 101)

Vernon Halliday for personal gain breaks the rules of the journalistic profession, which presuppose that journalists should abide by the principles of ethics in their work. Reliable journalism is public service and a code of ethics for journalists carries a great social value (see Allen 1922). Aidan White, the Director of the Ethical Journalism Network, lists five core values of journalism as a normative practice in this profession: (1) accuracy—journalists should look for the facts more than the truth, as they cannot always guarantee the “truth”; (2) independence—journalists do not represent anyone’s interests; (3) impartiality—journalists have to account for the fact that there is more than one side in each story; (4) humanity—journalists should be aware of the consequences of their work on other people (pictures and words can harm); (5) accountability—journalists should engage with their audiences and correct their

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mistakes.2 I agree with Nayebpour who claims that Vernon “pretends to defend and adhere to ‘public interest’, while his actions turn out to be more self-centred” (Nayebpour 2017: 158). He violates the ethical norms and normative conventions of his professional group. First, his decision is not independent—he publishes the photographs in the interest of his newspaper, knowing that a sensational story like this will boost circulation. Also, he is biased—more than informing the public opinion about Garmony he wants to take revenge on the xenophobe who had an affair with his former lover. The very fact of possessing compromising photographs gives him a gratifying sense of power over the man’s life and career. Maybe he does it only for himself; having convinced his colleagues to publish the photos of Garmony provides him with an illusion of success he is needing so much as the chief editor of a declining newspaper: “he needed this weight, […] the weight that no one else could shoulder”. However, it is Vernon’s editorial decision to reveal the photographs and not Garmony’s behaviour that is socially stigmatised. The Garmonys try to save face: they anticipate the publication of the photos in the paper and show them a day earlier on television. Their family unites in front of the cameras, the children holding their father by the hand, and Garmony’s wife justifying her husband’s misconduct. Vernon is officially condemned by Mrs Garmony: “Mr Halliday, you have the mentality of a blackmailer, and the moral stature of a flea” (Amsterdam, 125). As a result, Vernon is fired from the position of the general editor and he sadly realises on leaving the building that his limo is no longer waiting to take him home. Spencer-Oatey and Kádár (2016: 81) note that when people evaluate (im)politeness they look at “injunctive norms” or the moral rules represented by a given group. They also say that different social groups may have different “moral foundations” and that a given group’s culture and its moral order are interconnected (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016: 83). It would seem that Vernon’s idea of the “injunctive norms” in his society is different from Clive’s, and everyone else’s. Linley never understood what exactly was Julian Garmony’s crime in the photos, and what was wrong for men to dress up in female clothes. Halliday’s answer is: “His hypocrisy, Clive. This is the hanger and flogger, the family values man, the scourge of immigrants, asylum seekers, travellers,

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marginal people” (Amsterdam, 73). Clive believes all of it to be “irrelevant” (Amsterdam, 73) and he replies: “If it’s okay to be a transvestite, then it’s okay for a family man to be one too. In private, of course” (Amsterdam, 73). Vernon loses the battle against Garmony because his argument is “utilitarian” and “ugly”; he thinks that by humiliating the politician he will prevent him from becoming the PM, and the road to achieving this goal is through inciting public prejudice against crossdressing (Head 2007: 152). In effect, Vernon violates the moral order of his profession (his conduct is evaluated as unethical, every newspaper “cheering his dismissal”, Amsterdam, 147) and of public opinion (Mrs Garmony condemns him in front of the cameras). Dobrogoszcz claims that the world of Amsterdam is populated by “hollow shells of men, deadened and purposeless automata” with a “fixation on enmity and negativity” (Dobrogoszcz 2018: 126). As the story progresses, the reader realises that Clive and Vernon have never been real friends but their main concern has been either to tease each other or demonstrate one’s moral righteousness over the other. When they barely are on speaking terms, Clive decides to write Vernon a letter. The narrator presents Clive’s true opinion of Vernon in his interior monologue permeated with the free indirect thought: These kitchen execrations saw Clive through a second drink, and then a third. He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy. Poison, in preserved form, to be used against you long into the future. But Clive wanted to write something now precisely because he might not feel so strongly in a week’s time. He compromised with a terse postcard, which he would leave for a day before sending. Your threat appals me. So does your journalism. You deserve to be sacked. Clive. He opened a bottle of Chablis and, ignoring the salmon en croute in the fridge, went up to the top floor, belligerently determined to start work. There would come a time when nothing would remain of Vermin Halliday, but what would remain of Clive Linley would be his music. Work-quiet, determined, triumphant work, then—would be a kind of revenge. But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were three gins and a bottle of wine, and three hours later he was still staring at the score on the piano, in a hunched attitude of work, with a pencil in his hand and a frown, but hearing and seeing only the

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bright hurdy-gurdy carousel of his twirling thoughts and the same hard little horses bobbing by on their braided rods. Here they came again. The outrage! The police! Poor Molly! Sanctimonious bastard! Call that a moral position? Up to his neck in shit! The outrage! And what about Molly? (Amsterdam, 138–39)

His thoughts mix with alcohol but they are still relatively clear in Clive’s head: Vernon is an “enemy” against whom he professes “revenge”. The narrator’s use of the pronoun “your” (“putting the weapons into the hands of your enemy”) and “you” (“poison to be used against you”) indicates how closely he gets into the character’s mind. Clive’s comments on the card show intentional, bald on-record impoliteness: “Your threat appals me. So does your journalism. You deserve to be sacked ”. Clive, once again, demonstrates his moral superiority and he openly attacks Vernon’s positive face by criticising his journalism and by finding his behaviour appalling (positive impoliteness). His language is spiteful, revealing his negative emotions—he calls his former friend “Vermin” and “sanctimonious bastard”. In the final passage in FIT, he feels moral outrage which comes to him with obsessive thoughts about Vernon’s hypocrisy. How can someone who wants to destroy a politician’s life and respectable memory of an old friend accuse him of immorality and report him to the police: “The outrage! The police! Poor Molly! […] Call that a moral position? Up to his neck in shit! The outrage!”. Clive is a mediocre composer with the aspirations of Henry Purcell (Elie 1998), believing that the best way of revenge will be to get down to work, finish the symphony and prove to Vernon how insignificant his life is in comparison with his own music and talent. Vernon’s sentiment towards his ex-friend is no different. He convinces himself that there was never any friendship between them, especially not after reading the note. Similarly, the narrator presents his inner thoughts and plans via a combination of omniscient narration and FIT: Lying on the bed beside him was a venomous little card gloating over his downfall, written by his oldest friend, written by a man so morally eminent he would rather see a woman raped in front of him than have his work disrupted. Perfectly hateful, and mad. Vindictive. So it was war. Right, then. Here we go, don’t hesitate. He drained his cup, picked up the

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phone, and dialled a friend at New Scotland Yard, a contact from his old crime desk days. Fifteen minutes later all the details had been imparted, the deed was done, but Vernon was still back with his thoughts, still not satisfied. It turned out that Clive had not broken the law. He would be inconvenienced into doing his duty, nothing more than that. But there had to be more. There had to be consequences. (Amsterdam, 147)

Now, it is Vernon who finds it hard to understand Clive’s hypocrisy— a venomous note full of moral condescension coming from someone who was observing a woman raped in front of him and never reacted, he notes sarcastically. We know exactly what he is thinking: “Perfectly hateful, and mad. Vindictive. So it was war. Right, then. Here we go, don’t hesitate”. In an instant, he makes a call and hires a Dutch doctor to kill Clive. There is too much negativity and hatred between Vernon and Clive for the novella to end differently than in their ironic death. Malcolm says that the good cannot be rewarded in Amsterdam because there are no good characters here (Malcolm 2002: 195). Impoliteness is a key characterising feature of the protagonists’ thoughts, speech and actions; mutual accusations, spiteful language and disingenuous motives ruin an already shaky friendship. Head claims that the novella satirises “a peculiarly male world” (Head 2007: 153). Alain de Botton in his review of Amsterdam also notes that the book offers “a pitiless study of the darker aspects of male psychology, of male paranoia, emotional frigidity, sexual jealousy, professional rivalry and performance anxiety” (de Botton 1998: 12). Much as it is hard not to agree with these opinions, the greater meaning of this story lies in how an impolite attitude and one’s intention to cause harm to others can wreck human relationships.

4.4

Atonement, (Im)politeness and Empathy

Atonement is “the period romance” (James 2019: 182) which takes place in England in the 1930s and tells the story of an upper-middle-class family, concentrating in particular on Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old girl

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who destroys the lives of her sister Cecilia and her lover Robbie. It is one of the most well-recognised novels by Ian McEwan, which was popularised among wider audiences by Joe Wright’s film adaptation in 2008. Above all, the novel serves as an outstanding example of postmodern narration, something that reviewers called McEwan’s “glittering narrative pyrotechnics” (Kakutani 2002), offering the author’s “most selfreflexive engagement with the ethics of fiction” (James 2019: 189). It is divided into four parts, each part having a different narrating mode and presenting a different point of view on past, traumatic events. Briony is an avid reader of Romantic fiction and an aspiring young writer, she is an author of a melodrama The Trials of Arabella, a play she stages at home with her cousins as actors. One of them is Lola, an adolescent girl, who is raped outside the house at night by a family friend Paul Marshall, the heir to a chocolate business. Having accidentally witnessed the lovemaking between Cee and Robbie in the library, Briony thinks that it is Robbie who is the perpetrator and reports to the police that she saw him forcing himself on Lola. Robbie Turner goes to jail and when the Second World War breaks out, he is conscripted into the army but dies during the war. Cee will never see him again. In an act of atonement, grown-up Briony decides that she will never go to university but will keep working as a nurse in the hospital instead; she devotes her whole life to writing fiction, in particular, one novel which describes the happy life of Cecilia and Robbie, the life they never had, the life that she took away from them. Part One shows the events in the Tallis family from various perspectives: the heterodiegetic narration is focalised through the perspective of Briony (chapters 1, 3, 7, 10, 13), Cecilia (chapters 2 and 9) or their mother Emily (chapters 6 and 12); there is also one chapter focalised through Robbie’s character (chapter 8); chapters 4 and 5 are examples of zero focalisation known otherwise as omniscient narration. Part Two discusses wartime and Robbie’s experiences at Dunkirk and it also presents Briony as a practising nurse at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London. Part Three tells the stories of wounded soldiers and is based on memoirs (Lucilla Andrews’s No Time for Romance, 1977) as well as letters and documents from the Second World War collected by the author at The Imperial War Museum. The last part titled London 1999 offers the

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readers a truly post-modern resolution to the story—the seventy-sevenyear-old Briony reveals herself as a real author of the book and admits the truth about her childish mistake that turned out to have had irreversible consequences for her sister and Robbie. Briony, an autodiegetic narrator in this part, confesses before her readers that she is terminally ill and that she has been working on her book for many years, the project which made her relive the trauma of the past every day. Being a novelist herself, she is pondering on the nature of fiction and asking for the reader’s forgiveness for her tragic mistake in real life. I want to demonstrate how the thirteen-year-old Briony, the main focaliser in Atonement , is evolving as a character and how from her initial impolite attitude she turns to politeness at the end of the story. As was noted in Chapter 2 (Sect. 2.1) politeness has many linguistic definitions but its common denominator for all approaches is the cooperative attitude of the speakers. Impoliteness is characterised by the lack of cooperation or lack of willingness to cooperate with the other, which reflects the fact that the speaker has no intention of acting in the hearer’s best interest. Impoliteness is focused on maximising confrontation in discourse and it takes advantage of strategies “oriented towards attacking face, an emotionally sensitive concept of the self” to cause “social disruption” (Culpeper 1996: 350) and harm. I want to argue that young Briony causes social disruption with her lack of empathy towards other people, her family in particular, which in effect destroys Cecilia’s future with Robbie. Suzanne Keen in her study of narrative empathy looks into the concept from a psychological perspective and claims that empathy is “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect, [which] can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading” (Keen 2006: 208). Importantly, she differentiates between empathy and sympathy, claiming that they are not the same and can be confused with each other because both involve some individuals’ “mirroring” of what others are expected to feel in a certain context. In short, empathy is feeling the same emotions as the other, for example, grief, pain and sadness, which Keen labels as “I feel what you feel” (e.g. I feel your pain). In the case of sympathy the spectrum of emotions is very limited and it is narrowed down to feeling supportive emotions about other people’s feelings (e.g. I feel pity for your pain) or,

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as it is commonly understood, sympathy is all about feeling sorry for another person (Keen 2006: 209).3 Briony’s impoliteness is caused by her failure to empathise with others or, in other words, to imagine what it must feel like to be somebody else. Ian McEwan comments on Briony’s situation in reference to himself in an interview with Ramona Koval; he remembers the time when he was a child and what a difficult discovery it was for him to realise one day that all people, not only him, had their inner worlds and were as real as he was: My mother dropped me at the beach on her way to work. I was in North Africa. It was early in the morning. It was the Mediterranean spring and I had the day to myself. No friends—I don’t know why, that day—and I had one of those little epiphanies of ‘I’m me,’ and at the same time thinking, well, everyone must feel this. Everyone must think, ‘I’m me.’ It’s a terrifying idea, I think, for a child, and yet that sense that other people exist is the basis of our morality. You cannot be cruel to someone, I think, if you are fully aware of what it’s like to be them. In other words, you could see cruelty as a failure of the imagination, as a failure of empathy. And to come back to the novel as a form, I think that’s where it is supreme in giving us that sense of other minds. (McEwan, qtd. in Koval 2002)

McEwan’s understanding of people’s cruelty to others lies in their failure to feel empathy and in their inability to put themselves in other people’s shoes. In the real author’s view, our morality is shaped by our selflessness, by recognising and acknowledging other individuals’ presence, feelings and needs. Briony does not possess that knowledge because she lacks life experience as a child. Atonement was described as a novel about the “problems of perception” (Koval 2002) since Briony witnesses an event she misunderstands but she attributes to it her own meaning without realising that she was being an unreliable witness. Briony’s impoliteness lies in the conscious and deliberate attribution of her own logic and meaning to what she saw, or actually, to what she did not see regardless of the feelings of others. Lynn Wells called Briony an “imaginative teller of tales” (Wells 2010: 99); at the age of eleven she wrote her first story, a “foolish affair” (Atonement , 6) based on folktales, and now she spends her days reading

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Romantic fiction and staging a play. The Trials of Arabella are a melodrama in the form of a Gothic romance to “inspire not laughter, but terror, relief and instruction, in that order” (Atonement , 8), the whole undertaking making her “particularly vulnerable to failure” (Atonement , 8). Her vivid imagination and her childish perception of the world of adults, however, are not solely responsible for Briony’s decision to hurt Robbie and falsely accuse him of rape. Nayebpour (2017) in his stylistic analysis of Atonement enters the characters’ fictional minds using cognitive narratology to account for Briony’s motifs. Cognitive narratology as part of the “post-classical” approach to narrative focuses on the study of characters and their inner world rather than the study of the plot, action or event. Nayebpour views McEwan as a “cognitive novelist” (Nayebpour 2017: 25) and claims that the main concern of many of his novels (Amsterdam, Atonement , On Chesil Beach) is character presentation (Nayebpour 2017: 27).4 In his view, the main problem in McEwan’s stories “arises when the rift between the central characters’ intermental units and their intramental orientations is left unfilled causing disequilibrium in the narratives” (Nayebpour 2017: 27). To clarify, the intermental aspect of the character’s mind is representative of their social self and the intramental aspect responds to the character’s individuality and their private self. In the analysis of the mental functioning of the main focaliser Briony argues that her “subjective first position” or “intramental side” occupies her mental state and thus leads to “negative emotional consequences” (Nayebpour 2017: 29). The state of social disequilibrium and the dismantling of the intramental (social, family) bonds between Briony, Cee and Robbie is caused by Briony’s “intramental dissents” (Nayebpour 2017: 27), which make her feel different, even special: Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and

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everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had. This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. For, though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers. She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn’t really feel it. (Atonement, 36)

Briony’s thoughts reflect those of young Ian McEwan’s: how does it feel to be someone else? In a series of rhetorical questions she is trying to understand other people’s minds but always in relation to herself: “[…] did her sister really matter to herself?” or “Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony?”. She knows that life can be complicated but she has little willingness to empathise or believe that other people may have the same “bright and private inside feeling” as she does. Other people’s private selves or the fact that they experience similar feelings seem to her “overwhelmingly probable” but it is something she does not often think about—as the narrator notes, “she knew this, but […] she didn’t really feel it”. What Nayebpour in his stylistic analysis classified as Briony’s excessive “intramentality”, literary critics and reviewers coined in more judgmental terms, for example, “joyful naivete and self-dramatizing imagination” (Kakutani 2002), “her egotism” and “narcissis[m]” (Wells 2010: 100), or “ethical disab[ility]” (James 2019: 190). Briony’s thoughts are in line with general impoliteness rules as outlined by Culpeper (1996, 2011). I want to argue that Briony has condescending thoughts which block her empathy for others: she believes that everyone else who thinks differently than herself is like a machine, “intelligent and pleasant on the outside” but lacking the inner world she has, which makes them less significant. Culpeper enumerates several types of patronising behaviour, such as condescending, belittling, ridiculing and demeaning behaviours and gives more specific examples of strategies, e.g. “Treat people in a service capacity as if they are beneath you; whenever possible, use terms like ‘the little people’ or ‘the help’” (Culpeper 2011: 309). Briony Tallis may not use offensive words but it is her condescending thoughts and impressions

