Narrative, Interrupted: The Plotless, the Disturbing and the Trivial in Literature 9783110259971, 9783110259957

Table of contents :
Preface
Part I: The Still Waters of Narrative: The Boring and the Plotless
Conversational and Authorial Disclosure in the Dialogue Novel: The Case of The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Resistance to Plot and Uneven Narrativity: A Journey from “A Boring Story” to The Rings of Saturn
What Happens When Nothing Happens: Interpreting Narrative Technique in the Plotless Novels of Nicholson Baker
Events Can Be Quoted (and Words Need Not Be)
Pynchon’s Poetics of Boredom: Cognitive and Textual Aspects of Novelistic Dreariness
Part II: A Web of Sense: Interpreting the Disturbing and the Difficult
Toward a Zoonarratology: Storytelling and Species Difference in Animal Comics
Watching a Tree Grow: Terrence Malick’s The New World and the Nature of Cinema
Navigating – Making Sense – Interpreting (The Reader behind La Jalousie)
History Impossible: Narrating and Motivating the Past
Unnatural Temporalities: Interfaces between Postmodernism, Science Fiction, and the Fantastic
The Imperfect Is Our Paradise: Intertextuality and Fragmentary Narration in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace
Fragile Narrative Situations: Conrad Compared to Sebald
Part III: Shadow of a Tail: Problems of Authorship
Name Change and Author Avatars in Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi
Stranger than Fiction, or, Jerome David Salinger, Author of Lolita: Real, Implied and Fictive Authorship
Translators, Scoundrels and Gentlemen of Honor: Problems of Nabokov’s Loyalty
Affordances of Form in Stanzaic Narrative Poetry
A Shadow on the Marble
Index

Citation preview

Narrative, Interrupted

Narrative, Interrupted The Plotless, the Disturbing and the Trivial in Literature

Edited by Markku Lehtimäki Laura Karttunen Maria Mäkelä

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-025995-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-025997-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

© 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Gesamtherstellung: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen

∞ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

To Professor Pekka Tammi

Tammi is a good man, and a solid scholar. —Dmitri Nabokov

Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII PART I: The Still Waters of Narrative: The Boring and the Plotless JAMES PHELAN Conversational and Authorial Disclosure in the Dialogue Novel: The Case of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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M ATTI HYVÄRINEN Resistance to Plot and Uneven Narrativity: A Journey from “A Boring Story” to The Rings of Saturn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 BO PETTERSSON What Happens When Nothing Happens: Interpreting Narrative Technique in the Plotless Novels of Nicholson Baker . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 L AURA K ARTTUNEN Events Can Be Quoted (and Words Need Not Be) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 SAMULI H ÄGG Pynchon’s Poetics of Boredom: Cognitive and Textual Aspects of Novelistic Dreariness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 PART II: A Web of Sense: Interpreting the Disturbing and the Difficult DAVID HERMAN Toward a Zoonarratology: Storytelling and Species Difference in Animal Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 M ARKKU LEHTIMÄKI Watching a Tree Grow: Terrence Malick’s The New World and the Nature of Cinema. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

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M ARIA M ÄKELÄ Navigating—Making Sense—Interpreting (The Reader behind La Jalousie) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 M ARI H ATAVARA History Impossible: Narrating and Motivating the Past . . . . . . . . . . 153 JAN A LBER Unnatural Temporalities: Interfaces between Postmodernism, Science Fiction, and the Fantastic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 SANNA K ATARIINA BRUUN The Imperfect Is Our Paradise: Intertextuality and Fragmentary Narration in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 JAKOB LOTHE Fragile Narrative Situations: Conrad Compared to Sebald . . . . . . . 211 PART III: Shadow of a Tail: Problems of Authorship LEONA TOKER Name Change and Author Avatars in Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 M ARINA GRISHAKOVA Stranger than Fiction, or, Jerome David Salinger, Author of Lolita: Real, Implied and Fictive Authorship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 H ANNU TOMMOLA Translators, Scoundrels and Gentlemen of Honor: Problems of Nabokov’s Loyalty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 BRIAN MCH ALE Affordances of Form in Stanzaic Narrative Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276 GENNADY BARABTARLO A Shadow on the Marble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

Preface But all at once it dawned on me that this Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream But topsy-turvical coincidence, Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense. Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind Of correlated pattern in the game, Plexed artistry, and something of the same Pleasure in it as they who played it found. (Nabokov, Pale Fire 62–63)

As narrative theorists, we are familiar with the experience of interpretive revelation dramatized in this extract from Pale Fire. Then why not study this moment instead of concerning ourselves with narratological categorization and prototype modeling? Why not examine the painstakingly woven spider web of meanings and its unique shiny texture? Like life itself, narrative inquiry may sometimes appear as a senseless series of repetitions, and it would take a Nabokovian hero such as Charles Kinbote to see a grand design in it. And then, all at once, one stumbles upon a meaningful disturbance that calls for a theoretical readjustment. Descriptive poetics at its best deals with meaningful disturbances—with texture and coincidence—rather than senseless repetitions. In its urge to find evidence against narratological doxa (plot, sequence, experientiality, even narrativity itself), it has produced highly original theorizing with an exquisite sense of detail and authorial design. This volume, Narrative, Interrupted, goes beyond the macro framing typical of postclassical narratology and sets out to sketch approaches more sensitive to the rich variety of narratives: boring and rambling stories, dialogue novels, nonhuman comics, and autobiographies of the genuine or fictive kind. Whereas structuralist narratology was governed by linguistic-based models of narrative time and agency, the postclassical approaches construct top-down reading models that often remain just as blind to the frame-breaking potential of individual literary narratives. Neither model is equipped to deal adequately with the potentially disruptive particularities on the narrative micro level. Cognitive narratology is

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by definition resistant to narrative contingencies since it grounds itself on prototype modeling, whereas in the rhetorical approach the emphasis on communication may frustrate attempts to focus on details that might downplay the communicative situation or even make the story incommunicable. We are being told that there are narratives everywhere, but at the same time the expansion of narratological approaches to cultural studies and the social sciences may lead to a narrow privileging of the “natural” or linear, causal, and mimetic type of narrative. This is the point made by Pekka Tammi in his oft-quoted article “Against Narrative”: “is it not the specific function of literary narratives to do it otherwise —by rendering problematic, by subverting, or by making strange in a thousand and one ways all those sweeping formulations thought up by theorists on the basis of standard, natural cases?” (29). Tammi goes on to show how Anton Chekhov’s “A Boring Story” displays precisely those anti-linear, anti-causal, iterative, or otherwise recalcitrant features that are ignored by the sweeping, yet currently much favored, definitions. It is easy to misread these revelations. The “literary-narratologist” approach outlined by Tammi has been questioned by one of the most influential theorists of narrative, Meir Sternberg, who laments that when it comes to the definition of narrative and narrativity, “Pekka Tammi… goes from oblivious silence to overzealous dismissal”: As a student of literary fiction, he refuses to enter “the technical debate about defining narrative,” by appeal to a false analogy.…That a literary scholar should provoke such an elementary boomerang effect, as if fiction, its typology, and the rest of its study could all profitably dispense with narrativity, is doubtless revealing. (511)

Sternberg is perhaps too quick to equate Tammi’s approach with the socalled unnatural narratology (e.g. Alber et al.). He criticizes the “unnaturalists” for working with a narrow conception of the mimetic, seeing it “as normal, ordinary, verisimilar, more or less interchangeable with ‘realist.’” This conception of mimesis, he argues, is nothing short of false. He asks, “So why force the door of ontic ‘impossibility’ and analogous unnaturalisms? Opened as early as Aristotle’s Poetics…this door has been kept open since, in theory as well as in practice, to a variety of new deviant arrivals in a variety of narrative forms, periods, and subgenres, aiming to deform, ‘defamiliarize’ time, space, action, character, thought, point of view” (517). Sternberg is right in pointing out that narratology— from Viktor Shklovsky’s formalism and Gérard Genette’s structuralism to Brian McHale’s postmodernist poetics—has always foregrounded impossible variants.

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In Sternberg’s discussion, Tammi’s literary narratology emerges, albeit in a footnote, as a kind of predecessor to the recent unnatural narratologies and their claim to novelty. It seems that Sternberg does not quite recognize the difference between these two approaches, unnatural narratology on the one hand and literary narratology on the other. While some “unnaturalists” employ mimetic readings of impossible storyworlds in order to come to terms with their strangeness (to naturalize them), literary narratology makes the opposite move: it insists on a theoretically informed close-reading of seemingly realistic texts which only reveal their strangeness and difficulty when looked at up close. It is also a question of whether to concentrate on the strange elements of story or the oddities of discourse. The representation of eating a cherry in a realist story may be a stranger literary-narratological phenomenon than the representation of the mental life of an inanimate object in fantasy fiction. A seemingly unmotivated element such as the idle consumption of a watermelon in Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” may also function as a point of condensation that returns the inquisitive gaze of the reader. It is here that the tradition in which Tammi belongs comes to the foreground, and it is precisely that of Russian formalism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American narrative theory. Unlike the mainstream cognitive approaches or even the emergent unnatural narratology, most of the articles collected here explore the artifice involved in presenting something ordinary and realistic. The collective aim of the volume is to analyze, question, and put to the test some of the basic tenets of contemporary narrative theory. In order for there to be an interruption, there must be something to interrupt. A common denominator for the narrative texts discussed here is the interruption of the causaldynamic chain of events presented in narrative clauses or of the experiential flow of human-like narrative agents. Each of the three sections seeks to interrupt, as in stop to consider, a prevailing conception of narrativity. The first section challenges the traditional idea of narrative as a sequence of events, causally ordered, and unusual and dynamic enough to hold the reader’s interest. The second section investigates and problematizes the more recent notion, introduced by Monika Fludernik, of human experientiality as the defining feature of narrativity. The third section focusing on authorial disruptions and interventions seeks to counteract the tendency of ignoring questions of authorship in narrative studies. The first section of the book, “The Still Waters of Narrative: The Boring and the Plotless,” deals with potentially anti-dynamic elements such as dialogue, details, private events, and boredom. The contributors take their cue from Tammi’s article “Against Narrative” and Brian McHale’s concept of weak narrativity, which refers to stories told with much ir-

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relevance and indeterminacy. Weak narrativity, whether it is found in narratives that foreground dialogue, lyrical images or boring descriptions of everyday incidents, allows us to investigate the mechanics of narrative interest and narrative dynamics. The book’s opening essay by James Phelan combines a theoretical inquiry into the role of character-character dialogue with an analysis of George V. Higgins’s celebrated crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Phelan explores the ways in which scenes of dialogue employ a complex art of indirection, since they involve multiple speakers, audiences, and purposes. Phelan argues that understanding the rhetoric and ethics of Higgins’s novel is a valuable step toward understanding the rhetoric and ethics of dialogue more generally. Matti Hyvärinen, in his reading of W. G. Sebald’s travel narrative The Rings of Saturn, argues that in addition to weak narrativity, there is a phenomenon which may be termed “uneven narrativity.” Hyvärinen sketches a theoretical model equipped to handle a complex and seemingly non-narrative work such as Sebald’s that resists narrativity on one level, yet displays high and prototypical narrativity in its embedded stories. In a similar vein, Bo Pettersson analyzes the narrative features of plotless fiction. Using Nicholson Baker’s novels as test cases, Pettersson shows that where the plot is minimal, description becomes more central, and the narrator’s observations of everyday objects and incidents reach extraordinary proportions. Laura Karttunen points out that events can also be presented in the form of a quotation, as can other non-verbal phenomena, which suggests that the definition of direct speech as a narrative of words is inadequate. She argues that a medium-independent model of quotation will be able to account for the innovative non-verbal and multimodal quotations found in contemporary literature. In the concluding chapter of the first section, Samuli Hägg tries to come to terms with the highly problematic fictional boredom that abounds in the demanding mega-fictions of Thomas Pynchon. While skeptical of the cognitive trend in narrative studies, Hägg analyzes narrative boredom in terms of specific textual features and as a readerly experience. The second section of the book, “A Web of Sense: Interpreting the Disturbing and the Difficult,” focuses on natural, non-natural, and unnatural narratives and the problems they pose for interpretation and narrativization. Taking its guiding metaphor from Pale Fire, this section is concerned with people’s sense-making operations when facing strange and difficult narratives, whether literary, graphic, or cinematic. In this way, the articles in this section engage in the ongoing debate about cognitive narratology and unnatural narratives, but their specific aim is to uncover the strangeness of literary and visual narratives that cannot be explained away by theoretical generalizations.

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David Herman takes as his starting point the claim that one of the central factors contributing to narrativity is a focus on human or human-like individuals experiencing events in the storyworld. Herman wants to test the limits of this claim by examining representations of the experiences of nonhuman animals. Using Jesse Reklaw’s and Shirley Hughes’s graphic narratives as his case studies, Herman explores the extent to which narratives can project nonhuman experiences and not just those of humans or human-like agents. Markku Lehtimäki also takes a critical look at anthropomorphic definitions of narrativity and argues that nonhuman nature can function as an organic part of cinematic narrative. Analyzing both the natural and transcendental aspects of Terrence Malick’s film The New World, Lehtimäki suggests that filmic narratives pose narratological questions quite different from those of prose literature. Maria Mäkelä considers the reader constructions implicit in classical and cognitive narratology and approaches these imaginary sense-making agents through the figure of the disembodied jealous husband in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie. By analyzing the readerly shortcomings of this monomaniacal voyeur figure, Mäkelä illustrates some of the differences between the classical and postclassical conceptualizations of narrative sense-making. The next few articles focus on the relationship between narrative form and problematic histories. Mari Hatavara emphasizes that the process of narrativization, or making sense of narrative fiction, is founded not only on our experience of everyday life, but also on our familiarity with the generic properties of fiction. She analyzes the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Graves and argues that fiction is able to combine the modes of experiencing, telling, and reflecting and to overcome the reader’s temporal distance from the storyworld. This question takes another turn in Jan Alber’s article that deals with the unnatural (i.e. physically or logically impossible) temporalities of postmodernism. Alber explains the disconcerting or defamiliarizing effects of unnatural time lines by arguing that postmodernist texts transfer the impossible temporalities typical of science fiction to otherwise realist contexts. Like Alber, Sanna Katariina Bruun explores the presentation of difficult and disturbing topics in historical narratives. Whereas in Hatavara’s and Alber’s articles the focus is mainly on temporal ordering and its violations, Bruun foregrounds spatiality and intertextuality as the main constituents of postmodernist historical fiction. She points out that it is up to the reader to make sense of the fragmented pieces and shattered subtexts found in Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace. This idea, shared by all articles in this section, corresponds to the Nabokovian ideal of finding a “web of sense” and a “correlated pattern” in the game of literary interpretation. Jakob Lothe

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concludes the section with his article on fragile narrative situations. He revisits Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Sebald’s Austerlitz and elucidates the pivotal role of the frame narrator in each novel. The third and final section, “Shadow of a Tail: Problems of Authorship,” combines a general inquiry into questions of authorship with a detailed focus on Vladimir Nabokov, whose works continue to provide narratologists with challenging test cases. The guiding principle of Pekka Tammi’s authoritative but dizzying doctoral dissertation Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics was that the author’s artistic vision lurks behind his fictional inventions and word-play and that, in the end, literary works are designed by their authors to fulfill aesthetic purposes. In the poststructuralist school of thought, decidedly not favored by Pekka Tammi himself, literary texts tend to be reduced to an endless flow of signs with indeterminate meanings. In the age of the dead author, one of Tammi’s most productive projects has been to reinstate the author and his or her unique poetics at the center of narrative scholarship. Leona Toker, whose essay opens the final section, discusses the meaning of name change in documentary narratives in terms of the relationship between the resultant in-roads of fictionalization and their truth-value. Her examples include works that deal with the Soviet Gulag or Nazi concentration camps: Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. Toker’s essay shows the persistence of the testimonial function despite the disruption of the autobiographical pact and despite the fictionalization initiated and sometimes signaled by giving real people fictional names. The question of the author’s “real” self resurfaces in Marina Grishakova’s article devoted to the partly imaginative connections between Vladimir Nabokov’s and J. D. Salinger’s mysterious author personas. Grishakova analyzes the various author-constructs (actual, implied, and fictive authors) in terms of their textual manifestations but also situates them in the wider socio-cultural context. Hannu Tommola also places Nabokov in the larger cultural and literary context when considering his role as the translator of his own and Pushkin’s works. Tommola regards Nabokov as a partly foreignizing, partly domesticating translator with an idiosyncratic notion of fidelity. Brian McHale uses Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin to develop his theory about narrative in poetry. In his article, McHale characterizes some of the typical interactions between stanza form and narrative articulation in several types of stanzaic poems and suggests how poets may use specific lyrical strategic to achieve particular narrative effects. The final section takes its poetic starting point from Nabokov’s Pnin, in which the figure of the squirrel functions as a “master emblem” of the narrative: “Pnin naturally fails to notice a system in the recurrences but

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the attentive reader…will see…the general design” (Barabtarlo 22). This book ends with Gennady Barabtarlo’s detailed textological, narratological, and philosophical examination of Nabokov’s unfinished text, The Original of Laura. This is a narrative interrupted in the true sense of the term, and Barabtarlo’s virtuosic analysis of it provides a coda for the present volume. That an expert reader is able to reconstruct, from fragments, such a plausible model of the whole points to two conclusions: much of Nabokov’s unique magic lies in the details, but there is also an authorial design to be discovered by a scholar in possession of a blueprint of the artist’s design principles. *** Let us not go into the author’s life, as Nabokov said of Proust—or, as he phrases it in his lecture on Tolstoy, “I hate the vulgarity of ‘human interest,’ I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time” (Lectures 138). This volume is designed to respond to the towering scholarly presence of Pekka Tammi, whose output is a rich combination of the study of narrative structures and authorial poetics (Problems), intertextuality and interpretation (Subtexts), free indirect discourse (“Risky”; “Exploring”; see also Lehtimäki and Tammi), visual narrative (“Introduction”), and metanarratological criticism of overly positive manifestos of the narrative turn in the humanities (“Against” and “Against ‘against’”). Tammi’s seminal textbook Kertova teksti [“The Narrative Text”], published in 1992, marked the beginning of a rigorous scholarly inquiry into narrative in Finland. Thanks to Professor Tammi’s enduring interest in the wide field of narrative theory, the new generation of Finnish narrative scholars has been able to enrich his formalist and structuralist approach with innovations from fields such as rhetorical, cognitive, unnatural, intermedial, and interdisciplinary narratology. In this book, the Tampere school of narratology—not a unified team but a loosely-knit group of individuals—answers Tammi’s call to study “overtly experimental, anomalous and marginal, transgressively zany, previously untheorized or insufficiently therorized cases” (“Exploring” 161). Joining them in this effort are the narrative theorists—Tammi’s colleagues and friends—who had their hand in shaping narratology into what it is today. In this book, some of the world’s leading narrative theorists offer their take on the plotless, the disturbing, and the trivial in literature and engage in the debate on narrativity and anti-narrativity, thereby honoring Professor Pekka Tammi on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Tampere, April 23, 2012 Markku Lehtimäki, Laura Karttunen, and Maria Mäkelä

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Works Cited Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. “Unnatural Narrative, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.” Narrative 18.1 (2010): 113–36. Barabtarlo, Gennadi. Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov’s Pnin. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1989. Lehtimäki, Markku, and Pekka Tammi. “Discourse.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel. Vol. 1. Ed. Peter Melville Logan. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 256–61. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Russian Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. —. Pale Fire. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1969. Sternberg, Meir. “Narrativity: From Objectivist to Functional Paradigm.” Poetics Today 31.3 (2010): 507–659. Tammi, Pekka. “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’).” Partial Answers 4.2 (2006): 19–40. —. “Against ‘against’ Narrative: On Nabokov’s ‘Recruiting.’” Narrativity, Fictionality, and Literariness: The Narrative Turn and the Study of Literary Fiction. Ed. Lars-Åke Skalin. Örebro: Örebro University, 2008. 37–55. —. “Exploring terra incognita.” FREE language INDIRECT translation DISCOURSE narratology: Linguistic, Translatological and Literary-Theoretical Encounters. Ed. Pekka Tammi and Hannu Tommola. Tampere: Tampere UP, 2006. 159–73. —. “Introduction: Crossing the Boundaries? Or, the Most Typical Comic Book in World Literature.” Thresholds of Interpretation: Crossing the Boundaries in Literary Criticism. Ed. Markku Lehtimäki and Julia Tofantšuk. Tallinn: TLÜ Kirjastus, 2006. 10–29. —. Kertova teksti: Esseitä narratologiasta. [= The Narrative Text: Essays on Narratology.] Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 1992. —. Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1985. —. “Risky Business: Probing the Borderlines of FID. Nabokov’s ‘An Affair of Honor’ (Podlec) as a Test Case.” Linguistic and Literary Aspects of Free Indirect Discourse from a Typological Perspective. Ed. Pekka Tammi and Hannu Tommola. Tampere: University of Tampere, 2003. 41–54. —. Russian Subtexts in Nabokov’s Fiction: Four Essays. Tampere: Tampere UP, 1999.

PART I The Still Waters of Narrative: The Boring and the Plotless

James Phelan (The Ohio State University)

Conversational and Authorial Disclosure in the Dialogue Novel: The Case of The Friends of Eddie Coyle Reading is not a spectator sport ... it is a participatory event. George V. Higgins, On Writing (109)

In his 2006 essay, “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’),” Pekka Tammi warns literary narratologists against the seductions of the narrative turn and its implicit project of describing all narrative. If we become so enamored with this project, Tammi argues, we are likely to lose sight of the distinctiveness of much literary narrative. Tammi exhorts us instead to study “the subversive and strange, previously untheorized or insufficiently theorized, cases: the glorious exceptions to the rules that classical definitions have been altogether too sweeping to recognize” (29). Tammi then practices what he preaches by developing an insightful analysis of the “weak narrativity” of Anton Chekhov’s “A Boring Story.”1 In this essay, I respond to Tammi’s exhortation by taking up a different kind of insufficiently theorized case, the dialogue novel.2 I will conduct my theorizing in conjunction with George V. Higgins’s remarkable 1972 Boston crime novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. More particularly, I want to develop a more sufficient rhetorical account of how narrative communication works in the dialogue novel by studying how it works in Higgins’s novel. Indeed, since rhetorical theory conceives of narrative as somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened, and since the dialogue novel is all about a series of somebodys going back and forth

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“Weak narrativity” is Brian McHale’s term to describe works that tell stories but do so “‘poorly,’ distractedly, with much irrelevance and indeterminacy, in such a way as to evoke narrative coherence while at the same time withholding commitment to it and undermining confidence in it; in short, having one’s cake and eating it too” (165). Narrative theorists have done some first-rate work on scenes of dialogue, but the dialogue novel itself remains insufficiently theorized. See especially Bakhtin, Herman, Kacandes, Murphy, Sternberg, and Thomas.

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with other somebodys on various occasions about various subjects for various purpose(s), it seems especially important for rhetorical theory to account for the dialogue novel. I have begun this project in two previous essays, both of which offer some illustrative commentary on Eddie Coyle. In the first of these essays (“Imagining”), I propose a distinction between conversational disclosure, the communications between the participants in the dialogue, and authorial disclosure, the communications between the implied author and his or her audience through that same dialogue—and across dialogues. In the second essay (“Rhetoric”), I contend that accounting for dialogue requires us to revise the standard narrative communication model that narrative theorists have widely accepted since Seymour Chatman first proposed it in 1978. In my view, Chatman’s model, which conceives of communication as proceeding along a chain of transmission from one agent to the next (actual author to implied author to narrator to narratee, implied reader, and actual reader), describes only one of a great variety of ways that authors communicate with readers. A more comprehensive and more flexible model, I suggest, views narrative communication as an act in which an implied author deploys various resources (paratexts, structural arrangements, narrators, characters, narratees, implied readers, and so on) to communicate with actual audiences. (Actual audiences may or may not be interested in trying to reconstruct the authorial communication; rhetorical theorists focus on those who are and refer to them as “rhetorical readers”—and sometimes as “we.”) In this essay, I seek to extend the explanatory power of both the distinction between kinds of disclosure in dialogue and this revised communication model by unpacking rhetorical readers’ efforts, first, to configure and reconfigure the progression of the dialogue novel, that is, to develop and revise hypotheses about its overall trajectory and purposes, and, second, to develop an understanding of the implied author who designs that progression. Since my concern throughout the discussion of Eddie Coyle is with the implied Higgins, I will as a convenient shorthand often refer to him just as Higgins. The standard features of the dialogue novel almost require their audiences to become adept at configuration and reconfiguration. The dialogue novel typically consists of a sequence of scenes dominated by characters talking to each other. If a narrator is present, she is typically relegated to the background. The Friends of Eddie Coyle, for example, consists of thirty chapters, each devoted to a scene of dialogue (or a small set of such scenes) presented in chronological order. Higgins typically restricts his narrator to the tasks of delivering basic exposition, identifying speakers, and reporting key events in a straightforward, matter-of-fact manner. Higgins refrains from using the narrator to make connections across

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scenes or to do more than minimal interpretation of the events. As a result, the task of discerning the trajectory and coherence of the larger narrative falls to Higgins’s audience. To be sure, Higgins gives us a great deal of indirect guidance, and here I shall focus on two of his main methods, each associated with a different central character. In the first method, deployed in the presentation of Eddie Coyle, the authorial and conversational disclosures combine to reveal an increasingly clear view of the character and his situation, and our job is to relate those disclosures to the developing progression. In the second method, deployed in the presentation of Eddie’s so-called friend, the saloon keeper Dillon, the conversational disclosures initially dominate the authorial disclosures and misdirect our understanding of the character and his role in the progression. Only gradually do the authorial disclosures overtake and subsume the initial conversational disclosures, and when they do, they lead us to some substantial reconfigurations of the progression. But before I move to detailed analysis of these two methods, I need to provide three additional contexts: (a) an account of my rhetorical understanding of narrative progression; (b) some information about Higgins’s reputation for composing authentic dialogue; and (c) a broader theoretical discussion of communication through dialogue.

Configuration, Reconfiguration, and Narrative Progression By progression I mean the temporal synthesis of textual dynamics and readerly dynamics that underlies our experience of reading narrative. Textual dynamics are the internal mechanisms that initiate, generate, and bring to some resolution the movement of a narrative from beginning through middle to ending. Textual dynamics include both plot dynamics—the introduction, complication, and resolution (in whole or more often in part) of instabilities within, between, or among characters— and telling dynamics—the ongoing relations of authors, narrators, and characters-as-tellers with the narrative, authorial, and actual audiences.3 These relations may include tensions arising from unequal knowledge, discrepant beliefs, or divergent value systems, among these various agents. Readerly dynamics consist of the multi-layered (cognitive, affective, ethical) trajectory of the audience’s response to the textual dynamics. I regard 3

For more on these audiences, see Rabinowitz (Reading and “Truth”). Briefly, the authorial and narrative audiences are roles that the actual audience takes on; in the narrative audience, we believe in the reality of the fictional storyworld; in the authorial audience we become the author’s ideal readers.