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about others that boost her self-importance and significantly lower her sense of empathy. I would like to make it clear that Briony’s impoliteness does not necessarily make her a negative character but it demonstrates the negative social consequences of focusing on herself and disregarding other minds/people. Still, she intentionally makes her viewpoint central to the story as its author and asks for the reader’s understanding of her past sins in the novel’s coda. Briony’s point of view as a focalising agent is characterised by the sense of order and logic that she immediately imposes on the world around her. It is particularly visible when from a window of her room she is looking at her sister and Robbie at the fountain. Cecilia is removing some of her clothes in front of Robbie to retrieve a piece of a priceless family vase which broke off and fell into the water. Cee is plunging into the fountain in her underclothes and emerges before him all wet with the broken piece. Briony judges what she sees by her child-like standards— she believes the gardener’s son to be a serious threat to her sister: Closer, within the boundaries of the balustrade, were the rose gardens and, nearer still, the Triton fountain, and standing by the basin’s retaining wall was her sister, and right before her was Robbie Turner. There was something rather formal about the way he stood, feet apart, head held back. A proposal of marriage. Briony would not have been surprised. She herself had written a tale in which a humble woodcutter saved a princess from drowning and ended by marrying her. What was presented here fitted well. Robbie Turner, only son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father, Robbie who had been subsidised by Briony’s father through school and university, had wanted to be a landscape gardener, and now wanted to take up medicine, had the boldness of ambition to ask for Cecilia’s hand. It made perfect sense. Such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance. What was less comprehensible, however, was how Robbie imperiously raised his hand now, as though issuing a command which Cecilia dared not disobey. It was extraordinary that she was unable to resist him. At his insistence she was removing her clothes, and at such speed. She was out of her blouse, now she had let her skirt drop to the ground and was stepping out of it, while he looked on impatiently, hands on hips. What strange power did he have over her? Blackmail? Threats? Briony raised

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two hands to her face and stepped back a little way from the window. She should shut her eyes, she thought, and spare herself the sight of her sister’s shame. But that was impossible, because there were further surprises. Cecilia, mercifully still in her underwear, was climbing into the pond, was standing waist deep in the water, was pinching her nose—and then she was gone. There was only Robbie, and the clothes on the gravel, and beyond, the silent park and the distant, blue hills. The sequence was illogical—the drowning scene, followed by a rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal. (Atonement, 38–39)

Although she is just a child, Briony understands how social conventions work, for example, she thinks that marrying Robbie would be beneath Cecilia. She compares Robbie to “a humble woodcutter” from her tale who aspires to gain the heart of her sister whose social position is so much better than his. The narrator-focaliser exhibits a condescending attitude and enumerates Robbie’s drawbacks as a suitor: he is an only son of a poor cleaning lady and he does not know his father, he could be a gardener at most but thanks to Mr Tallis’s kindness and financial support he has become a graduate of the medical faculty at Cambridge and can now pursue a medical career. Briony’s evaluation of Robbie as a person is a face threatening act which attacks his negative face, that is, the speaker puts the other’s indebtedness on record (Culpeper 1996: 358). Briony underlines how much Robbie owes her family and indicates that he is of inferior social background. She is outraged by the fact that despite his humble, indebted social position he has “the boldness of ambition” to ask for Cee’s hand in marriage. The focaliser’s ideological viewpoint is very clear. For Briony, her sister’s behaviour is a “shame” and her lover’s audacity to court her should never happen in real life because “such leaps across boundaries” are only possible in romances. She uses value-laden language (Short 1996: 264–86) to judge the lovers’ conduct: in her eyes, Cee at the fountain is performing Robbie’s orders and taking off her clothes because he asked for it, though “mercifully” she stays in her underwear. Robbie, viewed from the window, seems to exercise power over her sister: he “imperiously” raises his hand, and “impatiently” looks at Cee as she dresses down. Although Briony is an unreliable witness to the scene (she is not physically there and has a

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limited view of the context, and also she is still a child who misinterprets what she sees), the narrator uses factive verbs to manifest the veracity of her account: “there was something rather formal about the way he stood”, Cee “was unable to resist him”, what she saw “made perfect sense” and “fitted well” into a love scenario according to young Briony. In short passages in the free indirect thought she reflects on the potential reasons for Robbie’s influence over Cecilia in the form of rhetorical questions: “What strange power did he have over her? Blackmail? Threats?”. Finally, Briony employs schema-oriented language, which reflects her background knowledge regarding romantic relationships. As a fan (and writer) of romances, she unveils her naivete and childish romantic ideals. In her view, what she saw at the fountain must have been nothing else but “a proposal of marriage”. In her strictly ordered world, romantic courtship has its logical stages: first the drowning scene, next the rescue of the princess, and finally the marriage proposal. Here, Briony notices an “illogical” sequence of Robbie’s courtship, which casts suspicion on him in her mind. His possessive conduct clashes with Briony’s image of a romantic lover from the hoi polloi. Briony’s concentration on her “intramental mind” (Nayebpour 2017: 186) makes her engrossed in her world, which is characterised by “a taste for the miniature” as one aspect of her “orderly spirit” and “a passion for secrets” (Atonement , 5). Nayebpour claims that writing allows her to fulfil such desires because it combines “secrecy and the pleasures of miniaturization” (Nayebpour 2017: 187). Briony’s everyday life is devoid of drama, intense emotions, or secrets. The narrator says that her wish for harmony and orderliness has made her immune to “the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing” (Atonement , 5). She would never have thought that she had it in her to be cruel because “[m]ayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes” (Atonement , 5), which, I want to say, desensitised her morally and ethically to the awareness of other people’s feelings and left her dormant to evil. Briony’s focalised narrative about Robbie remains unchanged when she sees him with Cecilia as they make love in the library. Once again, she misinterprets the signs—what is a passionate love act between Cee and Robbie is the predatory behaviour of the gardener’s son for Briony. From her point of view, the secret

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encounter in the family library that she accidentally witnesses is a fight between Cecilia and her lover: At first, when she pushed open the door and stepped in, she saw nothing at all. The only light was from a single green-glass desk lamp which illuminated little more than the tooled leather surface on which it stood. When she took another few steps she saw them, dark shapes in the furthest corner. Though they were immobile, her immediate understanding was that she had interrupted an attack, a hand-to-hand fight. The scene was so entirely a realisation of her worst fears that she sensed that her overanxious imagination had projected the figures onto the packed spines of books. This illusion, or hope of one, was dispelled as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. No one moved. Briony stared past Robbie’s shoulder into the terrified eyes of her sister. He had turned to look back at the intruder, but he did not let Cecilia go. He had pushed his body against hers, pushing her dress right up above her knee and had trapped her where the shelves met at right angles. His left hand was behind her neck, gripping her hair and with his right he held her forearm which was raised in protest, or self-defence. He looked so huge and wild, and Cecilia with her bare shoulders and thin arms so frail that Briony had no idea what she could achieve as she started to go towards them. She wanted to shout, but she could not catch her breath, and her tongue was slow and heavy. Robbie moved in such a way that her view of her sister was completely obscured. Then Cecilia was struggling free, and he was letting her go. (Atonement, 123)

The focaliser chooses to describe what she saw in terms of “an attack, a hand-to-hand fight”, employing schema-oriented language that controls her narrative and aims at presenting Robbie in a negative light. Her vantage position is that of a child who uses highly emotionally laden vocabulary which confirms her greatest fears about Robbie after seeing him with Cee at the fountain. In her eyes, Robbie uses force with her sister, for example, he “pushed his body against hers”, “trapped her” against the bookshelves and “gripped her hair”. Her narrative account of the scene is evaluative: Cecilia’s eyes are “terrified” (she is terrified for one reason only—to see Briony there) and she “struggles free” from his

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embrace rather than is released from it (Briony dramatises her description to indicate Cee’s vulnerability as Robbie’s victim). At the same time, she vilifies Robbie who in her eyes is a sexual predator looking “huge” and “wild” and holding Cecilia’s whole “forearm” which was “raised in protest, or self-defense”. Briony’s narrative has a recurring stylistic pattern—although she is an unreliable narrator, she indicates her thoughts and perceptions using factive verbs as if she wanted to convince the reader that her impressions are right and that this is exactly what she has witnessed: she “had an immediate understanding ” (no second thoughts) that she had interrupted an attack and the scene “was so entirely a realisation of her worst fears” (nothing is seeming but her words confirm the truth status of her account). The ideological viewpoint of the focaliser in the description of the library scene reflects Briony’s mindset (see Short 1996: 277)—she is biased against Robbie, she is suspicious about him and perceives him as a wrongdoer who threatens her sister. Cecilia is presented as an innocent and frail character from a romance who is in danger and needs to be saved. The reader is presented with Robbie’s perspective in the next chapter and we learn that his love for Cecilia is true and that he had never hated anyone as much as he hated Briony when he noticed her at the library door, his hatred being “as pure as love, dispassionate and icily rational” (Atonement , 139). Briony’s self-absorbed, “intramental” perspective has disastrous consequences the moment she accuses Robbie of rape. Once again, she creates her own narrative and claims to have seen things she has not seen at all; she confuses the real world and real people with the fictional world over which she has power as a writer. Her cold sense of logic and order prevails over her ability to empathise with others. Briony convinces herself that the man she saw in the night harming her cousin Lola was no one else but Robbie—the Robbie who ordered Cee about at the fountain, the Robbie who harassed her sister in the library and who has now found a new victim. She interrogates Lola: ‘Lola, who was it?’ […] So many seconds had passed—thirty? forty-five?—and the younger girl could no longer hold herself back. Everything connected. It was her own discovery. It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her.

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‘It was Robbie, wasn’t it?’ The maniac. She wanted to say the word. Lola said nothing and did not move. Briony said it again, this time without the trace of a question. It was a statement of fact. ‘It was Robbie.’ Though she had not turned, or moved at all, it was clear that something was changing in Lola, a warmth rising from her skin and a sound of dry swallowing, a heaving convulsion of muscle in her throat that was audible as a series of sinewy clicks. Briony said it again. Simply. ‘Robbie.’ (Atonement, 165–66)

In short passages conveyed in the free indirect thought, the readers have some insight into Briony’s mind. She is convinced that it was him because Robbie is a “maniac” and the facts (or what she believes to be the facts) fit her story: “everything connected”. Briony’s speculations and suspicions which used to be just her thoughts become facts when she voices them. The level of certainty grows with each new repetition of his name: “It was Robbie, wasn’t it?” (least certain, indicated by a question tag); “It was Robbie” (a statement of fact spoken aloud to convince herself ); and “Robbie” (repetition of what she now believes to be true). Her conviction is so strong that she lies to the police and reports that she saw Robbie Turner, the gardener’s son, violating her cousin Lola just outside her house:—“You saw him with your own eyes”, asks the policeman;—“Yes. I saw him. I saw him” (Atonement , 181), is her reply. Impoliteness, as has been mentioned before, can be transmitted by various strategies employed by speakers who intend to cause damage to the other’s positive or negative face. Culpeper talks about another strategy intended to threaten the other’s negative face (or their freedom of action and freedom from imposition), namely, explicitly associate the other with a negative aspect—“for example, personalise, use the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’” (Culpeper 1996: 358). I want to argue that young Briony does exactly this; she associates Robbie with negative and abhorrent behaviour, for example, being a tyrant towards Cecilia at the fountain, posing as a brute to her sister in the library and, finally, being a “maniac” who rapes Lola. We can observe how Briony’s imagination is getting out of control and how her eagerness to tell a coherent story forces her to believe in her

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lies. Although still a child, she is mature enough to know that she causes Robbie harm and her decisions are conscious and intentional (Briony is too grown up to jump to conclusions and, being a writer, she likes thinking things over: “It was Robbie, wasn’t it?” […] “It was Robbie” […] Simply. “Robbie”). Briony’s negative impoliteness has evil consequences—with her aggravating testimony she destroys Robbie’s future (he will never become a doctor, and he will go to jail); she also breaks Cecilia’s heart (Cee and Robbie will never see each other again). Briony, however, undergoes a transformation as a character in the final part of Atonement . She reveals her identity as the author of the book and admits before the reader that Cee and Robbie’s love story never had a happy ending and that she could only reunite them in fiction. In reality, Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes (Dunkirk) in 1940 and Cecilia was killed in the bombing that destroyed Balham Underground station in the same year. Seventy-seven-year-old Briony is a novelist diagnosed with vascular dementia who is feeling a strong urge to atone for the evil she has caused in the past. As an autodiegetic narrator she finally “puts intermentality higher than intramentality” and tries to understand other minds/people by “rely[ing] on love as the only surviving aspect of human beings” (Nayebpour 2017: 224). The mature Briony turns to politeness at the end of her life; she is finally interested in learning what it must have felt like to be Cecilia or Robbie, and what they must have gone through during the war, separated from each other. The elderly Briony is ready to cooperate and tell the real story; she says that her book is “a final act of kindness” (Atonement , 372) to Cee and Robbie, in which she symbolically reinstates “the social equilibrium” (Leech 1983: 82) which she violated long time ago. In her confession to the reader, Briony is asking for their understanding: The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

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I’ve been standing at the window, feeling waves of tiredness beat the remaining strength from my body. The floor seems to be undulating beneath my feet. I’ve been watching the first grey light bring into view the park and the bridges over the vanished lake. And the long narrow driveway down which they drove Robbie away, into the whiteness. I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration […] Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It’s not impossible. (Atonement, 371–72)

This may seem like a very little effort to try to imagine how it must feel like to be somebody else, but through fiction and with age Briony has learnt empathy—she tries to place herself in the shoes of the lovers she separated to better understand the damage she has caused. “The attempt was all”, she says, realising that she will probably never be forgiven but she wants her readers to know that the act of attempting to imagine other people’s suffering is something after all and that she tried. In an “act of kindness”, she reaches out to the lovers and offers them a (fictional) happy ever after, and just as she used her imagination to destroy their future together, she is now using it to reunite them and save their memory from oblivion. Briony would like to turn back the clock and bring back the “social equilibrium” (Leech 1983: 82) because she says: “If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration […] Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library […]”. Michael Lemahieu claims that Atonement “is in many ways an exploration of the problem of other minds—of ‘the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you’” (Lemahieu 2019: 63). But what we also learn from McEwan’s fiction is that understanding others is impossible without empathy and politeness—the willingness to cooperate with the other and to act in the other’s best interest. It takes Briony fifty-nine years to learn to be empathetic and cooperative, which is exactly the time she has spent writing her novel.

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4.5

Summary

Politeness and impoliteness are valuable pragmatic tools aiding characterisation in Ian McEwan’s fiction. The theory of impoliteness emerges as a key characterising device that reflects the differences in perspective between the main characters in Enduring Love. Joe Rose, a rationalist and proponent of the neo-Darwinian approach, struggles to understand her partner Clarissa, who is professionally interested in Romantic literature and is guided by empathy and imagination in her life—Joe criticises her as being “disloyal” and “unsupportive” (Enduring Love, 139). His even greater conflict is with his stalker, Jed Parry, who suffers from erotomania and harasses him after they meet by chance at the scene of the balloon accident. Jed’s first-person narration is permeated with religious obsession, madness and paranoia, and it is characterised by both politeness and impoliteness, depending on the character’s mood: his polite letters to Joe on the one hand and physical aggression in the restaurant on the other hand. Joe’s behaviour and language are full of condescension, patronising tone and dissociation (Culpeper 1996, 2010) from everything he does not understand. Amsterdam offers a fresh look at impoliteness viewed as a social practice by involving the speakers’ value judgments that refer implicitly to their “moral order” (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 6). McEwan’s novella is an exemplification of how the characters’ immoral decisions are directly linked with impoliteness (see Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016; Haugh and Kádár 2017). Clive Linley is a composer who has problems sticking to deadlines. When strolling in the Lake District in search of inspiration for his symphony he fails to help a young woman who, as it turns out later, was attacked by an infamous rapist. Clive infringes on the ritual of “bystander intervention” (Kádár and Márquez-Reiter 2015: 240) for purely egoistic reasons. His best ex-friend Vernon Halliday is a chief editor of a broadsheet newspaper who breaks all rules of his journalistic profession by announcing the publication of discrediting photos of the British Foreign Secretary to boost the circulation numbers and take personal vendetta. In this way, he violates the moral order of his professional group (his conduct is evaluated as unethical and he loses his job) as well as shocks public opinion (Mrs Garmony, the politician’s wife, in

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a desperate attempt to save her husband’s face in public, calls Vernon a “blackmailer” with “the moral stature of a flea” on television). The pragma-stylistic analysis of Atonement describes the transformation of the main focaliser Briony Tallis with the use of (im)politeness (Culpeper 1996, 2011; Leech 1983) and the theory of cognitive narratology. I argue after Nayebpour (2017) that she goes from “intramentality” (focus on her mind) to “intermentality” (focus on other minds), which helps her to learn empathy and to better understand her selfish mistake as a child. When Briony is young, her attitude is characterised by impoliteness: she has condescending thoughts about others and associates her sister’s lover with negative behaviour (that of a brute, tyrant and maniac) which eventually leads to tragic and evil consequences for Robbie and Cecilia. The first part of the novel offers alternating focalisation to present Briony and what she sees from various points of view and to show her ignorance about love and sex (Dobrogoszcz 2018: 134– 35), thus indicating to the reader that she cannot be fully trusted as a storyteller. What is interesting from a stylistic perspective is that Briony as an unreliable narrator is using factive verbs to back up her speculative thoughts because she likes her stories to be coherent and logical, but following the rules of her logic. As a mature novelist, she turns to politeness (cooperation with other minds) in her attempt to symbolically reinstate the “social equilibrium” (Leech 1983: 82) in her own book. She brings back Robbie’s good reputation in fiction but it is only after she has learnt to love and empathise in real life.

Notes 1. Lewis revised his definition of convention; he allowed for exceptions and created the possibility of degrees of conventionality (Lewis 1969: 78–79). 2. Read and listen more at: https://www.rcmediafreedom.eu/Multimedia/ Video/The-5-Core-Values-of-Journalism. 3. Empathy is usually associated with negative emotions such as pity or pain but Keen emphasises the fact that even though psychological and philosophical studies on empathy concentrate on the negative emotions,

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empathy is also felt for positive feelings, for example, happiness, triumph, satisfaction (Keen 2006: 209). 4. Pascal Nicklas shares Nayebpour’s opinion about McEwan’s interest in the characters’ relationships with the others and says: “At the heart of McEwan’s poetology is the desire to look through the eyes of someone else. The confusion of the self and the other […] in general opens up for Ian McEwan the ethical dimension of literature” (Nicklas 2009: 9).