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progression as the synthesis of textual and readerly dynamics because they are mutually influential: an implied author’s concern with one influences her handling of the other, as becomes clear when we consider narratives with surprise endings. The implied author’s interest in surprising readers controls much of the construction of the textual dynamics, even as that construction affects the specific nature and quality of the surprise. The synthesis between textual and readerly dynamics is brought about through our interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments, since these judgments are implicit in the implied author’s shaping of the textual phenomena but actualized by individual readers. As a helpful heuristic for charting progressions, I have developed the following model: Beginning Exposition Launch Initiation Entrance

Middle Exposition Voyage Interaction Intermediate Configuration

Ending Exposition/Closure Arrival Farewell Completion/Coherence

The items in the first two rows are aspects of plot dynamics; those in the third are aspects of telling dynamics; and those in the fourth of readerly dynamics. Exposition includes contextual information for the narrative itself (sometimes through paratexts) or for its events (details of place, time, and character). Launch corresponds to the introduction of the first global instability or tension, voyage to the sequence of complications that follow, and arrival to the resolution (often only partial) of those complications. Initiation, interaction, and farewell correspond to the trajectory of relationships between tellers (authors, narrators, characters) and audiences (narratees, narrative audiences, authorial audiences, actual audiences). The items in the first three rows have consequences for readerly dynamics, consequences rooted in our interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments that influence the larger movements of readerly dynamics identified in the fourth row. Entrance refers to our initial hypothesis about the overall trajectory and purpose of the narrative at the moment of launch. Intermediate configuration refers to our ongoing refinements and revisions (or reconfigurations) of that hypothesis. Completion/coherence refers to our final (re)configuration, including our decisions about purpose. Since our hypotheses and our final (re)configuration include our recognition of the affective and ethical dimensions of the narrative, the terms configuration and reconfiguration are convenient shorthands, designed to emphasize the temporal dimension of readerly dynamics without losing sight of how much goes into our developing responses. Finally, since the model posits that the progression is designed by the implied author, employing it can

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aid our efforts to reason back from our reading experience to an understanding of his or her character and values.

Higgins’s Dialogue Although literary critics have not paid much attention to Eddie Coyle—a search with the key words “Higgins” and “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” in the MLA International Bibliography in summer 2011 turns up only one entry (Vesterman)4 —other crime novelists hold Higgins’s narrative and its dialogue in high esteem. Dennis Lehane calls Eddie Coyle “the gamechanging crime novel of the last fifty years” (vii), and Elmore Leonard goes so far as to declare it the “best crime novel ever written,” one that “makes The Maltese Falcon look like Nancy Drew” (vii). Both Leonard and Lehane also single out Higgins’s dialogue as crucial to the novel’s success. Leonard, after noting the “authenticity” of Higgins’s dialogue, employs the principle that imitation is the highest form of flattery: “Five years after Eddie Coyle, a New York Times review of one of my books said that I often ‘cannot resist a set piece—a low-life aria with a crazy kind of scatological poetry of its own—in the Higgins manner.’ And that’s how you learn, by imitating” (vii). Lehane simply indulges in good oldfashioned hyperbole: Ah, the dialogue. It takes up a good eighty percent of the novel and you wouldn’t mind if it took up the full hundred. No one, before or since, has ever written dialogue this scabrous, this hysterically funny, this pungently authentic—not Elmore Leonard, not Richard Price, not even George V. Higgins himself…Open any page of this book and you will find vast riches of the spoken word…In most novels, talk is the salt and plot is the meal. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle talk is the meal. It’s also the plot, the characters, the action, the whole shebang. (ix–x)

I wholeheartedly agree that Higgins’s dialogue deserves plaudits. Indeed, like Vladimir Nabokov’s style in Lolita, it provides an excellent example of a well-crafted part of a narrative that offers substantial aesthetic pleasure independent of its contributions to the evolving progression. This pleasure arises from the very display of such colorful speech, from the heteroglossia within and across conversations, and more generally from Higgins’s performance as the composer of it all, including the “low-life arias.” Different readers will have their own favorite passages. Here are 4

Vesterman offers many astute observations about the style of Higgins’s dialogue as well as some insightful observations on the opening chapter. Peter Wolfe’s Havoc in the Hub offers an intelligent overview of Higgins’s corpus. His chapter on Eddie Coyle is compatible with my argument, but his focus is primarily thematic.

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just a few of mine: Eddie’s telling the gun dealer Jackie Brown in the very first chapter what it was like to get his fingers slammed in a drawer, an aria that ends with “Ever hear bones breaking? Just like a man snapping a shingle. Hurts like a bastard” (5); Eddie’s metaphor to describe the magazine of a gun: “Got a mouth on her like the Sumner Tunnel” (21); Jackie Brown’s line that “This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid” (78); and this exchange between Eddie and Dave Foley, an enforcement agent for the U.S. Treasury: Eddie talks about buying skis to take on his trip to New Hampshire for his sentencing hearing after his conviction for transporting stolen whiskey. Eddie: “I figure as long as I got to go up there I might as well make a weekend out of it, you know? Think we’ll have snow by then?” Foley: “I think we’re getting some right now” (12). The dialogue is often so arresting that it is easy to get stuck on the idea of its “authenticity,” but I shall resist that impulse here as I focus on how Higgins uses it to communicate with his audience.

Dialogue and the Dialogue Novel; Or Conversation as Narration In Living to Tell about It, I argue that character narration is an art of indirection, one in which an implied author designs a single text to fulfill the different communicative purposes of at least two tellers (implied author and character narrator) addressing at least two audiences (narratee and authorial audience). Character-character dialogue is an even more complex art of indirection, since it entails additional speakers with different purposes (implied author and at least two characters), and since the implied author must simultaneously motivate each character’s speech within its mimetic context and within that of his or her own communicative purpose. Furthermore, sometimes that mimetic context means that the characters themselves will seek to disguise their purposes or otherwise attempt to deceive their interlocutors. Thus, for example, in the exchange between Eddie Coyle and Dave Foley about skis and snow, Higgins motivates Eddie’s speech in his desire to persuade Foley that he regards the sentencing hearing as no big deal, and Higgins motivates Foley’s in his interest in letting Eddie know that he sees through the act. At the same time, Higgins communicates to us that Eddie has a lot of anxiety about the hearing and that Foley not only has the upper hand in their exchange but also has no hesitation about reminding Eddie of that fact. Strikingly, however, Higgins depicts Dillon as better able to disguise his conversational purposes, and, consequently, both Foley and Higgins’s audience initially remain in the dark about them.

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Just as narrators perform three main tasks—reporting about characters, settings, and events, interpreting those reports, and evaluating them—so too do characters, albeit much more indirectly. Eddie’s aria about getting the bones in his hand broken is, among other things, a crucial report about relevant backstory. Eddie tells it in order to stress that Jackie has to deliver on his promise to sell Eddie untraceable guns, since traceable guns would mean that Eddie would get more bones broken (“Am I going to have to start pricing crutches?” [5]) and that Jackie too would pay a steep price (“they’ll do worse to you” [6]). But Higgins also uses Eddie’s aria to communicate to us two additional points: (1) Eddie already has one strike against him with the higher-ups in the mob; and (2) however much Eddie acts superior with Jackie, he is ultimately a small cog in a bigger wheel, a cog that cannot afford another malfunction. Jackie’s line about this life being hard is both an interpretation and an evaluation that reveals his own commitment to the values of toughness and intelligence. Over the course of the narrative Higgins communicates his general endorsement of Jackie’s statement—though, unlike Jackie, Higgins has a broader view of “this life.” In addition, Higgins also indicates, in one of his many ironic strokes, that Jackie has himself been stupid for boasting to Eddie about his deal to sell machine guns and then later letting Eddie see the guns themselves. This discussion of dialogue as an art of indirection has already begun to flesh out the distinction between conversational disclosure and authorial disclosure. This distinction enables us not only to identify the two tracks of communication in any dialogue but also to analyze the relationship between those tracks. This relationship can vary widely, from minimal distance (in cases where the implied author uses a character as a reliable spokesperson for his views) to maximal distance (in cases where the implied author communicates messages that run counter to the facts, interpretations, and ethical evaluations the characters deliver in the dialogue). Implied authors have multiple ways of signaling their distance: they can place clues in the conversation itself, and they can establish particular characters as unreliable reporters, interpreters, or evaluators so that whenever they speak, their word carries little authority. In addition, implied authors frequently use a series of conversational disclosures as the basis for authorial disclosure in a new dialogue: in other words, in any given dialogue, the authorial disclosure may exceed the conversational disclosure as a result of knowledge that the implied author and audience share and that the participants in the conversation do not. As a novel progresses, this kind of authorial disclosure across conversations is likely to increase precisely because the author has more previous conversations to draw upon.

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As noted above, conversational disclosure itself is often far from straightforward—and the flesh-and-blood Higgins himself is on the record praising dialogue in which the motives of the characters are not transparent.5 Conversational disclosure will exceed authorial disclosure when the mimetic context makes it clear that one or more of the characters possess knowledge that the implied author has not (or not yet) disclosed to his audience. For example, in Chapter 3 of Eddie Coyle, Eddie asks his interlocutor, identified here only as “the second man” but later revealed to be Jimmy Scalisi, where he’d like to pick up the guns Eddie will supply him. Eddie: “Same place?” Scalisi: “I think that’s going to be a little out of my way tomorrow” (23). Both Eddie and Scalisi know which place they’re referring to, but Higgins does not bother to invent a way to tell us. For Higgins, that specific information is less important than the fact that Scalisi can’t get there and so makes a plan for them to leave messages for each other at Dillon’s bar—and in that way bring them within Dillon’s orbit. In cases of authorial disclosure across conversations, the implied author relies on the audience to track the relationships between and among conversations (convergences, complementarities, divergences, contradictions, and so on) and to draw the appropriate inferences. For example, in chapter 23 of Eddie Coyle, when Dave Foley tells Dillon that “I don’t really know very much about [Coyle’s New Hampshire] case” (148), Higgins discloses to us something very different, namely, that Foley does not trust Dillon enough to share his knowledge. Once we attend to the relationships between authorial disclosure and conversational disclosure in Eddie Coyle, we can recognize that Higgins’s skill with the dialogue is at least as much about his management of those relationships as it is with his ability to make the dialogue sound “authentic.” It is this skill, I suggest, that Lehane is responding to in his claim that in Eddie Coyle the dialogue is “the whole shebang.”

Textual Dynamics in Eddie Coyle Although Eddie is the protagonist, the textual dynamics indicate that Higgins is constructing a network novel. That is, Eddie’s fate is inextricably tied to events, including the flow of information, and judgments by people in two larger networks in which he participates: (1) the Boston crime network, involving gun dealers, bank robbers, some other small-

5

In On Writing, Higgins does an astute analysis of the gap between explicit conversation and underlying motives in John O’Hara’s short story “Appearances.”

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time players like himself, the initially enigmatic Dillon, and ultimately the head of the regional Mafia; (2) the New England law enforcement network, involving U.S. Treasury agents like Foley, the Boston police, the Massachusetts State Police, and the District Attorney in New Hampshire. In addition, the very structure of the telling—the thirty discrete scenes of dialogue—can be understood as a network of disclosure that reinforces the novel’s interest in networks and the flow of information within and across them. The textual dynamics show that although different characters have different degrees of knowledge about the links in the larger networks, no single character has a comprehensive knowledge of those links, something that has major consequences for Eddie, as a sketch of the plot dynamics will reveal. In the first three chapters, Higgins shows Eddie making three deals: one with Jackie Brown to buy some guns, one with Foley to inform on Jackie, and one with Jimmy Scalisi to sell the guns at a nice profit. By the end of the third chapter, Higgins has clearly established Eddie’s character and shown his connections to the two different networks, with the crime network itself having two distinct branches. By the end of the third chapter, Higgins has launched the progression by intertwining Eddie’s three deals and indicating that Eddie’s facing jail time is one global instability and the question of whether he can walk the tightrope between the different networks is another. The voyage contains multiple complications. Jimmy Scalisi uses the guns he gets from Eddie for a series of well-executed bank robberies. Meanwhile, Dillon has his own meetings with Foley at which he reveals that Eddie and Scalisi have been working together on some unspecified activities. Although Eddie does inform on Jackie, the New Hampshire prosecutor tells Foley that’s not sufficient to keep Eddie out of jail. Eddie thus has to decide whether to inform on Scalisi, and he goes so far as to set up a tentative meeting with Foley. But before they can meet, Scalisi and his crew get caught because they have been informed on by Scalisi’s girlfriend, Wanda, who wants payback for Scalisi’s disrespectful treatment of her. In the gunplay accompanying the arrest, the protégé of the Mafia boss gets killed, and the boss wants his own payback. The word circulates through the mob that Eddie must have made the deal he’d only been contemplating. Therefore, the boss hires Dillon to eliminate Eddie, a job Dillon skillfully executes. In the final chapter a prosecutor and a defense lawyer discuss Jackie’s case and his probable fate as someone who will repeatedly be in and out of the official legal system in the coming years.

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Higgins and Eddie; Or, Authorial and Conversational Disclosure in Chapter 2 I turn now to readerly dynamics by examining Higgins’s first method of providing indirect guidance to our efforts to configure the narrative. I will look most closely at the conversation between Eddie and Foley at the end of Chapter 2, but it will be helpful first to reconstruct the context provided by Chapter 1. Since Eddie is turning to Jackie for the first time, his deal immediately places Eddie in a new network involving Jackie, his suppliers, and Jackie’s other customers. Although, at twenty-six, Jackie is young, he is confident and tough—already a hard case. He is not at all intimidated by Eddie’s story about his broken fingers. Shortly after hearing it, he says, “I got guns to sell…I done a lot of business and I had very few complaints. I can get you four-inchers and two-inchers. You just tell me what you want. I can deliver it” (7). In addition, Jackie holds his own in the negotiation with Eddie about the price of the guns. But Jackie makes a young man’s mistake when he brags to Eddie about selling machine guns. As noted above, Higgins uses Eddie’s story about his broken fingers to initiate us to his handling of the relationship between conversational and authorial disclosure (as Eddie warns Jackie, Higgins also marks Eddie as a small-timer in a vulnerable position). Nevertheless, throughout his dialogue with Jackie, Eddie comes off as appropriately careful, as knowledgeable about why Jackie can be so confident (“You got somebody in the plant” [7])—and as curious about Jackie’s other customers. When Jackie boasts that he has someone interested in machine guns, Eddie asks, “What color is he?” (8). Jackie’s youth and his unproven status with Eddie in combination with Eddie’s story about his broken fingers establish the initial instability: can Eddie trust Jackie? At the same time, because the conversational disclosure does not extend to why Eddie wants to buy guns—he doesn’t tell, and Jackie doesn’t ask, since the use of the guns is not relevant to their deal—Higgins discloses a tension of unequal knowledge: he and Eddie know and we, unlike Jackie, want to know. In the second chapter, we learn that Eddie is about a month away from his sentencing hearing and that he desperately wants to avoid a return to jail. As he says to Foley, “I got three kids and a wife at home, and I can’t afford to do no more time…Hell, I’m almost forty-five years old” (13). Higgins’s skill is especially on display in the closing exchange, as he immediately complicates both the instability from chapter 1 and the global instability.

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“Yeah,” the stocky man said. “Suppose you had a reliable informer that put you onto a colored gentleman that was buying some machine guns. Army machine guns, M-sixteens. Would you want a fellow like that, that was helping you like that, would you want him to go to jail and embarrass his kids and all?” “Let me put it this way,” the agent said, “if I was to get my hands on the machine guns and the colored gentleman and the fellow that was selling the machine guns, and if that happened because somebody put me in the right place at the right time with maybe a warrant, I wouldn’t mind saying to somebody else that the fellow who put me there was helping uncle. Does the colored gentleman have any friends?” “I wouldn’t be surprised,” the stocky man said. “Thing is I just found out about it yesterday.” “How’d you find out?” the driver said. “Well, one thing and another,” the stocky man said. “You know how it is, you’re talking to somebody and he says something and the next fellow says something, and the first thing you know, you heard something.” “When’s it supposed to come off?” “I’m not sure yet,” the stocky man said. “See I’m right on the button with this one, I come to you as soon as I heard it. I got more things to find out, if you’re—if you think you might be interested. I think a week or so. Why don’t I call you?” “Okay,” the driver said. “Do you need anything else?” “I need a good leaving alone,” the stocky man said. “I’d as soon not have anybody start thinking about me too much on this detail. I don’t want nobody following me around, all right?” “Okay, we’ll do it your way. You call me when you get something, if you do, and if I get something I’ll put it in front of the U.S. Attorney. If I don’t, all bets are off.” The stocky man nodded. “Merry Christmas,” the driver said. (15–16)

In the first part of this passage, the conversational disclosure is straightforward: Eddie wants to know whether informing on Jackie and his customer will persuade Foley to put in a good word for him in New Hampshire, and Foley makes it clear how much information he would need. The authorial disclosure, however, communicates a discrepancy between what Eddie wants and what Foley is willing to promise him. Eddie wants a stay-out-of-jail card, but Foley promises only to say “something to somebody” about Eddie “helping uncle”—even as Foley emphasizes how much information he needs. The authorial disclosure exceeds the conversational disclosure because Eddie shows no sign of registering the discrepancy. He does not object to Foley’s requirements or ask for a greater guarantee but instead allows Foley to steer the direction of the conversation with the next two questions (about who else and when). Eddie is all too ready to mistake Foley’s limited promise for something greater. Foley of course is aware of what he is and is not promising.

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Even more significant authorial disclosure comes from reading across the conversations in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. This disclosure leads to our first reconfiguration of the plot dynamics. We now see that Eddie’s question to Jackie, “What color was he?” was motivated by more than idle curiosity or even knee-jerk racism. Indeed, Higgins invites us to recognize that Eddie has initiated this meeting with Foley precisely because of Jackie’s mention of this potential customer, and, thus, the whole conversation in Chapter Two, including Eddie’s posturing about buying skis, and then later Foley’s opining that Eddie could be facing up to five years in jail, has been leading up to this moment.6 The first reconfiguration involves our understanding of the instability in Eddie’s relation to Jackie Brown: it’s not just a question of whether Eddie can trust Jackie but also a question of whether Eddie can use Jackie. Even as Eddie schools Jackie in the importance of Eddie’s being able to trust him Eddie begins looking for a way to exploit Jackie for his own advantage. This reconfiguration introduces a pattern of ironic reversals that will become increasingly significant as the narrative continues. Reading across the conversations also leads us to recognize a third authorial disclosure: Eddie has jumped to unwarranted conclusions—or at least to the conclusions that he thinks will be most attractive to Foley— with his reference to a “colored gentleman,” since Jackie never answered his question about race. This jump not only highlights the casual racism underlying his assumption either that the purchaser must be connected with the Black Panthers or that Foley would be more interested if that were the connection but also how eager Eddie is to have something to offer Foley. This disclosure along with Eddie’s willingness to overlook the limits of Foley’s promise conveys how much the looming presence of the sentencing hearing affects Eddie’s behavior. In the second part of the passage—from Foley’s question, “Does the colored gentleman have any friends?” to the end—the conversation unfolds as a kind of sparring match with Foley on offense and Eddie on defense until Foley decides to let up on Eddie and give him some breathing room. Again it is helpful to look at the conversational disclosures in light of each speaker’s purpose. Foley’s questions (who else and when) indicate that he wants to know how solid and how detailed Eddie’s information is, while Eddie’s speculative and evasive answers indicate that

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The earlier conversation also provides an excellent lesson in how to use conversational disclosure for the authorial disclosure of necessary background: Higgins uses Eddie’s protestations of innocence and Foley’s skepticism as the mechanism for conveying the facts of Eddie’s crime and its likely consequences to us.

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he does not have specifics and that he is primarily interested in knowing what Foley would be willing to do for him, if he could provide those details. Foley’s shift to asking, “Do you need anything else?” suggests that he understands the relation between what Eddie wants and what Eddie knows. The more natural follow up to Eddie’s “The first thing you know, you heard something,” would be “Did you hear anything else?” By asking instead, “Do you need anything else?” Foley implies that he knows Eddie does not have any more information and that he has already given Eddie a lot of what he needs to get more, namely the appropriate incentive. Finally, by ending with his ironic “Merry Christmas,” a wish that Eddie conspicuously does not return, Foley reminds Eddie of who has the upper hand. For his part, Eddie plays good defense, and, indeed, his skill suggests that he has at least some awareness of Foley’s purposes. Eddie’s “I wouldn’t be surprised about others, but I just found out” both makes the information potentially more valuable and allows him to back off from promising too much. His “I’m right on the button with this one” is as good a play as he can make, given how little he knows, and given that earlier in the conversation Foley had chided him for delivering information too late to be useful. Finally, his “I need a good leaving alone” is an even better play, since it gives him the room to maneuver that he wants. Since Foley and Eddie exhibit this awareness of each other’s purposes, the conversational and authorial disclosures overlap to a large degree. But again reading across the conversations adds a layer to the authorial disclosure. While Eddie puts his request for a good leaving alone in terms of “this detail,” we know from Chapter 1 that he wants to keep doing his other business with Jackie. Foley, as we soon learn, is smart enough to know that Eddie has additional reasons for wanting to be left alone, but, unlike us, he does not know what they are. This authorial disclosure has the additional important consequence of adding another complication to the developing instabilities: can Eddie simultaneously succeed in his new criminal operation and escape the impending jail sentence by cozying up to law enforcement? In other words, the instabilities now include whether Eddie will be able to juggle successfully his relationships in these different networks. By establishing significant parallels between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2—in each Eddie negotiates a deal with one other person outside his own immediate network—Higgins’s authorial disclosure across the chapters guides us to additional aspects of configuration and reconfiguration. First, we recognize the rough equivalence between the commodities of exchange in each deal: guns and money, on the one hand, and information and influence, on the other. Second, with regard to affect

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and ethics, we recognize that in this world interpersonal relationships are built primarily on self-interest. At best the ethics governing interpersonal relationships are those referred to in the phrase “It ain’t personal, it’s just business.” Eddie needs guns, Jackie needs buyers, they negotiate a price. Eddie needs a break, Foley needs information, they negotiate a deal. But at worst the interpersonal relationships are ones in which self-interest is so strong that other people get reduced to objects that can be used for one’s own benefit. The most obvious example is Eddie’s eagerness to use Jackie to stay out of jail. Although Eddie and Foley are not exploiting each other in this way, each is less interested in what he can do for the other than in what the other can do for him. Eddie is not a good citizen out to help law enforcement but rather a crook wanting to know just how much information he has to give Foley in order for Foley to make the call to New Hampshire. For his part, Foley wants as much information as possible in exchange for doing as little as possible for Eddie. If Eddie misses this dimension of the deal, Foley is not going to point that out. Later, after Eddie does turn in Jackie and the New Hampshire U.S. Attorney tells Foley that’s not good enough to affect the sentencing, Foley reminds the distraught Eddie that he only promised to make the call and that he ought to grow up. “This life’s hard but it’s harder if you’re stupid.” Higgins uses these authorial disclosures through the conversations and the restricted role of the narrator to establish his own—and our— affective distance from the characters and the action. Eddie’s plight has the potential to make him a sympathetic character, but Higgins’s own clear-eyed portrayal of Eddie’s participation in the ethics of exploitation renders Eddie unsympathetic. We do not attach affectively to any of the characters even as we’re drawn into the complexity of Eddie’s situation and his effort to stay on the tightrope. The implied Higgins emerges as a dispassionate examiner of Eddie and the world in which he moves. Higgins projects neither affection nor disdain for his characters but instead a clear-eyed view of this world’s values—self-interest, money, information—and the way they intersect and interfere with each other. The greatest effect of this clear-eyed view is that it fuels Higgins’s penchant for irony.