References Allen, Eric W., “The Social Value of a Code of Ethics for Journalists,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The Ethics of the Professions and of Business 101 (1922): 170–79. Birkerts, Sven, “Grand Delusion,” New York Times Book Review 81, no. 2 (1998): p. 7, January 25, 1998. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes. com/books/98/01/25/reviews/980125.25birkert.html. Bousfield, Derek, “‘Never a Truer Word Said in Jest’: A Pragmastylistic Analysis of Impoliteness as Banter in Henry IV, Part 1.” In Contemporary Stylistics, edited by Marina Lambrou and Peter Stockwell, 209–20. (London: Continuum, 2007). Bousfield, Derek, Impoliteness in Interaction. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 167). (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008a). Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1978] 1987). Childs, Peter, The Fiction of Ian McEwan. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Childs, Peter, “Critical History.” In Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, edited by Peter Childs, 29–40. (London: Routledge, 2007). Culpeper, Jonathan, “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness,” Journal of Pragmatics 25, no. 3 (1996): 349–67. Culpeper, Jonathan, Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2001). Culpeper, Jonathan, “Impoliteness and Entertainment in the Television Quiz Show: The Weakest Link,” Journal of Politeness Research 1, no. 1 (2005): 35–72.

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Culpeper, Jonathan, “Conventionalised Impoliteness Formulae,” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010): 3232–45. Culpeper, Jonathan, Impoliteness. Using Language to Cause Offence. (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 28). (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). de Botton, Alain, “Another Study in Emotional Frigidity. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan,” Independent on Sunday, “Culture”, September 13, 1998, p. 12. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books-anotherstudy-in-emotional-frigidity-1197915.html. Dobrogoszcz, Tomasz, Family and Relationships in Ian McEwan’s Fiction: Between Fantasy and Desire. (Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 2018). Elie, Paul, “Going Dutch. Amsterdam,” The Village Voice, December 22, 1998. https://www.villagevoice.com/1998/12/22/going-dutch/. Greenberg, Jonathan, “Why Can’t Biologists Read Poetry? Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love,” Twentieth Century Literature 53, no. 2 (2007): 93–124. Haugh, Michael and Dániel Z. Kádár, “Intercultural (Im)politeness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 601–32. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Head, Dominic, Ian McEwan. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Hydén, Margareta, “Verbal Aggression as Prehistory of Woman Battering,” Journal of Family Violence 10, no. 1 (1995): 55–71. James, David, “Narrative Artifice.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan, edited by Dominic Head, 181–96. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Jucker, Andreas H., “Politeness in Eighteenth-Century Drama: A Discursive Approach,” Journal of Politeness Research 12, no. 1 (2016): 95–115. Kádár, Dániel Z., Relational Rituals and Communication. Ritual Interaction in Groups. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Kádár, Dániel Z. and Michael Haugh, Understanding Politeness. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Kádár, Dániel Z. and Rosina Márquez-Reiter, “(Im)politeness and (Im)morality: Insights from Intervention,” Journal of Politeness Research 11, no. 2 (2015): 239–60. Kakutani, Michiko, “Books of The Times: And When She Was Bad She Was… Atonement by Ian McEwan,” The New York Times, March

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7, 2002. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/07/books/books-of-the-timesand-when-she-was-bad-she-was.html. Keen, Suzanne, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” NARRATIVE 14, no. 3 (2006): 207–36. Kizelbach, Urszula, The Pragmatics of Early Modern Politics: Power and Kingship in Shakespeare’s History Plays. (Amsterdam and New York: Brill, 2014). Koval, Ramona, “Ian McEwan,” September 21, 2002. Accessed August 20, 2021. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/booksandw riting/ian-mcewan/3630848#transcript. Leech, Geoffrey N., Principles of Pragmatics. (London: Longman, 1983). Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, “Enduring Love: Science vs. the Divine, with Suspense and Passion,” New York Times, Section E, p. 11, January 15, 1998. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11/ daily/love-book-review.html?scp=94&sq=balloon%2520boy&st=cse Lemahieu, Michael, “The Novel of Ideas.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan, edited by Dominic Head, 60–74. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Lewis, David, Convention: A Philosophical Study. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). Malcolm, David, Understanding Ian McEwan. (Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press, 2002). McEwan, Ian, Enduring Love. (Vintage: London, 1997). McEwan, Ian, Amsterdam. (London: Vintage, 1998). McEwan, Ian, Atonement. (London: Vintage, [2001] 2007). McIntyre, Dan and Derek Bousfield, “(Im)politeness in Fictional Texts.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 759–84. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Nayebpour, Karam, Mind Presentation in Ian McEwan’s Fiction. Consciousness and the Presentation of Character in Amsterdam, Atonement and on Chesil Beach. (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2017). Nicklas, Pascal, “The Ethical Question: Art and Politics in the Work of Ian McEwan.” In Ian McEwan: Art and Politics, edited by Pascal Nicklas, 9–22. (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009). Palmer, Alan, “Attributions of Madness in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love,” Style 43, no. 3 (2009): 291–308. Popiel, Magdalena, “‘This Genteel Escapism…’. Art as Flight from Life in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, On Chesil Beach and Atonement,” ZNUV 52, no. 1 (2017): 89–103.

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Randall, Martin, “‘I Don’t Want Your Story’: Open and Fixed Narratives in Enduring Love.” In Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, edited by Peter Childs, 55–65. (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). Rot, Uroš, “Ian McEwan—Novels About Neurological and Psychiatric Patients,” European Neurology 60 (2008): 12–15. Ryan, Kiernan, “After the Fall.” In Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, edited by Peter Childs, 44–54. (London: Routledge, 2007). Short, Mick, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1996). Simpson, Paul, “Politeness Phenomena in Ionesco’s The Lesson.” In Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics, edited by Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson, 169–92. (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Spencer-Oatey, Helen and Dániel Z. Kádár, “The Bases of (Im)politeness Evaluations: Culture, the Moral Order and the East-West Debate,” East Asian Pragmatics 1, no. 1 (2016): 73–106. Tedeschi, James T. and Richard B. Felson, Violence, Aggression, and Coercive Actions. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1994). Terkourafi, Marina, “Politeness and Pragmatics.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, edited by Kasia Jaszczolt and Keith Allan, 617–37. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Terkourafi, Marina and Dániel Z. Kádár, “Convention and Ritual (Im)politeness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Impoliteness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 171–95. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Wells, Lynn, Ian McEwan. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

5 Extradiegetic (Im)politeness or How the Implied Author Communicates with the Reader

5.1

Introduction

Few pragma-stylistic studies point to the function of (im)politeness as part of the communication between the text (implied author) and the implied reader in fiction. As aforementioned, Jucker (2016) analyses the role of politeness in the context of two English eighteenth-century plays and describes the relations of politeness on both intradiegetic and extradiegetic levels, which he calls respectively “the politeness in the literary text” and “the politeness of the literary text” (Jucker 2016: 112). Also, Black (2006) notes that the act of reading books may be considered an imposition by the reader, as it requires their time and energy. She further argues that “a very serious type of FTA that occurs on the authorial or narratorial level lies in the choice of topic” (Black 2006: 74). She claims that many fictions are offensive to some readers, for example, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses led to a fatwa pronounced against him and, eventually, to his assassination during his lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, USA in August 2022. Some less extreme cases of fiction being insulting to the readers © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 U. Kizelbach, (Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18690-5_5

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is Nabokov’s Lolita or James Joyce’s Dubliners, the latter being so offensive that it experienced great difficulties with publication and a printer was said to have destroyed the plates. Black rightly says that there is a relationship between the reader and the writer and that “we may be offended by certain topics, as recurrent demands for censorship show” (Black 2006: 74). Much as my definition of extradiegetic impoliteness does not concern the choice of the topic by the author, I agree that there exists a relationship between the reader and the writer and, in my view, the impoliteness begins when their mutual communication no longer runs smoothly but is characterised by discord and a lack of cooperation. Ian McEwan’s works show true potential not only for the intradiegetic impoliteness or “the impoliteness in the literary fiction” (see analysis in Chapter 4) but also for the extradiegetic impoliteness or “the impoliteness of the literary fiction”, which this chapter aims to demonstrate. Extradiegetic impoliteness is when the implied author, using the narrator figure, expresses their impolite beliefs through narration, which may have potential face-threatening consequences for the implied reader, e.g. moral shock, dissociation from the protagonist or the real author, feeling hurt or put out. Narrators utilise various techniques to achieve this effect in fiction, such as the manipulation of style (the narrator’s discourse stylistically resembles the protagonist’s discourse), the use of the free indirect style in narration to present the narrator’s views and ideological standpoint as the character’s views, and collapsible viewpoints of the narrator and the character, which blurs the boundary between the narrator’s and the character’s points of view. Impoliteness on the extradiegetic level of communication in fiction is conveyed indirectly, through free indirect speech and thought, the conflation of stylistic features and points of view in the narrator’s and protagonist’s discourse, or via implicatures, such as irony and sarcasm. The key goal of extradiegetic impoliteness is to violate the reader’s “moral order” (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016: 74), their ethical and moral norms and expectations, which results in impediments on the narrator-reader level of communication. Extradiegetic impoliteness stands in opposition to what Booth calls an “ideal” situation of good rapport or “secret communion” (Booth 1961: 300) between the author and the reader, i.e. when

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they share similar presuppositions, standards of behaviour and norms of what is right or wrong (Leech and Short 2007: 209).1 Saturday demonstrates how the use of free indirect thought can lead to confusing the protagonist’s impolite beliefs and the real author’s views. The protagonist of the novel acts as the implied author’s advocate mostly because the heterodiegetic narrator seems to be sharing the character’s thoughts via FIT. The narrator also employs irony as an indirect impolite comment addressed to the implied reader. In Solar , I analyse the extradiegetic narrator’s impolite style with its potential face-threatening consequences for the implied reader. The narration in the novel is characterised by the collapsing points of view via FIS/FIT and viewpoint indicators. Free indirect style, the novel’s essential stylistic device, blurs the boundary between the implied author’s, the narrator’s and the protagonist’s voices in the novel. Therefore, tracking down an actual speaker is more complex and at the same time offers more freedom for the speaker to express impolite views in the narrative. In other words, Solar shows how the plurality of discourse perspectives and points of view in the narrative may create a safe space for expressing impolite beliefs by narrators in fiction. Finally, Nutshell offers impolite judgments uttered by the protagonist who is at the same time the narrator in the story (homodiegetic narration). The narrator’s subjective account and his limited perspective allow the implied author to evade the responsibility for the impolite comments on the extradiegetic, reader-oriented level.

5.2

Saturday: Terrorism and (a Lack of) Imagination

McEwan’s Saturday is often compared to Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, with the former showing a single day in the life of a gifted neurosurgeon from London. Henry Perowne has everything: a beautiful wife to whom he still feels attracted after many years of marriage, two adult and successful children, a prosperous job and a luxurious mansion in one of the city’s posh districts, Fitzrovia, as well as a couple of good friends with whom he regularly plays squash. 15 February 2003, the day described in the novel, unlike every other day is extremely eventful and

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emotion-laden for Henry. The story is focalised through the protagonist’s rationalist and analytical mind, and his perception of the events on that day is closely connected to the city’s imperialist history and his awareness of being a proud representative of the Western world. On this day the surge of protesters march the streets of London to take their stand against the American invasion of Iraq, supported by the British government. The novel reflects real events—on this day a coordinated series of anti-war protests were, indeed, held in over 600 cities around the world, London being one of them. Stop (The British Stop the War Coalition) estimated that it was the largest political demonstration in the city’s history. McEwan’s story is set in the context of the war on terrorism after the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001. According to newspaper reviews, the book constitutes “[a] detailed portrait of an age, of how we live now” (The Daily Telegraph) and serves as “[a]n allegory of the post-9/11 world” (The Washington Post ). Henry embodies the fears and frustrations of his age on this very morning when he sees a burning plane flying towards the British Telecom Tower. Fortunately, what Henry sees in the sky from the corner of his room turns out to be a cargo plane with a burning engine, which makes a decent landing at Heathrow airport and whose pilots remain unscathed. McEwan expressed his solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attacks and with their families in an emotional piece for The Guardian, in which he accused the terrorists of religious fanaticism, “dehumanising hatred” and “a failure of the imagination” (McEwan 2001b). In this piece, he puts himself in the shoes of the victims of the suicide plane attacks: This is the nature of empathy, to think oneself into the minds of others. These are the mechanics of compassion: you are under the bedclothes, unable to sleep, and you are crouching in the brushed-steel lavatory at the rear of the plane, whispering a final message to your loved one. There is only that one thing to say, and you say it. All else is pointless. You have very little time before some holy fool, who believes in his place in eternity, kicks in the door, slaps your head and orders you back to your seat. 23C. Here is your seat belt. There is the magazine you were reading before it all began.

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The banality of these details might overwhelm you. If you are not already panicking, you are clinging to a shred of hope that the captain, who spoke with such authority as the plane pushed back from the stand, will rise from the floor, his throat uncut, to take the controls... (McEwan, The Guardian, 2001b)

If only the hijackers had imagined what it would have been like to be the passengers on that plane, they would have been incapable of continuing with their plan of action. Once you enter somebody else’s mind and feel like this other person, it is impossible to hurt them or to be cruel, argues McEwan. The gift of imagination enables us to pretend to be somebody else and to put ourselves in their position; imagining to be somebody else is “at the core of our humanity” (McEwan 2001b) and it moulds our compassion and morality. In Saturday, the narrator’s description of the incident with the plane is surprisingly similar to the real author’s ideas and his understanding of the post-9/11 trauma. When Henry realises that the thundering sound in the sky is not a comet but a burning plane, he has one thought in his head—terrorists—and he drops the plan of waking his wife. He thinks: “Why wake her into this nightmare?” (Saturday, 15). Immediately, he starts pondering on what it would be like to be inside that plane, or any hijacked plane, strapped in his seatbelt, numb with panic and unable to escape, with minus sixty degrees outside: Plastic fork in hand, he often wonders how it might go—the screaming in the cabin partly muffled by that deadening acoustic, the fumbling in bags for phones and last words, the airline staff in their terror clinging to remembered fragments of procedure, the levelling smell of shit. But the scene construed from the outside, from afar like this, is also familiar. It’s already almost eighteen months since half the planet watched, and watched again the unseen captives driven through the sky to the slaughter, at which time there gathered round the innocent silhouette of any jet plane a novel association. Everyone agrees airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed. (Saturday, 15–16)

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Whose thoughts are these, McEwan’s or Perowne’s? In one of his interviews, McEwan admits: “Henry Perowne is not me, although I gave him one or two elements of my own life. […] I gave him my house; I gave him little bits of my children, of my wife” (Lynn 2007: 39). The protagonist’s thoughts expressed in free indirect discourse in the novel can easily be mistaken for the real author’s beliefs. For example, John Banville said in his review that “Saturday is a dismayingly bad book” (Banville 2005: 9) mostly because he assumed that McEwan shared the thoughts of his protagonist (Winterhalter 2010: 340). The stylistic features of the narrator’s account overlapping with those of the protagonist’s discourse led to some readers’ disappointment with the novel, as it seemed that Henry Perowne as a mouthpiece of the author was disseminating philistine beliefs and small-mindedness. Banville covertly criticised McEwan’s readers for their “ecstatic reception” of the book and ended his review with a rhetorical question: “Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture, are we so disablingly terrified in the face of the various fanaticisms which threaten us, that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous novel as this?” (Banville 2005: 9). John Banville, an acclaimed Irish writer and intellectual, just like many other reviewers and first critics may have been under the impression that McEwan validated Perowne’s conservative views, which cast suspicion and landed heavy criticism on the author.2 With access to Perowne’s mind, the reader is closer to his thoughts. In a mental sequence that resembles an interior monologue, the readers also step into the shoes of every passenger on that plane. Using free indirect thought, the narrator indicates every detail during the flight: holding a plastic fork in your hand unaware of what will come next, other passengers’ screaming muffled by a rumble of a bomb-damaged engine, the unpleasant smell of the passengers’ faeces and people’s desperate fumbling for their phones to record a message to their loved ones. Such a graphic visualisation of human tragedy allows the narrator to indicate that his protagonist has imagination and, unlike the terrorists, he is capable of compassion. Henry’s imagination and empathy put him in a superior position to the bad guys—he can think of himself as a good and moral person because he can feel for others. In the second part of

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his interior monologue, Perowne claims common ground with the rest of the world, “half [of ] the planet” to be exact, united in mourning, watching the short film of the planes hitting the Twin Towers over and over again and reliving this tragedy many months later. Speakers assert common ground through various linguistic strategies oriented towards mitigating a potential face threat to their hearers. This strategy is part of positive politeness and it is supposed to foster good relationships in communication (Brown and Levinson 1987: 102; Bousfield 2008a: 57). The speaker’s presupposing or asserting common ground with others also underlines their shared interests with a group. Henry feels part of a global community of good and empathetic people and assumes that “[e]veryone agrees” that these days planes look very different in the sky—they make people feel concerned or afraid. Because of the free indirect thought style in the last sentence, the reader may have doubts about who the speaker is and whose thoughts exactly they are reading, the implied author’s or the character’s. We look at London through the eyes of the protagonist, who is fascinated by the city’s monumental architecture on the one hand, and concerned about his family’s safety in the aftermath of 9/11 on the other. Regardless of the cold, he can stand on the street and wonder how this city is “a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece” where millions of people live, work, entertain themselves and travel and where “nearly everyone want[s] it to work” (Saturday, 5). Henry is proud of London, which seems to him like “a coral reef ” (Saturday, 5) around which one should move carefully so as not to destroy its harmonious existence. But things have changed after the terrorist attacks. On his way to work, Perowne is watching three women in burkhas on Harley Street from his car, they are standing outside a doctor’s office and having some sort of a debate, while one of them who is clearly invalid leans on the forearms of her companions. To the protagonist, they somehow disrupt the topography of the city: The three black columns, stark, against the canyon of creamy stucco and brick, heads bobbing, clearly arguing about the address, have a farcical appearance, like kids larking about at Halloween. Or like Theo’s school production of Macbeth when the hollowed trees of Birnam Wood waited

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in the wings to clump across the stage to Dunsinane. They are sisters perhaps, bringing her mother to her last chance. The lights remain stubbornly red. Perowne pushes the gear shift into “park”. What’s he doing, pushing down so hard on the break, tensing up his tender quadriceps? He can’t help his distaste, it’s visceral. How dismal, that anyone should be obliged to walk around so entirely obliterated. At least these ladies don’t have the leather beaks. They really turn his stomach. And what would the relativists say, the cheerful pessimists from Daisy’s college? That it’s sacred, traditional, a stand against the fripperies of Western consumerism? (Saturday, 124)

Is Henry bothered by the sight of Muslim Arab women on a London street—no, of course not. But he dissociates himself—he belongs to a different group—and he makes it clear that there are certain things he does not understand about the Arab culture. The narrator, using the free indirect style, employs value-laden language to emphasise this. The Arab women are looking “farcical”, and their clothes, specifically battoulah (referred to here as a “leather beak”)—an important part of the Muslim dress code and an element of women’s fashion—“turns his stomach”. The free indirect thought fragments of this passage cause Henry’s personal, biased views to sound more general, for example: “How dismal, that anyone should be obliged to walk around so entirely obliterated”—this is another aspect of the Muslim religion he does not understand. Henry is not a pessimist but, somehow, the image of the three women in hijabs reminds him of a tragic ending of one of the grimmest plays by the Bard. The protagonist’s (subconscious) condescending remarks are indicative of negative impoliteness, they emphasise Henry’s relative power and show that he “does not treat the other seriously” (Culpeper 1996: 358). The women look like “kids larking about at Halloween” or they resemble the characters in a “school production of Macbeth”. I agree with Christina Root who says: “Seeing the city as a triumph of the secular ideals of the Enlightenment now threatened by global reaction, Henry is obsessed by the irony that the city’s embodiment of the ideal of religious tolerance, evident in the three women in burkhas he sees standing outside a doctor’s office in Harley Street […] now puts it and everyone in it at terrible risk” (Root 2011: 67). The free indirect thought passages in this fragment make Henry’s beliefs suspiciously close to the narrator’s beliefs,

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which may act as a potential face threat to the reader’s negative face by “making the other feel uncomfortable” (Culpeper 1996: 358), and by “the other” I mean the readers. At a dinner with his children, Perowne enters into a heated debate with Daisy about the imminent war in Iraq and the anti-war street protests. Daisy, a free-thinking, emancipated young poet who has just come back from Paris, is waiting for the publication of her first volume of poetry. She has been to the demonstration in the park for reasons obvious to her: the war will kill many innocent Iraqis, the connection of Saddam with WMD or the very Al-Qaeda was, to say the least undocumented, and the American government—“these extremists, the Neo-cons […] Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz. Iraq was always their pet project” (Saturday, 190)—for Daisy the invasion of Iraq is all about power and oil. Even though Henry is quite certain that starting the war with the Arab world at present may not be a good idea, he believes it to be a step towards preventing problems in the future: ‘Daddy, you’re not for the war, are you?’ He shrugs. ‘No rational person is for war. But in five years we might not regret it. I’d love to see the end of Saddam. You’re right. It could be a disaster. But it could be the end of a disaster and the beginning of something better. It’s all about outcomes, and no one knows what they’ll be. That’s why I can’t imagine marching in the streets.’ (Saturday, 187)

Henry is not a bad person but his rational instincts tell him not to back the anti-war protests and maybe choose the war, which will be “the lesser evil” (Saturday, 187). He believes that “the price of removing Saddam is war” (Saturday, 190) and that war is acting towards everyone’s greater good. The reader observes that his imagination has its limits— he can imagine the tragedy of the passengers in the hijacked plane, but he cannot imagine the wretched fate of thousands of Iraqi citizens who will be collateral damage of this war. And, as he admits to Daisy, he cannot imagine himself marching in the streets. Henry’s pro-war attitude shows that his motifs for empathy are not always altruistic—“it’s all about outcomes”, and as long as there is a chance to prevent the Western

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world from any military threats, it is worth the sacrifice. As was indicated in Chapter 4, there is an important difference between empathy and sympathy in fiction. In psychological studies, empathy involves both cognitive and emotional components, namely, an empathiser adopts the other’s perspective and imaginatively experiences this person’s cognitive states (Coplan 2004: 144). Sympathy is closely connected with empathy but it does not include perspective-sharing, which entails that a sympathiser feels sympathy for the target, e.g. they are concerned about the other’s well-being or feel sorry for them, but they do not experience the same range of emotions as the other (Coplan 2004: 145). For clarity’s sake, what McEwan calls “moral sympathy” (Saturday, 127) in the novel I will call empathy because it means adopting someone’s perspective and imagining what it must feel like to be in somebody’s position without losing the sense of self. Tim Gauthier in his study of Saturday explains how Henry’s empathy works in the novel. He says: “Perowne […] admits, if only momentarily, that the exercise of empathy frequently implies inequality between empathizer and empathized. […] [I]n the novel’s construction, empathy becomes a tool for identifying the other’s weaknesses and turning them to one’s advantage” (Gauthier 2013: 9). His selective imagination reinforces his non-pacifist stance on the war. What if we are like Henry? We feel for others but when faced with a difficult choice, we always choose what seems to be “the right thing”. In free indirect style, the narrator indicates Henry’s awareness of human self-interest when displaying an empathetic attitude in the excerpt below. Henry, stopping in front of the fish display on Paddington Street ruminates on the nature of empathy: This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. Not only distant peoples are our brothers and sisters, but foxes too, and laboratory mice, and now the fish. Perowne goes on catching and eating them, and though he’d never drop a live lobster into boiling water, he’s prepared to order one in a restaurant. The trick, as always, the key to human success and domination, is to be selective in your mercies. For all the discerning talk, it’s the close at hand, the visible that exerts the overpowering force. And what you don’t see… (Saturday, 127; ellipsis in the original)

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The fragment above is one of many in the novel where the reader might have the impression that Henry is the implied author’s advocate. The narrator in his subtle communication with the implied readers through free indirect thought presents Henry’s views on “moral sympathy” in the twenty-first century. Perowne is an empathetic person—he would never throw a live lobster into boiling water—yet he has no problem eating it in a restaurant. With irony, the narrator refers to modern trends of manifesting prosocial behaviour by displaying an empathetic attitude in public or by using empathetic rhetoric on social media and television. In other words, everyone these days deserves our empathy, for example, the people we do not know, laboratory rodents and fish, thus expanding “the circle of moral sympathy”. In the later part of the passage in FIT, the narrator underlines the fact that human empathy is linked with an imbalance of power and social gain, as “be[ing] selective in your mercies” is what helps us stay in the game and be successful in life. We do care about others, but we care less when our personal lives or freedoms are at stake, and we care even less when we do not see what we care about. The narrator is suggesting that we are like Henry and Henry is like us—he sympathises with the victims of the plane crash because he realises that he could have been one of them but it is harder for him to imagine some Iraqi civilians thousands of kilometres away. Irrespective of the outcome of the war on terrorism, this war is an attempt to save his world from harm—always worth striving for. The free indirect style allows the narrator to communicate his ironic message to the reader in an off-record manner (indirectly), and I do not mean here the off-record use of irony as a polite strategy for doing an FTA (see Brown and Levinson 1987: 69). What I mean is Leech’s understanding of irony in the Irony Principle (IP): “If you must cause offence, at least do so in a way which doesn’t overtly conflict with the PP, but allows the hearer to arrive at the offensive point of your remark indirectly, by way of an implicature” (Leech 1983: 82). As noted by Culpeper (1996: 356), Leech’s understanding of irony is not far removed from Brown and Levinson’s off-record politeness, but much as irony in Brown and Levinson’s view is oriented towards face mitigation and promoting harmony in communication, the Irony Principle takes advantage of the

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other’s face and contains insincere politeness, which may put off the addressee: Apparently, then, the IP is dys-functional : if the PP promotes a bias towards comity rather than conflict in social relations, the IP, by enabling us to bypass politeness, promotes the ‘antisocial’ use of language. We are ironic at someone’s expense, scoring off others by politeness that is obviously insincere, as a substitute for impoliteness. (Leech 1983: 142)

The Irony Principle is “parasitic” (Leech 1983: 142) on the Politeness Principle (PP) and the Cooperative Principle (CP) because what the speaker is conveying is neither entirely polite nor fully sincere. In other words, the speaker is being impolite while seeming to be polite. In Leech’s understanding, irony is a combination of “the art of attack with an apparent innocence which is a form of self-defence” (Leech 1983: 144), thus relegating aggression and offence to the background. Let us once again look into the narrator’s language describing Henry’s thoughts at the fish display. The remark about “the expanding circle of moral sympathy” has an ironic meaning and hints at the ubiquitous and possibly irritating presence of the empathetic attitude and empathy-oriented social rhetoric, implicating people’s hypocrisy, according to the implied author. Henry, a typical representative of the Western world, is a hypocrite judging by his thoughts about a lobster. In the same way, he is a hypocrite as regards his ability to exercise imagination and activate his empathy for others only in cases that involve his own safety and are dictated by his selfinterest. “Be selective in your mercies” is another ironic comment made not just about Henry but also directed at the implied readers—we choose to be empathetic for others when we are in a position of power but our empathy is much weaker when there is nothing in it for us. Certainly, there are readers who are not moved by the narrator’s commentary in the free indirect thought, but some readers may take these comments personally. As was mentioned above, the Irony Principle is not offensive per se, in an on-record manner, but it has the “antisocial” potential with the power to hurt or make the other feel uncomfortable. Ironic remarks are never interpreted at their face value—they need reading between

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the lines and inferring extra information. Leech believes that irony has a wide spectrum of meanings and that it ranges from comic irony to sarcasm, but in all his definitions he emphasises the fact that irony can offend, or as Culpeper (1996: 358) notes “he does not allow for nonoffensive irony”.3 I propose Perowne’s interior monologue about lobsters and human empathy as a literary exemplification of Leech’s Irony Principle, which leads readers to critically assess their morality and wonder why the implied author is making them do it. Another implicit criticism that stems from the narration is that of the media and their sensationalist coverage of global wars and crises. McEwan in another article for The Guardian discusses the conduct of American and British media stations reporting the catastrophe of 9/11 and of TV viewers watching broadcasts in their homes. He describes how together with his son they were surfing the channels “hungrily and ghoulishly” (McEwan 2001a) in search of new information or a “breaking news” moment to satisfy their insatiable curiosity about updated news feeds. At first, it was reliving every moment of the tragedy and the zest to know more: “Was it two planes or three that hit the Twin Towers?” or “Was the White House now under attack?” or “Where was the plane the air force was supposed to be tracking?” (McEwan 2001a). McEwan compares himself to an “information junkie” (McEwan 2001a) who is waiting impatiently to see more horrifying images and suddenly finds himself having very little time to reflect on the tragedy of the victims in an “orgy of ‘fresh’ developments” (McEwan 2001a). The author ends his piece on a pessimistic note and says that everybody watching live coverage of 9/11 knew that these graphic images were eternally etched in their memory and that the world would never be the same, only worse. Incidentally, Henry Perowne has the same thoughts in the book. He believes that the 1990s seem innocent times in comparison with the new millennium and that “[n]ow we breathe a different air” (Saturday, 32), comparing the post-9/11 to a new Hundred Years’ War. He blames the media for making him and everybody else feel unsafe and anxious, waiting for a never-ending war with the Islamic world: It’s a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of

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anxiety. The habit’s grown stronger these past two years; […] The government’s counsel—that an attack in a European or American city is an inevitability—isn’t only a disclaimer of responsibility, it’s a heady promise. Everyone fears it, but there’s also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don’t let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it’s happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know. Also, Henry needs to hear about the pilots in custody. (Saturday, 176)

In this free indirect thought passage (except the last sentence) the narrator provides a critical commentary about the media and their destructive power on the mind—TV channels thrive on sensation, war and tragedy, and make people addicted to political news, thus creating a global “community of anxiety”. The coverage of the 9/11 attacks has even more resonance after two years because it has been consciously used by TV stations for inciting hatred and violence on a global scale. The Western world “ha[s] become engulfed by the paranoia of menace proliferated by the media, which dominates the public discourse” (Dobrogoszcz 2018: 156). TV viewers may be terrified by what may come but, all the same, they would like to watch every minute of it on television and “from every angle”. Henry is one of them, and the readers are no exception. This is another way of the implied author’s performing an FTA off-record . The narrator’s views presented as the protagonist’s thoughts in FIT make an indirect accusation of the media, only proving their reputation as the fourth estate. Under the guise of Henry’s thoughts, using the free indirect style the narrator is telling his readers truths about television they know only too well.

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Collapsible Viewpoints and Their Consequences in Solar

Impoliteness in Solar must not be discussed in isolation from the novel’s essential stylistic device—its free indirect style. In this mode of expression, the heterodiegetic narrator provides the narratee with a direct representation of the character’s words and opinions using free indirect speech (FIS) and thought (FIT) which allows him to shape and manipulate the implied reader’s view of his character. The free indirect style in Solar , together with other stylistic characteristics of the text (collapsible viewpoints of the narrator and protagonist, linguistic indicators of point of view) not only significantly change the narrative perspective in the story but also create a lot of room for the extradiegetic narrator’s impoliteness conveyed via implicature to the implied reader. Michael Beard, the protagonist in Solar , is a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist in his late fifties;—however, his best years in science are well behind him. He is in charge of the (fictional) Centre for Renewable Energy in Reading, UK, and holds numerous honorary memberships in prestigious research institutes. He is a glutton and a womaniser—Patrice is his fifth wife. The other four marriages have all failed—and this one is also on the brink of failure. In Part One of the novel (2000 ), to revive his tired career Beard embarks on a trip to the Arctic to investigate climate change, an official mission to save the planet which, he hopes, will earn him a fortune. With a party of twenty artists Beard sets off on an eightweek-long journey to a place where the signs of planetary warming will be the most radical, and his departure is accompanied by “a toast, a round of applause, [and] a quick succession of handshakes and backslaps” (Solar , 48) from his colleagues at the Centre. From the narrator’s third-person objective account, we can learn that Beard is a disillusioned and self-conscious ex-genius, whose great discovery in physics popularly known as the Beard-Einstein Conflation, which rocked the 1972 Solvay Conference, belongs to the past. From the perspective of the year 2000, it seems that awarding him the Nobel Prize was a mistake and his stroke of genius at the age of twenty-one must have been nothing other than a stroke of luck:

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Einstein had upended mankind’s understanding of light, gravity, space, time, matter, energy, founded modern cosmology, spoken out on democracy, on God or his absence, argued for the bomb, then against it, played the violin, sailed boats, had children, given his Prize money to his first wife, invented a fridge. Beard had nothing beyond his Conflation or his half of it. Like a shipwrecked man, he had clung to this single plank and counted himself privileged. How had it come about? Perhaps it was true that the Committee, angrily divided between three front-runners, had settled for its fourth choice. However Beard’s name had slipped through, it was generally felt that it was the turn of British physics anyway, though, in certain senior common rooms, some muttered that the Committee in its compromise had confused Michael Beard with Sir Michael Bird, the gifted amateur pianist who worked on neuron spectroscopy. (Solar, 50)

The heterodiegetic narrator downgrades Michael Beard as a scholar by comparing him with Einstein, who “founded modern cosmology” and “invented a fridge”. And what did Beard do? “How had it come about” that it was Beard’s name standing next to Einstein’s in the Beard-Einstein Conflation theory? Social deixis is an indicator of the narrator’s view of the protagonist, who is referred to by his last name, Beard. Short (1996: 272) claims that referring to a person with “title + last name” demonstrates social distance, whereas calling somebody by their first name indicates closeness. In Solar , the third-person narrator distances himself enough, but he does not call the protagonist “Professor Beard” but simply “Beard”. This would suggest that Michael Beard, in the narrator’s eyes, does not deserve to be called “professor” and his success in the past seems to be a lucky chance happening. On the other hand, calling this character simply “Beard” reveals some level of the narrator’s familiarity with the protagonist’s dilemmas and understanding of his situation (“Beard” is the most common term of address for the protagonist in the novel). Social deixis is employed by the narrator to: (a) encourage the reader’s sympathy for this character; (b) show the narrator’s familiarity and understanding of the protagonist’s professional situation. However, what I believe is crucial in understanding the protagonist is our recognition of the collapsing levels of narration between Beard, the focalising agent, and the narrator. On many occasions in the story, the

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narrator’s speech is indistinguishable from Beard’s speech because of the free indirect style. In the excerpt below, the protagonist’s views (in italics) are blended with the narrator’s account: Polkinghorne’s disembodied smile presided over Beard’s melancholic reflections on the end of his marriage. He experienced a genial blend of sadness, anger, nostalgia (those early months were bliss) and a warm, selfforgiving sense of failure. And repetition. Five was enough. He would never go through this again, and with that thought came the familiar recognition of his new freedom. When matters were settled he would buy a small London flat, he would be responsible only for himself , he would guard ferociously his independence and cure himself of this strange lifelong habit of marriage. It was lovers he needed, not wives. (Solar, 52; emphasis mine)

The narrator presents to us his protagonist’s thoughts mostly via free indirect thought. The passage begins with the narrator’s representation of thought (NRT) as part of the omniscient narrator’s account, where Beard is shown reflecting on the end of his latest marriage with mixed feelings: “He experienced a genial blend of sadness, anger, nostalgia…”. However, the continuation of this thought “(those early months were bliss)” slips from the narrator’s mode to the character’s mode because of FIT, as there is no introductory reporting clause but rather the declarative form of the reported clause indicating the character’s state of mind (experiencing mixed feelings) is preserved. The heterodiegetic narrator’s view is now indistinguishable from the protagonist’s view, again, with no reporting clause: “Five was enough. He would never go through this again”. The frequency adverb “never” gives us the flavour of an original thought of the character—it is as if we knew that Beard was tired of his fifth marriage and promised himself never to make this mistake again. The narration is then handed over to the omniscient narrator via NRT: “and with that thought came the familiar recognition of his new freedom”. In the rest of the passage Beard’s thoughts are conveyed to us via FIT with no reporting clause (e.g. “He thought that”). The readers are invited to see things from Beard’s perspective also through the use of the “near” deictic this as in: “he would […] cure himself of this strange lifelong habit of marriage” and, again, by the flavour of the original in