Higgins and Dillon Dillon appears as a speaker in Chapters 6, 11, 23, 26, 28, and 29, and he appears as the subject of other people’s conversations in Chapters 3, 14, and 24. All of these conversations are of worthy of analysis, but here I have space only to summarize several and then look more closely at a few. In Chapters 6, 11, and 23, Higgins shows Dillon speaking with

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Foley about Eddie. Dillon’s reports of Eddie’s activities in and around Dillon’s bar further complicate the instabilities associated with Eddie, since these reports raise Foley’s suspicions about Eddie’s current criminal activity. In addition, Higgins uses the structural similarity between the Eddie–Foley conversations (Chapters 2, 16, 21, and 25) and the Dillon– Foley conversations—a member of the mob turns informer—to add an additional irony to Eddie’s situation: the rat gets ratted on. Thus, part of the authorial disclosure is that Eddie is as mistaken in trusting Dillon as Jackie is in trusting Eddie. As for Dillon himself, his conversation in Chapter 6 makes him appear to be even more beleaguered than Eddie, as he explains to Foley the fear that keeps him from testifying before the grand jury. The most salient relationship between authorial and conversational disclosure involves the connection between this conversation and the first mention of Dillon in Chapter 3—Scalisi and Eddie say they hear something about Dillon and the grand jury that they don’t like. The implication is that Dillon is going to testify. But once Chapter 6 reveals that he is not, Higgins also reveals that the information that travels across the criminal network is not always reliable. At the end of the conversation in Chapter 6 Dillon gives Foley a teaser about Eddie, saying that Eddie and Scalisi are calling his bar leaving messages for each other—but that he does not know what is actually going on. In Chapter 11, he extends the tease with a dramatically told story about how distressed one of his customers is to get a message that Scalisi needs to talk to him about something important (Chapter 11), revealing only at the end that the customer is Eddie. By Chapter 23, Dillon has become much more assertive with Foley. After telling another story of Eddie’s behavior at the bar—he displays a roll of bills and gives a few to somebody whom Dillon won’t identify—he urges Foley to go and “think about how come a little fish has got a lot of money all of a sudden” (149). Higgins also uses the structural parallel to highlight two major differences between the Eddie–Foley and the Dillon–Foley conversations. (1) Higgins makes Eddie’s motive for informing on Jackie clear from the outset (Eddie wants his stay-out-of-jail card), but he does not disclose Dillon’s motive for informing on Eddie. (2) Higgins uses Eddie’s informing on Jackie to complicate significantly the global instability—Foley arrests Jackie and his phone call to the New Hampshire prosecutor does not yield any clemency for Eddie—but Dillon’s informing on Eddie does not have any such consequences. Although Foley uses the information to get himself transferred back from drug enforcement to monitoring the mob, he never gets enough evidence to go after either Eddie or Scalisi. As a result, Higgins uses these scenes to introduce and complicate a tension

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about Dillon’s motives for telling. Higgins very slowly resolves this tension, as he gradually discloses the complexities of Dillon’s character and his place in the crime network. Dillon’s growing assertiveness with Foley, and Foley’s own comments to his colleague Waters that he feels as if Dillon is playing him, are part of Higgins’s gradual revelation that Dillon is a far more artful poser with Foley than Eddie is. But the pivotal authorial disclosure comes in Chapter 24, in a conversation between Scalisi and his partner Fritzie Webber as they drive to the bank job during which they get arrested. [Webber]: “I wonder what the fuck it was that got Dillon so stirred up?” [Scalisi]: “He was worried about Coyle. I believe him. He was wondering if Coyle was swapping us for that thing he’s got going up in New Hampshire, there.” (151)

Although the conversation does not resolve the tension about Dillon’s initial motives for informing on Coyle, this authorial disclosure of Dillon’s place in the criminal network has a ripple effect on our reconfigurations. Rather than being a marginal figure like Eddie, Dillon is well-connected. He knows about Scalisi’s bank jobs, and he knows that Eddie also knows about them. (Eddie, by contrast, does not know that Dillon knows about either Scalisi’s operation or his own involvement in it.) Dillon is not so obviously powerful that Scalisi and Webber take his advice, since Scalisi reasons that, even if Eddie is smart enough to know about their operation, he has no way of knowing when and where this job is. Understanding Dillon’s central place in the network also leads us to recognize another contrast between his conversations with Foley and Eddie’s with Foley. Eddie pretends to know more than he actually does in order to get what he wants from Foley. Dillon pretends to know less than he does in the interest of keeping Foley on his side while also protecting himself and those he favors—a strategy that, however, makes Eddie a sacrificial lamb. We now can see that in the conversation in Chapter 23 both Dillon and Foley are pretending to know less than they do in order to find out how much the other knows. [Dillon]: “I think Eddie thinks probably he isn’t gonna go to jail there, and I wonder why he thinks that.” “I wonder where he got the money,” Foley said. “That’s what bothers me. I always understood he was just getting by. I wonder what he’s been doing to get all that money.” (149)

Dillon doesn’t share Foley’s wonder about where Eddie got the money because, as we learn in the next chapter, Dillon knows that Eddie has been selling guns to Scalisi. Foley doesn’t share Dillon’s wonder about why

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Eddie might think he’s not going to jail, because Foley knows that he is going. But neither will enlighten the other. Foley won’t tell Dillon that Eddie tried and failed to get the stay-out-of-jail card because he doesn’t want Dillon to know that Eddie is a fellow informer. Dillon won’t tell Foley where Eddie got his wad of cash because then he’d reveal that he is far more connected and knows way more than he pretends to know. At the same time, Higgins manages the authorial disclosure across conversations for an additional communication here, one he triggers through Dillon’s speculation that Eddie was using his wad of money to buy “a color tee-vee” (147). Earlier, in Chapter 18, Eddie, while commiserating with Scalisi about how difficult women can be, tells him that he hit the number and won $ 650 and that he changed his plans to buy his wife a color teevee with the money because she complained about a smoky oil burner when he came in the door the other night. Chapter 23 transforms this earlier conversational disclosure, a side comment to the more dramatic interchange between Dillon and Wanda, into the authorial disclosure that Dillon is wrong about what Eddie was doing with his money and partially wrong about where he got it. The more general communication is that Dillon—and by extension the network along which news travels in the underworld—is at least partly unreliable. A little later, once Dillon accepts the job of killing Eddie, Higgins guides us to further reconfigure the events of Chapter 23. As each character pursues his self-interest, Eddie remains in jeopardy. If Foley were to tell Dillon about Eddie’s unsuccessful play for clemency, Dillon would have to revise his hypothesis that Eddie knows he’s not going to jail. If Dillon were to tell Foley that Eddie’s money comes from supplying guns to Scalisi and that he believes Eddie has informed on them, Foley would have reason to correct Dillon—and to pursue the arrests of Eddie and Scalisi. But since self-interest dominates here as it does everywhere else in this world, Eddie becomes collateral damage. In Chapter 26 much of the remaining tension about Dillon’s character gets swiftly resolved through conversational disclosure, as he talks with the mob boss’s representative about eliminating Coyle and demands that he get to do the job on his own terms. But again the conversation includes additional authorial disclosure that guides our configuration and reconfiguration. The following excerpt comes after Dillon tells the rep that he tried to warn Scalisi about a possible informer. “This guy,” the man said, “anybody we know?” “Could be,” Dillon said. “We hadda break him up a while back here. He set up Billy Wallace with a gun that had a history. We hadda teach him. I thought he learned his lesson. I threw a little work his way now and then.” “Name of Coyle?”

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“That’s the one,” Dillon said. “I had him driving a truck for me and a fellow up in New Hampshire there and he got hooked with it. Which was why he was coming up. He didn’t talk then but he had a fall coming and he knew it. I thought maybe he was thinking about dumping me, but of course he wouldn’t do that without making a will first. So I guess he dumped Jimmy and Artie instead. Bastard.” “He’s the one Scal mentioned,” the man said. “LeDuc give his name to the man. Coyle. Eddie Fingers. That’s the one.” “You want him hit?” “The man wants him hit,” the man said. (163)

Because we know from Chapter 22 that Scalisi’s girlfriend Wanda has done the informing, the authorial disclosure framing the whole scene is that Dillon is unreliably interpreting Eddie’s role. Part of the reason, Higgins suggests, is that these men cannot even conceive that a woman would be responsible for anything happening in their world. In this respect Higgins combines his depiction of the sexist assumptions of the criminal underworld, especially evident in the Scalisi–Wanda relationship (“My kid brother talks about his goddamned Mustang the same way you talk about me,” she objects [110]) with his predilection for dramatic irony. This dimension of the scene also helps set up the authorial disclosures that arise from Higgins’s juxtaposition of Chapter 29, which recounts Dillon’s extremely professional and efficient execution of Eddie, who goes to his grave thinking that Dillon is his friend, and Chapter 30, which emphasizes the flaws in the way the official legal system will deal with Jackie Brown. The authorial disclosure across the chapters is that the flaws in the official system are far preferable to those in the more efficient mob system (for more on the communication in these two chapters, see my “Rhetoric”). There are other key authorial disclosures in this conversation in Chapter 26. Dillon’s interlocutor apparently takes Dillon’s report about Coyle as confirmation of the information that Scalisi gave the mob lawyer LeDuc. But of course Scalisi’s source is Dillon. Consequently, the authorial disclosure is that Dillon acts as witness, judge, prosecutor, and eventually executioner of Eddie. The simultaneous conversational and authorial disclosure that Dillon hired Eddie to drive the stolen whiskey subtracts several more degrees from Dillon’s increasingly cold blood. Rather than feeling any responsibility for Eddie’s plight or any sense of gratitude or loyalty for Eddie’s taking the rap without informing on him, Dillon remains suspicious of him. Indeed, Eddie’s getting “hooked” there and his earlier mistake with the traceable gun lead Dillon to think of him as less than fully trustworthy—and therefore expendable. It is this logic that underlies his conversations with Foley: let me trade the weak, mistake-prone Coyle for whatever protection Foley can give me. Poor Eddie, we now realize, never had a chance.

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But to say “poor Eddie” is to overlook our knowledge that Eddie’s self-interest has put him on the verge of doing what Dillon accuses him of doing. In that respect, we have to add another layer of irony to our reconfiguration: Eddie takes the fall for Wanda’s betrayal of Scalisi—but only because she beat him to the punch.

The Affective, the Ethical, and the Implied Higgins Indeed, by the end of the novel, Higgins’s dispassionate dissection of the interaction between self-interest and the unreliable flow of information across the criminal network leaves us with a highly negative view of that network not only because the criminals prey on law-abiding citizens but because they also prey on each other. It’s not just Eddie who has no real friends, because the ethic of self-interest means that in this world, finally, it’s every man for himself. This ethic of self-interest exists alongside a faith in information that travels along the network, but this faith is often misplaced. Foley and his colleagues do not live by the same ethic as the mob, but they, too, are hard cases who will use others for their own ends—even as they have only a limited success in achieving those ends. Affectively, we do not grow progressively more attached to Eddie or any of the characters, though we remain fascinated by the intricacies of the networks and develop a grudging respect for those who are able to manage their own survival. Ultimately, the ethical and the affective dimensions of the progression lead us back to the implied Higgins, who exposes the way this world works by letting his characters act and especially speak in pursuit of their own ends and then guiding us to share his dispassionate judgments of them. He is not an implied author who endears himself to us through the affection he displays for his characters and his storyworld but rather one who commands our respect for his clear-eyed, uncompromising vision of a Hobbesian world in which life for most is nasty, brutish, and short. Indeed, that uncompromising vision leads him to the cold consolations of dramatic irony. Of course one dialogue novel set among the crime and enforcement networks in early 1970s Boston cannot be the paradigm case for all dialogue novels. Similarly one essay on the dialogue novel cannot sufficiently theorize it. Indeed, the communication in a dialogue novel that consistently employed one or more characters as surrogates for the implied author would be qualitatively different from the communication in Eddie Coyle.7

7

See my “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Narrative Communication” for a discussion of how Higgins constructs surrogates for himself and his audience in the novel’s final chapter.

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But Higgins’s practice—and this essay’s effort to explicate its workings— strongly suggest that communication in the dialogue novel will require its actual audience to be very active in the tasks of configuration and reconfiguration and will typically depend for its effectiveness on the implied author’s handling of the relationships between conversational disclosure and authorial disclosure. Indeed, because the handling of those relationships is so crucial to the communication, the dialogue novel will ultimately guide its actual audience to look beyond the conversations of its characters, however authentic they may be, in order to focus on the affective, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of the implied author’s communication to us.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. 1929/1963. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Herman, David. “Dialogue in a Discourse Context: Scenes of Talk in Fictional Narrative.” Narrative—State of the Art. Ed. Michael Bamberg. Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins, 2007. 91–102. —. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. Higgins, George V. The Friends of Eddie Coyle. 1972. New York: Picador, 2010. —. On Writing. New York: Henry Holt, 1991. Kacandes, Irene. Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001. Lehane, Dennis. “Introduction.” The Friends of Eddie Coyle. New York: Picador, 2010. Leonard, Elmore. “Introduction.” The Friends of Eddie Coyle. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. McHale, Brian. “Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry.” Narrative 9.2 (2001): 61–67. Murphy, Terence Patrick. “The Uncertainties of Conversational Exchange: Dialogue Monitoring as a Function of the Narrative Voice.” Style 39.4 (2005): 396–411. Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2007. —. “Imagining a Sequel to The Rhetoric of Fiction; Or A Dialogue on Dialogue.” Comparative Critical Studies 7 (2010): 243–55. —. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005. —. “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Narrative Communication: Or, from Story and Discourse to Authors, Resources, and Audiences.” Soundings 94.1–2 (2011): 55–75. Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. 1987. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 1998. —. “Truth in Fiction: A Re-Examination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry 4 (1977): 121–41.

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Sternberg, Meir. “Point of View and the Indirectness of Direct Speech.” Language and Style 15 (1982): 67–117. —. “Proteus in Quotation Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Discourse.” Poetics Today 3.2 (1982): 107–56. Tammi, Pekka. “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’).” Partial Answers 4.2 (2006): 19–40. Thomas, Bronwen. “Dialogue.” Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Ed. David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. 80–93. Vesterman, William. “Higgins’s Trade.” Language and Style 20 (1987): 223–29. Wolfe, Peter. Havoc in the Hub: A Reading of George V. Higgins. Lanham, MD: Lexington Publishers, 2007.

Matti Hyvärinen (University of Tampere)

Resistance to Plot and Uneven Narrativity: A Journey from “A Boring Story” to The Rings of Saturn In November 2006, during an academic visit to Atlantic Canada, Peggy Heller, a political theorist whose manuscript of a dissertation I was about to discuss there, gave me W. G. Sebald’s small and unsettling book Campo Santo (2005) to read during my intercontinental flight home. Unfortunately, as my memory is not as exact as Sebald’s, I am unable to recollect all the events, encounters, and sensations of the journey with the same exactitude as Sebald does throughout his work, nevertheless the inimitable voice of the essays did not leave me but insisted on further investigations into Sebald’s work. Travelogue is the dominant genre in Sebald’s œuvre, a choice that posits his writing at first sight within non-fiction while in fact opening doors to traffic between fiction and non-fiction, narrative and essay. Parts of his work—for example The Emigrants (1993) and Campo Santo—may be read without much trouble as non-fiction, whereas distinct fictional elements prevail in Austerlitz (2001). A characteristic, even peculiar feature in his novels and essays is the documentary use of images—photographs, paintings, maps—including his most fictional works.1 Reading Sebald helps me, as I hope, to explore and elaborate further a slightly confusing theoretical dilemma: How does one currently understand and recognize narrativity? For a long time now, narrative theorists have reasoned that ‘narrative’ is not a categorical all-or-nothing issue but that we rather should approach it in a more-or-less manner (e.g. Abbott; Fludernik; Herman). Unfortunately, this argument of gradients or degree of narrativity does not solve all of the potential problems, as I endeavor

1

Below, I maintain that Sebald’s topic in The Rings of Saturn is human destruction. From page five onwards, for example, he praises the work of his two recently deceased colleagues. I am muted by the harsh extra-literary fact that my good friend and colleague Kathleen Margaret Heller, born in Toronto in 1956, died, after a short struggle against an aggressive illness, on 20 June 2011, before I was finally able to finish this article that I had started to prepare—long before knowing anything about her illness.

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to demonstrate in this article. My awareness of this problem of uneven narrativity was originally triggered by Pekka Tammi who, in his splendidly provocative essay “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’),” analyzes Anton Chekhov’s short story in terms of its ‘weak narrativity.’ Tammi draws his notion of weak narrativity from Brian McHale (165), who says that “[w]eak narrativity involves…telling stories ‘poorly,’ distractedly, with much irrelevance and indeterminacy, in such a way as to evoke narrative coherence while at the same time withholding commitment to it and undermining confidence in it; in short, having one’s cake and eating it too” (quoted in Tammi 30). To reveal my cards already, I will ask, in what follows, whether this characterization defines all ‘weak narrativity’ or rather one particular category of non-prototypical narrativity. High and dense narrativity, for McHale and Tammi, would obviously signify telling stories well, economically, and with enough determinacy and coherence. Tammi surveys a plethora of definitions of narrative in his article prior to his conclusion: “Theorists…persist in their view of narrative as an instrument for coming to terms with time, process, and change” (31). Tammi proceeds then to a resourceful reading of “A Boring Story,” showing all kinds of indeterminacies and oscillations between iterative and singular narrations, and points out the readers’ difficulties in grasping the actual sequences of events in the story. Unquestionably the short story is alarmingly static in places and concentrates on enduring, painful states of affairs without the prominence of a clear and dramatic plotline. This is all true, but in what terms does this indicate ‘weak narrativity’? Monika Fludernik proposed, in her path-breaking Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, “the redefinition of narrativity qua experientiality without the necessity of any actantial groundwork. In [her] model there can therefore be narratives without plot, but there cannot be any narratives without a human (anthropomorphic) experiencer of some sort at some narrative level” (13). If we endorse experientiality as the key element of narrativity, “A Boring Story” is of course a prime example of high narrativity. The old professor’s awareness of being incurably ill, his experience of dissolved communion with his family, as well as his irreparable feeling of the lost meaning of his academic work dominate the short story instead of a flow of temporally well-arranged events. Paradoxically then, I can largely agree upon the qualities of the short story outlined by Tammi, I can recognize similar features in close reading of the text, but depending on our obviously different version of narrativity, we can arrive at totally contrasting results about the level of narrativity in the story. Perhaps, then, both the perspective of classical narratology, focusing on the sequence of events, and Fludernik’s strictly experiential notion are still somehow one-sided. Partly in order to alleviate this dilemma,

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David Herman suggests in his Basic Elements of Narrative a more complex model that attempts to strike a reasoned balance between these two positions (9–22). It is worth noticing that Herman’s conceptual strategy differs from most of the traditional ‘bare minimum’ definitions discussed by Tammi even on another level, since his purpose is to mark out the prototypical core of narrativity. Let me define ‘prototypical narrative’ as one that most people, in most cases would easily recognize as a narrative. By resorting to folk knowledge, such an understanding is both historically changing and culturally shaped. Following Fludernik’s and Herman’s thought, there is not too much to be learned from the play with such extremely marginal narratives as in “The king died and then the queen died of grief” (Forster 60). However, reading “A Boring Story” with the help of Herman’s prototype offers new contradictions. To begin with, narratives are for Herman “situated” presentations (14). It is equally clear that the story is a part of Chekhov’s artistic work from a particular period, and that the old professor’s narration is deeply situated within the confines of his conundrum. On the second level, a prototypical narrative “cues interpreters to draw inferences about a structured time course of particularized events.” At this point, we face actual resistance caused by the iterative and pseudo-iterative narration, and yet there is a narrow thread of “particularized” events to be detected, one “cued” by the text. The third element of world-making and world-disruption, in contrast, is extensively elaborated in the short story. The story exhibits a dramatic structure of before and after: before the professor had a magnificent career, before he knew personally all the prominent scholars in Russia and was celebrated all over Europe, before he enjoyed lecturing and flourished in his work. ‘Now,’ since his illness, since all the excruciating changes in his life, this successful world has perished. On the fourth and final level, Herman picks up the element of experientiality, ‘how it feels,’ maintaining that narrative representation “also conveys the experience of living through this storyworld-in-flux, highlighting the pressure of the events on the real or imagined consciousnesses” (4). “A Boring Story” most forcefully explores the nuances of the experience of the distressed and disintegrating professor, even to the point of foregrounding the horrible lack of genuine events in his life in comparison with the dull, iterative, and meaningless quasi-events. It is obvious then that “A Boring Story” distorts the clear sequence of events and makes understanding the temporal structure complicated or partly impossible; nevertheless, this is done for the purpose of foregrounding the disruption in the professor’s life and to convey the experience of the total disintegration of his life. Despite all the efforts needed in

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capturing the event sequencing, the short story arguably represents a high level of prototypical narrativity, but unevenly in terms of the basic elements. This uneven narrativity may solve some problems; it certainly creates new ones. Rather than reasoning that Herman’s model has now neatly solved our problem between the contrasting interpretations between the classical approach and Fludernik’s natural narratology, I propose that the model introduces a new kind of instability in appraising narrativity. If I read Herman correctly, he does not suggest any mediating process, codependency, or mechanism able to harmonize the potentially contrasting effects of his four elements of narrativity. It is therefore credible to presume that we can have narratives that expose high narrativity in terms of some elements (say, three and four) while being resistant, ambiguous, and highly static in terms of other elements (say, second element, the sequence of events). Different narratives and different narrative genres may therefore privilege diverse elements and diverse combinations. On a primary theoretical level this idea is not hard to accept, at least intuitively. However, if we accept it, a further problem arises: what is left of the concept of narrativity itself, if its criteria change from narrative to narrative? If we have arrived at a point where it is inadequate to characterize texts in terms of ‘dense’ or ‘weak’ narrativity; we should also have more particularized terms for characterizing different ways of departing from prototypical narrativity. In what follows, I will leave Chekhov and reflect on the issue of uneven narrativity with the help of a more recent author, W. G. Sebald, and his novel The Rings of Saturn (1995). My proposal is to turn the idea of uneven narrativity into a resource of reading instead of seeing it as a mere deficit of theory.

Sebald’s Travels Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn2 develops the tensions between the basic elements of narrative to an extreme and thus offers a prime case in point to elaborate my theme. So prominent is Sebald’s resistance to clear and conventional plot-lines that Kathy Behrendt discusses him as an example of anti-narrativity, drawing the idea from Galen Strawson’s essay “Against Narrativity.” Sebald’s prose, however, is far too complex to fit 2

Born in Germany, Sebald (1944–2001) wrote his books in German. Nevertheless, from the 1960s he resided in England where he taught German literature. I believe that he was able to monitor the English translations adequately, and used primarily two excellent translators, Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell.

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into such clear-cut frames as proposed by Strawson. In Strawson’s theory, people can be divided, even genetically, into the “diachronic/narrative” and “non-diachronic/episodic” personalities. Therefore, Strawson suggests, these “Diachronics and Episodics are likely to misunderstand one another badly” (431). Against this rather rigid theory of character, I suggest that both “diacronicity” (thinking of oneself in terms of a temporally continuing and essentially the same person over time) and “episodicality” (thinking of oneself as a qualitatively different person than the past self) are culturally widely shared resources that competent adults use interchangeably in different situations. Sebald is a prime example in confusing Strawson’s clear categories: Sebald is keenly interested in his own and the collective past, his travel narratives cannot be characterized in simple terms of “form-finding,” yet he insists on being a storyteller. For Strawson, “the paradigm of a narrative is a conventional story told in words.” Thus he takes “the term to attribute—at the very least—a certain developmental and hence temporal unity or coherence to the things to which it is standardly applied—lives, parts of lives, pieces of writing” (439). This definition already posits both Chekhov and Sebald outside the sphere of narrativity. The narrow definition leaves too much on the non-narrative side. Therefore his claim that episodic thinking falls outside narrativity is not convincing. Following his normative definition of narrative, Strawson portrays the philosophers Plato, St. Augustine, Martin Heidegger, and Thomas Nagel as typical cases of Narrativity—while such novelists as Marcel Proust, Iris Murdoch, Virginia Woolf, and Stendhal belong to his Episodic personalities (432). Thus it appears that some of the best narratives are written by individuals who are unable to understand narrative personality due to their episodic outlook. The way out of such an impasse requires the rejection of an overly homogenous and essentialist understanding of narrative. James Phelan, for example, points out one key aspect of narrative diversity when he says: At one end of a wide spectrum are narratives offering thick descriptions.…At the other end of the spectrum are narratives that stand above the myriad details of experience, using the mode’s finite means in the service of abstraction and simplification, eschewing thick description for the synoptic view (girl meets boy; girl loses boy; girl reunites with boy). (167)

Sebald and Chekhov are situated mostly at the former end of the spectrum, while Strawson prefers to think of narratives only in terms of the other end, by way of simplification and form-giving. The idea of uneven narrativity allows for elaborating the diversity of narratives and narrativity further. Following the idea of this article I suggest that the narrativity of

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Sebald’s novel is uneven as regards the basic elements of narrativity, as well as in terms of the levels of the narrative organization. The frame of The Rings comes from the travelogue, as is usually the case in Sebald’s work. “The journey is universally recognized as a narrative in our culture,” writes Kai Mikkonen (286). More specifically, Mikkonen suggests that the “notion of travel ascribes and tends to increase narrativity” (288). Nevertheless, travels are not one and the same: the quest (e.g. Proppian wonder tales), the pilgrimage and the odyssey set the relationships between writing, reading, and traveling differently. Sebald’s writing, in particular in The Rings, does not foreground causally linked events or a traveler’s adventures. The frame of travelogue provides the texts with a meandering structure of sensing, thinking, and talking, and essayistic meandering is exactly what Sebald does with the material of his travels: “At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara [Sebald’s partner] in search of somewhere to live” (Emigrants 3); “In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years in a county which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna…” (Vertigo 33); “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work” (Rings 3). All these beginnings locate the speaker, the exact point of time, and the rationale motivating the trip. All of these equally point in the direction of non-fiction, to something really experienced and witnessed by Sebald. Nevertheless, the beginning of Austerlitz, without giving an exact date, begins with a similar documentary reference to time, intention, traveling, and the unsettling sense of ‘feeling unwell’ (Austerlitz 1). Most confusingly, the narratorial voice of Austerlitz already sounds familiar from the more documentary books (“a tone of inconsolable disarray,” as Brockmeier [347] has it). Note also the strong bodily presence of the author—his situatedness—while readers are invited to acknowledge the sensations of illness and awkwardness right at the outset of most of these journeys, and explicitly so in The Rings. The frame of travelogue, of course, does not guarantee any degree of non-fictionality, as Austerlitz indicates. In Vertigo, the emphasis is on the arts (e.g., Stendhal, Casanova, Kafka); in Austerlitz the emphasis is mostly on architecture, memory, and the Holocaust; in The Rings, on the most diverse representations of destruction. A novel which begins like a realistic account of a walking trip soon turns to discuss Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson in a learned manner; visits the coastline near the Battle of Sole Bay (1672), during which, “on the Royal James alone, which was set aflame by

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a fireship, nearly half the thousand-strong crew perished” (Rings 77); and turns to discuss the genocides in the Congo and Nazi Germany. On one level, the novel is almost a catalog of incomprehensible human cruelty, waste, and destruction in modern times. The disparity between the frame and content is enormous: a stroll in East-Anglia, in a perfectly peaceful landscape, invites the whole array of modern atrocities to march in, one after the other, before the eyes of the reader. After all, the troubled times of the British Empire are not so far away, and the problems of destruction do not entirely hide on the other side of the German Sea, as the author prefers to call the North Sea. As Murray Baumgarten says about The Emigrants, “his journey becomes a paradoxical pilgrimage into historical memory—into a set of cultural memories apparently erased, deleted from the contemporary European landscape” (271). The structure of Sebald’s novel is complex enough to frustrate any attempt at analyzing it in any systematic way; nonetheless, I try to suggest a rough draft for further discussion. On the embedding level, in the travelogue, very little seems to happen in this novel. In Vertigo, by contrast, the traveler is constantly pained by deep anguish, nearly paranoia, and he has to escape from cities and revise his plans time after time—while the subject of the book is indeed Franz Kafka. However, in The Rings the frame primarily offers a possibility to move on swiftly in essayistic investigations into a kaleidoscope of themes (e.g., Rembrandt’s painting, the fishing industry, the life and fate of Roger Casement). The frame of travel, in other words, seems above all to allow a rich variety of thematic combinations. Travelogue foregrounds space and renders the complication of the temporal structure easier. One of the most creative shifts takes place in introducing the case of the Congo: “On the second evening of my stay in Southwold, after the late news, the BBC broadcasted a documentary about Roger Casement, who was executed for high treason” (Rings 103). The traveler falls asleep, and has later to work hard to collect the details from various archives. Finally the narrator reveals how Casement meets Konrad Korzeniowski— Joseph Conrad—in the Congo, then takes a few steps backwards in the chronology to the time of Conrad’s father as an unfortunate anarchist resisting Russian rule in Poland, a stance which leads to his deportation into a miserable Russian camp and premature death; then again the story proceeds with Conrad’s own adventurous life as a sailor. Note also that there is no causal link between the traveler’s stay in Southwold, the BBC broadcasting the program on Casement, nor the traveler’s falling asleep during the broadcast. They are chance occurrences made possible, for example, by the fact that the narrator-traveler does not stay in a tent or spend the evening in a local pub conversing with local characters.