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Beard’s use of value-laden adjectives to describe marriage, which he sees as a “strange”, “lifelong” habit. Much as free indirect thought is seen as a move away from authorial intervention and into the active mind of the character (Leech and Short 2007: 272), it is still hard to distinguish the overlapping narrator’s and character’s voices in Solar because they share similar stylistic features. For example, their accounts are based on factive verbs in the past tense (“experienced”, “needed”, “was/were”) as in: “He experienced a genial blend of sadness” (narrator) vs. “It was lovers he needed, not wives” (Beard). Beard is characterised in two ways in the novel: (a) via third-person omniscient narration; (b) via collapsing voices in narration realised through the text’s stylistics, such as free indirect discourse and the narrator’s manipulative use of linguistic indicators of viewpoint (e.g. social deixis, factivity, value-laden language). I would like to present two instances of collapsible narration in the novel which show how through the free indirect discourse Beard’s impolite attitude can be associated with the extradiegetic narrator’s impoliteness and point of view. The first example is from the novel’s first part—Beard’s expedition to the Arctic. He is invited to an expedition investigating climate change as a leading physicist, whose research on wind-based energy could contribute to combating global warming. We soon learn, however, that Beard is quite sceptical about global warming. Moreover, he quickly realises that he is the only real scientist on the team, the rest being “a committed band of artists” (Solar , 61). In the Arctic, he is constantly troubled by the condition of a boot room, a small and dark changing room below the wheelhouse where the members of the climate change expedition hang up their outer layers. It comes to him as a great shock every time he comes back from field research that he cannot find his gloves or boots or even his suit (which he always leaves on the same peg, number seventeen). On the memorable day when Beard’s snowmobile breaks down and he is chased by a polar bear, he comes back to their base only to discover that the room, again, is in chaos, and the others do not mind: No one, he thought, admiring his generosity, had behaved badly, everyone, in the immediate circumstances, wanting to get out on the ice, had been entirely rational in ‘discovering’ their missing balaclava or

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glove in an unexpected spot. It was perverse or cynical of him to take pleasure in the thought, but he could not help himself. How were they to save the Earth—assuming it needed saving, which he doubted—when it was so much larger than the boot room? (Solar, 78; emphasis mine)

From Beard’s perspective, conveyed to us in the third-person objective narration and the free indirect thought, it is the members of the expedition who are responsible for the chaos in the boot room. Despite an indicated reporting clause (“he thought”), the distinction between IT (indirect thought) and FIT (free indirect thought) in the first sentence is blurred. Who, Beard or the narrator, is commenting on the carefree attitude of the other members of the expedition? Leech and Short (2007: 266) claim that a single lexical or graphological feature of the text may indicate FIS/FIT because it immediately evokes the character’s manner of expression or style. In the first sentence, we can see that the narrator’s ideological viewpoint is the same as the character’s thanks to some valueladen expressions. For example, the narrator chooses the verb “discover” rather than the more neutral “find out” to comment on the team’s happy ignorance of the organisational chaos: “No one, he thought, […] had been entirely rational in ‘discovering’ their missing balaclava or glove in an unexpected spot”. By using the value-laden verb “discovering”, put in single quotation marks in the novel, the narrator ironically emphasises Beard’s indignation about this situation—it is only Beard who can see the mess and nobody else can. Next, the narrator’s view of Beard follows in the form of an NRTA (narrator’s representation of thought act), which gives us background information about the character’s thoughts—“cynical” and “perversely” pleasurable. Finally, Beard’s thoughts are presented in FIT (italics) with his usual cynicism and irony: “How were they to save the Earth […] when it was so much larger than the boot room?”. In the embedded narratorial comment “assuming it [the Earth] needed saving”, we are not entirely sure who, Beard or the narrator, assumes that the whole save-the-climate expedition is pointless since the narrator’s ironic tone is very similar to Beard’s. One thing is clear, the irony used by the narrator in the context of the boot room scene highlights the fact that Beard does not think highly of the expedition members.

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Beard’s impolite observation based on unpalatable presuppositions and condescensions to use Culpeper’s (2011: 256) terms, leads us to understand that Beard is the only “real” scientist among the group of artists, whom the narrator calls “a friendly tribe of exotics” (Solar , 77), imitating Beard’s ironic style. Irony is often perceived as a “collocative clash” (Leech and Short 2007: 223); it is the combination of words that are opposite to our expectations because they are connected with e.g. a different set of values than expected. Calling the expedition members “a tribe of exotics” who are also “friendly” is another condescending comment belittling the team’s expertise, which places the narrator in the same ideological position as the protagonist. Beard’s impoliteness is seen in exercising his equity rights, believing that he as an individual has the right to personal consideration and fairness, to use Spencer-Oatey’s (2000: 14) terms. The condescending view of the other members of the team presented in FIT (“How were they to save the Earth […] when it was so much larger than the boot room?”) is an implication by the focalising agent that (a) they are too disorganised to make any plan work; (b) the profession of a climate scientist is unnecessary since the Earth’s climate does not require human intervention. Beard’s indirect impoliteness expressed in FIT can be described as pointed criticism/complaint or “producing or perceiving a display of low values for some target”, as we can learn from Culpeper (2011: 256), and is face-threatening towards his colleagues (climatologists, artists). It is classified as positive impoliteness based on attacking the positive face of the hearer, i.e. belittling their achievements or skills and showing a lack of appreciation. The embedded comment “assuming it needed saving, which he doubted” seems to be a continuation of Beard’s thought, but is ambiguous enough because of the speaker’s use of the conjunction “assuming” (that something is true), which may as well be part of the extradiegetic narrator’s thought and exposes the narrator to the same risk of expressing impolite beliefs as their character. The phrase “assuming it needed saving” implicates the speaker’s doubt about climate change and suggests the extradiegetic narrator’s tacit agreement with the character’s view. Leech and Short (2007: 271–72) note that it is impossible to distinguish the character’s thoughts (FIT) from the narrator’s/author’s thoughts (IT) based on the use of formal linguistic criteria alone. Ian McEwan

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cannot be held responsible for the truth of the beliefs he attributes to his character via narration, but collapsible points of view and a similar style of the narrator and the protagonist encourage the reader to perceive Beard’s impolite observations as the extradiegetic narrator’s observations and, thus, as the real author’s observations. There are, however, some biographical elements in this description. The chaos in the boot room in the novel was inspired by the chaos in the ship’s boot room on McEwan’s weeklong trip to the Arctic five years before writing Solar (the expedition was sponsored by a British project, Cape Farewell, and the idea was to inspire painters, photographers, sculptors, authors, and dancers to think about climate change). In a BBC documentary, McEwan says that the disorder in the room could be a metaphor for “human frailty” and for how even the best intentions can go awry when in the hands of human beings: “All it needs is one mistake, and then there’s a domino effect of someone saying: ‘Well, dammit,’ you know, ‘I’ll take those boots because someone took my boots.’ And you actually have a social contract in total collapse. The boot room now is just a scene of total lack of cooperation. Environmentalists who care about the planet can’t even get their boots together” (McEwan, qtd. in Neary 2010). Incidentally, McEwan’s words reflect Beard’s thoughts presented in FIT. In the interview, he also admits that having Beard as the protagonist in the story was convenient to him as an author: “It’s interesting to have such a wildly erroneous guy at the centre of things. I could get him to say and do things that maybe I wouldn’t if I was trying to make a climate science novel and have a paragon of virtue at its centre. […] But it meant I could have a sideswipe at a few other things along the way, like the British press. It gave me a sort of freedom to just lash out a bit” (McEwan, qtd. in Neary 2010). From a pragma-stylistic perspective, the implied author’s manipulation of point of view and their effective use of free indirect thought creates a lot of freedom for the extradiegetic narrator’s impoliteness in literary communication. Another example of “the impoliteness of the literary text” comes from Part Two (2005) and involves Beard’s unfortunate statement at a conference. This time, extradiegetic impoliteness results from the manipulation of FIS and points of view. Beard as the focalising agent is used by the

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narrator to pose an off-record threat to the narratee’s positive face. Offrecord impoliteness is a way of expressing impolite beliefs via implicature. Because “off-recordness” as a superstrategy conveys impolite beliefs indirectly via implication, it can be cancelled or denied by the speaker, unlike bald on-record impoliteness, which communicates impolite beliefs in a very clear and unambiguous way, as was noted by Bousfield (2008a: 93). Beard gets invited to be the head of a government campaign for promoting physics in schools and universities. During a panel discussion in a seminar room in Imperial College, together with other professors and secondary-school teachers, he is listening to a lecture on the socially constructed lion’s gene Trim-5, given by Nancy Temple, professor of social sciences from the University of Ulster. Having learnt about the socially constructed gene that is yet to be discovered by scientists, Beard hardly overcomes the feeling of embarrassment at, what he believes to be, a ridiculous theory. After the lecture, as the head of the committee, he is interviewed by the press and voices his opinion on the topic of the underrepresentation of women in physics: Then a woman from a mid-market tabloid asked a question, also routine, something of an old chestnut, and Beard replied, as he thought, blandly. It was true, women were under-represented in physics and always had been. The problem had often been discussed, and (he was mindful of Professor Temple as he said it) certainly his committee would be looking at it again to see if there were new ways of encouraging more girls into the subject. He believed there were no longer any institutional barriers or prejudices. There were other branches of science where women were well represented, and some where they predominated. And then, because he was boring himself, he added that it might have to be accepted one day that a ceiling had been reached. Although there were many gifted women physicists, it was at least conceivable that they would always remain in a minority, albeit a substantial one, in this particular field. There might always be more men than women who wanted to work in physics. There was a consensus in cognitive psychology, based on a wide range of experimental work, that in statistical terms the brains of men and women were significantly different. […] These were widely observed innate differences in cognitive ability. In studies and metastudies, women were shown to have, on average, greater language skills, better visual memory, clearer emotional judgment

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and superior mathematical calculation. Men scored higher in mathematical problem-solving and abstract reasoning, and in visual-spatial awareness. Men and women had different priorities in life, different attitudes to risk, to status, to hierarchies. Above all, and this was the really striking difference, amounting to roughly one standard deviation, and the one to have been studied repeatedly: from early in life, girls tended to be more interested in people, boys more in things and abstract rules. And this difference showed in the fields of science they tended to choose: more women in the life sciences, more men in engineering and physics. (Solar, 133–34; emphasis mine)

Beard’s speech has a spectacular and disastrous effect. Professor Nancy Temple is heavily offended and she announces her resignation: “Before I go outside to be sick, and I mean violently sick because of what I’ve just heard, I wish to announce my resignation from Professor Beard’s committee” (Solar , 134). I want to argue here that the interview given by Beard is an off-record impoliteness directed not only at Professor Temple but also at female scientists in general. We are uncertain about the exact positioning of the narrative focus: who is presenting his views on the lack of women in physics, Beard or the extradiegetic narrator? The passage above begins in the indirect mode (indirect speech) and we can see that the narrator distances himself from the focalising agent through reporting clauses, e.g. “as he thought”; “he believed”; “and then, because he was boring himself, he added that…”. However, the narration suddenly slips into the free indirect mode (FIS) as a continuation of Beard’s opinion: “Although there were many gifted women physicists […]”. The italicised passage is presented in FIS, with no reporting clauses and the retention of the back-shift of tense: “In studies and metastudies, women were shown to have greater language skills”. FIS in its typical role in fiction is interpreted as “a movement towards authorial intervention” and away from the active mind of the character (Leech and Short 2007: 277), and it creates distance between the narratee and the character’s words (Leech and Short 2007: 262). The view on some innate differences in cognitive ability between men and women are general enough to be treated as universal statements, which could be professed by both the character and the extradiegetic narrator: “In studies and metastudies, women were shown to have, on average, greater language skills, better

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visual memory, […] Men scored higher in mathematical problem-solving […]”. However, the narrator also emphasises the verb “wanted” (italicised in the novel) in what seems to be Beard’s subjective opinion in FIS: “There might always be more men than women who wanted to work in physics”. The views expressed in free indirect speech in the passage above are impolite beliefs conveyed in an off-record way, via implication. First of all, Beard’s opinion on male and female brains and their connection with physics is not broken by the narrator’s reporting clauses, which implies that Beard’s impolite views may be similar to the extradiegetic narrator’s views. Impoliteness stems from the speaker’s patronising attitude and ungrounded generalisations, which he presents as facts. He notes that although there are many gifted female physicists, it is “at least conceivable that they would always remain in a minority” in the field of physics. The value-laden adjective “conceivable” and the adverb “always” play a key role in conveying impoliteness here, which makes the reader wonder: Why is it conceivable? Doesn’t the speaker accept the possibility that it can be otherwise? Why does the speaker take for granted that female physicists will always be in the minority? If the speaker does not consider another possibility, why is he in charge of the committee whose role is, among others, to encourage more girls into the subject? This unsupported presumption is followed by another generalisation that “there might always be more men than women who wanted to work in physics” (the verb “wanted”, italicised in the original, shows a strong conviction of the speaker’s beliefs). To account for his views, the speaker falls back on psychological studies which prove that male and female brains are “significantly different” in their “cognitive abilit[ies]”. He also claims that since childhood girls are people-oriented and boys are more interested in things and abstract rules. He finishes the interview with another biased precept that “this difference” (different social conditioning for boys and girls) “showed in the fields of science they tended to choose: more women in the life sciences and the social sciences, more men in engineering and physics”. In the context of the speaker’s assumed generalisations, the underrepresentation of women in physics results from socialisation and their innate cognitive abilities which prevent them from going into physics; girls

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“by default” are interested in other things because they have different brains. “Significantly different” in the context of the speaker’s words is a euphemism for “unable to understand physics”. The off-record nature of Beard’s impoliteness makes it applicable to a larger group (female scientists) and not just a single person (Nancy Temple). In this way, the novel supports the theory that “more indirect forms of impoliteness are more offensive” as we read in Culpeper (2005: 44) because Beard’s off-recordness turns out even more harmful than if he had acted bald onrecord and simply admitted that in his opinion Professor Temple was a mediocre scientist. In Solar , the extradiegetic impoliteness corresponds with the impoliteness for characterisation on the level of the story world. Beard’s unfortunate interview wins him many enemies after his name is smeared in the gutter press several days later. The hostile articles in local newspapers are a consequence of his impoliteness towards Professor Temple and, as he learns from the press, all women in science. In the fragment below I want to show how Beard is characterised within the plot and how the articles in local papers serve as a face threatening act aimed at his positive face (the want of social approval, and acceptance). There are several ways (types of acts) of attacking the hearer’s positive face in linguistics, among others: (a) acts showing that the s[peaker] negatively evaluates or does not want the h[earer]’s wants, e.g. expressions of disapproval, criticism, ridicule; and (b) acts manifesting the s’s indifference or lack of care for the h’s positive self-image, e.g. expressions of violent emotions that embarrass the hearer, irreverence and the mention of taboo topics, raising emotional or divisive topics, etc. (Brown and Levinson 1987: 65– 68). To his horror, Beard realises that the papers have done thorough research about his professional career and even his love life: Beard ignored the voices calling out his first name as he crossed the road. Never help feed a press story about yourself. But the next day he wondered if he should have turned back when he read of himself ‘scuttling away in shame’ under the headline ‘Nobel Prof Says No To Lab Chicks’. […] After a minor eruption of morning headlines, there was silence for two days. He thought he had come through. But during that time one tabloid was busy with its research. On Saturday, Beard’s love

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life was revealed and artfully braided with the ‘no to girls in white coats’ story. On Sunday the other papers picked it up and piled in and he was reinvented as ‘the bonkin boffin’, a ‘Nobel love-rat’, and a kind of learned satyr—‘the prof-goat’. (Solar, 136–37)

Beard’s off-record impoliteness at the conference is reciprocated by the press in an on-record manner. Media journalists call him offensive names, for example, “the bonkin boffin”, “Nobel love-rat” or “the prof-goat”, alluding to his adventurous love life and numerous wives. These derogatory nominations threaten Beard’s positive face in public to purposefully destroy his reputation as a physicist. According to Culpeper’s positive impoliteness model, they represent the following strategies: use taboo words—swear or use abusive or profane language and call the other names (Culpeper 1996: 358). In the more serious press, Beard’s (as is believed) chauvinistic attitude towards women in science assumes the proportion of neo-Nazism, as the physicist is hailed to be a “genetic determinist” and a fanatic, whose views on gender difference derive from social Darwinism, which admittedly led to the development of the “Third Reich race theories” (Solar , 137). One allegation leads to another and Beard is eventually hailed “the neo-Nazi Professor” (Solar , 137) in the local media. As mentioned above, the narrator employs pragma-stylistics, for example, deixis or free indirect thought, to express sympathy for the protagonist, but Beard is often characterised negatively by the narrator. Spencer-Oatey and Kádár claim that impoliteness is not only recognised in interpersonal interactions and the use of impolite verbal strategies by speakers but (im)politeness evaluations also depend on a system that regulates social life in a given culture, such as people’s values, norms, virtues, practices—something that we call “the moral order” (SpencerOatey and Kádár 2016: 74). Judging someone’s behaviour as polite or impolite, good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate is based on a group’s interpretation of this behaviour, which relies on some implicit norms and standards shared by the group (or a given culture) (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016: 74). The narrator’s characterisation of Beard and his actions within the plot shows him as an individual who violates the

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moral order in society through unethical conduct without a sense of guilt or remorse. One such example is his unethical and cowardly behaviour connected with the accidental death of Tom Aldous in his house. Aldous works at the Centre, he is a great admirer and a young continuator of Beard’s theory and, incidentally, his wife’s lover. Beard bumps into him in his living room when he comes back from the expedition on climate change. In a frenzy, Aldous wants to run towards Beard but he slips on a rug, hits the back of his head against the corner of the glass table and falls, dying instantly. Beard has doubts if he should call the police and imagines himself under investigation for murder: (1) He slipped, I tell you, he slipped on the rug as he ran across the room towards me. (2) Oh yes? And why was he running, Mr Beard? (3) To throw his arms around my knees and plead with me not to have him sacked, to beg me to join with him to save the world from climate change. (4) There would be sceptics. (5) For the last time, Mr Beard, did you not smear blood on the corner of the table? And what have you done with the murder weapon, Mr Beard? (6) Innocence would come at a high cost. It would have to be earned, fought for. Media interest would be lacerating. Sex, betrayal, violence, a beautiful woman, an eminent scientist, a dead lover—perfect. Patrice, sincerely or maliciously, would be his chief accuser. Two years thinking of nothing else. Nobel laureate, balding boffin, government appointee, in the dock, fighting to stay out of jail. (Solar, 90; emphasis in the original)

This imagined scenario is supposed to help Beard decide what to do. Turns (1–4) are conveyed in the free direct thought (FDT) at its extreme, with no reporting verbs. They represent the character’s conscious thoughts, a sudden realisation of the gravity of the circumstances. But Beard soon realises that honesty with the police investigator may not pay off, hence his comment in FIT in turn (4): “There would be sceptics”. He puts himself in the shoes of a potential murderer and imagines more extreme questions by the investigator, as in (5): “Mr Beard, did you not smear blood on the corner of the table? And what have you done with the murder weapon, Mr Beard?”. In a longer passage (6) conveyed in FIT, the narrator shows Beard’s cool calculation. If he tells the truth, his name will be on the front page of every newspaper in the country,

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which he finds exciting (“Sex, betrayal, violence, a beautiful woman, an eminent scientist, a dead lover—perfect”). On the other hand, admitting what happened will reveal his marriage problems and cost him a face loss in public (“Nobel laureate, balding boffin, government appointee, in the dock, fighting to stay out of jail”). The price to be paid for honesty seems too high, so he will not call the police. Instead, he descends to the cellar, brings a hammer and smears its handle with blood. Next, he buries the dead body. After this tragic accident, Beard finds Aldous’s brilliant notes on organic and inorganic chemistry and quantum physics and decides to present them to the public as his ideas. Beard’s actions in the novel can be considered morally ambiguous in Western culture: they involve unethical and dishonest behaviour at Tom’s accidental death as well as intellectual theft. Moral standards in today’s world require that he should at least be sorry, but the narrator presents him as a great cynic: “Beard took up Aldous’s file again. It was the least he could do, to honour the dead…” (Solar , 102). Another example shows further consequences of Beard’s unethical actions and demonstrates how other characters in the story evaluate him. In Part Three (2009 ) we learn that Jock Braby, Beard’s colleague from the Centre who had given him Aldous’s notes, now threatens to sue him— Beard is expected to waive his patent rights to the technology developed based on the stolen theory, which rightly belongs to the Centre. He has no intention to reveal the truth at the upcoming media event, and he maintains before the lawyer that he is going to present all ideas as his own. His closest business partner, Toby Hammer, ends their friendship and business over the phone: ‘We won’t be meeting again. I don’t think I could bear the sight of you, Michael. But you might as well know. I’m talking to a lawyer in Oregon. I’ll be taking action to protect myself against what are rightfully your debts. We, you, already owe three and a half million. Tomorrow’s going to cost another half million. You can go down there yourself and explain to all the good people. […] I hate you, Michael. You lied to me and you’re a thief. But I don’t want to see you in prison. So stay out of England. Go somewhere that doesn’t have an extradition treaty.’ ‘Anything else?’

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‘Only this. You deserve almost everything that’s coming to you. So go fuck yourself.’ The line went dead. (Solar, 277)

Hammer attacks Beard’s positive face with bald on-record impoliteness. There are at least two strategies Hammer employs to show Beard that he has lost all respect for him. Because Beard is/used to be a respectable professor of physics and the head of the Centre for Renewable Energy, Hammer points out very clearly that they are no longer business partners and friends: “We won’t be meeting again”, or “I’ll be taking action to protect myself against what are rightfully your debts. We, you, already owe three and a half million” (emphasis added). This strategy Culpeper labels as dissociating from the other (Culpeper 1996: 357): it is used when the speaker denies any association or common ground with the hearer. Hammer attacks Beard’s positive face directly to show his lack of approval of Beard’s conduct and to downgrade him as a person and a scholar. Hammer continues to offend Beard by calling him names (Culpeper 1996: 358), e.g. “you’re a thief ” and using swear words, as in “go fuck yourself ”. On-record impoliteness expressed by Hammer towards the protagonist serves as an important mode of characterisation in the novel. Hammer’s impolite opinion leaves no doubt as to what Michael Beard has become throughout the story—a wicked person, a liar and a fraud. Solar ’s impoliteness is very visible on two structural levels: the level of the story (plot and characterisation of the protagonist) and the level of the extradiegetic communication between the implied author and the reader.

5.4

Nutshell or Political Incorrectness in Utero

Nutshell is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s tragedy and it presents the selfconscious musings of a baby Hamlet in his mother’s womb. The nascent Hamlet plots revenge against his twenty-eight-year-old mother Trudy and her lover Claude, a real estate developer and a younger brother of Trudy’s husband, John Cairncross. Hamlet’s father is a poet and a

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publisher of poetry who had to move out of an expensive mansion in London to give his wife some space. Trudy and Claude organise a conspiracy against John to take over the priceless townhouse by serving him a poisoned smoothie, Hamlet being a silent witness to their murderous act. The story is narrated by the foetus, whose point of view is highly restricted: he cannot see but he can feel and he hears things, for example, he can hear his mother’s conversations with her lover or podcasts she listens to through “earbuds” (Nutshell , 11). Hamlet has extensive knowledge of literature (Trudy listens to Ulysses and other classics before going to sleep) and some knowledge about the world thanks to the BBC World Service (he is not a fan though). Additionally, Hamlet is a wine connoisseur as his mother listens to an audiobook Know Your Wine, and she drinks wine, too. Still, his perspective is limited and he speculates a great deal about the world he is going to join in just two weeks. According to Adam Mars-Jones (2016), McEwan’s Hamlet is a “quasi-omniscient” first-person narrator who is unpredictable—he can hear distant sounds of aeroplanes descending towards Heathrow airport but he has problems making out words spoken a few inches away. “McEwan’s solution is to have the transmission of information defeated by the crunch of salted nuts in his mother’s mouth, by the tiled echo of a bathroom when the taps are running, or simply by his narrator dozing off ”, the reviewer notes (Mars-Jones 2016). Hamlet’s perspective, to quote Fludernik, is “embodied”—he is a reflector figure, who is “fleshed out as a character so that one can assume that he has a subjective position on various matters” (Fludernik 2009: 36).4 Importantly, a first-person narrator is an embodied narrator who is positioned on both the intradiegetic and extradiegetic levels of the narrative (Fludernik 2009: 37). In other words, McEwan makes his narrator the character in the story world, but Hamlet’s self-conscious digressions (which are similar to theatrical asides ad spectatores) link the narrator figure with an extradiegetic level of communication with the implied reader. Nutshell received many positive reviews. “A masterpiece”, said The Times; “Nutshell is a high-risk, high-wire act, brilliantly executed”, we can read in Times Literary Supplement; “A brilliant novel […] A tour de force in language and literary intrigue”, noted Books of the Year. John Boyne, a reviewer from The Irish Times, was particularly fond of the idea

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of the foetus’s voice which, he said, was “cultured” and “knowledgeable”, as Hamlet “knows his Sancerre from his Pinot Noir, can quote Hobbes and Darwin with ease and has some pretty interesting views on the Higgs boson” (Boyne 2016). Kate Clanchy called the narrator “unconvincing” but she appreciated his “grand, elegiac tone” which, she noted, resembled that of Lolita’s Humbert Humbert’s, having “the same infinite knowledge of history and English poetry, the same covetous, obsessively physical eye” (Clanchy 2016). As for the real author’s impressions, he was expecting some stir among his readers: “I said to Annalena, ‘I might have to go abroad when this is published, far away.’ I just thought, I’m going to get such a kicking for this. But, the more I thought that, the more I enjoyed it. I was committed from the first sentence” (McEwan, qtd. in Aitkenhead 2016). Even if Ian McEwan treated his book as a light-hearted, humorous project, some of his reviewers took it personally. Annalisa Queen, a freelance journalist and critic, said: “Nutshell fails when McEwan turns earnest. I initially took the fetus’s long monologues on world events as part of the larger joke, but it’s clear after a while that some of them are sincere” (Queen 2016). The narrator’s digressions are pointed at modern society and its dependence on social media sites which, in Hamlet’s view, impose new social fads to challenge traditional values. Such thoughts come to him while he is pondering about his mother: But lately, as I track my mother’s shifting relation to her crime, I’ve remembered rumours of a new dispensation in the matter of blue and pink. Be careful what you wish for. Here’s a new politics in university life. This digression may seem unimportant, but I intend to apply as soon as I can. Physics, Gaelic, anything. So I’m bound to take an interest. A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender […] any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in

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context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs. (Nutshell , 145–46)

The narrator’s digressions about the contemporary identity politics Queen calls “grumpy little cultural commentaries” (Queen 2016) and she ascribes them directly to the real author. The homodiegetic narrator addresses the reader persona, the implied reader, for whom the extradiegetic narratee is standing in (see Fludernik 2009: 147), as in: “Be careful what you wish for. Here’s a new politics in university life” or “This digression may seem unimportant, but I intend to apply as soon as I can”. McEwan’s anxiety about his audience’s unfavourable reaction to Nutshell and his amusing commentary about fleeing the country after the novel’s publication only proves that the real author must have presumed (expected?) that the real reader would assume the role of the external narratee and disagree with the narrator’s sentiments. In my view, the implied author intentionally makes his narrator the character in the story because he seems to be aware of the offensive nature of Hamlet’s “oddly intrusive asides” (Adams 2016). The protagonist’s focalised, subjective perspective relieves the implied author of the responsibility for the narrator’s politically incorrect comments. I want to argue that the novel displays extradiegetic impoliteness towards its implied readers by violating the readers’ moral order and expressing politically incorrect beliefs through the narrator’s selfconscious digressions. In the fragment above, Hamlet is attacking the fragile selves of the younger Millennials, popularly referred to as the “snowflake” generation, socially-conscious individuals with a propensity to being too easily upset and offended, according to Cambridge Dictionary. The term “snowflake” is considered irreverent and offensive and it is usually ascribed to young people with left-wing political sympathies5

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and mainstream views. The narrator claims that the university breeds “snowflakes” by promoting socially-conscious behaviour and calming down its sensitive students by providing, metaphorically speaking, “the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies”. Hamlet’s sarcastic tone indicates the implied author’s criticism of modern universities which avoid inconvenient topics for fear of upsetting students. The narrator is mocking the culture of “trigger warnings”, which have become part and parcel of the university’s social conduct. Every time a lecturer plays a video with explicit images or discusses a book containing upsetting topics, they inform their group about it to avoid uncomfortable situations so that, for example, particularly vulnerable students can leave the classroom. “Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face”, he concludes. Incidentally, McEwan’s opinions seem to be in line with the narrator’s opinions on that subject. In an interview, the real author voices his concerns about contemporary identity politics in a university context. When asked whether identity politics these days is a version of “decadent narcissism” (McEwan, qtd. in Aitkenhead 2016) McEwan replies: It feels like that, coming to the university aspect of it. These children have grown up in an era of peace and plenty, and nothing much to worry about, so into that space comes this sort of resurgence that the campus politics is all about you, not about income inequality, nuclear weapons, climate change, all the other things you think students might address, the fate of your fellow humans, migrants drowning at sea. All of those things that might concern the young are lost to a wish for authority to bless them […] rather than to challenge authority. (McEwan, qtd. in Aitkenhead 2016)

In his interior monologue Hamlet also refers to what is popularly known as “cancel culture”—a way of social conduct, especially on social media, in which it is common to endorse rejecting someone or stopping to support someone because they have said or done something that offends us (Cambridge Dictionary). He says: “If my college does not bless me, validate me and give me what I clearly need, I’ll press my

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face into the vice chancellor’s lapels and weep. Then demand his resignation” (Nutshell , 146). The implied author paints a picture of pampered university students who need validation of all their actions, and of who they are, and the moment they do not get their superiors’ approval they take offence and want them removed from office. The original purpose behind “cancel culture” was to remove problematic individuals from the social mainstream. In recent years “cancel culture” has become a powerful tool for administering social justice based solely on the sense of right or wrong of the internet users promoting their opinions on social media sites. “In a cancel culture, we appoint ourselves the arbiters of right and wrong and also the judge and jury, because thanks to social media, we get to dole out punishment” (Cambridge Dictionary), which seems to be how Hamlet understands it—“cancel culture” is a new social fad which is spiralling out of control. The Chair, an American comedy-drama released by Netflix in 2021, is a good example to illustrate how “cancel culture” works at university. The series offers a humorous take on academia and shows the everyday lives of professors in the English Department at (fictional) Pembroke University. The protagonist, Professor Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh), is the first woman chosen for the position of Chair in this department. Ji-Yoon has to juggle her time to get things done: she is a single mother who has to look after her little daughter, she manages the whole department which is underfunded, and she needs to sort out her personal life. Several episodes in the first series are devoted to “cancel culture” and its effect on academia. The students of the English Department mete out punishment to Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), a literature professor and Ji-Yoon’s friend, who does the Nazi salute during class while explaining absurdism and fascism. The students record his gesture on their phones, the recording is taken out of context and goes viral on the Internet, and the students demand his resignation or a formal apology. Dobson refuses to apologise, while Ji-Yoon wants to wait out the crisis but in the meantime faces a vote of no confidence against her as chair and is informed by the university attorneys that she must officially condemn Bill’s conduct to save her own job. The series shows the political impact of “cancel culture” on the university and its values. “Cancel culture” is powerful enough to decide on the employment policy

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in academia and makes the viewer realise the fact that university teachers have to censure themselves to stay in the game. For Hamlet, identity politics represents “the decline of the West in new guise”. The narrator makes offensive comments about the educated youths who not only choose their future but also choose their identity, race and gender. “Biology is not destiny after all”, he says; these days you can be anyone you like—you can be white but identify as black, you can claim to be disabled or “disabled in context”, you can also change your natural gender or identify as a person of a different gender—“neutrois, two spirit, bigender”. A wide variety of gender choices is offered by social media: seventy-one gender options to be exact, he notes sarcastically. Again, the narrator’s words could be ascribed to the real author, as was noted by the book’s reviewers. Emily Donaldson says that Hamlet “sounds suspiciously like a middle-aged author sarcastically rolling his eyes at the current generation’s identity politics and trigger warnings” (Donaldson 2016). Mars-Jones believes that these words “make perfect sense coming from a writer whose recent remarks on the subject of transgender people […] caused a certain amount of offence” (Mars-Jones 2016). Mars-Jones refers to McEwan’s speech to the Royal Institution during which he was asked whether biology and social norms reduced the human potential to adopt a different gender. The novelist replied: The self, like a consumer desirable, may be plucked from the shelves of a personal identity supermarket, a ready-to-wear little black number. […] For example, some men in full possession of a penis are now identifying as women and demanding entry to women-only colleges, and the right to change in women’s dressing rooms. (McEwan, qtd. in Johnston 2016)

In a Q&A session after his lecture, he was asked by a woman from the audience to clarify his transgender remarks, which she found offensive. McEwan replied again: Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men. […] And I think there is sweeping through American [university] campuses a kind of strange sense of victimhood and a sense of purposeful identities that we can’t actually all of us agree with. Of course sex and race

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are different, but they also have a biological basis. It makes a difference whether you have an X or Y chromosome. (McEwan, qtd. in Johnston 2016)

To cut the long story short, McEwan was condemned by transgender activist groups for questioning the right of transgender people to choose their gender. Stonewall called his views “uninformed” and “extremely sad” (Johnston 2016). Peter Tatchell, a human rights activist, compared his opinions on gender to “ethical authoritarianism” and called them “disempowering” towards the oppressed groups (Johnston 2016). McEwan publicly apologised for his remarks about gender and trans people, saying that the comment on men’s penises “was biologically unexceptional. However, biology is not always destiny” (McEwan 2016b).6 Still, his novel contains similar views on the subject and even though it was aimed at being nothing more than pleasurable reading, the reviewers felt that the narrator’s comments were bitter and sincere and that they reflected the real author’s views. Whether what we say is considered polite or impolite is not always a question of a particular form of linguistic behaviour but rather of how this form of linguistic behaviour is evaluated by others, be it one’s society, community, or interest group. Politeness can also be viewed as a type of social practice, which means that polite behaviour “arises through evaluations of social actions and meanings” (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 251), which people recognise because these are based on practices or “regular or recurrent ways of formulating talk and conduct that are understood by participants as doing and meaning certain things” (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 251). McEwan’s Q&A session after his lecture was not impolite as he did not offend anyone with his words but some members of the audience took offence because he dissociated himself from the culture they represented—identity politics and the transgender culture, e.g. “Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men”. Kádár and Haugh (2013: 238) claim that we always take a given stance concerning the culture we represent and project our identity accordingly. McEwan’s replies indicated that he does not belong to these cultures. In his comment on American campuses and their “strange sense of victimhood” the word “strange” suggests that he does not entirely understand

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it. To evaluate the author’s replies as polite we would need him to associate with these social cultures (“positive identity practice”) but what he did was he dissociated himself from them (“negative identity practice”).7 Kádár and Haugh note: “Negative identity practices are those that individuals employ to distance themselves from a rejected identity, while positive identity practices are those in which individuals engage in order actively to construct a chosen identity” (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 238, see also Bucholtz 1999: 211–12). Negative and positive practices are both parts of forming cultural identities and if one aligns oneself with a given cultural identity, one simultaneously distances oneself from other cultures. By sticking to his own opinions, the author publicly distanced himself from the cultural identities he did not represent, which was immediately perceived as impolite by his audience. McEwan openly admitted in an interview that Nutshell is “an allegorical indictment of our post-factual age, in which feelings matter more than the truth” (Aitkenhead 2016). Trudy also chooses her identity in the story as she gets rid of the uncomfortable sense of guilt and decides that because she never planned to kill anybody or did anything wrong, she is not responsible for what happened and her husband’s death is all Claude’s fault. Hamlet puts it bluntly—his mother is an accomplice in the crime but she chooses not to own it: Away with the real, with dull facts and hated pretence of objectivity. Feeling is Queen. Unless she identifies as King. I know. Sarcasm ill suits the unborn. And why digress? Because my mother is in step with new times. She may not know it, but she marches with a movement. Her status as a murderer is a fact, an item in the world outside herself. But that’s old thinking. She affirms, she identifies as innocent. Even as she strains to clean up traces in the kitchen, she feels blameless and therefore is—almost. (Nutshell , 146–47)

We finally know why Hamlet digresses so much: his mother Trudy is “in step with the times”. She has a social media-like sense of justice, she manipulates her selfhood and uses identity politics in the most coolcalculated way. Trudy is a hypocrite: she is guilty of murder but it is more convenient for her to pretend to be innocent. McEwan admits in