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The travels finally funnel Korzeniowski into the Congo and to the scenery of Heart of Darkness, to his meeting with Casement as the probably only representative of the British Empire in the Congo reporting honestly on the ongoing massacre of the original population. Now the narration leaves Conrad and follows Casement’s story on to his eventual hanging on the strength of an alleged military treason, when he supported his Irish cause during the Great War (Sebald resorts to this old term for the First World War). In the frame narrative, the author watches television and falls asleep; whereas in the following storytelling much grimmer episodes come to the foreground. The high narrativity of Casement’s story, his tragedy, I should add, is difficult to refute without subscribing to an overly simplistic understanding of narrative. Temporality is there, as is the world-making and world destruction, and the experientiality of the story is not hidden. As in “A Boring Story,” the reader has problems following the chronology of the frame narrative and, sometimes, of the embedded stories too. This is due to the fact that Sebald’s narrator often tends to blur the point of transition from one story to another, as if preferring to change tracks in the middle of his notoriously long subordinate clauses. The frame story of travel itself seems not, in this novel, to contain much in terms of dramatic settings, development, or emplotment. The narrating ‘I’, virtually indistinguishable from Sebald, walks in Suffolk, visits places and meets people, until he phones home, and Clara comes to fetch him from a pub called Mermaid. To add a strong documentary flavor, a genuine reality effect indeed, there is a photograph portraying Sebald resting against a huge Lebanese cedar in Ditchingham Park (Rings 263). Unfortunately, as the reader soon learns, the picture was taken ten years previously, and a hurricane had since destroyed the whole park. The photo is, after all, a visual document—if not of a Paradise Lost—then of the destruction of the old tree stand in Suffolk due to insufficient planting, raging plant diseases and natural catastrophes.

Story and Discourse In the final chapter of the novel, while discussing in an essayistic style Sir Thomas Browne and silk worm farming in Britain and Nazi Germany, the narrator finally arrives at the time of writing (the 13th of April 1995; Rings 294), only to go immediately ahead by accounting some peculiar coincidences in his own family histories. Arriving at home has thus neither finished the story, nor is the end of the journey any proper answer to the instabilities introduced earlier—in any other sense than that the author has arrived home with material for his further literary work. The

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frame is thus a strong case in point of what Brian McHale has termed ‘weak narrativity’ (McHale; Tammi). In addition to this weak narrativity, there is also an aspect we may arguably call ‘resistance to story and sequence.’ By ‘resistance to story’ I mean a narrative strategy which does not foreground the events of the past, or the construction of a distinct and sequentially clear storyworld, but rather one which privileges the moment of telling, the narrative discourse and reflection (Baumgarten 278) over all dramatic sequences of events in the past. In so doing, Sebald advances the events of the story until they finally merge together with the moment of crafting the narrative discourse. Comparing the novel to more traditional travelogues may clarify Sebald’s narration. Even though there is the central character, ‘I,’ his acts and features remain astoundingly vague and in the background. For sure, the traveler observes, experiences and thinks. But even then the reader must be awake—is it truly the traveler who thinks, or is it the narrator of the novel who does the reflecting while drafting the manuscript, or a merger of these instances? Unlike some other travelogues, the frame narrative is not about visiting highly exoticized or dramatic resorts, which would imprint their deep impressions on the character. The traveler visits atrocities of all kinds, so much is true, and registers them. Yet again, for example the scenery of the Battle of Sole Bay is not exactly visible during a walk on the East Coast of England; it is only by visiting museums, consulting history books and studying paintings that Sebald is able to construe the experience and reflection upon the sea battle. Therefore the paintings to reconsider, therefore the afterthoughts about the number of lost men, exceeding the population of most cities of the time. A rough outline of the structure might look something like this, though it must be noted that this representation of the embeddings is analytical, for the text can either continue on one level or jump to any other level without a clear warning: Frame: travelogue (weak narrativity) Investigations and essays into the themes of the novel (partly anti-narrative) Images (narrative and/or anti-narrative) Intensive storytelling (strong narrativity)

On the frame level, and through the concomitant reflections, the author challenges the reader’s capacities to follow the narrative and the course of events. Here the novel often hovers between weak narrativity and anti-narrative. In contrast to this weak narrativity on the frame level, the embedded intensive story-telling is characterized by strong narrativity. The mysterious story about Major George Wyndham Le Strange (Rings 59 –64) is a good case in point. We learn that Le Strange had “served in

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the anti-tank regiment that liberated the camp at Bergen-Belsen on the 14th of April 1945.” After the war he returns to manage his great uncle’s estates in Suffolk, until he begins to withdraw from social contacts in the mid-1950s. After his death, he left his property of seven million pounds to his housekeeper. The role of the housekeeper was quite particular: According to the newspaper report, Le Strange employed this housekeeper, a simple young woman from Beccles by the name of Florence Barnes, on the explicit condition that she take the meals she prepared together with him, but in absolute silence. (62)

According to the story, Le Strange gradually discharged his whole household staff, in order to live in silence with his housekeeper. Sebald does not merely recount this odd story; he also adds a copy of the newspaper clipping which launched his interest in Le Strange’s story. Sebald does not offer any explicit textual interpretation as a closure; instead, he provides a double-page photo of a forest full of dead bodies in the middle of the story. The image has no comments or captions at all, yet the reader tends to think of it as an image from Bergen-Belsen. Despite the weak narrativity on the frame level, these kinds of moments in Sebald’s storytelling compellingly exhibit dense and particular narrativity. It is noteworthy that the stories of Roger Casement, Major Le Strange as well as many stories told by Jacques Austerlitz are indeed prototypical narratives; compelling, temporally ordered, surprising, touching, and perplexing (cf. Sternberg 640–48). Sebald crafted them to be memorable and recognizable.

The Role of Storytelling Structuralist narratology tended to focus on separate, individual narratives, which, as it was presumed, illustrated and instantiated the deep level of permanent narrative grammar (and possibly for this reason, were ideologically determined and suspect) (Prince). Narratives were worlds apart, closed and finished; therefore they had a strong closure and the tendency to follow the strict sequence of beginning, middle, and end. Many studies on oral, everyday storytelling have recently criticized this rigid model (Georgakopoulou; Hyvärinen et al.; Langellier and Peterson; Ochs and Capps). Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, in particular, argue that in conversational storytelling descriptions of previous narratives are questioned, chronologies regularly invite clarifications, evaluations are challenged; and explanations can lead to continued speculations about their adequacy (18–20). Structuralist narratology typically freezes the social process of storytelling by investigating narratives in separation, or worse, under-

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stands even storytelling merely from the perspective of multiplying the number of entirely separate narratives. Strawson, for example, frames storytelling as a perpetual monologue—an individual telling his or her story once and again. Hayden White, in The Fiction of Narrative, similarly sees storytelling as a characteristic of text, in posing his old question in a new form “whether storytelling—or what we may call, more technically, the narrative mode of discourse” (273). For White, storytelling is still a part of the language system, while Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of language helps to locate it within the use of language. “Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere,” Bakhtin says in Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, therefore “each utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication” (91). Utterance, for Bakhtin, is a singular speech event by one speaker from its beginning to end, thus The Rings is one utterance by Sebald and construed by compiling many different and potentially competing sub-utterances. My concept of storytelling, then, comprises this exchange of (narrative) utterance with all kinds of responses and not only the characteristics of a single utterance. Phelan, by following Bakhtin’s idea, recalls the socio-political aspect that narratives are presented “in contest” during storytelling (168). The study of Sebald’s work, in accordance with my analysis, requires the recognition of socio-political storytelling as an analytic tool in the study of fiction, as it already has been in the study of everyday conversations. Sebald combines, as I have argued, weak and resistant narrativity on the frame level and intensive narrativity on the level of embedded storytelling. The whole novel is only barely or fragmentarily a narrative, while the storytelling keeps the narrativity intensive and the narrative closure at bay. Briefly, storytelling is a social and political practice, and is therefore not properly visible within the structuralist model. Any closure, any end of story can be re-questioned, augmented or contradicted by the stories that follow. From this perspective of cultural storytelling, Sebald’s novel has an episodic and fragmented structure, where the images and different stories comment upon each other, without one, covering meaning or closure to appear at the end of the narrative. The book is, at the same time, full of captivating sub-stories as parts of the continuous storytelling, and still without the form of closed, conventional narrative. Sebald adds to difficulties of reception by employing his exceptionally long paragraphs, often continuing page after page. An entirely new storyline can begin right in the middle of a long paragraph. On page 119, for example, begins the last paragraph on Conrad’s story. Two pages later, Sebald is ready to leave Conrad and briefly tell about Joseph Loewy, “an

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uncle of Franz Kafka” (Rings 121). Using a photograph as a further cue, he soon moves to the narrator’s own recollections, remembering how “to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness” (122). In a short while “the so-called historical memorial site of the Battle of Waterloo” (123) is presented as “the very definition of Belgian ugliness.” Out of the “objective” narration of Conrad’s story, the paragraph had moved into an essay and to personal memories of the narrator, ending with a “hunchbacked pensioner,” seen by the narrator in a Belgian restaurant (126–27). On page 5 he starts telling about his recently deceased colleague Michael Parkinson, while at the end of the paragraph, on page 17, he has just discussed Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson. Some structuralist theories would explicitly disregard Sebald’s narration qua narration. Emile Benveniste, Gérard Genette, and Hayden White contrasted ‘narrative’ and ‘discourse’ linguistically. By taking his examples from the 19th century realistic novel and the historiography of the same period, Benveniste outlined a conception of purely chronological narrative of the past world. He argued that a whole array of linguistic forms such as ‘I,’ ‘you,’ and other deictic references to the writing moment were strictly excluded from the ‘narrative’ mode, whereas the French form of the aorist was typical for this narrative ‘in the strict sense.’ “The tenses of a French verb are not employed as members of a single system; they are distributed in two systems which are distinct and complementary,” Benveniste argues (206). The “historical utterance” that narrates the past has a particular form. It is sufficient and necessary that the author remain faithful to his historical purpose and that he proscribe everything that is alien to the narration of events (discourse, reflections, comparisons). As a matter of fact, there is then no longer even a narrator. The events are set forth chronologically, as they occurred. No one speaks here; the events seem to narrate themselves. The fundamental tense is the aorist, which is the tense of the event outside the person of a narrator. (208; my emphasis)

Genette remarks that Benveniste includes “in the category of discourse all that Aristotle calls direct imitation and which actually consists (at least in its verbal portion) in the discourse attributed by the poet or storyteller to one of the characters” (“Boundaries” 8). The examples Benveniste and Genette offer come from the historian Glotz and from Balzac. “In discourse, someone speaks and his situation in the very act of speaking is the focus of the most important signification. In narrative, as Benveniste insists, no one speaks, in the sense that at no moment do we have to ask ‘Who is speaking?’ ‘Where?’ ‘When?’ etc., in order to receive fully the meaning of the text,” argues Genette (10). All kinds of first-person narration, of course, here falls within ‘discourse,’ but also such third-person

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forms that elucidate the narrator. Sebald uses such ‘discourse’ systematically throughout Austerlitz: “Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Austerlitz began, in reply to my question…” (9; my emphasis). What is currently, after Labov and Walezky, discussed in terms of oral storytelling could only be understood in terms of discourse in the terminology of Benveniste. Genette even suggests a hierarchy of “naturalness” between these modes: Actually, discourse has no purity to preserve because it is the natural mode of language, the broadest and most universal mode, by definition open to all forms. On the contrary, narrative is a particular mode, marked and defined by a certain number of exclusions and restrictive conditions (no present tense, no first person, etc.) Discourse can “narrate” without ceasing to be discourse. Narrative can’t “discourse” without betraying itself. (“Boundaries” 11)

In his Narrative Discourse, Genette has already rejected the idea of dividing texts into discourse and narrative (or story). As he says, “the level of narrative discourse is the only one directly available to textual analysis” (27), meaning that the earlier distinction no longer applies. The mere title of the English translation blends these earlier separate worlds. Story refers now to “the succession of events…that are the subjects of the discourse,” not to a purified and particular linguistic form (25). Discourse, reflections, and comparisons are of course recurrent and predominant features in Sebald’s prose. Instead of metaphor, Sebald prefers to use the open comparison provided by simile (“It is as if…”), comparing all the time what he sees with something known from his past or literature. Chronology he destroys systematically and in the most innovative ways; and it is perfectly clear that someone is indeed speaking in his text. By applying the concept of narrative White suggests, Sebald’s novel is not a narrative at all but through and through a discourse. Yet in those sections I have called “storytelling,” when Sebald self-consciously enters the field of narrative contestation, he temporarily resorts to the particular linguistic form Benveniste and Genette discuss in terms of the “objectivity of narrative” (Genette, “Boundaries” 8). Sebald’s novel emphatically foregrounds the ‘I,’ both as the character walking in Suffolk and as the author finishing his book “[on] 13th of April, 1995” (Rings 294). The naming of the date when Sebald is able to “bring these notes to a conclusion” adds a new level of fusion. The final day of writing the novel is, at the same time, transported into the storyworld, introducing one more ending for the story. A reader who would concentrate only on the events of the past, following a presumed sequence, would be frustrated before finishing the first page. Almost immediately after outlining his mental state at the beginning of the journey, Sebald

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continues: “At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralyzing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction” (3; my emphasis). Sebald does not linger in the story time (‘narrative,’ to use Benveniste’s and White’s language) and past history even for a page, but draws his afterthoughts, various other points of time, and narrative discourse immediately in front of the reader, and keeps traveling back and forth in time. No-one can be fooled into believing that the events ‘narrate themselves.’ Lydia Davis’ novel The End of the Story (1995) works systematically with a similar blending of story-time and discourse. First the female narrator is telling about the end of a love story, but this is increasingly interrupted by a story about writing a novel on the end of a love story—the novel the reader is reading. The problems of memory, reliability and endless editing intervene over the course of the “original” story, and actions taken within the relationship and actions taken as regards the manuscript end up being on an equal level. Nevertheless, in contrast to what I have argued earlier, there is after all something dramatic taking place on the level of the frame narrative in The Rings of Saturn. After noticing the ‘paralyzing’ impact that the images of destruction have on him, the author continues: “…a year after to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. It was then I began in my thoughts to write these pages” (3–4). In Aristotelian terms, the sequence might—ironically—be outlined as follows: beginning–end–middle–end–end (middle again). The travel story, in other words, is over, firstly, when the journey is over (Rings 261); secondly, when the author is admitted into hospital and decides to write about the journey (4–5); and, thirdly, when he finishes writing the book (294).

At the Limits of Narrative David Herman’s version of postclassical narratology and prototypical narrativity, portrayed above, has solved some problems in freeing the concept of narrativity from the exclusive level of plotline, conflict, and disruption. In doing so, it brought in new kinds of contradictions. For example, the frame narrative of The Rings displays rather weak narrativity when analyzed from the perspective of the sequence of events, conflict, and disruption. However, if we read the essayistic and visual expanses as explorations of the experience, the narrative, as a whole, exhibits a very high level of narrativity.

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The travelogue enables a personal and embodied approach to Sebald’s investigations on human destruction; essays, images, and particular stories resist the dominance of one story, one closure, and one route of reading. Brian Richardson argues in his Unlikely Stories, while discussing an example offered by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, that the “absence of causal connection makes it appear non-narrative, if not nonsense, as the author is ready enough to admit” (94). It is not difficult to agree with Richardson that “Little Red Riding-Hood strays into the forest and then Pip aids the runaway convict” appears to be non-narrative, but it may be a fallacious step to expect something as particular as causal connection for a remedy. For most readers, there is no relevant thematic connection between the two sentences in the example. They simply seem to open two independent storyworlds without any relevant interconnections. “Contrary to what Richardson argues,” says Mikkonen, “even if we agree with him that causality is a central aspect in narrative experience, it is not always decisive for considering something a narrative” (293). The causal connection runs into severe problems with chance, contingency, and Herman’s third element of world-disruption. Narratives are vitally about trying to understand contingency, and one standard definition of contingency is “not causally determined” (Bruner; Hutto; Morson). Noël Carroll’s more specified proposal of “narrative connection” seems to discriminate both against nonsensical stories and the overly deterministic weight of causal connection. For Carroll, the earlier events of the story need not causally determine or cause the later events, but the latter events need to make sense within the worlds opened by the earlier events—and the first events need to be relevant after the final ones. In the case of The Rings, for example, there is no obvious causal connection between “I” taking a walking trip in East-Anglia, and his falling ill the year after the walk. Yet falling ill is entirely possible, and it is possible to make it relevant in evaluation of the journey, as the author does. “In the second half of the 1960s I travelled repeatedly from England to Belgium,” writes Sebald at the beginning of Austerlitz. This event has no causal connection with the “I” actually meeting Austerlitz at Antwerp Central Station. Nevertheless it makes such a meeting possible and understandable. As for narrative, it is obvious that Sebald’s novel as a whole is rather a study of the limits and merits of narrative than ‘a’ narrative. The author is able to mobilize, in the same novel, the resources of ‘weak narrativity’ on the level of frame story; resistance to narrativity by employing the forms of essay and competing narratives; as well as powerful narrativity in telling particular stories about disappeared towns, disappearing fishes, perished men, and persecuted people. Sometimes Sebald is miles away from prototypical narrativity stepping freely outside of the whole text

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type in essayistic explorations, and then suddenly telling a truly prototypical story with the particularized course of events, dramatic disruptions and instabilities, and showing the suffering consciousnesses. One of his particular gifts as storyteller, indeed, is his proficiency in diversion. The next path taken by the story is as unheralded as the course of his travels. My own journey through weak and uneven narrativity, anti-narrativity, and resistance to sequence and story, can now be summarized into the following theses: (1) Narrativity is always a matter of degree (Abbott; Fludernik; Herman). (2) The character of narrativity has changed since the experiential turn has challenged the role of sequence of events as the key denominator of narrativity (Fludernik; Herman; Hyvärinen et al.; Patterson; Squire). (3) Narrativity is not a homogeneous phenomenon. A key consequence of David Herman’s prototypical model is to see four relatively independent aspects of narrativity. (4) Narrativity can exist and often exists unevenly, in particular as regards the aspects of event sequencing, world-making and destruction, and experientiality. (5) The anti-narrative argument (Behrendt; Strawson) remains unspecific as far as the criteria of narrativity are not properly specified and if the criteria differ dramatically from those used in recent theories of narrative, including those of post-classical narratology. (6) Complex narrative texts, such as novels, films, and entire life historical interviews, can exhibit narrativity unevenly. Uneven narrativity should be recognized both i) in terms of the different levels or criteria of narrativity; and ii) in terms different levels or sections of the text. As Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn demonstrates, one level of the novel can resist narrativity (as clear sequencing of events) while other levels (embedded storytelling) signify high and prototypical narrativity. (7) ‘Weak narrativity,’ finally, can also refer to different versions of uneven narrativity; including both causally over-determined and overly vague representations.3

3

Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the conference Arts, Violence, and Imagination, London, October 23–25, 2009, and at the International Narrative Conference, Cleveland, April 8–11, 2010. I am grateful to the participants for their comments. The research for this article was done in the Academy of Finland research project ‘The Conceptual History of Narrative’ (SA 111743).

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Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think’: The Landscape of Postmemory in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers 5.2 (2007): 267–87. Behrendt, Kathy. “Scraping Down the Past: Memory and Amnesia in W. G. Sebald’s Anti-Narrative.” Philosophy and Literature 34.2 (2010): 394–408. Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. 1966. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Miami Linguistics Series vol. 8. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1971. Brockmeier, Jens. “Austerlitz’s Memory.” Partial Answers 6.2 (2008): 347–67. Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. Chekhov, Anton. “A Boring Story.” 1889. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Stories by Anton Chekhov. New York: Bantam Books, 2000. 55–107. Davis, Lydia. The End of the Story. New York: Picador, 1995. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. London: Edward Arnold, 1974. Genette, Gérard. “Boundaries of Narrative.” New Literary History 8.1 (1976): 1–13. —. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. 1972. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Ed. Michael Bamberg. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007. Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Hutto, Daniel D. “The Narrative Practice Hypothesis: Origins and Applications of Folk Psychology.” Narrative and Understanding Persons. Ed. Daniel D. Hutto. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 43–68. Hydén, Lars-Christer. “Identity, Self, Narrative.” Beyond Narrative Coherence. Ed. Matti Hyvärinen et al. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. 33–48. Hyvärinen, Matti, et al., eds. Beyond Narrative Coherence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. Labov, William, and Joshua Walezky. 1967. “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience.” Journal of Narrative and Life History 7.1–4 (1997): 3–38. Langellier, Kristin M., and Eric E. Peterson. Storytelling in Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004. McHale, Brian. “Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Poetry.” Narrative 9.2 (2001): 161–67. Mikkonen, Kai. “The ‘Narrative Is Travel’ Metaphor: Between Spatial Sequence and Open Consequence.” Narrative 15.3 (2007): 286–305. Morson, Gary Saul. “Contingency and Poetics.” Philosophy and Literature 22.2 (1998): 286–308. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Patterson, Wendy. “Narratives of Events: Labovian Narrative Analysis and Its Limitations.” Doing Narrative Research. Ed. Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou. London: Sage, 2008. 22–40.

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Phelan, James. “Narratives in Contest; or, Another Twist in the Narrative Turn.” PMLA 123.1 (2008): 166–75. Prince, Gerald. “Narratology and Narratological Analysis.” Journal of Narrative and Life History 7.1–4 (1997): 39–44. Richardson, Brian. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1997. Squire, Corinne. “Experience-Centred and Culturally-Oriented Approaches to Narrative.” Doing Narrative Research. Ed. Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou. London: Sage, 2008. 41–63. Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001. —. Campo Santo. 2005. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin Books, 2006. —. The Emigrants. 1993. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: The Harvill Press, 1996. —. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: The Harvill Press, 1998. —. Vertigo. 1990. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: The Harvill Press, 1999. Sternberg, Meir. “Narrativity: From Objectivist to Functional Paradigm.” Poetics Today 31.3 (2010): 507–659. Strawson, Galen. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio (New Series) XVII.4 (2004): 428–52. Tammi, Pekka. “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’).” Partial Answers 4.2 (2006): 19–40. White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” 1981. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. 26–57. —. The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957–2007. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2010.

Bo Pettersson (University of Helsinki)

What Happens When Nothing Happens: Interpreting Narrative Technique in the Plotless Novels of Nicholson Baker On Plotlessness, Description, and Nicholson Baker’s Fiction Plot is one of the defining features of narrative in classical narratology, from Aristotle to Genette. Whatever its aspects were called—fabula and sjuzhet or story and discourse—and however defined, event sequencing used to be central in understanding narrative. But in its postclassical phase, narratology has considerably broadened its scope. In one of the seminal works of this phase, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, Monika Fludernik views story and discourse as based on a narrow “realist understanding of narration” and secondary to experientiality, the hub of her narratology that can better deal with different kinds of fiction (334). Thus, Fludernik’s wide reading of both pre-realist and post-realist fiction prompted her to develop a new kind of narratology. Part and parcel of Fludernik’s view is the recognition that plotless fiction is not as marginal as the fact that traditional narrative studies has mostly ignored it seems to suggest. In postmodern fiction, Fludernik finds that traditional event sequencing can be handled in three novel ways: by irreconcilable event lines, by impossible plots, and by the lack of plots, the latter being exemplified by Samuel Beckett’s “Ping” and Nathalie Sarraute’s fiction (273). Of course, a story without a plot is much like a sentence without a verb—it just seems to lack the throbbing pulse of life. This is why I find it intriguing to analyze one of the most popular authors of contemporary American fiction, Nicholson Baker (born 1957), who in a number of novels seems to be able, as it were, to get away with having no plot or, rather, minimal plots. So far, Baker is the author of eight novels and five books of non-fiction, one of which is co-written with his wife Margaret Brentano. He made his reputation as a miniaturist by two novels in which nothing much happens. In The Mezzanine (1988), a young man called

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Howie returns from his lunch hour to take the escalator to his office on the mezzanine floor of a corporate building: thus the main plot focuses on his ten second (or so) escalator ride. In Room Temperature (1990), a man called Mike is feeding his infant daughter, affectionately called “the Bug,” a bottle of milk during about twenty minutes. In a later novel, A Box of Matches (2003), Baker returns to the minimal plot novel by describing the middle-aged family man Emmett’s routine of getting up while still dark to make coffee in thirty-three chapters, each depicting his morning ritual. More recently, Baker has published a plot-wise rather simple novel, The Anthologist (2009), in which the narrator describes how he is compiling an anthology and writing its introduction as he tries to come to terms with the fact that his girlfriend has left him. By depicting the processes of writing and grieving during a few summer months, this novel in fact includes a complex plot line and is thus quite different from the three novels I propose to study in this paper.1 In analyzing Baker’s more or less plotless fiction, I take my cue from Pekka Tammi’s call for renewing narrative studies by “studying… the subversive and the strange, previously untheorized or insufficiently theorized cases” (29). Tammi in part bases his point on the notion of weak narrativity (29–31), which Brian McHale defines as “telling stories ‘poorly,’ distractedly, with much irrelevance and indeterminacy, in such a way as to evoke narrative coherence while at the same time withholding commitment to it and undermining confidence in it; in short, having one’s cake and eating it too.…[H]ere difference in degree (relatively less narrativity) entails difference in kind…” (165). We shall consider in what senses Baker’s strange case conforms to McHale’s weak narrativity. Let me, however, start out by noting that minimal plot sequencing is not a feature of post-realist fiction alone. Some of the classics in the genre are Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey around My Room and A Nocturnal Expedition around My Room (1794 and 1825 in French) and their fictional explorations of the indoors landscape of a single room. As de Maistre’s translator Andrew Brown notes in his introduction to a recent reprint of the books, de Maistre’s isolated narrator is forced “to supplement the paucity of events in the room by resorting to memory, imagination, daydream and storytelling—which sometimes seem to merge into one an-

1

Still, the narrator of The Anthologist voices Baker’s view of plot: “Plot developments, how badly we need you and yet how much we flee from your clanking boxcars. I don’t want to ride that train” (178).

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other” (xi). Baker’s techniques in vitalizing his novels are in fact much like those of de Maistre, which suggests that even narratives that on the face of it seem rather plotless are kept alive by a variety of techniques. In short, as Alain de Botton has noted as regards de Maistre’s fiction, what is needed is a kind of openness to new impressions or, simply, “Receptivity” (viii). It is this receptivity in the narrator-protagonists in Baker’s three novels that has made Arthur Saltzman dub their author “A Columbus of the Near-at-Hand” (1). When plot is relinquished or marginalized, the subsequent attention to detail can lead to significant discoveries. In the case of Baker as well as de Maistre, the attention to details leads, in turn, to description, which in literary studies is rather under-theorized. In one of the few volumes devoted to description in fiction, Werner Wolf summarizes the most prevalent view of it: “In narrative fiction at any rate, description usually constitutes a subordinate frame that operates under the auspices of the dominant frame ‘narrative’ and usually helps prepare the ground on which the characters act” (50). In so doing, Wolf builds on and refers to Gérard Genette’s claim in Figures II (1969) that description is a mere aid to narration (ancilla narrationis), a point which was turned on its head as Michael Riffaterre in 1986 called it mater narrationis (50). Perhaps a more tenable position was taken by Seymour Chatman, who, as an answer to Genette, titled a chapter of his study Coming to Terms “Description Is No Textual Handmaiden” and stressed that “Description has a [metonymic] logic of its own, and it is unreasonable to belittle it because it does not resemble the chrono-logic of Narration” (24). Thus, I would not agree with Peter Schwenger’s suggestion (based on a number of critics) that “the opposition between description and narration should be abandoned,” but perhaps rather “rethought in less rigid terms” (145). In that spirit, Ansgar Nünning has recently highlighted and studied description (95–96 et passim) and, perhaps most importantly, David Herman has analyzed “the (fuzzy) boundary between description and narrative” (92) and shown how text types reinforce each other in contributing to the what, where, and when of storyworlds (90–97, 105–36). In Coming to Terms, on which Herman in part bases his view, Chatman makes an important observation when he states that text types, such as narrative, description, and argument, “routinely operate at each other’s service” (10). In Baker’s novels, it is quite evident that the text type hierarchy changes throughout the novels: narrative can be used at the service of description, description at the service of narrative, and ultimately both narrative and description are at the service of a kind of argument. In other words, there are number of ways besides plot that the story holds the readers’ interest.

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Thus, even if the lack of plot does not necessarily lead to detailed description in fiction,2 it does so and is intended to do so in Baker’s fiction. Some statements by Baker may clarify his view. In an interview on the Internet, he notes: “The only plot I find satisfying is: what previous thoughtlet led to a mental climate that would potentially give rise to another minor thought?” (as quoted in Miller). This contiguous rather than sequential logic seems central in Baker’s three novels. However, as I have noted, they all have minimal plots, which are full of what Baker, in U and I, a book on John Updike, calls “narrative cloggers,” which he views in relation to devious plot sequencing: “The only thing I like are the clogs…; the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed…unlooked-for seepage-points of passage” (73). By blowing up details, description suggests new ways for the plot to go on. That is, plot need not be seen in contrast to description, but they can build on each other: in Baker’s fiction description may seem to stop the plot, but some detail will present another narrative thread by which the narrative or another narrative goes on. In other words, the main plot can be minimal or almost non-existent, whereas the digressions may include narratives. When analyzing The Mezzanine, Ross Chambers aptly speaks of its “paradigmatic dimension of discourse” (768). He pinpoints how Baker marginalizes plot (the syntagmatic dimension) and focuses on description. There is much truth in that, but I would like to start out from Saltzman’s view that, in his novels, Baker is “promoting the descriptive set piece to the stature typically accorded plot and character” (179), and try to show that description and plot— and, finally, character—blend in rather unique ways in Baker’s three novels.

Narrative Technique in The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, and A Box of Matches The main event sequence of The Mezzanine, I have noted, only takes a few seconds, but, more importantly, as the narrator-protagonist Howie notes, “the escalator ride…is the vehicle for this memoir” (37). As a memoir told a few years after the ride, it ranges rather freely over the narrator’s life at the time, mostly depicting what happened to him right before he

2

As, for instance, in the descriptive vagueness of Beckett’s “Ping,” which is discussed below.

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stands on the escalator. The first and last sentences of the novel frame the entire story. AT ALMOST ONE O’CLOCK I entered the building where I worked and

turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt stapled over the top. (3) AT THE VERY END of the [escalator] ride, I caught sight of a cigarette butt

rolling and hopping against the comb plate where the grooves disappeared.… The maintenance man was at the bottom. I waved to him. He held up his white rag for a second, then put it back down on the rubber handrail. (135)

The action of the main plot is minimal (the narrator enters the office building and takes the escalator ride), so the narrative interest must lie elsewhere. The first sentence includes inklings of what is to be described, in the order of the syntax of the sentence: attention to time passing, the narrator (his thoughts, memories, opinions, and clothes), his office building and office work, the escalator and its maintenance, a paperback, a paper bag, and stapling (including other menial work). In relation to the story-now of the escalator ride, most of what is told comes across in the form of analepses (or flashbacks), and these analepses are mostly short narratives that take different forms. Hence, plotlessness in the sense of minimal event sequencing of the main plot does not preclude a number of brief digressive narratives in the analepses. But it is important to note that most of the analepses are occasioned by the narrator’s obsessive interest in objects. He may remember having been in his office before noon and going to the chemist’s (CVS) during his lunch hour (with the escalator ride returning him to work after his lunch hour), but his attention does not focus on the spatial locations as such but on particular objects he discerns in his surroundings. The analepses often enter the narrator’s mind through the objects—thus, they can be at the service of description, or the other way around. The analepses can be grouped into three kinds. First, there are shortrange analepses that depict events and thoughts that have occurred to the narrator earlier the same day, from the immediate past (walking toward the escalator) to the morning (waking up and having breakfast). For instance, chapter One may introduce the minimal main plot, but it also includes an analepsis of how the narrator “Earlier that lunch hour” buys a half-pint of milk (4). Chapter Two starts with a momentous event in the life of the narrator-protagonist: “MY LEFT SHOELACE had snapped just before lunch,” which makes him go to the chemist’s to get a pair of shoelaces during his lunch hour (11). He then goes on to depict how this came about. Further on, most of chapters Nine to Twelve depict the nar-

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rator going to the men’s room just as his lunch hour is starting (71–98). But just as the main plot would not be of interest without different kinds of addition, the short-range analepses only come alive by other narrative means. Second, there are long-range analepses, from the day before the escalator ride to childhood memories. The narrator notes: “I admit that part of my pleasure in riding the escalator came from the links with childhood memory that the experience sustained” (35). Having received a bag for his half-pint of milk, the narrator remembers how he in his high school days used to decline the offer of bags in stores (6–7). In fact, the long-range analepses are not very numerous, unless they were to include all the objects from the narrator’s past that occasion brief childhood reminiscences. Third, the novel contains a large number of analepses in analepses, often embedded: “As soon as my gaze fell to my shoes…, I was reminded of something…The day before…my other shoelace, the right one, had snapped, too…” (15). In relation to the story-now of the escalator ride, the snapping of the shoelace (11) is an analepsis, so the memory of how the lace of the other shoe snapped the day before is an analepsis in an analepsis. Similarly, as he is discussing how the former shoelace broke, the narrator inserts a brief long-range analepsis about the shoes: “It was the original shoelace, and the shoes were the very ones my father had bought me two years earlier, just after I had started this job, my first out of college—so the breakage was a sentimental milestone of sorts” (15). Moreover, the narrative in The Mezzanine is enlivened by a number of other means. There are some prolepses (flashforwards), usually long-range, such as, “I was driving south,…on my way to the job that I had taken after leaving my job with the department on the mezzanine” (37), which starts a three-page prolepsis (37–39) exemplifying that the “capacity for wonderment” (at escalators, among other things) can also be found in adults (40). Occasionally, there are narratives of generic action, as when the narrator observes: “I sometimes watched…Tina [a secretary] advance the date of the date-stamper” (32), after which the narrator portrays that action in detail, as a generic analepsis within the analepsis of what took place before he went to lunch (32–33). The most prevalent narrative technique, digression, is related to the moves in time between the analepses and the prolepses, and between the references to the story-now and the discourse-now of the telling. As we have seen, many of the analeptic narratives are, in effect, digressions. Another central digressive technique in the novel is the description of objects. As the narrator holds forth, “anything, no matter how rough, rusted, dirty, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth” (38). This is one of the narrator’s many insights

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and one that informs Baker’s entire oeuvre, because it depicts what Baker does: in his fiction and nonfiction alike, he delights in detail, especially of objects most of his readers use daily, but pay no attention to. In The Mezzanine, for instance, the straw, the windshield wiper, and the paper-towel dispenser receive careful attention and in part even historical overviews of how they have evolved. Thus, Howie refuses to go the way of Martin Heidegger, who considers the metaphysical and etymological dimensions of things in his essay “The Thing,” or to be satisfied with Bill Brown’s assertion that “Things lie beyond the grid of intelligibility… outside the order of objects” (5).3 Like Baker’s other narrators, he simply makes use of his own keen perception and all sorts of archives and informants to get to the bottom of things and their respective history. Other techniques include footnotes ranging from a sentence to four pages, one of which, not surprisingly, provides a brief history of the footnote (121–23n). But the footnotes may also be reminiscences, brief historical overviews, digressions on doorknobs (with embedded analepses) or, as in the longest one, on grooves in skating on ice and on long-playing records (65–68). Also, despite the prevalent object description and its metonymic logic, there are also quite a few serendipitous imaginings in the novel. The shortest is a speculation on how a giant piece of popcorn might explode in deep space (104) and the longest deals with the likely frequency of the narrator’s thoughts, providing a long list that is headed by the narrator’s girlfriend L. and ends with Kant, Immanuel (126–28). Here and elsewhere, the narrator displays the mindset of a scientist, and hence it is not surprising that the abrasion of shoelaces leads him to perusing the latest scientific research on it and finding a veritable gem of an article in an issue World Textile Abstracts from 1984: “Methods for evaluating the abrasion resistance and knot slippage strength of shoe laces” (132). In Room Temperature, Baker makes use of and develops many of the above narrative techniques. The most prevalent techniques are analepsis, analepsis in analepsis (often in multiple layers), and digression of various kinds, often in relation to analepsis. The novel differs from The Mezzanine in that, as the narrator Mike puts it, “This room is astir—astir with history” (53). He is especially absorbed with how the air moves in the room as he is feeding his infant daughter a bottle of milk. In his attention to detail, he is as obsessed as Howie: “Would I die without knowing the true history of the air, not world-wind-wide, but even confined to twenty

3

In fact, in terms of the age-old philosophical thing versus object debate, Baker seems to straddle it: for him, things are important as such but also as objects related to the subject (the narrator). For a discussion of thing and object, see Bill Brown (4–5 et passim).

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minutes in a small cubic area of my daughter’s room?” (54). But in contrast to Howie, Mike repeatedly discusses his perception of persons close to him, especially the Bug and her mother. To be more precise, as a father watching his firstborn child, he observes the Bug in loving detail. Looking into her nose, he reflects: “You looked into the translucent orange regions and saw surfaces of inconceivable perfection. Any fleck that was visible only pointed up the general pristineness” (35). In watching his daughter, he reminisces about how his relationship to her mother Patty has developed. Also, much more than Howie, Mike is full of literary, musical, pop cultural, and scientific quotes and references. On one page alone, there may be mentions of Sibelius, Palestrina, and Serkin (the pianist), but also more specific references to Debussy’s La Mer, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Robert Boyle’s General History of the Air—as well as insightful discussion of them (52). Room Temperature also includes a number of imaginings, and even what may be termed imagined analepsis. Mike imagines at length how he would have finished his first symphonic piece (starting with “the implosive atmospheric instauration of a newly opened jar of peanut butter” [108]) and how it might have been received (108–11). Also, Baker makes use of extended simile in noting that the fact that the Bug is given a nose vacuumer at the hospital at her birth “was like” the story of the boy, who swallows a toad, and, after it is surgically removed, gets to keep it (40–41). Unlike The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, A Box of Matches centers on routine: it consists of thirty-three chapters describing the narrator getting up while still dark and lighting the fire with the thirty-three matches in the box. However, Emmett—a forty-four-year-old editor of medical textbooks—observes his surroundings as keenly as Baker’s earlier narrator-protagonists. Many techniques are familiar from the previous novels. In chapter 1, the narrator makes use of extended similes and metaphors when describing lighting the fire in the morning, either as an explicit comparison (“what I’m looking at is an orangey ember-cavern that resembles a monster’s sloppy mouth”) or an extended imaginative description: “When it’s very dark like this you lose your sense of scale. Sometimes I think I’m steering a space-plane into a gigantic fissure in a dark and remote planet” (3). Here Baker introduces what is to become the most central technique in the novel: description ranging from the generic to the specific (or the other way around), that is, from a generic you to the specific I (the narrator). Such moves can also be multiple. Here is an instance going twice from I to you within a few sentences, as the narrator in one of the frequent short-range analepses explains how he filled his car with gasoline the day before.

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I looked up from my gassing crouch…, trying to take in the rushing cents’ column, which go by so fast that you end up only making sense of… Yesterday the numbers stopped dead on $ 16.00 and I said, “Bingo, baby.” When you hit it on the money, a good thing will happen to you that day. (146, 147; my emphases)

However, readers barely notice such shifts, since they are a typical feature of autobiographical fiction and autobiography, as Keith Richards’ Life (2010), to take a recent example, repeatedly attests: the idiosyncratic is shown in relation to the common, so that readers can compare and contrast what is typical of the narrator to the kinds of experience they are familiar with. In chapter 1, the extended imaginative description of the space flight goes on for a few more sentences and then, in a new paragraph, starts a three-page analepsis on how “Last night my sleep was threatened by a toe-hole in my sock” as the narrator is reading “Robert Service poems” before going to sleep (4). This sets the tone for the novel, since it largely consists of (mostly) short-range analepses, which often are at the service of digressions—or the other way around. As the narrator begins to describe his locations, such as the living room or its fireplace, he soon digresses on details, in the former case on the history of its oriental rug (45–46) and in the latter on the creator of the Rumford fireplace (93). Then he briefly describes the fireplace in some detail (93–94), before adding a long-range analepsis of how the narrator’s family moved into the house (94–98), which includes a digression on the history of chimney sweeps (95–97). In other words, despite its repetitive structure and shifts between the general and the specific, A Box of Matches by and large makes use of the same techniques as Baker’s first two novels. In the above, I have gone through a number of techniques that Baker employs in order, as it were, to compensate for the lack of main plot in his novel. But, of course, putting it this way is to prioritize the plot. The point of Baker’s fictional world is to show how much you can discover by an interest in detail and by using your imagination—and perhaps even to point to how plotdriven narratives may distort facts and take away from the insights and pleasures afforded by digressions of all kinds. For narratologists today, Baker’s techniques may seem to favor what Galen Strawson has called anti-narrativist, spatial, and “Episodic” ways of experiencing life (430). What is important is not the overall life story, narrative, or plot, but the brief episodes that make up the lives of people who, like Strawson himself, focus on them. Still, as I have noted, even as Baker largely shuns overall narrative or event sequencing, he does make use of narrative by many kinds of analepses, prolepses, digressions, extended similes and metaphors, and imaginings.

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Interpreting Baker’s Novels Studying weak narrativity can help us understand how narrative technique is part and parcel of interpreting literature. For instance, elsewhere I have tried to show that only by analyzing the narrative technique and genre in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels can you comprehend their thematic import and that narratological and hermeneutic study can go hand in hand in assessing the end of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (see Vonnegut; “Narratology”). Similarly, what Baker’s three novels demonstrate is that various narrative techniques and text types blend: narrative serves description, description serves narrative, and the description of objects, their use and history, is central. But, more importantly for keeping readers reading, all techniques in the novels serve character description—and thus the argument of the novels. The three semi-autobiographical first-person narrators are in many senses Everymen as well as have many features that link them to their creator—for instance, Mike in Room Temperature is born on January 5, 1957, two days before Baker (41). They are Everymen also in the sense that their names are only mentioned in passing (and quite late in The Mezzanine and Room Temperature) and that they lead quotidian lives that resemble those of many American men. But Howie, Mike, and Emmett are also given distinguishing features, especially by the vivid depiction of their current life situations (with exposition of their pasts) as a single man, the father of an infant, and a middle-aged family man, respectively. What is more, in their inner lives and thoughts, they resemble their creator, as is evident in the related meticulous attention to details in Baker’s collection of essays, The Size of Thoughts. Some literary allusions and narratorial statements seem to give clues as to how these narrators are to be understood. The paperback Howie in The Mezzanine reads during his lunch hour is Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, the classic guide to self-improvement. Since Howie is some sort of minor official in a somewhat Kafkaesque corporate world, the allusion seems to be rather ironic. He quotes Meditations briefly: “Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life…,” but immediately counters it by thinking “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” (120). He may be impressed by Meditations, but is “tired of Aurelius’s unrelenting and morbid self-denial” (124), and sings the praises of the footnote and his own digressive frame of mind by, among other things, lauding digression as “sometimes the only way to be thorough” (122). In Room Temperature, Mike defends his view of life when feeding his infant daughter by stating a motto for the miniaturist frame of mind he cherishes as much as Howie and Emmett: “I certainly believed, rocking

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my daughter on this Wednesday afternoon, that with a little concentration one’s whole life could be reconstructed from any single twentyminute period randomly or almost randomly selected…” (41). The quotidian lives that Howie, Mike, and Emmett are leading are significant as such, and the seemingly most insignificant action can epitomize all of a man’s life, just as memory and thought can illustrate the riches of what may seem an uneventful life. In A Box of Matches, Emmett repeatedly refers to his favorite poet Robert Service (1874–1958), but only mentions the title of one of his poems, “The Men That Don’t Fit In” (27). In that poem we can read (even though Baker does not quote it): “It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones / Who win the lifelong race” (Service 42, ll. 19–20). This, I think, is the key to interpreting the narrator-protagonists of The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, and A Box of Matches. They may seem to be versions of James Thurber’s Little Man—obsessed with detail, prone to inactivity, rather laughable, even losers of sorts—but in their lives and minds, they have disregarded, unfathomable riches. Also, they all have redeeming social features: as a single man Howie keenly observes his co-workers and has had some loving relationships (mother, father, girlfriend); Mike is a very happy father and loves his wife dearly; and Emmett finally decides to give up his ritual to get up in the morning, so that he can creep back into bed with his loving wife. The three novels can be read as eulogies of the riches in the quotidian lives of men. Thus, all the narrative techniques depicted above are Baker’s way of showing how original the minds and lives of all humans are. By literary allusions and narratorial statements, readers are led to understand that the narration as well as the descriptions in the novels, with their wealth of digressions, serve to reveal the hidden cognitive treasures of the Little Men. Moreover, as the quotes from Baker’s fiction may have suggested, apart from the digressive play, much of the enjoyment in reading Baker lies in his style, not least his long and winding syntax and his precise and abundant vocabulary that draws on various areas of expertise. All such formal features serve to describe the rather related characters of Howie, Mike, and Emmett not only as Baker’s alter egos but also as unsung heroes of the quotidian—and narrative technique forms a central part in that description. This corroborates my point about the importance of combining narratological and hermeneutic study (“Narratology”): the protagonists are mainly portrayed by their digressive narration. Furthermore, the above analysis recognizes the close relation between poetry and narrative that McHale (in “Weak Narrativity”) and I (in “Literary Criticism”) have suggested. As far as McHale’s weak narrativity goes, I have tried to show that Baker narrates “poorly” or “distractedly” only on the surface and that

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there is much narrative coherence in the very way his narrators tell their digressive stories. That is, they do not make use of what Marie-Laure Ryan has called “aesthetically deficient plot twists,” such as cheap plot tricks or plot holes (56), but present a wealth of additions and twists to their almost non-existent main plots. Indeed, how they tell their stories in many ways portrays them as characters and substantiates the argument for the significance of the inner lives of the Little Men. What this analysis of Baker’s three novels suggests is that fiction that seems more or less plotless and thus exemplifies weak narrativity may include a wealth of brief narratives in the form of analepses, digressions, and imaginings, which then can be used at the service of description. In turn, the descriptions of objects can include narratives, especially analepses, so that narrative and description can be used at the service of each other. Finally, since both narrative and description serve character description, which in my interpretation takes a stand for “the steady, quiet, plodding ones,” they are at the service of the text type of argument—at least for readers who recognize Baker’s hints to that effect. But the hierarchy could also be viewed in quite a different way: character description (or its implicit argument for holding the Little Men in high regard) can also be seen as serving the life narrative of the three narrator-protagonists. In other words, it is not a question of the chicken or the egg—you simply cannot have one without the other. Baker’s miniaturist fiction is so enjoyable, because description, narrative, and argument go so seamlessly together by presenting the digressive logic of the diffident and learned narrators. What Baker achieves, then, by slowing down the action and allbut obliterating plot is a kind of defamiliarization. In his classic essay on defamiliarization, Viktor Shklovsky points out: “Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war” (5). Bypassing the typical patriarchal stance of the time (“our wives”), we can notice the very important last point—“our fear of war”—which suggests how serious an effort defamiliarization can be. For Shklovsky (and for thousands of literary scholars after him), defamiliarization in literature is “the very hallmark of the artistic” (12), but it is so much more, since it can revolutionize not only individual perception and literary appreciation but also social life. In Baker’s novels, this logic amounts to digressions and detailed descriptions that slow down and renew perception so that the quotidian comes alive. Thus, description is blended with detailed perception, historical precision with flights of the imagination, so that everyday life gains in significance—for the narrators and their readers alike.

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Conclusion: Weak Narrativity in Plotless Fiction, or, Baker vs. Beckett Finally, let me briefly contrast Baker’s fiction with one of the most famous instances of plotless fiction, Beckett’s “Ping.”4 Perhaps the most major difference is length: as a short story in the collection No’s Knife, “Ping” covers less than three and a half pages. The second major disparity is what David Lodge, in one of the most discerning essays on “Ping,” has called its “elaborate repetition” and its “meagreness of explicit syntax, the drastic reduction of…punctuation, finite verbs, conjunctions, articles, prepositions and subordination” (86). For instance, this is how “Ping” starts: “All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn” (165). As this brief excerpt may suggest, there are no finite verbs at all in “Ping”—thus the sentences are drained of life as much as the narrative is by its lack of plot. As we have noted, Baker’s plotless novels, on the contrary, delight in convoluted but precise syntax and rich vocabulary. On another level, much as I interpreted a kind of argument for the riches in the quotidian lives of ordinary men, Lodge does his very utmost to find meaning in “Ping” and suggests that “Ping is the rendering of the consciousness of a person confined in a small, bare, white room, a person who is evidently under extreme duress, and probably at the last gasp of life” (86). Lodge’s interpretation must of course be seen against the backdrop of critical accusations of the utter meaninglessness and uninterpretability of “Ping,” but to me it proposes, despite some hedging, an exaggeratedly firm interpretation, even overinterpretation, of a short story that Beckett seems to have intended as vague. Thus, Lodge’s reading of “Ping” shows how critics often will do their best to find meaning in what may seem to be—and to be intended as—vague or even unintelligible, as in some Dada poetry. In sum, as always in Beckett, there is certainly some method in what may seem the madness of “Ping,” but vagueness and interpretive perplexity can also be part of that method—which is a far cry from that of Baker. What these few notes on “Ping” may suggest is that the weak narrativity of plotless fiction can range on a scale from Baker to Beckett. Baker evidently endeavors to keep his style and syntax reasonably easily readable. He may use analepses, prolepses, digressions, descriptions, embedded narratives, and imaginings, but they emanate from a particular, named and clearly identified, narrator-protagonist, whose character is given depth by his meandering narrative. In “Ping,” Beckett takes plotlessness about as 4

Originally “Bing” (1966) in French, translated by the author in 1967.

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far as it can go by a much more radical fragmentation of syntax, narrative, and character—however much Lodge may try to domesticate it by his careful, insightful, but rather overinterpretive reading. And, in the final analysis, while much of Beckett’s late fiction, despite the resilience and tenacity of its destitute characters and voices, points to silence, inertia, even death (even though a certain emphasis on human communication is evident at times), Baker’s miniaturist novels implicitly and at times explicitly highlight quotidian human existence and its social and creative aspects—a crucial discrepancy that also comes across through narrative means. Thus, postclassical narratology may learn from Baker as much as from Beckett how weak narrativity works in fiction. The narrativity in Baker’s and Beckett’s fiction is indeed so different from fiction with more plotdriven strong narrativity that we can speak of a difference in kind. But the very dissimilarities between Baker and Beckett also patently demonstrate that this is not enough. They may both centrally depict the consciousness of their narrators, but their use of narrative technique, characterization, style and language differ greatly. Thus, as so often in scholarship, the coining of a term shows that there is a neglected area of study and as that area receives some attention, it reveals that much more analysis is needed. In this way, what Pekka Tammi recognized as strange fiction may be less strange but richer and better understood.

Works Cited Baker, Nicholson. The Anthologist. London et al.: Simon & Schuster, 2009. —. A Box of Matches. 2003. London: Vintage, 2004. —. The Mezzanine. 1988. Cambridge: Granta, 1989. —. Room Temperature. 1990. London: Granta, 1991. —. The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. 1996. London: Vintage, 1997. —. U and I: A True Story. London: Granta, 1991. Beckett, Samuel. “Ping.” 1966. No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose 1947–1966. London: Calder and Boyars, 1967. 165–68. Botton, Alain de. “Foreword.” Xavier de Maistre, A Journey around My Room and A Nocturnal Expedition around My Room. 1794/1825. Trans. Andrew Brown. London: Hesperus Press, 2006. vii–ix. Brown, Andrew. “Introduction.” Xavier de Maistre, A Journey around My Room and A Nocturnal Expedition around My Room. 1794/1825. Trans. Andrew Brown. London: Hesperus Press, 2006. xi–xv. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2002): 1–22. Chambers, Ross. “Meditation and the Escalator Principle (on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine).” Modern Fiction Studies 40.4 (1994): 765–806. Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990.

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Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” 1951. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York et al.: Perennial Library / Harper & Row, 1975. Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Lodge, David. “Some Ping Understood.” Encounter XXX.2 (1968): 85–89. de Maistre, Xavier. A Journey around My Room and A Nocturnal Expedition around My Room. 1794/1825. Trans. Andrew Brown. London: Hesperus Press, 2006. McHale, Brian. “Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry.” Narrative 9.2 (2001): 161–67. Miller, Laura. “Lifting Up the Madonna [interview with Nicholson Baker].” On-line journal Salon 10 (1996). www.salon.com/10/bookfront/salon.html. 7 July 2010. Nünning, Ansgar. “Towards a Typology, Poetics and History of Description in Fiction.” Description in Literature and Other Media. Ed. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. 91–128. Pettersson, Bo. “Literary Criticism Writes Back to Metaphor Theory: Exploring the Relation between Extended Metaphor and Narrative in Literature.” Beyond Cognitive Metaphor: Perspectives on Literary Metaphor. Ed. Monika Fludernik. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. 94–112. —. “Narratology and Hermeneutics: Forging the Missing Link.” Narratology in the Age of Interdisciplinary Narrative Research. Ed. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. 11–34. —. The World According to Kurt Vonnegut: Moral Paradox and Narrative Form. Åbo/ Turku: Åbo Akademi UP, 1994. Richards, Keith, with James Fox. Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design.” Narrative 17.1 (2009): 56–75. Saltzman, Arthur. Understanding Nicholson Baker. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1999. Schwenger, Peter. “Still Life: A User’s Manual.” Narrative 10.2 (2002): 140–55. Service, Robert. Collected Poems. New York: Putnam, 1940. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Device.” 1917. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1998. 1–14. Strawson, Galen. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio 17.4 (2004): 428–52. Tammi, Pekka. “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’).” Partial Answers 4.2 (2006): 19–40. Wolf, Werner. “Description as a Transmedial Mode of Representation: General Features and Possibilities of Realization in Painting, Fiction and Music.” Description in Literature and Other Media. Ed. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. 1–87.