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an interview that Trudy’s conduct reflects “the contemporary trend for any dimension of identity—race, gender—to be reclassified as a matter of personal choice, determined not by objective facts but an individual’s feelings” (McEwan, qtd. in Aitkenhead 2016). It seems that the real author’s social critique is about how much people’s identities can be negotiated and manipulated as part of identity politics in the twenty-first century. He notes in the same interview: “What does it matter to me if people’s identity suddenly finds new routes to express itself? Where I get a little critical of it is where selfhood becomes all of your politics, in a world in which we are more troubled than at any point I can remember in my adult life” (McEwan, qtd. in Aitkenhead 2016). Hamlet audaciously underlines the fact that “feeling” and “self” is everything: “I’ll feel, therefore I’ll be. […] I’ll be an activist of the emotions, a loud, campaigning spirit fighting with tears and sighs to shape institutions around my vulnerable self. My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth” (Nutshell , 146). Hamlet uses sarcasm as “jocular mockery” to embarrass his mother, and elicit negative emotions in his audience, but also to enhance his face (see Culpeper et al. 2017: 343). In my view, his sarcastic comments provoke even a fiercer criticism of contemporary identity politics, suggesting how easy it is in the global community to play the victim and be(come) an oppressed individual or how one can manipulate one’s sensitivity and vulnerability for social gain, or as the narrator puts it to “shape institutions”. Since the politically incorrect opinions of the narrator and the views expressed by McEwan in his speech are similar (Hamlet’s views being much more extreme), it is easy to conflate the homodiegetic narrator with the flesh-and-blood author. This, in turn, causes an effect of impoliteness that real readers may experience while or after reading the book. Impoliteness is intentional: it happens when the speaker communicates their face-attack intentionally, or when the audience perceives the speaker’s behaviour as intentionally face-attacking (Culpeper 2005: 38). The readers of the novel may get the impression that the real author is hiding behind the fictional character’s back and using the narrator’s voice to offend them. In Nutshell , some of the book reviewers had this impression and suspected that the narrator Hamlet was the real author’s mouthpiece: “Nutshell fails when McEwan turns earnest”—this opinion

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is a clear indication that the reviewer thought of Hamlet’s digressions as the real author’s sincere comments. There is nothing in McEwan’s biography that would account for his lack of tolerance for transgender people or his narrow-minded views regarding identity politics. In his letter of apology in The Guardian,8 he reminds his readers of it: “Not one of the journalists, trans-activists and others who have commented on my remarks at the Royal Institution last week have troubled to complicate matters by finding out my actual views on sexual identity. I made them available on Facebook, Twitter, my website, in statements to the press and a letter to Stonewall. No response” (McEwan 2016b). “The implied X” and “the flesh-and-blood X” are not the same and so “the implied McEwan” and “the flesh-and-blood McEwan” cannot be treated as equal in the novel. Even if we assume that the textual author is “the constructive agent” (Phelan 2005: 47) responsible for creating the text and having an increased ideological and ethical influence on the text as its producer, still we cannot say that the textual author is the same as the real author figure (see Phelan 2005: 45). Much as the authorial intentions can be many in Nutshell ,9 the fact of the matter is that the implied author expresses impolite, politically incorrect beliefs through narration, with real face-threatening consequences for the readers. The extradiegetic impoliteness in the text led to the reviewers’ moral shock and dissociation from the real author (“I initially took the fetus’s long monologues on world events as part of the larger joke, but it’s clear after a while that some of them are sincere”). The novel demonstrates how the implied author can break his readers’ trust and, thus, violate the “secret communion of the author and reader” (Booth 1961: 300). The tacit communication and cooperation between the implied author and the implied reader are broken, as the reader no longer feels that they are on the same wavelength with the implied author because their “moral order” (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016: 74), ethical norms and expectations were violated.

5.5

Summary

Regardless of whether real authors intentionally choose to offend their audience or not (which will forever remain their secret), fictional

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communication allows writers to convey impolite views through narration, e.g. through homodiegetic narrators or via free indirect discourse in the heterodiegetic narration. It is a convenient technique because it helps novelists express their ideological stance in someone else’s guise, be it the narrator or the protagonist. Fiction on many occasions saves authors from taking the responsibility for the impolite nature of the(ir) message to the reader. Saturday conveys an implicit criticism of a modern trend to display an empathetic attitude in public, mostly on television and social media platforms. Henry Perowne is the implied author’s advocate; he is an educated person, a surgeon, who feels deep empathy for the victims of the plane crashes during the 9/11 terrorist attacks but, at the same time, he quietly supports the war in Iraq as the lesser evil. His imagination has its limits—he can imagine suffering American and British people but not suffering Iraqis, who will become collateral damage of the American war on terrorism in the Middle East. The narrator uses free indirect thought to turn Perowne’s thoughts into universal thoughts on the Western mentality. “Be selective in your mercies” is the narrator’s impolite observation conveyed ironically to the implied reader, which means: social empathy is in vogue so do empathise, and make sure that you empathise with the right people. Solar is characterised by the collapsible viewpoints of the narrator and the character, which demonstrates how the novel’s narration creates room for extradiegetic impoliteness. The narrator’s style is very similar to the character’s style. Ironic and condescending Michael Beard, an ex-genius physicist with a tarnished university career, mocks his fellow members of the climate saving expedition, or suggests at a press conference that women’s brains are “significantly different” in cognitive abilities from men’s brains, which, in his opinion, accounts for the lack of female physicists. Much as the real author cannot be held responsible for the truth of the impolite beliefs professed by his protagonist, the collapsible points of view, the use of free indirect speech and thought and the similar style of the narrator’s and the character’s discourse encourage the readers to see Beard’s impolite observations as the extradiegetic narrator’s impoliteness. And, finally, Nutshell provides a critique of contemporary identity politics and cancel culture, which, in the narrator’s view, are used as instruments of exerting social control. The unborn Hamlet offers the

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reader an extensive commentary on the contemporary university and its students who manipulate identity politics to place themselves in the position of the victims of the system, the system that has to be amended to suit their needs. The homodiegetic narrator uses interior monologue to present his politically incorrect thoughts on social media and how they popularise new fads, for example, “seventy-one gender options to be exact”. The fact that the narrator is the protagonist in the story and, because of that, his impolite comments are perceived as more subjective, saves the implied author from harm and helps him escape responsibility for voicing impolite and politically incorrect views in the book.

Notes 1. Expressing impoliteness in fiction and through fiction is more complex than expressing impolite beliefs in real-life. Fludernik (2009: 9) states that every narrative creates a fictional world which is almost identical with the real world, and where characters imitate “life-worlds” interactions, which is a reason why fictional texts should be given a thorough pragmatic analysis. It is important to remember that authors in fiction address an “implied reader” (Booth 1961: 151) rather than a real reader, which implicates that it is not the real audience but the idea of the potential audience who can be subject to impoliteness or criticism. 2. Christina Root (2011: 63) discusses the consequences of the affinity between the protagonist’s and the narrator’s speech in Saturday in her review of the novel: “In fact, Henry’s philistinism and general literary obtuseness as well as his political and professional arrogance were sticking points for reviewers and for the first critics writing about Saturday, who couldn’t quite believe that McEwan was endorsing the views of a character who seems in so many ways smug and limited, but didn’t see any other way to read him except as the author’s mouthpiece”. Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace (2007: 466) says: “Saturday is complicated by the striking absence of any specific clues that Henry warrants anything less than the reader’s full engagement and consideration. In light of that absence, the novel seems to imply that the author endorses Henry’s perspective”. 3. There are other approaches, which indicate that irony has a purely comic function and serves entertainment purposes only (see Roy 1981).

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4. Fludernik (2009: 36–37) specifies: “‘Embodied’ means that the perspective comes from an anthropomorphic figure whose brain interprets what s/he sees and who is able to make statements about her/himself. ‘Impersonal’ means the opposite: the focalizer gives away nothing about her/himself ”. 5. See an article “My Semester with the Snowflakes” written by a fifty-twoyear-old student at Yale (2019) and a veteran US Navy SEAL who writes about his initial reservations about studying with people much younger than him at an Ivy League institution. His article reveals social criticism of the “snowflake” students in the US. For example, his family would teasingly ask him about his classes at Yale: “How are things up there with the liberal snowflakes?” (Hatch 2020). The original article was published in Medium in 2019 but the author deleted it. 6. Here is a larger part of McEwan’s public apology issued in The Guardian on 6 April 2016. “I’m surprised that a couple of sentences of mine during a short Q&A session at the end of my lecture should have caused a stir. My subject was the literary representation of the self in the work of Montaigne, Shakespeare, Pepys, Boswell and others. In response to a question, I proposed that the possession of a penis or, more fundamentally, the inheritance of the XY chromosome, is inalienably connected to maleness. As a statement, this seems to me biologically unexceptional. However, biology is not always destiny. That the transgender community should want or need to abandon their birth gender or radically redefine it is their right, which should be respected and celebrated. It adds to the richness and diversity of life. It’s an extension of freedom and the possibilities of selfhood. Everyone should deplore the discrimination that transgender communities have suffered around the world. That the community should sometimes find itself in conflict with feminists (over changing rooms, trans beauty pageants, access to women’s colleges)— well, that’s a conversation on which I can shed no useful light” (McEwan 2016b). 7. “Identification practices” was a term introduced by the sociolonguist Mary Bucholtz. “Identity practices” are “processes by which identities are projected, negotiated and contested in interaction” and which manifest themselves in two ways: “positive identity practices” and “negative identity practices” (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 238). 8. Ian McEwan never had to apologise for Nutshell . He only apologised for his words during the lecture given to the Royal Institution.

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9. Ian McEwan claims that his main reason for writing Nutshell was sheer entertainment and that the idea for the book came to him spontainously, watch https://www.facebook.com/vintagebooks/videos/101543993 98004774/ (accessed March 12, 2022).

References Adams, Tim, “Nutshell by Ian McEwan. A Tragic Hero in the Making,” The Guardian. Last modified August 30, 2016. Accessed January 5, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/30/nutshell-ianmcewan-review-hamlet-foetus. Aitkenhead, Decca, “Ian McEwan: ‘I’m Going to Get Such a Kicking’,” The Guardian. Last modified August 27, 2016. Accessed January 20, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/27/ian-mcewanauthor-nutshell-going-get-kicking. Banville, John, “A Day in the Life. A Review of Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” New York Review of Books, May 26, 2005. https://www.nybooks.com/art icles/2005/05/26/a-day-in-the-life/. Black, Elizabeth, Pragmatic Stylistics. (Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Linguistics). (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edn. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, [1961] 1983). Bousfield, Derek, Impoliteness in Interaction. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 167). (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008a). Boyne, John, “Nutshell by Ian McEwan. Review: Ridiculous or Rather Brilliant,” The Irish Times. Last modified September 2, 2016. Accessed January 5, 2022. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/nutshell-by-ianmcewan-review-ridiculous-or-rather-brilliant-1.2763491. Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1978] 1987). Bucholtz, Mary, “‘Why Be Normal?’: Language and Identity Practices in a Community of Nerd Girls,” Language in Society 28 (1999): 203–23. Clanchy, Kate, “Nutshell by Ian McEwan. Review—An Elegiac Masterpiece,” The Guardian. Last modified August 27, 2016. Accessed January

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5, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/27/nutshell-by-ianmcewan-review. Coplan, Amy, “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62, no. 2 (2004): 141–52. Culpeper, Jonathan, “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness,” Journal of Pragmatics 25, no. 3 (1996): 349–67. Culpeper, Jonathan, “Impoliteness and Entertainment in the Television Quiz Show: The Weakest Link,” Journal of Politeness Research 1, no. 1 (2005): 35–72. Culpeper, Jonathan, Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. (Studies in Interactional Sociolonguistics 28). (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Culpeper, Jonathan, Michael Haugh and Valeria Sinkeviciute, “(Im)politeness and Mixed Messages.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 323–56. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Dobrogoszcz, Tomasz, Family and Relationships in Ian McEwan’s Fiction: Between Fantasy and Desire. (Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 2018). Donaldson, Emily, “Ian McEwan’s Nutshell Narrated, with Great Fun, by a Fetus,” The Star. Last modified September 11, 2016. Accessed December 2, 2021. https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2016/ 09/11/ian-mcewans-nutshell-narrated-with-great-fun-by-a-fetus.html. Fludernik, Monika, An Introduction to Narratology. (Translated by Patricia Häusler-Greenfield and Monika Fludernik). (New York and London: Routledge, 2009). Gauthier, Tim, “‘Selective in Your Mercies”: Privilege, Vulnerability and the Limits of Empathy in Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” College Literature 40, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 7–30. Hatch, James, “My Semester with the Snowflakes,” Przekrój Magazine. Last modified July 22, 2020. Accessed February 24, 2022. https://przekroj.pl/ en/society/my-semester-with-the-snowflakes-james-hatch. Johnston, Chris, “Ian McEwan Criticised by Campaigners over Transgender Remarks,” The Guardian. Last modified April 2, 2016. Accessed January 12, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/02/ian-mcewan-critic ised-over-transgender-remarks. Jucker, Andreas H., “Politeness in Eighteenth-Century Drama: A Discursive Approach,” Journal of Politeness Research 12, no. 1 (2016): 95–115.

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Kádár, Dániel Z. and Michael Haugh, Understanding Politeness. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Kowaleski Wallace, Elizabeth, “Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” Studies in the Novel 39, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 465–80. Leech, Geoffrey N., Principles of Pragmatics. (London: Longman, 1983). Leech, Geoffrey N. and Mick Short, Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Pearson/Longman, [1981] 2007). Lynn, David. 2007. “A Conversation with Ian McEwan,” The Kenyon Review, New Series 29, no. 3 (2007): 38–51. Mars-Jones, Adam, “In the Body Bag. A Review of Nutshell ,” London Review of Books 38, no. 21 (2016): no page numbers. Last modified October 6, 2016. Accessed December 15, 2021. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/ n19/adam-mars-jones/in-the-body-bag. McEwan, Ian, “Beyond Belief,” The Guardian, Writers on 9/11, September 12, 2001a. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001a/sep/12/september11.pol iticsphilosophyandsociety. McEwan, Ian, “Only Love and Then Oblivion. Love Was All They Had to Set Against Their Murderers,” The Guardian, Writers on 9/11, September 15, 2001b. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001b/sep/15/ september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2. McEwan, Ian, Saturday. (London: Vintage, 2005). McEwan, Ian, Solar. (Vintage Books, 2010). McEwan, Ian, Nutshell . (London: Vintage, 2016a). McEwan, Ian, “Penis Comment Was Biologically Unexceptional,” The Guardian. Last modified April 6, 2016b. Accessed November 10, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016b/apr/06/penis-commentwas-biologically-unexceptional. Neary, Lynn, “Ian McEwan: Teasing Farce from Flawed Humanity.” Last modified April 2, 2010. Accessed November 15, 2021. http://www.npr.org/2010/ 04/02/125470747/ian-mcewan-teasing-farce-from-flawed-humanity. Phelan, James, Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). Queen, Annalisa, “A Bookish Mind at Play in Nutshell .” Last modified September 14, 2016. Accessed January 15, 2022. https://www.npr.org/ 2016/09/14/493004017/a-bookish-mind-at-play-in-nutshell?t=164647853 8139.

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Root, Christina, “A Melodiousness at Odds with Pessimism: Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” Journal of Modern Literature: Re-assessing, Breaking, Transcending Genres 35, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 60–78. Roy, Alice, “The Function of Irony in Discourse,” Text 1 (1981): 407–23. Short, Mick, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1996). Spencer-Oatey, Helen (ed.), Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport Through Talk across Cultures. (London: Continuum, 2000). Spencer-Oatey, Helen and Dániel Z. Kádár, “The Bases of (Im)politeness Evaluations: Culture, the Moral Order and the East-West Debate,” East Asian Pragmatics 1, no. 1 (2016): 73–106. Winterhalter, Teresa, “‘Plastic Fork in Hand’: Reading as a Tool of Ethical Repair in Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” Journal of Narrative Theory 40, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 338–63.