Laura Karttunen (University of Tampere)

Events Can Be Quoted (and Words Need Not Be) [H]e will attempt to represent the roll of thunder, the noise of wind and hail, or the creaking of wheels, and pulleys, and the various sounds of flutes, pipes, trumpets, and all sorts of instruments: he will bark like a dog, bleat like a sheep, or crow like a cock; his entire art will consist in imitation of voice and gesture, and there will be very little narration. (Plato, Republic, Book III)

As the emphatic affirmation in the title suggests, someone has made a claim to the contrary: events cannot be quoted. This is what Gérard Genette wrote in Narrative Discourse: “Mimesis in words can only be mimesis of words. Other than that, all we have and can have is degrees of diegesis. So we must distinguish here between narrative of events and ‘narrative of words’” (164). Whereas in the theater the actors can show or imitate events, a verbal narrative can only aspire to an illusion of mimesis. And there is but one exception, ‘narrative of words,’ a term Genette uses when referring to the direct mode of speech representation. Following Plato, Genette states that in mimesis the floor is given to the character, whose speech is reported as it was supposedly spoken. The quantity of information and detail is maximized and the narrative speed slows down to a scenic mode. In narratized or narrated speech, on the other hand, the speech act is stripped of its details and condensed. It becomes an event like any other. Thus, both narrated events and narrated speech fall under the diegetic mode. Even though the distinction proposed by Genette has some heuristic value, his renaming of the two Platonic categories as the ‘narrative of words’ and the ‘narrative of events’ is infelicitous. As has been pointed out in numerous studies, speech cannot be reproduced with any accuracy, and as I will show below, certain kinds of events can be represented in a manner that is no less mimetic than direct speech representation. The problematic distinction between the narrative of words and the narrative of events is but one aspect of what I perceive to be the textualist or verbal bias in Genette’s theory of narrative, evident in passages such as this: “[N]o narrative can ‘show’ or ‘imitate’ the story it tells.…Narration, oral or written, is a fact of language, and language signifies without im-

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itating” (164). Working within the structuralist tradition, Genette based his model of speech representation on the conception of language as a code, a system of differences. This led him to underestimate the problems posed by the differences between media. Genette states that there is no difference between the sentence spoken by a character and its representation in the text “other than what derives from the transition from oral language to written” (169), as if language were more or less platform independent—as if it consisted of words and meanings only. Because of its narrow view of language, Genette’s model can accommodate for neither non-verbal sounds nor the non-verbal elements of speech. As we recall, Plato did not focus exclusively on verbal objects of quotation; he thought mimicking the non-human sound of thunder was just as bad as mimicking the speech of a reprehensible character. A quotation can present other things besides words, meanings, and speech acts. Yet even in quite recent models of speech representation, verbal quotation is at least implicitly regarded as the norm. In what follows, I will illustrate how research into speech reporting has been gradually moving away from the kind of verbal and categorical approach favored by Genette.1 As I see it, the direction taken by that research has been towards greater flexibility, context-sensitivity and intermediality. Meir Sternberg’s functionalist speech-act model (1982) and Monika Fludernik’s theory of schematic language representation (1993) constitute the two major milestones on this journey. But not even these groundbreaking theories are totally immune to the verbal bias, which suggests that the privileging of words and communication and the overlooking of sound quotations, for example, may be something of a collective blind spot among narrative scholars. In highlighting that blind spot I am obviously not suggesting that we should reject these invaluable models. My objective is to show, with the help of Herbert Clark and Richard Gerrig’s theory of quotations as demonstrations, what could be gained by abandoning the wordcentered view of quotation. Even though the textual level of a narrative, its words and sentences, is the one immediately accessible to us, it is often not the most relevant.

1

I am not the first to address the shortcomings of a grammatical and categorical model of speech reporting. The classic text is Brian McHale’s 1978 review article. The functionalist approaches put forth by McHale and Sternberg paved the way for the theories to be discussed below. Fludernik (26–31) offers a useful overview of the fate of Plato’s distinction in narrative theory, including Genette. I should point out that I am using the terms quotation and direct speech representation interchangeably, even though the latter is misleading when it comes to non-verbal quotations. I have opted for representation because of its conventionality.

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Quotations of Events in The God of Small Things Since Genette’s approach consists in setting up discrete syntactic categories of directness (report of words) and indirectness (narration of events), it seems to rule out the possibility of presenting actions and events in the form of a quotation. Moreover, a mimetic, reproductive relationship (a representational rather than a syntactic relation in Sternberg’s parlance) supposedly cannot obtain between a non-verbal event and words.2 Some of the more recent theories of quotation, often informed by sociolinguistics, include other objects of quotation as well. It is not just words that can be quoted, as Mark de Vries points out, but sounds, graphic symbols, names, events, emotions, and ideas, too (47).3 He argues that interjections such as crack, whoops, and hah hah can function as parenthetic direct speech demonstrating sounds, events, and emotions, respectively. Eh, for instance, can serve as a parenthetic demonstration of hesitation. (57) In the following passage from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, embedded in direct speech are two quotations of hesitation: “Then Sophie Mol said to Chacko, ‘Ummm...excuse me? D’you think you could put me down now? I’m ummm…not really used to being carried’” (147). Arguably umm… might be regarded as just another word that is reproduced along with the others. But since it is also a speech performance factor (or what some people call a dysfluency) that is normally omitted from quotations, reproducing it means marking it for some purpose. By depicting the girl’s act of hesitation, the quotations highlight the fact that she does not feel comfortable around her father whom she has not seen in years. In order to illustrate the need for a wider conception of quotation, I will discuss some further examples from The God of Small Things. The novel contains numerous quotations of actions, which facilitate immersion just like direct speech does—by creating the impression of contemporaneous happening as opposed to retrospective reporting: 2

3

Sternberg (“Proteus”) provides a detailed critique of Genette’s inconsistent use of the term mimesis, which can stand for sympathy, realism, specificity, distinctiveness and reproduction. In this article, I am focusing on quotation as a form rather than broaching the broader representational question of mimesis. It does have a tendency of creeping in through the back door, though. I cannot do full justice to Sternberg’s ingenious article here; I discuss it at length in my forthcoming dissertation on hypothetical patterning in literature. The question of quoting non-verbal phenomena such as actions has gained currency of late because of the growing popularity of chat rooms, where writing must adapt to the requirements of informal interaction. Expressions typical of internet slang such as LOL and *hug* are quotations of actions, but they also perform those actions. They are a means of smuggling the non-linguistic reality into written language. Indeed, it is only through quotation that this can happen, as de Vries points out (56).

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(1) Two clicks to close the suitcase./ Click. And click. (114) (2) She lunged at him once again. Ickilee ickilee ickilee! (178) (3) The other [arm] swinging like a soldier’s (lef, lef, lefrightlef ). (141)

In the first, quite ordinary case, click demonstrates the act of clicking shut the lock of a suitcase and the sound it makes. This example alone would not be sufficient to question Genette’s distinction between the narrative of words and the narrative of events, because it is predominantly the sound rather than the action that is depicted. In addition, the onomatopoeic expression click is also a word, and as such it does signify rather than just imitate. But in the second example, it is the act of tickling that is presented, not the sound it makes, for tickling as such does not really make a sound. The expression ickilee ickilee ickilee is similar to coochie coochie coo in that it conventionally accompanies the act of tickling. Both expressions are iconic in the sense that the fast-paced rhythm resembles the movement of the tickling fingers. De Vries would call ickilee ickilee ickilee a conventionalized quasi-linguistic representation of an action. (56) However, it also has a descriptive component in that it is reminiscent of the verb to tickle. This quotation thus combines linguistic description with a quasi-linguistic demonstration (see Clark & Gerrig 789). In the third example, it is the act of swinging one’s arm that is presented. This time there is no speech and no sound to be represented, only the action. That is, at least as far as the textual actual world is concerned. The sound may nevertheless be heard in the perceiving mind’s ear. The God of Small Things is quite exceptional in the way it depicts the idiosyncratic perceptions and thoughts of the 7-year-old twins Estha and Rahel (cf. Karttunen 429). The quotations of actions and sounds constitute yet another facet of the unique mind style coloring the narrative. For these two language learners, words have an aura of magic about them, as if they could bring about the events they name. Conversely, actions such as tickling, swinging one’s arm, and bowing call forth verbal echoes: (4) ‘Bow,’ he said, and smiled, because when he was younger, he had been under the impression that you had to say ‘Bow’ when you bowed. That you had to say it to do it. ‘Bow, Estha,’ they’d say. And he’d bow and say, ‘Bow,’ and they’d look at each other and laugh, and he’d worry. (97)

Estha views the word bow as a constituent part of the act of bowing. The passage reminds me of a toddler who upon seeing someone sawing a plank zooms over and starts saying the Finnish word for saw over and over again (saha, saha, saha), thereby emulating the rhythmic action and sound of sawing wood. The child, like Estha, is not so much describing the action as experiencing it and rejoicing in it by saying the word. Actions and words overlap; there is no clear dividing line between them. In

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Roy’s novel such features of child language are manipulated to aesthetic ends: reworked, distorted, and stretched to their limits. By exposing the reader to the relatively conventional quotations discussed above and by inviting her to naturalize them by recourse to the twins’ experience of the world, Roy desensitizes her to more unconventional uses of language. In the end, not even the most outrageous instance of word-play will wrench the reader from her illusion: (5) Estha saw how Baby Kochamma’s neckmole licked its chops and throbbed with delicious anticipation. Der-dhoom, der-dhoom. It changed colour like a chameleon, Der-green, der-blueblack, der-mustardyellow. (147)

Der-dhoom, der-dhoom quotes the movement and the changing color of the mole as if it made a sound, even though Estha only sees it. Der-dhoom is hardly a conventional way of demonstrating an inaudible event like this. While it does mimic a beat, Baby Kochamma’s pulse perhaps, there is no sound to be heard on the scene—unless it is the beating of the boy’s own heart. Even more unusual is the latter quotation where the changing hue of the mole is represented with the reduplicative expression “der-green, der-blueblack, der-mustardyellow.” As in ickilee, the quotation recruits the descriptive content of the words while retaining the immediacy and directness characteristic of direct speech. This quotation of an event is testament to Roy’s keen eye and ear for the conventions of language, but also to the capacity of this particular linguistic structure for generating novel forms. In Genette’s model, only direct speech representation seems to qualify as a true narrative of words. Even though the quotations reproduced above represent actions (and/or sounds), in terms of syntax they are very much like direct speech. They are free standing or parenthetic, and they are introduced by a descriptive phrase followed by a typographic signal such as a line-break indicating that mimicking is about to take place. The quotations are also similar to fictional dialogue in that the narrative speed is scenic. It takes the same amount of time to read “lef, lef, lefrightlef” as it does to swing the arm.4 As Genette himself points out, the difference between the modes of speech representation ultimately boils down to a question of temporality (Narrative 166). In terms of temporality, these examples are just like dialogue, where the discourse time is in sync with

4

De Voogd discusses some fabulous sound quotations from Joyce’s works. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce depicts the duration of a tenor’s long note by a lengthy string of words describing it. It takes the reader the same amount of time to read the words as it does for the tenor to sing that note (de Voogd 175).

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the story time. The passages also lack one of the distinguishing features of indirectness, the reporter’s analysis (see Coulmas 4). Whereas indirect speech is processed by the reporter, here there is a sense of immediacy. For Sternberg, Genette’s mistake was to wed syntactic forms with particular representational ends, which led him to place too great an emphasis on syntactic rather than rhetorical considerations (“Proteus” 119). But the conflation of syntax with rhetoric is also problematic from the point of view of syntactic approaches. Had Genette been writing about the forms of (direct) quotation and (indirect) narration and not about a narrative of events and a narrative of words, the quasi-linguistic quotations above would not be anomalous at all. When it comes to representing actions, there is a more general tendency in narrative theory of privileging the narrative sentence and its main constituent, the verb. William Labov, for example, treats expressive phonology and sound effects as evaluative devices that accompany the narrative proper consisting of narrative clauses (379). While it is true that sound effects often mark the emotional high points of a narrative, indicating why the teller feels the story to be tellable, they can also represent actions, as we have seen. In Deborah Tannen’s example, a young woman uses sound words to recount a sequence where she scared her assailant away with a rock (“Introducing” 327). Rather than just illustrating a preceding narrative clause, the sound words actually constitute the action sequence. The prevalence of quoted actions and sounds in oral narratives is explained by the fact that they lend themselves to the kind of blow-byblow account that is very high in tellability when compared to analytical, condensed, and indirect syntax.

Away from Verbal–Reproductive Theories of Quotation: Two Steps in the Right Direction As early as 1982, Meir Sternberg made a strong case against the notion of reproduction in speech representation and against Genette’s distinction between the verbal and non-verbal objects of quotation. According to Sternberg, the existence of such widely accepted forms of direct speech as translated quotations and interpretive paraphrases of someone else’s words or gestures proves that reproducing the sentence uttered is not a necessary feature of quotation (“Proteus” 134–37). In translation, different words are used to express the same propositional content, and gestures contain neither words nor propositions but are rather communicative acts that the quoting agent verbalizes. The possibility of quoting future or counterfactual speech also goes against the reproductive hypothesis. Sternberg states

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that since speech does not consist of words only but of phonetic features, too, a narrative of words in Genette’s sense of the term is impossible to begin with. In thought, the share of non-verbal content is even greater. So neither speech nor thought nor gestures can be reproduced, but all three can be quoted. (134) Consequently, Sternberg replaces Genette’s distinction between words and events or verbal and non-verbal reality with a distinction between the expressive and the nonexpressive. All expressive elements in the world can be quoted. Or, rather, since any object can be “made articulate, given perspectival features, transformed from mere object into quoted subject,” all elements in the world—even a rock or a mole—can be quoted. (135) The only kind of quotation left out from Sternberg’s comprehensive account is the one that is not meaningful in human terms, such as a sound of the natural world. In his communicative or speech-act model of quotation, inanimate objects are anthropomorphized, for they are presented as saying something rather than just sounding like something. This is a natural consequence of Sternberg’s definition of quotation as mimesis of discourse, characterized by “the fact that its represented object is itself a subject with expressive features: verbal, moral, sociocultural, thematic, aesthetic, informational, persuasive” (108–09). Actions such as tickling or swinging an arm do not possess such features—unless their “message” is cast into words—which means that they are not conducive to what Sternberg (109) calls a perspectival montage between the quotee and the quoter. Considering that fictional narrative thrives on perspectival ambiguity and the parodic or polemic relationships between the framing and the framed speech act, Sternberg’s emphasis is anything but misplaced. But it does come at the cost of excluding sound quotations, which, according to his definition, are not quotations at all. Even though Sternberg introduces several types of quotations deviating from the standard case where verbal content is reproduced in verbal form, and even though he refuses to treat reproduction as a universal obligation and the distinguishing feature of direct speech, he does not rule it out entirely. Monika Fludernik goes further than that and argues that rather than constituting exceptions, these examples in fact illustrate a tendency common to all quotations: the tendency to typification and schematization. Instead of reproducing word-for-word, direct speech representation involves extracting the gist of an utterance and expressing it with the help of ready-made, clichéd phrases. (Fludernik 418) As in Sternberg’s model, it is essential that the pragmatic content of the communicative act be conveyed, no matter which words were used originally. In addition to Sternberg’s categories of mute signals and modalized and preproductive speech, Fludernik mentions further types of non-re-

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productive quotations.5 To name but two, she importantly recognizes that quotations can be used to convey attitudes and emotions instead of a prior speech act. Let me illustrate this with a wonderful example from Greg Myers’s article on the functions of hypothetical speech in group discussions: “I think you just get on with what you’re doing and you see a few things and go oh yeah fair enough but I don’t feel guilty when I’m driving home tonight and think oh shit I’ve just burnt a bigger hole in the ozone, you know, honest I can’t.” (580–81)

The speaker uses highly expressive hypothetical speech as a shorthand for his emotions regarding climate change and the need to do something about it. In the latter instance he uses hypothetical speech to illustrate an attitude which he does not endorse. One’s feelings are notoriously difficult to describe in so many words, especially in cases such as this where the speaker is only barely aware of them. Yet it is relatively simple to depict feelings in quotations by means of expressive features such as oh yeah and oh shit. Fludernik argues that expressive features function as “objective correlatives” of emotion and of consciousness and can therefore be regarded as a means of symbolization and typification: “It then becomes possible to identify both lexical and syntactic expressivity as a strategy of typification and symbolization, employed to symbolize the non-linguistic…discourse of emotion within the boundaries of linguistic consciousness” (419). When she talks about an “objective correlative” instead of “reproduction” in connection with the representation of emotions and consciousness, she clearly moves away from the reproductive conception of quotation. Fludernik’s view of expressive features as transcending the discrete categories of speech representation (429) is also at odds with the grammatical approach and in sympathy with Sternberg’s functionalist model. Despite gesturing towards an anti-verbal model of quotation (that is, one that does not privilege meaning), Fludernik stops short of taking the next logical step, which would be to dispose of the idea of verbal quotation as the standard. While emphasizing emotions and attitudes, she still endorses the traditional view that the function of speech representation is to convey the propositional and pragmatic content of a prior communicative act (418, 436). Even though the requirement of copying word-for5

Fludernik (414) lists ten kinds of “anti-mimeticism.” A similar list has been provided by Tannen (“Introducing” 313–14). Sternberg is critical of Fludernik’s radical claim that all instances of speech representation must be viewed as manufactured, as fictions of language (“Factives” 186).

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word has now been dropped, the obligation to convey the pragmatic content of the utterance still stands. This position is clearly an improvement on the verbal bias of Genette’s approach, but it is still problematic because it skews our view of the spectrum of quotations. While Fludernik does not deny the possibility of quoting other things besides the propositional and pragmatic content of utterances, she still elevates the latter to normative status. Other types of quotations are then treated as exceptions to the normative case. This has adverse consequences for her analysis of quotations that substitute some of the original words with expressions such as so and so, etc., or blah blah blah. Here is one of the examples she discusses: “They are surface structure narratives, which run somewhat as follows: So and so (by name) builds a fishtrap on a certain bend of a river a certain year.” (Longacre; quoted in Fludernik 410)

According to Fludernik, expressions like so and so are indicative of authorial intrusion and typification, and “a curious refusal to name or to report in verbatim fashion” (410). The embedded quotation here is not verbatim, for it substitutes so and so and a certain for particular words in the original speech act(s). Lacking in all specifics, the quotation conveys neither a proposition nor an illocutionary act. A model of quotation focused on propositional and pragmatic content cannot reasonably account for what happens in this example. But the theory of quotations as demonstrations can. Rather than conceiving of the field of quotations as a set of concentric circles—with verbal quotations at the center—Clark and Gerrig propose a layered model where the common denominator of quotations is not any particular object of reproduction but the act of demonstrating something.

Clark and Gerrig’s Theory of Quotations as Demonstrations and Why We Need It Clark and Gerrig argue that quoting involves demonstrating verbal or non-verbal objects the way you would demonstrate the serve of a famous tennis player by mimicking his posture and his movements. Even though Clark and Gerrig concur with Sternberg and Fludernik that most quotations do in fact convey the propositional and pragmatic content of a prior speech act, they do not base their theory on this empirical fact. Instead, they start from the assumption that a quotation is a selective demonstration that captures only some aspects of the original. Sometimes the aspect being depicted is the illocutionary act, but Clark and Gerrig state that a quotation can demonstrate any of the following aspects and more:

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delivery (voice pitch, voice age, voice quality, speech defects, etc.), language (language, dialect, register), and linguistic acts (illocutionary act, proposition expressed, locutionary act, utterance act, collaborative act) (775). They argue that no quotation can convey all the aspects listed here even though this is the claim implicit in the term verbatim. Rather than objectively recording speech in the manner of a tape recorder, the quoting agent necessarily adopts a perspective, foregrounding some aspects of speech and letting others fall into the background. There is always authorial involvement, an element of choice, even when the quotation happens to reproduce the words uttered and the proposition expressed. Speech reports need to have a point, because memorizing and recalling all the details of a conversation is impossible due to the wealth of data. Clark and Gerrig name the foregrounded or focal feature the depictive aspect of the quotation, whereas the other aspects are supportive, annotative, or incidental (768). The supportive aspects are part of the quotation and enable the act of demonstration, but they were not present in the original (speech) act. In the example with the tickling above, the phonetic features of ickilee ickilee ickilee are supportive, and the depictive aspect is the rhythm. In the following quotation, the English language functions as a supportive aspect, chosen because the international readership of Roy’s novel probably does not understand Malayalam: “Chacko said to Ammu in Malayalam, ‘Please. Later. Not now’” (145). The quotation demonstrates Chacko’s illocutionary act of making a request, which is therefore the depictive aspect. Like Sternberg, Clark and Gerrig recognize the quoter’s license to make adjustments for the sake of intelligibility. The concept of the supportive aspects of quotation seems to pertain to these adjustments. The idea of the depictive, supportive, annotative, and incidental aspects of quotation offers something new in that it allows one to account for, or perhaps rather to disregard, the constraints of a particular medium. Theories of direct speech have traditionally had to grapple with the inadequacy of the quoting medium. The lack of transcription techniques for phonetic features such as tone of voice tends to lead theorists to embrace a view that is the polar opposite of the idea of verbatim reproduction: quoting involves producing a version that is faithful to the content of the original only. At one end of the continuum is W. V. O. Quine’s (219) idea of transcribing the physical incident of speech like a birdsong, at the other Monika Fludernik’s view that speech is analyzed into phonemes and words and that only the gist of the utterance is memorized and reproduced. By adopting Clark and Gerrig’s idea of selective demonstration, one need not go to either extreme. In their example where someone demonstrates John McEnroe’s serve, it does not make a difference that the

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demonstrator is right-handed or that the tennis ball and racket are nonexistent, for these are supportive aspects. Even though the demonstration differs from its object in these significant respects, it recognizably depicts it. (769) One need not even rely exclusively on one’s mimicking skills, for one can make the object of demonstration explicit. In Seinfeld, Kramer mystifies Jerry and George by mimicking something or someone. He informs them afterwards that he was demonstrating “Frank and Estelle’s reaction to hearing about George’s man love for a she-Jerry.” The theory of quotations as demonstrations does not call for total iconicity (which is unachievable); the intent to demonstrate will go a long way. Clark and Gerrig offer a fresh take on the question of thought representation as well. If ickilee ickilee ickilee is close enough an approximation of the act of tickling, then surely “she thought, ‘I’m going to make a fool of myself’” is close enough to the apprehensive thoughts going through the head of a performer before a show. The speech event itself is supportive in that it allows one to depict aspects of one’s own or someone else’s thoughts in a manner that is understandable to others (793). One of the classic complaints about direct thought representation is that it makes thoughts out to be more verbal, more intentional, and more reflective than they actually are. The theory of quotations as demonstrations manages to sidestep this issue. Presenting a person’s thoughts in the form of wellformed sentences (supportive aspect) in no way entails the assumption that thoughts are like that. Direct thought representation does not need to be a copy of the thought in all respects—indeed it cannot be, for the mind runs on a platform of synapses, not writing. The reader just needs to recognize the speaker’s or author’s intention of demonstrating mental functioning. The same goes for quoting mute reality as in: “And Ammu’s angry eyes on Estha said, All right. Later.” (145) The eyes obviously do not speak, but we accept this sentence as a demonstration of the look in them. What the idea of the supportive aspects of quotation does is take the focus off the medium and its imperfections. It allows us to filter out the white noise resulting from the change of medium. Rather than viewing language as somehow inadequate to the task of representing mental activity or nonverbal reality, the theory celebrates the ability of language users to demonstrate recognizably things they know very little about. It also grants the literary scholar permission to abstain from speculating on the extent to which language matches thought—that “stale exam question” abhorred by Genette (Revisited 61). On the other hand, Clark and Gerrig’s theory in no way prevents us from exploring the features associated with a particular medium. It seems to me that the supportive and incidental aspects are a key to the differences between media, allowing us to zoom in on the materiality of a given medium, should we wish to do so.

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Returning now to the fish trap example discussed by Fludernik, we can see that according to the theory of quotations as demonstrations there is nothing peculiar about the use of so and so, for the depictive aspect of the quotation is neither the sentence uttered nor its propositional content. The speaker demonstrates the structure of a particular type of narrative, and even says as much, which makes particulars such as “who” or “when” irrelevant. So and so and a certain serve as supportive aspects, as building blocks that do not claim to reproduce any original but do enable the speaker to demonstrate the structure of such narratives. What Fludernik refers to as the typification of the linguistic form of the quotation is in fact a consequence of the speaker choosing to demonstrate something else. It seems to me that the relationship between Clark and Gerrig’s and Fludernik’s theories could be one of complementariness: selective demonstration is a universal of quotation, but typifying explains the linguistic shape that these demonstrations take. The innovativeness of Clark and Gerrig’s approach lies in their realization that even words, propositions, and the illocutionary act can sometimes play a supporting role. The model thus accommodates for quotations of sounds and actions as well, whereas theories that privilege the propositional and pragmatic content posit no other positive term besides faithfulness, which means that the field of non-faithful and non-verbal quotations is left unexplored and undifferentiated. In Clark and Gerrig’s medium-independent model, quotations of sounds, emotions, and actions are not viewed as exceptions to the rule of verbal quotation but as independent varieties in their own right. Nor do we need to stop there, for the theory will admit of any object that can be demonstrated. And if all quotations capture only some aspects of their objects, Genette’s claim that only language can be presented mimetically (reproduced) by means of language will not hold. If a quotation can mimic the rhythm or the duration of a sound, it is not any less reproductive than a quotation that reproduces words. If there were a minimum level of reproductiveness, it would have to be set very low (see Fludernik 409).

The Theory of Quotations as Demonstrations Explains Literary Conventions The problem with the earlier models of direct speech representation was that a feature specific to one genre (serious written language) was taken to be the hallmark of all quotations. Promoting reproduction to a false universal meant losing sight of the various functions of quotations in other genres. Having separated analytically the various aspects of lan-

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guage amenable to demonstration, the theory of quotations as demonstrations allows us to investigate how these aspects are entangled or coupled in specific genres.6 While it is the quoter’s responsibility to inform her addressee which aspect she is demonstrating, only rarely does the decision lie in her own hands. Speakers as a rule are not aware that they are engaging in selective demonstration when quoting, so it seems that in many cases the context and genre will do the selecting for both quoter and audience. In newspapers, quotations tend to demonstrate the illocutionary act and sometimes the sentence uttered. A transcript produced within, say, conversation analysis will usually demonstrate the utterance act and the collaborative act, but if the same forms are transported from the context of conversation analysis to narrative fiction, they will be construed as demonstrations of subjectivity, emotion, dialect, and, through the technique of ‘marking,’ of the quoted speaker’s character (cf. Clark & Gerrig 781). Such overlapping depictive aspects are difficult to disentangle, and even more so if one is to take into account the expressiveness associated with the quoting agent as well.7 I will therefore mention, by way of example, just two cases where the theory of selective demonstration potentially clarifies our understanding of a literary convention: the use of aspects of delivery to depict emotions and the representation of non-standard speech. As regards the context of fiction, Clark and Gerrig’s observation about the layering of depictive aspects seems especially fruitful. They analyze an example where a girl reports, in highly expressive language, what she said in the hospital. Clark and Gerrig point out that the quotation may demonstrate several things: 1. the loudness, intonation and gestures that the girl used when speaking in the hospital, or 2. her anger and frus-

6

7

A change in thinking about direct speech was brought about by studies utilizing oral corpora (e.g. Tannen, Talking). Short, Semino, and Wynne react to this change by retaining all the essentials of the reproductive theory but viewing them as specific to the genre of serious written language. They insist on the idea of “faithfulness” to the communicative content (lexical items, grammatical structures) of the original (328). They do, however, adopt Clark and Gerrig’s idea that the reproductive assumption is conventionally implied in serious writing rather than constituting a linguistic rule applying across all contexts. By giving primacy to faithfulness—even if only as an empirical fact—Short, Semino, and Wynne commit themselves to the reproductive fallacy. Fludernik’s conception of expressive features as “objective correlatives” of emotion begs the question: whose emotion? In fiction, expressive language is used to simulate a feeling consciousness, but in natural narratives at least, the quoter’s emotions dominate, as seen in the example with the ozone layer. Bakhtin acknowledges the problem of double expressiveness in speech reporting (92). It is not just a question of framing the quoted speech in an attempt at re-accenting, but of injecting expressiveness to the other’s speech itself.

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tration. At a yet higher level, when quoting other people, a speaker may mimic a person’s idiolect in order to get into character (776–77). Fictional direct speech is similarly layered. In The God of Small Things, Estha addresses her mother, only to get a snappish response: “‘Now WHAT?’ The WHAT snapped, barked, spat out.” (107) While the capital letters depict an aspect of delivery, loudness, on a higher level of abstraction the quotation demonstrates Ammu’s anger. As is well known, in reading fiction we tend to jump right to that higher level, and authors are guilty of the same thing, for instead of depicting sound qualities they tend to offer an interpretation of them: “she said angrily.” Since literary dialogue usually consists of well-formed sentences, including aspects of delivery means marking the speech for some purpose. In fact, what appear to be depictions of prosodic features are so closely intertwined with expressiveness, characterization, and judging that the level of sound seems to disappear entirely. The features of delivery may then play but a supportive role. Clark and Gerrig’s layered model of quotations allows us to view speech performance factors, too, as optional rather than essential objects of demonstration. To put it differently, sometimes it might make sense not to approach fictional dialogue as speech representation at all. The force of generic constraints is perhaps most acutely felt when attempting to demonstrate a regional dialect without marking the speaker as “the kind of person who speaks with an accent.” In postcolonial literature in particular, such an effect is highly undesirable, because it suggests that the speech of the subaltern deviates from, or is an adulterated form of the colonizers’ language (cf. Ashcroft et al.). Even if it is possible, by manipulating the frame, to minimize the gulf between the narrator’s style and the characters’ idiom in a given novel, the speaker easily ends up being marked anyway because standard orthography is such a strong frame assumption. Hence, it is not surprising that direct speech in fiction rarely reads like a precise phonetic transcription of the sounds and stress patterns typical of a particular variant (see Leech & Short 135). It is symptomatic that in Roy’s novel there is an attempt to imitate Indian English only when spoken by the unlikeable character Comrade Pillai, the opportunistic and prejudiced communist leader. Leech and Short observe that rather than reproducing the salient features of a particular regional dialect, non-standard speech in fiction may simply signal otherness and distance from the author’s standard language (137). They bring up the common conception that what matters is the contrast between the fictional speakers and their styles, not fidelity to an original. Clark and Gerrig’s model, by virtue of breaking apart the aspects of language amenable to demonstration, allows us to glimpse beyond the reproductive–non-reproductive debate. It is not a case of either–or but

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of more–or–less. Since it is language—or dialect—that is being demonstrated and not the delivery, there is no need to reproduce all phonetic details. But this does not mean forsaking the attempt to demonstrate an actual regional dialect. As the demonstration only needs to be recognizable, just one dialect feature may be all that is needed. Being able to decouple aspects of delivery from aspects of dialect in this way is essential from the perspective of postcolonial politics. It is important to avoid marking while at the same time demonstrating a recognizable regional language and a distinct cultural point of view.

Some Zany and Difficult Quotations The theory of selective demonstration is an adjustable lens that allows us to focus alternately on the meaning, the sound shape, or the material, printed form of a quotation. It importantly recognizes that not all kinds of texts set store on the communication of ideas and values. Concrete poetry and the various kinds of avant-garde prose, for example, will be better served by a theory acknowledging different foci of interest besides semantic and pragmatic content. Short et al. are perhaps too dismissive in their attitude to such rarer types of quotations, arguing that only “in very particular circumstances indeed” will the typeface, for instance, be of any consequence (330). In fiction such examples are not quite so rare. For example, in the LI chapter of Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi, there is a message hidden in the numbered inventory of the rooms and inhabitants of the apartment house: in each of the three sections, a string of the letter a, m, or e runs diagonally across the page. The three sections together spell the French word ame. If one were to quote this sequence, one would have to use a fixed-width font to retain the hidden message. The typeface would therefore be a supportive rather than an incidental aspect of the quotation. Perec also reproduces a collection of novelty business cards featuring several different fonts. This is an instance of direct writing representation, a form typically associated with a high faithfulness claim in the model presented by Short et al. (353). However, the concept of faithfulness, centered on lexis and syntax, fails to capture what is going on here. The fonts are non-incidental; otherwise they would not be there. Even more challenging in its complex materiality or multimodality is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves that makes use of various type-faces and relies on iconicity and kinetics for some of its effects (see Gibbons). There is a sequence of pages containing only one sentence, then just one word, and the reader’s act of turning the pages resembles the fictional character’s act of running. The fastening pace also mimics

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the building up of suspense, so the sequence may also be viewed as an instance of emotional iconicity. If one wished to quote this sequence, reproducing the words and sentences would not begin to cover it. Rather than revolving around the linguistic code, Clark and Gerrig’s approach is open to all types of things one can do with language. One way of verifying the existence of a linguistic or literary norm is to see whether it is exploited and subverted in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction. As Pekka Tammi puts it in Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics, “the best test for the models themselves may well be their application to the Nabokovian idiosyncrasies through which the norms and boundaries are transgressed” (3). As we have seen, Clark and Gerrig’s theory explains quotations where words and meanings are of secondary importance. One such instance is the demonstration of a person’s speech defect. Rather than reproducing something that the person has actually said, the quoting party may choose words that best highlight the speech impediment, even if the result is pure nonsense (Clark & Gerrig 781). In Nabokov’s novel Pnin, the eponymous hero conveniently uses the word nothing four times: “‘I haf nofing,’ wailed Pnin between loud, damp sniffs, ‘I haf nofing left, nofing, nofing!’” (43). The natural assumption here is that the quotation is a demonstration of the delivery, more specifically of Pnin’s mispronunciation of the θ sound. And in keeping with the literary convention that foreign accents and speech defects are a matter of fun, Timofey Pnin emerges as a somewhat laughable figure. But by exploiting the capacity of quotations to demonstrate language at several levels, Nabokov creates a double image, for what is also conveyed is Pnin’s proposition that he has nothing left.8 The technique is analogous to the one employed right after Pnin has had his teeth pulled out. Despite the exquisite lyrical style of the description of his mouth, the fact remains that his teeth have been pulled out and he is probably in pain. Even if a person speaks with an accent, he may have something to say, and he may be in pain. That is, sometimes nofing means nothing.9

8 9

Professor Barabtarlo’s Phantom of Fact is an indispensable resource on Pnin. My reading of this passage puts me in that choir of critics who have noted a peculiar warmth and compassion in Pnin (see Barabtarlo 40–41). I presented an earlier version of this text at the ISSN Narrative Conference in St. Louis, April 7–10, 2011. I wish to express my gratitude to those present for their kind interest and perceptive remarks.

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Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 1989. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Barabtarlo, Gennadi. Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov’s Pnin. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1989. Clark, Herbert H., and Richard J. Gerrig. “Quotations as Demonstrations.” Language 66.4 (1990): 764–805. Coulmas, Florian. “Reported speech: some general issues.” Direct and Indirect Speech. Ed. Florian Coulmas. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986. 1–28. Fludernik, Monika. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. 1972. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980. —. Narrative Discourse Revisited. 1983. Trans Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988. Gibbons, Alison. “The Narrative Worlds and Multimodal Figures of House of Leaves: ‘—find your own words; I have no more.’” Intermediality and Storytelling. Ed. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. 285–311. Karttunen, Laura. “A Sociostylistic Perspective on Negatives and the Disnarrated: Lahiri, Roy, Rushdie.” Partial Answers 6.2 (2008): 419–42. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1972. Leech, Geoffrey N., and Mick Short. 1981. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. Second Edition. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007. McHale, Brian. “Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts.” PTL 3.2 (1978): 249–87. Myers, Greg. “Unspoken Speech: Hypothetical Reported Discourse and the Rhetoric of Everyday Talk.” Text 19.4 (1999): 571–90. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. 1957. London: Everyman’s Library, 2004. Quine, W. V. O. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1960. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. 1997. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Short, Mick, Elena Semino, and Martin Wynne. “Revisiting the Notion of Faithfulness in Discourse Presentation Using a Corpus Approach.” Language and Literature 11.4 (2002): 325–55. Sternberg, Meir. “Factives and Perspectives: Making Sense of Presupposition as Exemplary Inference.” Poetics Today 22.1 (2001): 129–244. —. “Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Discourse.” Poetics Today 3.2 (1982): 107–56. Tammi, Pekka. Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1985. Tannen, Deborah. “Introducing Constructed Dialogue in Greek and American Conversational and Literary Narrative.” Direct and Indirect Speech. Ed. Florian Coulmas. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986. 311–32.

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—. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. de Voogd, Peter. “Joycean Sonicities.” Contextualized Stylistics: In Honour of Peter Verdonk. Ed. Tony Bex, Michael Burke, and Peter Stockwell. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. 173–79. de Vries, Mark. “The Representation of Language within Language: A SyntacticoPragmatic Typology of Direct Speech.” Studia Linguistica 62.1 (2008): 39–77.

Samuli Hägg (University of Eastern Finland)

Pynchon’s Poetics of Boredom: Cognitive and Textual Aspects of Novelistic Dreariness Boredom, particularly in its solemn and philosophical form, has received a fair amount of critical attention by both philosophers and literary scholars. Spleen, ennui, and other similar variants of sublimated idleness have been considered instrumental in the creative process of the suffering romantic artiste. Psychologists and cognition researchers, on the other hand, have provided us with accounts of the cognitive mechanisms of interest or lack thereof. Moreover, boredom is a spiritual malaise and hence a theological problem and, most famously, an essential sentiment of modern society. Boredom as such has been recognized by philosophers and cultural theorists from Nietzsche to Benjamin—and by characters, narrators and readers of novels from Emma Bovary to Charles Mason. The modern novel would be a most different creature without this prominent theme. In addition to pondering on the notion of idleness, the characters and narrators are sometimes also put to suffer and negotiate boredom. Readers can also be subjected to tedium, although the aesthetics of boredom has not been of particular interest for students of literature. What makes a literary narrative boring? What is it like to be bored by a narrative? How does fiction mobilize its reader’s boredom to artistic ends (in which case one feels that being bored is the intended outcome)? Narrative interest or boredom is as much a narratological problem as it is a literary-critical one. It is narrative strategy that is endowed with significant interpretive potential. Thomas Pynchon’s recent deployments of narrative boredom suggest that he is getting softer in his postmodernism but continues to make clever use of boring the reader. This is an exercise in descriptive poetics in which two complementary methodological observations provide the narratological undercurrent of the discussion. First, there is a lot to say in favor of doing “cognitive narratology” by continuing to systematize, with the aid of analytical metaphors, the reader’s illusions evoked by various narratives. The unfortunate implication of this argument is that, despite having been instituted for

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over a decade, cognitive narratology proper remains all but indifferent in terms of literary interpretation. Second, cognitive research, however lacking as the basis of critical methodology, is a rich source of interpretive frames and concepts for literary scholars.

Two Takes on Narrative Boredom Given the multifaceted nature of boredom, it is not surprising to find Patricia Meyer Spacks investigating boredom on both thematic and textual levels as well as on the level of the reader’s experience in her study Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind.1 In her reading of Donald Barthelme, for instance, Spacks locates boredom and interest in the very narrative structures and word choices of the text. On the other hand, while analyzing Sense and Sensibility, she maintains that boredom in the novel actually teaches its reader lessons on how not to be boring: it offers a detailed and provocative “pedagogic of the interesting” (125). In literary-theoretical terms, Spacks views boredom as a situation of narrative that a successful literary act manages to avoid: “The ideal dynamic between reading and writing depends in part on boredom as displaced, unmentioned, and unmentionable possibility. The need to refute boredom’s deadening power impels the writer’s productivity and the reader’s engagement” (1). I will take issue on this commonsensical view of boredom as the unmentionable cognitive Other that is to be skirted around. Apart from being the unmoved mover of narrative, I will argue that boredom as a suffered condition is in fact essential in the reading of fiction. Promisingly, some post-classical narratologists have also taken steps toward the conceptualization and empirical study of narrative interest. Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck tackle the issue by proposing to widen the scope of narratological inquiry of interest to include, not only textual qualities, but also the cognitive and contextual underpinnings of both literary works and their reading. Lifting their operative metaphors from Stephen Greenblatt’s new historicism, Herman and Vervaeck study the negotiation between the cultural material “circulated” in the narrative and the “cultural embeddedness” of the reader. According to them, the earlier

1

The sentiment of boredom has been the topic of many studies on literary history, cultural history and philosophy, but I will not attempt to comprehensively review this literature here. Together with Spacks’s study, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature by Reinhold Kuhn (1976), Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity by Elisabeth S. Goodstein (2006), and A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Svendsen (2005) provide good starting points.

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theoretical views of narrative interest are not satisfactory because they do not touch upon the contextual and cognitive aspects of interest or lack of it. To support their methodological argument, Herman and Vervaeck present a case study of, fittingly, Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) and its reception from their newly adopted textual, cognitive and contextual position. Here is how they analyze the diverging assessments of two critics, both writing in The New York Times: The indecision of The New York Times may well result from the combination of strong authorial assets with the practical difficulties of negotiation in the field of newspaper reviewing. Because of its proportions, Against the Day prevents any kind of quick intake, exasperating some and delighting others. (126)

Literary-critical speculation aside, Herman and Vervaeck proceed by delivering an analysis of the ways the researchers themselves received Pynchon’s novel and conceived of its narrative interest. One of them, “[p] ositively predisposed towards the book,” negotiated the interest of Against the Day by stressing the novel’s “pressing contemporary concern” instead of its “textual make-up.” In the end, however, the novel’s “aesthetic force” seemed too weak, particularly in places where “the circulation of cultural materials was not sufficiently hidden.” Instead, Skinny Dip (2004) by Carl Hiaasen, another example of Herman’s and Vervaeck’s, managed to “endear itself…because of its high craft and especially its measure in terms of plotting and dialogue.” Ergo: Against the Day is more boring than Skinny Dip? It certainly is difficult to present detailed analyses in the confines of a theoretical article. Nevertheless, Herman’s and Vervaeck’s adaptation of Greenblatt’s notion of circulation of cultural materials seems somewhat superficial. Their research agenda leads to the study of cognitive and contextual factors of narrative interest in a manner that is difficult to distinguish from a newspaper review. The question of narrative interest and boredom makes evident the problematic position of post-classical narratology. Spacks is a “classical” literary scholar without particular emphasis on theoretical rigor. As a result, she is free to present textual, phenomenological, and contextual evidence at will. Her argumentation is driven by interpretive ends and her approach is historical and philosophical. Herman and Vervaeck, in contrast, ambitiously head toward theory-driven empirical analysis of all the factors relevant for narrative interest. Unfortunately, their practical application falls short of the proposed systematic rigor and remains mere idle and general speculation. Most importantly, both Spacks and Herman and Vervaeck ultimately view boredom principally as an issue of evaluative literary criticism and not as a narrative function with aesthetic and interpretive ramifications worthy of analysis and interpretation.

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Overwriting, Boredom, and Pynchon’s Evacuations Echoing Hobbes’s philosophical one-liner about life itself, the Pulitzer Prize advisory board described Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) as ”unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene.” It is a lamentable literary-historical fact that this critical observation led to the prize not being awarded at all in 1974. The competence of the Pulitzer board may in hindsight be justly questioned. Nonetheless, as an exercise in applied normative aesthetics, the quote itself deserves closer scrutiny. While the logic of the list of qualities mentioned is not quite impeccable, it is worth noting that two of them designate Pynchon’s prose as somehow overwrought. In fact, “overwritten” and “turgid” may be regarded as the causes of the claimed “unreadability” of the novel. (I’m skipping “obscene” here as pure hypocrisy.) Overwriting is not irrelevant with the reader’s intuition when confronted with, not only Gravity’s Rainbow, but all of Pynchon’s output. Overwriting as a critical metaphor presupposes a normal or natural mode of writing. In the normal mode of writing, the effort and energy invested in the writing of a novel has a one-to-one correspondence with the novelistic end product when viewed in terms of thermodynamics. No excess heat or textual turgidity is emitted as byproducts. In overwriting, the energy used to produce a novel is out of proportion with the outcome. The author tries too hard, and this results in a distorted signal: ridiculous, pompous, decorous, over-determined, and unreadable prose. Too much of everything renders the narrative boring. It is a creative writing commonplace to state that simple and economical prose requires meticulous craft. Hemingway worked hard at his seemingly terse, “objective” style. Beckett struggled toward his blank page. Although full of effort, this is not overwriting in the proper sense of the word. In critical usage, overwritten text is a frantic, ludicrous and overblown display of the author’s tastelessness. The rub is, of course, that in Pynchon, the negative aspects of overwriting seem to serve a greater aesthetic purpose. In Pynchon research, the term overwriting has scarcely been used, at least not in a pejorative sense. In contrast, Thomas Moore has articulated a “feeling of connectedness” as a key aspect in reading Gravity’s Rainbow. The narrative is woven together with subtle yet plentiful textual and intertextual linkages. Apart from being overdetermined and overwritten with nodes, Pynchon’s texts are notorious for their stylistic overwriting. Against the Day underscores yet another dimension in Pynchon’s tendency to overwrite. The novel appropriates a plethora of more or less recognizable popular genres to further confound the reader; a strategy dubbed “genre-poaching” by Brian McHale (“Genre”). A reader schooled by Pynchon plunges as a perfect paranoiac to discern the chaotic overdrive of the narrative. But the

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narrative boredom is never far away. Tactically (or when nothing else will do?), the reader is prepared to give up and willfully submit to uncertainty and view the complexities of prose as a blur that nevertheless is somehow pleasing. It is easy to find fictional parallels to this experience in the texts themselves. The attempts to fight the giant Adenoid of Lord Blatherard Osmo, embedded in Pirate Prentice’s fantasy, is a fair approximation: [T]he Adenoid is blasted, electric-shocked, poisoned, changes color here and there, yellow fat-nodes appear high over the trees…before the flash-powder cameras of the Press, a hideous green pseudopod crawls toward the cordon of troops and suddenly sshhlop! wipes out an entire observation post with a deluge of some disgusting orange mucus in which the unfortunate men are digested – not screaming but actually laughing, enjoying themselves… (Gravity’s Rainbow 15)

Once the reading becomes saturated with stylistic, intertextual, and generic narrative information and the text still pushes on, the reader either stops reading or becomes digested into the text. No amount of critical machinery seems capable of organizing the text into a meaningful order. Shifting from “paranoiac” reading to “digested” reading involves narrative boredom. Narrative boredom occupies the transitional phase of losing one’s faith in the narrative and, consequently, one’s way in the text. It is not only with agony and frustration that we confront the overwriting in Pynchon; one gets to suffer boredom as well. And there are varieties of boredom in Pynchon. At the beginning of each of Pynchon’s big books, the reader is greeted with a cheerful collective. Gravity’s Rainbow introduces Pirate Prentice’s dream team of WW II Allied military intelligence. Mason & Dixon (1997) embraces the reader into the cozy and lively [atmosphere of the] home of the narrator’s sister Elizabeth LeSpark. Most recently, in Against the Day, we get to meet The Chums of Chance (no doubt familiar to the reader from the previous installments in their eponymous series of boy adventure fiction; see McHale, “Genre”). With the notable exception of Gravity’s Rainbow, the beginnings of the novels do in fact succeed in granting the reader a group of distinguishable and sometimes even identifiable people to cling to when the narrative inevitably begins to unravel. In Against the Day, the Chums of Chance and their air-born vessel Inconvenience actually offer the reader merry yet sporadic company until the end of the novel. This is symptomatic of a new and more humane phase of Pynchon’s postmodernism. At the very least, the narrative of Against the Day is more accessible than one would expect from Pynchon, although the critical reception of the novel does not support this claim; many reviewers complain about the chaos and sheer volume of the novel (see Leise). However, although the

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narrative of Against the Day does involve a daunting amount of criss-crossing plot-lines and numerous passages of considerable uncertainty and ambiguity, the local interpretive frames are more readily at reader’s disposal than in Gravity’s Rainbow. Albeit a mega-novel, Against the Day is still relatively user-friendly—and affirmative. This has a decisive effect on the tone and significance of the boredom characteristic of the novel. Let me demonstrate this by analyzing a case of Pynchon’s self-pastiche. In one of the many plot-lines in Against the Day, an unsuspecting group of scientists has brought an ancient living entity from an expedition up North, a holy figure disguised as a meteorite. As a vengeance to inobservant behavior on the part of the expedition, the entity unleashes its wrath of chaos and destruction on the Metropolitan area. Underground evacuation of the city ensues; here is how one Hunter Penhallow witnesses it: People were getting to their feet, preparing to leave. Someone noticed Hunter. “There’s room, if you’d like to come.” How stupefied he must have looked. He followed the group dumbly down a flight of winding metal steps to an electric-lit platform where others, quite a few others in fact, were boarding a curious mass conveyance, of smooth iron painted a dark shade of industrial gray, swept and sleek, with the pipework of its exhaust manifold led outside the body, running lights all up and down its length. He got on, found a seat. The vehicle began to move, passing among factory spaces, power generators, massive installations of machinery whose purpose was less certain – sometimes wheels spun, vapors burst from relief valves, while other plants stood inert, in unlighted mystery—entering at length a system of tunnels and, once deep inside, beginning to accelerate. The sound of a passage, hum and wind-rush, grew louder, somehow more comforting, as if confident in its speed and direction. Occasionally, through the windows, there were glimpses of the city above them, though how deep beneath it they were supposed to be traveling was impossible to tell.…The longer they traveled, the more “futuristic” would the scenery grow. (155)

This is not pathologically overwritten, but there is an impression of the narrated information stretching a bit thin as the narration carries on with decor: “[O]ther plants stood inert, in unlighted mystery…,” “[A]s if confident in its speed and direction.” The passage does not by itself produce the dizzying effect of being lost in the text. There is, however, a nagging feeling of excess. Hunter Penhallow is the focal character in the passage, but the prose does not seem to display the particular idiom of his persona. The conspicuous quotation marks near the end are attributable to the popular adventure fiction style in which this part of the novel is delivered. This is Pynchon’s familiar tone of “high seriousness,” recognized and aptly named by George Levine in 1976. The solemn voice surfaces

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in Pynchon’s fiction whenever needed. Anyone familiar with the opening paragraphs of Gravity’s Rainbow will recognize the excerpt as bearing affinity to the following: Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage’s frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 10 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city. They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into—… (3)

This is a nightmare rendition of the Evacuation of London, supposedly dreamt so by Pirate Prentice in the first two pages of the novel. It is a tricky bit of overwritten prose: challenging lexicon and syntax, minimal contextual information, no real character to hang on to (not even a name!), a dense web of cultural references which are likely to remain opaque anyway. Even for an expert Gravity’s Rainbow reader, Prentice’s awakening and the narrative’s easing into long-awaited Banana Breakfast with Pirate’s mates comes as a relief. The narrative drives the reader on the brink of exhausted desperation, and consequently exasperated boredom, with narrative information that is impossible to divide into intelligible chunks of meaning. Pirate’s dream is a prime example of the way in which Pynchon mobilizes confusion-driven narrative boredom for aesthetic ends. I suspect Pynchon has lost a number of readers because of these two pages. It is not as if there were not several comparable passages presented later on; it is that the reader is caught unaware and uninitiated in the beginning of the novel. The beauty of this particular passage is that the retrospective naturalization as Pirate’s dream does not make the narrative any more comprehensible. The web of unclear allusions and the overdrive of the first two pages continue to haunt the reading, and nothing clicks easily to place.2 2

From a cognitive point of view, there is obviously nothing difficult in this piece of narrative. The cognitive parameters of Fludernik’s Natural Narratology offer an easy solution for the narrativization of the evacuation passage. Right from the start, the frame

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Despite similarities in style and content, the evacuation scene in Against the Day is, essentially, one of relief and not of despair. This is evident from the very beginning. Recall the ominous voice heard in Pirate’s dream: “You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow…” (Gravity’s Rainbow 4). Instead, Hunter is offered a seat in the carriage to freedom. As aware of the author’s game of pastiche as is the reader, Hunter is rightly stupefied. The overwritten style that caused anxiety in the evacuation scene of Gravity’s Rainbow is echoed in Against the Day. But this is a different type of progress. Before the First World War hopeful evacuation still seems possible, although echoes of the more dismal future evacuations already sound in the text. Studying the differently toned passages of overwritten narrative boredom once again brings out the change in Pynchon. Critic Tom LeClair agrees: “Against the Day lacks the ferocity and fear of Gravity’s Rainbow.” The contours of narrative boredom in Gravity’s Rainbow produce anxiety while those of Against the Day stir hope, however futile in hindsight. Narrative boredom induced by overwriting is a means of narrative expression. Making the narrative boring is, among other things, a narrative strategy of mobilizing the reader through an aesthetic impasse and into interpretation.

Post-Classical Tedium Revisited Since being narratively bored or interested is a phenomenon of the embodied mind as well as relevant in terms of interpretation, it is natural to assume that post-classical cognitive narratology would be a relevant theoretical frame of reference. In terms of Monika Fludernik’s Natural Narratology, represented or experienced narrative boredom is simply one possible outcome of the reader’s process of narrativization. Reading potentially narrative texts, we recall, readers narrativize with reference to various cognitive frames depending on what kind of experientiality is represented in the text. Hence, prototypically, if a narrative’s ruling consciousness, and thus mediated experience, is that of the protagonist, the EXPERIENCING frame is adopted. If, by contrast, a narrative is constituted by the consciousness of the narrator persona, the TELLING (or of Experiencing is evoked in order to come to terms with the experientiality represented in the sequence. It is very telling that a narrative text that is quite problematic from the perspective of the aesthetics of reading should be such a simple case for cognitive narratology.

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REFLECTING, in the case of self-reflexive narratives) frame is utilized.