6 Conclusion

The main characteristics of linguistic politeness are cooperativeness with the other participants in communication, mitigation of face threatening acts and having the other’s best interests in mind, as well as maintaining social harmony. Politeness as a theory has evolved into a series of “postmodern” approaches, which no longer concentrate on fixed rules and maxims to describe effective communication, but are more discourseoriented, and rely on the context and the speaker for communicating and understanding polite speech and behaviour (see Bargiela-Chiappini 2003; Eelen 2001; Kádár and Haugh 2013; Mills 2003; Terkourafi 2005; Watts 2003). Similarly, impoliteness has changed from a strategy-based approach which emphasises a more conventional use of language to more relational and “post-modern” approaches, as in impoliteness linked with convention and ritual (Terkourafi and Kádár 2017), impoliteness, emotion and cognition (Langlotz and Locher 2017), cultural variation (Sifianou and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2017), sociocultural approaches (Mills 2017) and impoliteness and morality (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016). This book not only takes advantage of a strategy-based approach to (im)politeness but also looks at more relational, speaker- and contextoriented approaches to see the bigger picture and to demonstrate that, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 U. Kizelbach, (Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18690-5_6

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for example, impoliteness in Ian McEwan’s novels depends on the character’s intentional behaviour to attack the other’s face or reputation by using conventional impoliteness strategies and depends on the speaker’s intention to be impolite (e.g. Atonement ). Impoliteness, however, can also be a matter of evaluation, that is, the character’s conduct may be evaluated as negative/aggressive/immoral by others even though it may not seem so for the character in question (e.g. Amsterdam). The overview of the (im)politeness theory in fictional analysis has demonstrated that (im)politeness has not been used enough to investigate fictional communication or characterisation and that the majority of critical analyses have been performed by pragmaticists and, as a natural way of things, they have looked into the linguistic rather than literary aspects of the analysis, such as fictional characterisation. Importantly, neither politeness nor impoliteness has ever been used to analyse the fiction of a single author in terms of internal characterisation and narration. One of this book’s aims is to fill in this knowledge gap. The pragmatic aspect of narratology, this book suggests, lies in using pragmatics to analyse literary fiction on two levels of communication: on the intradiegetic level of the story world and the extradiegetic level of the implied author’s communication with the implied reader. In particular, literary pragmatics is interested in analysing “the communicative aspects of the language of fiction” (Jucker and Locher 2017: 2) as has been shown based on the characters’ polite and impolite exchanges and in the narrator’s communicating mostly impolite beliefs to the reader. McEwan’s texts have an intention—through polite or impolite speech and thoughts of the characters or the narrators they communicate certain messages to the implied reader, for example, they make the reader contemplate their morality and empathy, or they encourage the reader to observe the world around them and draw their own conclusions. More than once, the narrators’ comments and thoughts are impolite and may seem offensive to flesh-and-blood readers but the idea behind it is to foster critical thinking, regardless of how painfully honest it may be. The first, theoretical part of the present book emphasises the importance of the pragma-stylistic approach in narrative analysis. Thanks to the theory of (im)politeness, the analyst can set the discussion about McEwan’s fiction in a real-life context and explain, for instance, how impolite

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views expressed in the narration can influence the reader’s understanding of the story and their reaction to the book (e.g. taking offence at the author, dissociating from the protagonist). Stylistics serves as a validation of the textual cues and certain conclusions drawn based on these cues and presents them as more empirically grounded findings rather than the analyst’s subjective impressions. As far as characterisation is concerned, politeness and impoliteness permeate McEwan’s descriptions of his characters, especially their speech and thoughts. Joe Rose from Enduring Love expresses his impolite attitude towards the people or ideas he does not agree with; he openly criticises his partner Clarissa who is guided by politeness and empathy in her life. He also dissociates himself physically and mentally from his stalker, an erotomaniac who is obsessed with God and religion. Jed Parry is imprisoned in his narrative and, according to his point of view, Joe loves him. As a mentally unstable person, he interchangeably displays bouts of polite behaviour (his letters to Joe) and impoliteness (swearing and stalking, aggression in the restaurant and violence towards Clarissa in Joe’s apartment). The protagonist’s uncompromising rationalism increases his condescending attitude towards Jed and Clarissa, which inevitably links this character with impolite traits. Much as the impoliteness portrayed in Enduring Love has a more traditional, strategy-based form, the type of impoliteness used for characterisation in Amsterdam is presented as a social practice and is more focused on the evaluation of the character’s conduct as impolite by others. Two exfriends, Clive Linley, a music composer, and Vernon Halliday, an editor of The Judge, intentionally violate social rituals and norms for personal gain. Clive violates the ritual of “bystander intervention” and refuses to help an oppressed woman in the Lake District simply because he is searching for musical inspiration. Vernon violates the ethical code and “moral order” of his journalistic profession and announces to the public that his newspaper owns discrediting photos of the politician, whom he secretly hates. As a result, he loses face in the media and gets fired from his job. The analysis of Atonement uses (im)politeness and mind presentation to show the transformation of the main focaliser Briony, whose thoughts evolve from impoliteness to politeness. Being a young author of fiction, she displays a condescending attitude towards Robbie, her sister’s

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lover and her social inferior. Briony’s childishness, vivid imagination and self-centredness cause her to focus on her mind and hurt Robbie and Cecilia. With time, however, she understands her mistakes from childhood and tries to atone for them in old age—she learns to be cooperative and to care for other minds, and she revives the memory of Cee and Robbie in her book. Regarding external communication between the implied author and reader, impoliteness stands out as a major pragma-stylistic characteristic in McEwan’s novels. As aforementioned, “the impoliteness of the literary text” is a state of affairs when the implied author (or narrator) expresses their impolite beliefs and views to the reader through the text directly or indirectly, which has face-threatening consequences for the audience, e.g. moral shock or disgust, dissociation from the protagonist, feeling hurt or put out. In Saturday, the reader is acquainted with Henry Perowne’s thoughts about the war on terrorism, and it turns out that the protagonist, a successful neurosurgeon from London, hypocritically selects groups of people (and nations) with whom he empathises, always having his wellbeing in mind. He dissociates himself from the cultures (e.g. Arab culture) he does not understand and associates Muslims with negative aspects, such as a lack of imagination, and terrorism. I have argued that this book may act as an implicit face threat towards different groups of readers: readers following the Muslim religion may feel uncomfortable reading Perowne’s thoughts (especially if they confuse the protagonist with the real author figure), and the modern white Europeans, who might feel a familiarity with the protagonist’s self-pleased attitude. Solar uses impoliteness with free indirect speech and thought to demonstrate how the narrative (the narrator’s opinions about the protagonist) can dissociate readers from the main character by describing his pathetic personality and unethical conduct. It also demonstrates that the overlapping perspectives, those of the protagonist and the narrator, make it easier for the implied authors to include impolite content in the text— offensive remarks about the lack of women in physics or the senselessness of a climatologist’s profession make it more difficult for the reader to decide who is offending them: the narrator, the character, or maybe the real author hiding behind the narrator figure? Nutshell also encourages an impolite reading of its content—showing the homodiegetic narrator,

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who is being very critical of contemporary universities, their sensitive students, the overwhelming power of cancel culture and social media with their huge impact on the whole generation. Critical reviews indicate that some readers took the self-conscious narrator as McEwan’s mouthpiece and accused him of narrowmindedness. This example serves as the best proof of the fact that fictional impoliteness can be taken as a real, intentional offence by some readers. I want to believe that cooperation is the word that will eventually stay in the minds of this book’s readers. McEwan’s fiction has a powerful capacity of combining various linguistic approaches whose main function, from a literary scholar’s perspective, is to aid the interpretation of the story, to better understand the characters’ motifs and their actions and to explain more empirically readers’ impressions and reactions to his books. Cooperation then is another keyword, apart from impoliteness, to characterise this publication because it strives to demonstrate how closely and effectively pragmatics can collaborate with stylistics in the name of literary analysis. Just like impoliteness cannot exist without politeness, in the same way discussing the character’s polite or impolite speech and point of view seems lacking and biased without specifically naming the linguistic indicators of viewpoint in the text or distinguishing the passages in the free indirect discourse. Politeness then, understood as cooperation, not only describes the relationships between McEwan’s characters but it also symbolically denotes a close collaboration of pragmatics and stylistics in his works.

References Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca, “Face and Politeness: New (Insights) for Old (Concepts),” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003): 1453–69. Eelen, Gino, A Critique of Politeness Theories. (Manchester: St Gerome Publishing, 2001). Jucker, Andreas H. and Miriam A. Locher, “Introducing Pragmatics of Fiction: Approaches, Trends and Developments.” In Pragmatics of Fiction, edited by Miriam A. Locher and Andreas H. Jucker, 1–21. (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017).

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Kádár, Dániel Z. and Michael Haugh, Understanding Politeness. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Langlotz, Andreas and Miriam A. Locher, “(Im)politeness and Emotion.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Impoliteness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 287–322. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Mills, Sara, Gender and Politeness. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Mills, Sara, “Sociocultural Approaches to (Im)politeness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Impoliteness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 41–60. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Sifianou, Maria and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, “(Im)politeness and Cultural Variation.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Impoliteness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 571–99. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Spencer-Oatey, Helen and Dániel Z. Kádár, “The Bases of (Im)politeness Evaluations: Culture, the Moral Order and the East-West Debate,” East Asian Pragmatics 1, no. 1 (2016): 73–106. Terkourafi, Marina, “Beyond the Micro-Level in Politeness Research,” Journal of Politeness Research 1, no. 2 (2005): 237–62. Terkourafi, Marina and Dániel Z. Kádár, “Convention and Ritual (Im)politeness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Impoliteness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 171–95. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Watts, Richard J., Politeness. Key Topics in Sociolinguistics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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Secondary Sources Adams, Tim, “Nutshell by Ian McEwan. A Tragic Hero in the Making,” The Guardian. Last modified August 30, 2016. Accessed January 5, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/30/nutshell-ianmcewan-review-hamlet-foetus. Aitkenhead, Decca, “Ian McEwan: ‘I’m Going to Get Such a Kicking’,” The Guardian. Last modified August 27, 2016. Accessed January 20, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/27/ian-mcewanauthor-nutshell-going-get-kicking. Allen, Eric W., “The Social Value of a Code of Ethics for Journalists,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The Ethics of the Professions and of Business 101 (1922): 170–79. Archer, Dawn and Derek Bousfield, “‘See Better, Lear?’ See Lear Better! A Corpus-Based Pragma-Stylistic Investigation of Shakespeare’s King Lear ”. In Language and Style, edited by Beatrix Busse and Dan McIntyre, 183–203. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Arndt, Horst and Richard W. Janney, “Politeness Revisited: Cross-modal Supportive Strategies,” International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 23, no. 1–4 (1985): 281–300. Austin, John, How to Do Things with Words. (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Banville, John, “A Day in the Life. A Review of Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” New York Review of Books, May 26, 2005. https://www.nybooks.com/art icles/2005/05/26/a-day-in-the-life/. Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca, “Face and Politeness: New (Insights) for Old (Concepts),” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003): 1453–69. Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 3rd edn. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009).

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Index

187–189, 191, 192, 194–196, 206

A

Amsterdam 1, 2, 8, 92, 93, 100, 110, 125, 126, 128, 131, 133, 134, 136, 140, 150, 204, 205 Atonement 1, 8, 92, 97, 100, 110, 136–140, 144, 146–149, 151, 204, 205 author 1, 4, 7, 9, 44, 45, 58–63, 66, 68, 82, 83, 89, 93, 98, 99, 137, 142, 148, 158, 162, 169, 176, 177, 191, 193–195, 204, 205 flesh-and-blood author 62 implied author 4, 7, 9, 15, 58–64, 66, 67, 99, 157–159, 163, 167–170, 177, 185, 188–190, 195–197, 204, 206 real author 7, 9, 59–64, 99, 138, 139, 158, 159, 161, 162, 177,

B

Booth, Wayne 7, 59–62, 66, 67, 87, 88, 99, 101, 158, 195, 197 Bousfield, Derek 3, 13, 14, 26, 29, 34, 37–39, 44, 49, 73, 74, 109, 110, 120, 121, 163, 178

C

characterisation 3, 4, 8, 14, 31, 36–38, 43, 47, 67, 73, 75, 79, 100, 109, 110, 126, 150, 181, 182, 185, 204, 205 literary characterisation 58 Chatman, Seymour 60, 61, 101, 102 Clark, Billy 5, 14

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 U. Kizelbach, (Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18690-5

227

228

Index

communication 8 fictional communication 4 literary communication 2 contemporary 14 convention 20, 22, 27, 28, 30, 65, 126–128, 133, 143, 203 Cooperative Principle 74 Culpeper, Jonathan 3, 6, 13, 23–29, 34, 36–39, 44, 46, 47, 49, 109–111, 113–115, 118, 119, 124, 138, 141, 143, 147, 150, 151, 164, 165, 167, 169, 176, 181, 182, 185, 194

D

Dobrogoszcz, Tomasz 89, 134, 151, 170

E

eighteenth-century novel 14 empathy 8, 91, 110, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 149–151, 160, 162, 165–169, 196, 204, 205 Enduring Love 1, 2, 8, 89, 95, 96, 100, 110–112, 115, 117, 119–125, 150, 205 extradiegetic 2–4, 7, 8, 15, 43, 58, 63, 67, 82, 88, 96, 99, 100, 157–159, 171, 174, 176, 177, 179–181, 185, 186, 188, 195, 196, 204

F

face 3, 6, 7, 9, 14, 16–19, 23–25, 27, 29–32, 39, 40, 45, 46, 49, 63, 67, 80, 99, 114, 118–120,

124, 131, 133, 138, 140, 143, 151, 158, 159, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 176, 181, 184, 188–190, 194, 195, 203–206 face threat 19 negative face 3, 6, 16–18, 20, 24, 44, 118, 143, 147, 165 positive face 3, 6, 16–19, 24, 35–37, 45, 114, 124, 135, 176, 178, 181, 182, 185 face threat face threat 19 fictional characters 15 Fludernik, Monika 60, 82, 83, 186, 188 focalisation 81, 100, 137, 151 focaliser 81–83, 92, 95, 138, 140, 143, 145, 146, 151, 205 freedom 6, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 35, 118, 147, 159, 167, 173, 177 FTA 34

G

Genette, Gérard 82, 83, 101, 102 Goffman, Erving 16, 39

H

Harrison, Chloe 95–97, 100 Haugh, Michael 21, 22, 26, 27, 64, 66, 111, 126, 150, 192–194, 203 Herman, David 7, 57, 94 heterodiegetic 137, 159, 171–173, 196 homodiegetic 9, 159, 188, 194, 196, 197, 206

Index

229

I

L

immorality 8, 42, 110, 125, 135 implicature 64 impolite beliefs 20 (im)politeness 4, 6–9, 14, 28, 30, 31, 33, 40, 43, 47, 100, 109–111, 126, 127, 133, 136, 151, 157, 182, 203–205 impoliteness 2–9, 13, 14, 23–30, 36–40, 44, 46, 47, 58, 66, 67, 99, 100, 109–111, 113, 115, 118–120, 124–126, 128, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 147, 150, 151, 158, 168, 171, 174, 176, 177, 180–182, 185, 188, 194–196, 203–207 negative impoliteness 24, 119, 148, 164 positive impoliteness 24, 114, 135, 176, 182 intradiegetic 2–4, 8, 15, 43, 58, 67, 88, 96, 100, 110, 157, 158, 186, 204 irony 18 Irony Principle 168

Lambrou, Marina 75 linguistic analysis 9 literary communication 59 literary criticism 5 literary fiction 3, 7, 13, 14, 47, 66, 67, 99, 109, 158, 204 literary scholars 9 literary text 43

J

M

madness 8, 38, 110, 119, 150 maxim 19–21, 65, 74–76, 78, 79, 100, 116, 203 McEwan, Ian 1, 2, 4–9, 58, 64, 89, 90, 92, 95, 96, 98–100, 109, 126, 137, 139–141, 149, 150, 158–162, 166, 169, 176, 177, 186–189, 191–195, 204–207 McIntyre, Dan 34, 72, 82, 109, 110 metaphor 18 Middle English 14 Montoro, Rocío 89, 90, 100 moral order 22, 30, 46, 67, 126, 128, 133, 134, 150, 158, 182, 183, 188, 195, 205

Jucker, Andreas 2, 3, 14, 31–33, 35, 41–43, 47, 58, 109, 157, 204 N K

Kádár, Dániel 6, 14, 21, 22, 26–28, 30, 46, 67, 111, 126–128, 130, 133, 150, 158, 182, 192, 193, 195, 203

narration 4, 9, 63, 67, 82, 85, 88, 90, 91, 96–98, 100, 112, 113, 128, 135, 137, 150, 158, 159, 169, 172–175, 177, 179, 195, 196, 204, 205 narrative 1, 2, 7, 32, 43, 57–61, 67, 82–84, 92, 94–96, 98, 112, 113, 115, 121, 138, 140,

230

Index

144–146, 159, 171, 179, 186, 204–206 narratology 6, 7, 9, 57, 68, 79, 92, 95, 100, 140, 151, 204 narrator 3–5, 7, 9, 15, 33, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 80, 82–89, 93, 95–98, 112, 115, 134, 135, 138, 141, 143, 144, 146, 148, 151, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 166–168, 170–180, 182–184, 186–189, 191, 192, 194, 196, 197, 204, 206, 207 norm 7, 15, 22, 28, 30, 46, 64, 67, 99, 126, 128, 130, 133, 158, 159, 182, 191, 195, 205 Nutshell 1, 8, 9, 159, 185–188, 190, 193–196 Nuttall, Louise 97–100

O

off-record 34 Old English 14 on-record 34

P

patronising 26 Phelan, James 7, 62–64, 68, 195 Point of View 7 polite attitude 44 politeness 2–8, 13–16, 18–24, 26–29, 31–35, 37, 39–47, 66, 67, 99, 100, 109–111, 115–117, 119, 126, 127, 138, 148–151, 157, 167, 168, 192, 203–205, 207 negative politeness 19, 35, 41, 43, 44, 47, 114

Politeness Principle 168 positive politeness 19, 32, 35, 47, 114, 163 political incorrectness 185 postclassical 57 pragmaticists 9 pragmatics 2–7, 9, 13–15, 26–31, 33–35, 37–41, 43, 45, 47, 57–59, 64, 66, 69–74, 78, 79, 99, 109, 120, 150, 204, 207 Pratt, Mary Louise 59, 69, 72, 99 presupposition 60 Prince, Gerard 57, 58

R

Rabinowitz, Peter 68 rationalism 8, 110, 205 reader 1–9, 31, 41–45, 58–61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69–71, 76–84, 87–96, 98, 99, 116, 122, 128, 134, 137, 138, 142, 146–149, 151, 157–159, 162, 163, 165, 167–170, 172, 173, 177, 180, 185, 187, 188, 194–197, 204–207 implied reader 4, 7, 58–61, 67, 99, 157–159, 167, 168, 171, 186, 188, 195, 196, 204 real reader 60, 188, 194 Renaissance 14 ritual 15, 28, 30, 111, 126–130, 150, 203, 205 rudeness 44

S

sarcasm 24

Index

Saturday 1, 8, 90, 91, 100, 159, 161–163, 165, 166, 169, 196, 206 schema 77 schema refreshing 81 Schema Theory 7 self 16–18, 20, 21, 23, 37, 39, 60–62, 92, 93, 116, 117, 129, 130, 132, 133, 138, 140, 142, 145, 146, 149, 162, 166, 168, 170, 171, 173, 181, 185–188, 191, 194, 206, 207 second self 60 Shakespeare, William 1, 33–38, 47, 185 Short, Mick 4, 5, 60, 66, 68–70, 76–78, 82, 84–88, 99, 143, 146, 159, 172, 174–176, 179 Simpson, Paul 13, 43, 44, 47, 109 social behaviour 15 Solar 1, 8, 159, 171, 172, 174, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 196, 206

231

Sotirova, Violeta 71, 73, 99 speech and thought presentation 8 Spencer-Oatey, Helen 6, 14, 26, 30, 44, 46, 67, 111, 126, 133, 150, 158, 176, 182, 195, 203 Stockwell, Peter 72 strategy 6, 13, 19, 23–25, 36, 40, 46, 110, 114, 118, 119, 147, 163, 167, 185, 203, 205 stylisticians 9 stylistics 2–9, 14, 30–33, 38–40, 43, 47, 57, 58, 60, 64, 66–73, 79–81, 83–86, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 98–100, 109, 111, 140, 141, 146, 151, 157–159, 162, 171, 174, 177, 182, 204–207 sympathy 21, 88, 92, 138, 139, 166, 172, 182

T

Terkourafi, Marina 21, 22, 26–28, 30, 46, 111, 127, 128, 203