Finally, should the narrative portray neither a teller nor a character as its central consciousness, but merely evoke an illusion of vision, the reader resorts to the VIEWING frame (50). The schema of ACTION is used when confronted with “texts that are highly inconsistent…to tease out a rudimentary sense in story referential terms” (44). When it is the reader who is bored, the narrativization supposedly relies on the reader’s experience (see Alber). Unfortunately, natural narratology does not provide means for a more detailed analysis of discourse (boring or otherwise); instead, it is offered as a theoretically sounder alternative to classical narratology. Anyway, should one be interested in boredom as a character’s experience, one would well take advantage of the view of literary cognition offered by narratology that is based on the psychology of the Theory of Mind. Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine view the whole narrative text as a potential representation of the minds of the characters of the novel. Reading the character-bound representation of narrative boredom this way yields promising results (see Hägg, “Mason & Dixon”). However, when approaching characters in natural terms, narrative research based on the Theory of Mind is unable to grasp narrative boredom that has to do with the conventions of narrative, textual structures and the dynamics of reading. A narratologist’s critical stock response to the general doctrines of cognitive narratologies is to study experimental narratives which question, challenge and evade the cognitive parameters of supposed narrative understanding. For instance, the process of narrativization à la Fludernik appears most interesting when faced with narratives that hinder and thus make visible the process itself. This is interesting from the perspective of the theory of cognition, although not so much from the perspective of analyzing or interpreting narrative literature. A whole branch of narrative research self-styled “Unnatural Narratology” exists as a specialized field for investigating the extremities of literary narrative in comparison with cognitive literary theories (e.g. Richardson). In part questioning the cause of Unnatural Narratology, Maria Mäkelä has recently demonstrated that even seemingly ordinary or typical literary narratives can challenge the parameters of cognitive narratology (see also Tammi). Narrative boredom is a telling example of this: a cognitive phenomenon easily evoked by even the most ordinary narratives but nevertheless beyond the scope of cognitive literary theory. This is not to say that the concepts of cognitive research were of no value to literary criticism. First, popularized notions about cognition pervade our culture in the same way as popularized notions about psychoanalysis have done for decades. Second, even specialized concepts

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of cognitive studies may end up as heuristic analytic and interpretive metaphors for the use of literary scholars (cf. Ryan). In this spirit, let me proceed further with Pynchon’s boredom braced with some information about interest and the cortex. A representative of cognitive cultural studies, Patrick Colm Hogan bases his view of boredom on the way the human memory and sensory apparatus function. It all has to do with stimulation of the cortex, he offers. In his “guide to humanists” Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts, Hogan explains that we become bored when nothing much happens and there are too few stimuli on the cortex. On the other hand, if too much happens and there are too many stimuli on the cortex, we get all confused. Too many different things begin to feel like all the same, and we once again get bored. Apart from elementary cognitive psychology, Hogan backs this notion up with a well-argumented and beautifully documented analysis of the interest of John Coltrane’s solo in “My Favourite Things.” At times it is difficult to discern intelligible units in Coltrane and the music risks becoming a blur, but most of the time the notes Coltrane gives tickle the brain in all the right spots. There is plenty of musical novelty yet enough references to the familiar melody to keep the listener on the track. This gives Coltrane’s version of the tune both hit and hip potential; “keeping cool but caring” in Pynchon’s terms. Hogan’s self-analysis of the experience of Coltrane makes no pretense of being objective or “scientific.” Although based on the idea of cortical stimulation, the analysis itself seeks to grasp the qualia of musical aesthetic experience. As such, it is thoroughly illusionistic. The same goes for the study of narrative boredom as an experienced narrative strategy proposed here.

Narrative Vertigo, Narrative Boredom Doing descriptive poetics on Gravity’s Rainbow some ten years ago, I pointed to ways in which reading parts of the novel resembles playing a game: Let us, therefore, tentatively define ilinx as a thematized or actualized textual game that involves the pursuit of ‘narrative vertigo’, induced by disorienting either the characters or the reader, for instance, with transgressions of narrative conventions (Narratologies 156).

The game category ilinx, according to Roger Caillois, is “based on the pursuit of vertigo and consist[s] of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic on an

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otherwise lucid mind” (23). Perhaps I made a mistake; it might have been boredom all along. Here’s one of the examples given: The story here tonight is a typical WW II romantic intrigue, just another evening at Raoul’s place, involving a future opium shipment’s being used by Tamara as security against a loan from Italo, who in turn owes Waxwing for a Sherman tank his friend Theophile is trying to smuggle into Palestine but must raise a few thousand pounds for purposes of bribing across the border, and so has put the tank up as collateral to borrow from Tamara, who is using part of the loan from Italo to pay him. But meantime the opium deal doesn’t look like it’s going to come through, because the middleman hasn’t been heard from in several weeks, along with the money Tamara fronted him, which she got from Raoul de la Perlimpinpin through Waxwing, who is now being pressured by Raoul for the money because Italo, decicing the tank belong to Tamara now, showed up last night took it away to an Undisclosed Location a payment on his loan, thus causing Raoul to panic. Something like that. (Gravity’s Rainbow 247)

This slapstick scene was supposedly recounted to Pynchon’s arch-schlemiel Tyrone Slothrop by a black-market agent. Now consider the following sequence from Against the Day: In the festivities attending departure, romance, intoxication, and folly were so in command, so many corridor doors opening and closing, so many guests wandering in and out of the wrong rooms, that de Decker’s shop, declaring an official Mischief Opportunity, sent over to the hotel as many operatives as they could spare, among them Piet Woevre, who would rather have been working at night and toward some more sinister end. The minute he caught sight of Woevre, Kit, assuming he was a target of murderous intent, went running off into the hotel’s labyrinth of back stairways and passages. Root Tubsmith, thinking that Kit was trying to avoid paying off a side-bet made several evenings ago in the Gasino, gave chase. Umeki, who had understood that she and Kit would be spending the day and night together, immediately assumed there was another woman in the picture, no doubt that Parisian bitch again, and joined the pursuit. As Pino and Rocco, fearing for the security of their torpedo, ran off in panic, Policarpe, Denis, Eugénie, and Fatou, recognizing any number of familiar faces among the police operatives swarming everywhere, concluded that the long-awaited action against Young Congo had begun, and went jumping out of various low windows and into the shrubbery, then remembering absinthe spoons, cravats, illustrated magazines, and other items it was essential to salvage, crept back into the hotel, turned the wrong corner, opened the wrong door, screamed, ran back outside. This sort of thing went on till well after dark. In those days it was the everyday texture of people’s lives. Stage productions which attempted to record this as truthfully as possible, like dramatic equivalents of genre paintings, became known as “four-door farce,” and its period as the Golden Age. (561)

Here is Pynchon employing an old trick: the effect is roughly the same as in Gravity’s Rainbow. Both of the passages are generically designated, the first as “romantic intrigue” and the second as “four-door farce.” In both cases, the narrator also acknowledges the typicality of the scenes: “Some-

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thing like that,” “In those days it was the everyday texture of people’s lives.” In both cases, the reader is made to suffer perplexity before the complicated yet monotonous yarn of a narrative. There are two main strategies for coming to terms with this. On the one hand, the reader can conscientiously sort out the circular relationships among the agents of the silly plots. On the other, he or she might be tempted into considering the scenes as deliberately playful, inducing a feeling of being confused and, for a moment, lost in the narrative.3 Whether the effect produced by passages such as this is “narrative vertigo” or “narrative boredom” is a matter of judgment. In the literary boredom of Pynchon, part of the “interest,” I would again argue, is witnessing everything becoming a blur and attempting to figure out ways of enjoying the event—and conjuring out its interpretive significance. Having witnessed this particular narrative riff in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, the reader recognizes the vertigo-effect already as an auteur convention. In Against the Day it seems that the narrative macrostructure of the novel itself resembles the quoted series of misguided chases, the meshes of which one is clearly not supposed to sort out. If the overall operating principle of Gravity’s Rainbow is ferocious paranoia, Against the Day seems to idle on relaxed schizophrenia. For the reader of Against the Day, it is clear from the outset that no big central mystery will be revealed by carefully reading and meticulously researching the narrative lines. Again, we find that Pynchon’s postmodernism takes a turn toward moderation. Unlike Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day, by its overtly loose and chaotic narrative make-up, encourages the reader to sit back and enjoy the small joys of narrative. Fortunately for the Pynchon industry, there is a smorgasbord of minute peripheral mysteries to be solved in the novel, and in-jokes too: easy prizes for faithful readers.

The Dreariness of Narratology? Narrative boredom as it is understood here shares certain aspects with boredom as it confronts us in the everyday: the somewhat altered cognitive state of drowsiness, the sensation of idle repetitiveness and the like. 3

The boredom-evoking effect is increased by Pynchon’s penchant with abundantly alliterative prose. My thanks to Laura Karttunen for pointing this out. Faced with a complex text, the reader’s decision to surrender to narrative boredom may indeed have a lot to do with the “phonetics” of the text.

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In addition, however, boredom induced by reading literary texts creates a feeling of being overwhelmed or stunned by the text. Homeopathic doses of narrative boredom, paradoxically, have an affirmative and satisfying aesthetic effect. This can hardly be said about mundane everyday boredom. Likewise, the romantic cultural-historical notion of ennui and other forms of elevated bourgeoisie leisure are largely detached from the frames of real-life, “natural,” boredom. This is because narrative boredom and ennui are not natural concepts. They are concepts of literary and cultural interpretation. Their meaning is determined only in part by real-life cognitive parameters and more by the aesthetics of reading and social and cultural history, respectively. This is what gives these concepts whatever interpretive interest they have. *** In 1951, eighteen years before the coinage of the term “narratology,” a pioneer of applied philosophy, J. A. Passmore, wrote about the “dreariness of aesthetics.” For Passmore, an aesthetician (or anaesthetician?) guilty of dreariness was one too keen on passing personal observations of different art forms as general conceptualizations of normative aesthetics: [The aesthetician] simply talks dreary and pretentious nonsense. The alternative, I suggest, isn’t subjectivism but an intensive special study of the special arts, carried out with no undue respect for anyone’s ‘aesthetic experiences’ but much respect for real differences between the works of art themselves. (335)

Narratologists today should take, mutatis mutandis, heed of Passmore’s advice. Taking the assumed shared cognitive parameters of all or most narratives, however true or natural they may be, as the departure point for the study of literature leads to intolerable dreariness. In contrast, emphasis on the observed and experienced textual features of literary narratives produces interesting, enjoyable—and easily communicable—interpretive outcomes. Against Passmore’s advice, however, one definitely should take into account the “aesthetic experience” of reading. In the case of Pynchon, one would do well to follow the lead of Brian McHale’s exceptional endeavors in descriptive Pynchon-poetics (e.g. Constructing; “Genre”; “Mason & Dixon”). “Classical” narratology is the field of research most responsible for categorizing the narrative knowledge accumulated in the course of the history of literary scholarship. In hindsight, the structuralist project can be described as an enterprise of systematizing the illusionistic heritage of Western study of narrative. Structuralist narratology is “classical” precisely in its reliance on the interpretive conventions of narrative liter-

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ature, which render the textual patterns emergent. As such, “classical” narratology is neither “unnatural” nor “non-natural.” It is conventional. The concepts of narratology stem from intensive interpretive interaction with literary narratives. To whom would this be boring? Not even for Passmore. Dreariness looms once we proceed to study living narratives stultified by general assumptions about the cognitive processes needed for understanding them. Let me conclude with an evaluative remark on boredom and the recent turns of Thomas Pynchon’s literary career. “Bunch of old guys sitting around playing rock’n’roll” was the Frank Zappa quote Pynchon used to shed irony on his own “attachment to [the] past” in the introduction to Slow Learner (1984). Pynchon’s latest novel Inherent Vice (2009), a detective story set in the 1970’s counter-culture scene in California, fits Zappa’s description. In many respects, Inherent Vice is Classic Rock Radio in novel form and indeed “old guys sitting around playing rock’n’roll.” Literally: Inherent Vice is filled with references to both fictional and actual rock music of the time it describes. In this respect, it is a very valuable guide to the more un-typical sounds of the era. Metaphorically: the novel embraces dad-rock by its unashamedly popularizing and nostalgic investigation of the Hippie era and its demise. Critic Sam Anderson is not far off in describing the novel as a “manically incoherent pseudo-noir hippie-mystery.” It is so very suitable that Inherent Vice is the first Pynchon novel to be made into a movie. The novel proceeds in short, Vonnegut-style sections, which are highly visual and typically end with a gag. In fact, it would be perfect material for a slightly risqué sitcom, one with a hint of suspense and counter-culture in it. Here, however, Anderson is badly off the mark: You can almost hear Pynchon flip his big glowing “iPYNCHON!” switch, after which everything gets extremely, oppressively busy—so busy that the early sense of fun starts to curdle. When Doc steps out to make a few inquiries, he is immediately buried under an avalanche of subplots and superplots and crossplots: faked deaths, false identities, corrupt cops, old prison scores, international drug smuggling, the machinations of Las Vegas real estate.

It is precisely the fact that Pynchon never gets busy enough for the narrative to be truly overwhelming that is disappointing. The dizzying effects that produce the necessary boredom to make the reader lose one’s way and become digested in the text are missing. Instead, one is treated with shadowy traces of the narrative tactics familiar to the readers of Pynchon. As a result, from the perspective adopted here, Inherent Vice is tiresome by not being boring enough. Thomas Pynchon’s literary career reflects the change in his writing. It is the Age of Plenty for all Thomas Pynchon enthusiasts. Early 2000’s wit-

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nessed Thomas Pynchon as a prolific blurbist, writing liner notes to anything from an album by the indie rock act Lotion and a novel by Marge Simpson. Come 2003, Pynchon went as far as delivering an introductory essay of good 10 pages to Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Later in the decade, not really having digested Mason & Dixon yet, the industry had the gargantuan Against the Day to reckon with. Then Pynchon delivered Inherent Vice with virtually no hiatus. He even narrated an internet video trailer for the book, though jury is still out on whether the voice one hears actually is Pynchon’s. Whatever happened to the “slow-publishing reclusive author?” There is a danger of the very excitement over Thomas Pynchon becoming tedious. He offers the public too much, too fast, too easily.

Works Cited Alber, Jan. “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Narratology: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Lessness’ Reconsidered.” Style 36.2 (2002): 54–75. Anderson, Sam. “Incoherent Vice: My Thomas Pynchon Problem.” The New York Review of Books 2 Aug. 2009. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. New York: The Free Press, 1961. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Herman, Luc, and Bart Vervaeck. “Narrative Interest as Cultural Negotiation.” Narrative 17.1 (2009): 111–29. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide to Humanists. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Hägg, Samuli. Narratologies of Gravity’s Rainbow. University of Joensuu Publications in the Humanities 37. Joensuu: Joensuun yliopisto, 2005. —. “Tylsä Mason & Dixon: Yritys luonnolliseksi luennaksi.” Luonnolliset ja luonnottomat kertomukset: Jälkiklassisen narratologian suuntia. Ed. Mari Hatavara, Markku Lehtimäki, and Pekka Tammi. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2010. 110–28. LeClair, Tom. “Lead Zeppelin: Encounters with the Unseen in Pynchon’s New Novel.” Bookforum Dec./Jan. 2007. Leise, Christopher. “Introduction. ‘Exceeding the Usual Three Dimensions’: Collective Visions of the Unsuspected.” Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide. Ed. Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2011. 1–11. Levine, George. “Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Pynchon’s Fiction.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976. 113–36. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992. —. “Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching.” Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide. Ed. Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2011. 15–28. —. “Mason & Dixon in the Zone, or, A Brief Poetics of Pynchon-Space.” Pynchon and Mason & Dixon. Ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000. 43–62.

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Moore, Thomas. The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1987. Mäkelä, Maria. “Cycles of Narrative Necessity: Suspect Tellers and the Textuality of Fictional Minds.” Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative. Ed. Lars Bernaerts, Dirk de Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P (forthcoming 2013). Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2004. Passmore, J. A. “The Dreariness of Aesthetics.” Mind 60 (1951): 239, 318–35. Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006. —. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973. Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2006. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Cyberage Narratology: Computers, Metaphor, and Narrative.” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Ed. David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1999. 113–41. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995. Tammi, Pekka. “Against ‘against’ Narrative: On Nabokov’s ‘Recruiting.’” Narrativity, Fictionality, and Literariness: The Narrative Turn and the Study of Literary Fiction. Ed. Lars-Åke Skalin. Örebro: Örebro University, 2008. 37–55. Zunshine, Lisa. “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness.” Narrative 11:1 (2003): 270–91.

PART II A Web of Sense: Interpreting the Disturbing and the Difficult

David Herman (The Ohio State University)

Toward a Zoonarratology: Storytelling and Species Difference in Animal Comics In this essay, I build on two emergent (and interlinked) areas within the field of narrative studies: namely, metanarratology and research on storytelling across media. Metanarratology can be defined as the project of reassessing the terms in which questions about narrative have been cast up to now. Thus, by analogy with subdisciplines such as metamathematics and metaphilosophy, metanarratology explores the scope, aims, and methods of narratology as a field of inquiry, reconsidering what should count as best practices within the field and how those practices ought to be developed going forward.1 My essay likewise revisits foundational assumptions guiding the work of story analysts, including assumptions about the nature of narrativity, or what makes a text more or less amenable to being interpreted as a narrative in the first place. At the same time, I seek to contribute to the project of developing a narrative poetics that is capacious enough to accommodate forms of storytelling across a variety of media—in other words, a transmedial narratology. Focusing on graphic narratives featuring nonhuman animals, my analysis suggests how diversifying the corpus of narratives examined by narrative theorists, by factoring in comics and other storytelling media, may itself have important implications for metanarratology. Considering narratives presented in various media may require a recalibration of existing methods for the study of stories—as part of the larger metanarratological project of reflecting on what kind of theory the theory of narrative purports to be, or might aspire to be. But it is not just that the medium of animal comics raises questions for metanarratology; so too does their portrayal of the experiences of nonhuman animals—and of the relationship between human and nonhuman ways of encountering the world. More specifically, I explore how two re1

For more on the scope and aims of the project of metanarratology, see my “Formal Models in Narrative Analysis.”

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cent graphic narratives featuring nonhuman animals call into question the assumption—widely shared by narrative theorists—that a focus on human or human-like characters constitutes a necessary condition for narrativity. In revisiting this assumption, I suggest the need for closer coordination of work in narrative theory and research in fields such as ecological psychology, the philosophy of mind, and cognitive ethology, which studies “the mental experiences of [nonhuman] animals, particularly in their natural environment, in the course of their daily lives” (Ristau 132; see also Allen and Bekoff; Shapiro). Using Jesse Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats of My Childhood (2005) and Shirley Hughes’s Bye, Bye Birdie (2009) as my primary case studies, I argue that in some accounts of events involving nonhuman characters narrativity arises not from a focus on human projects per se, but rather from the attempt to imagine how a different kind of intelligent agent might differently negotiate the world—and from foregrounding, through these nonhuman negotiations, how human undertakings and experiences are enmeshed in wider webs of creatural life.2 In turn, I develop this argument in the service of a larger program for inquiry; at issue is a research program that aims to triangulate transmedial narratology, work in the cognitive sciences, and critical animal studies, an emergent field of scholarship that (as I discuss in the next section) reevaluates assumptions about the primacy of the human and calls for a rethinking of institutions and practices based on such assumptions. Animal comics like Reklaw’s and Hughes’ constitute an important test case for research situated at the intersection of these fields.3 For one thing, the genre can provide insight into broad questions about the nexus of narrative and mind—such as how multimodal narratives combining words and images represent ways of engaging with the world, nonhuman as well as human. At issue is how creators of animal comics use the visual and verbal tracks to parcel out cues prompting interpreters to draw inferences about the structure and quality of their characters’ experiences. At the same time, graphic narratives figuring nonhuman animals can be viewed as both the manifestation of and a resource for what might be termed “folk ethologies,” or understandings of animal behavior that

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In using the locution creatural life, I am building on Anat Pick’s discussion of a “creaturely poetics” rooted in the recognition of bodily vulnerability as a link between the human and nonhuman. I am also building on Braidotti’s discussion of how some of the work in critical animal studies that I review below has promoted “a bioegalitarian turn encouraging us to relate to animals as animals ourselves” (526). As I use the term, animal comic refers to any graphic narrative in which nonhuman animals are focal participants in storyworld events; in other words, in my usage this generic label is not limited to comics featuring an exclusively nonhuman cast of characters.

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circulate more or less widely in the culture. Study of animal comics can shed light on how the members of a culture or subculture engage in informal theorizing about nonhuman minds, revealing ways in which such theorizing has become entrenched in (and enabled by) the storytelling traditions associated with that (sub)culture. As Lisa Brown puts it, “comics and graphic novels are a virtually untapped source of insight into cultural paradigms about animals. In particular, comics...[provide] an alternate perspective on how we humans believe animals think and behave, and also how we treat them as a result” (6). Of special pertinence for the graphic narratives I discuss are cultural paradigms for understanding species differences, and in particular the boundary between human and nonhuman animals. How can this dividing line be conceptualized, and how do the narrative strategies used by storytellers such as Reklaw and Hughes index ways of understanding the boundary in question—for example, as sharply defined or fuzzily gradient, impermeable or porous, fixed or variable? In investigating these and other aspects of animal comics, my chapter goes beyond issues of metanarratology to consider prospects for a zoonarratology. Its name paralleling those of fields such as zoology, zoogeography, and zoosemiotics, zoonarratology can be defined as an approach to narrative study that explores how storytelling practices (and strategies for narrative interpretation) relate to broader assumptions concerning the nature, experiences, and status of animals. Zoonarratological research can be conducted both diachronically, across different epochs, and synchronically, across cultures, genres, and media in any given epoch. Further, the approach encompasses not only the ways in which narratives figure (or occlude) the experiences of nonhuman animals, but also how stories portray the experiences of human agents as situated within the larger domain of creatural life—that is, the extent to which (or manner in which) narratives represent humans as one animal species among others. Given the scope and complexity of these issues, my chapter can only sketch out a few directions for zoonarratological research; in doing so, however, it suggests how narrative theorists, by engaging with phenomena that also fall under the purview of the biosciences and other disciplines, can help develop productive new strategies for research on stories.

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Foundations for Zoonarratology Narrative and Nonhuman Minds One of my working assumptions is that it is part of the nature of narrative to focus on the impact of events on experiencing minds (Herman, Basic 137–60; see also Fludernik). In other words, I assume that across differences of genre, communicative context, and storytelling media, instances of the narrative text-type share a common focus on the what-it’s-like dimension of consciousness—to adapt the ideas of Thomas Nagel. As Nagel has argued, in the case of conscious beings, it is possible to ask what it is like to be (or experience the world as) that sort of being, whether a bat or a butterfly, a hummingbird or a human. In turn, narratives more or less explicitly foreground what it is like for characters to undergo particular experiences—how one or more minds is affected by events taking place in the narrated world, or storyworld. It is thus a natural extension of work premised on the inextricable interconnection between narrative and mind to explore how stories might represent the experiences of conscious beings who fall outside the domain of the human. Here Pekka Tammi’s analysis of Art Spiegelman’s Maus provides a useful starting point. Using Spiegelman’s text to argue for a transmedial “poetics that invests in the study of formal, systemic features of any variety of textual practice: poetic style, linguistic and rhetorical play, narrative structure, intertextuality and attendant phenomena in their diverse manifestations,” Tammi characterizes Maus as a graphic memoir that self-reflexively engages with questions about the scope and limits of historiography (“Introduction” 14). Further, Tammi discusses how Spiegelman’s text participates in the genre of the animal fable (15); works in this genre exemplify the structure of allegory, mapping human traits onto nonhuman animals and thereby staging, more or less obliquely, conflicts and problems in the human domain. In parallel with Aesop’s fable about the thrifty, hardworking ant versus the profligate, hedonistic grasshopper, Maus portrays Nazi soldiers as cats, Jews as mice, nonJewish inhabitants of Poland as pigs, soldiers in the U.S. army as dogs, the British as fish, and so forth. Spiegelman does not focus on these nonhuman agents per se, but rather uses cultural associations and attested behavioral patterns of the animals to structure his memoir about his father as Holocaust survivor. Here there is no detailed engagement with the lives of nonhuman animals; rather, the animals provide a kind of actantial infrastructure—based for example on predator–prey interactions between cats and mice—supporting Spiegelman’s portrayal of the

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human institutions, practices, and experiences that constitute his core concerns.4 As I have argued in a previous study (“Storyworld/Umwelt”), animal allegories like Spiegelman’s can be situated on a broader spectrum of strategies for figuring nonhuman experiences in graphic (and other) narratives. My account of this spectrum of narrative possibilities grows out of recent work in the philosophy of mind, psychology, robotics, and other fields that moves away from Cartesian geographies of the mental as an interior, immaterial domain, separated off from the wider sociomaterial world. Instead, characterizing intelligent behavior as distributed across brain, body, and world, this work suggests that minds of all sorts—human as well as nonhuman—are inextricably embedded in contexts for action and interaction, and in fact arise from the interplay between intelligent agents and the environments that they inhabit.5 From this postCartesian perspective, mind or consciousness, rather than happening “in the head the way digestion happens in the stomach” (Noë, Out 7), is something that living organisms do, by virtue of species-specific modes of sensorimotor coupling between agent and world. Across species, in other words, agent–environment interactions differ in their qualitative details but not their basic structure. Insights from this research on mind as situated, embodied, and extended inform figure 1, which presents a continuum of strategies for representing nonhuman experiences. Whereas forms of Cartesian dualism set up a dichotomous relationship between the mind in here and the world out there, the continuum in figure 1 is based on a different kind of polarity—namely, a contrast between between relatively coarse-grained and relatively fine-grained representations of experiences that arise from the interplay between nonhuman agents and their surrounding environments. As one moves rightward from the left end of this continuum, where the narrative strategies used in Maus are situated, one finds less and less 4

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In this connection, it is important to stress how historically specific (and distinctly anti-Semitic) animal-to-human mappings bear on Spiegelman’s animal allegory. As Jeanne Ewert notes, “[t]he image of Jews as rodents is not original to Spiegelman” (92). Rather, Spiegelman uses this specific allegorical parallel to parody anti-Semitic cartoons and other World War II-era propaganda suggesting that Jews, like mice, are vermin that need to be exterminated. As Ewert also discusses, by drawing on a tradition that extends back to the “funny animal” genre of cartooning associated with Walt Disney’s animal creations, Maus also ironically recontextualizes Nazi propaganda linking Jews and Mickey Mouse in particular (92–93). Relevant studies include Clark (Being and Supersizing); Gibson; Noë (Action and Out); Thompson; Torrance; and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch.

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98 AA

AP

ZP

UE

Coarse-grained Representations

Fine-grained Representations

of Nonhuman Experiences

of Nonhuman Experiences AA = Animal Allegory AP = Anthropomorphic Projection ZP = Zoomorphic Projection UE = Umwelt Exploration

Figure 1. A Continuum of Strategies for Representing Nonhuman Experiences

human-centric ways of figuring nonhuman encounters with the world. Further, the model accommodates shifts of narrative strategy that can occur within individual texts featuring nonhuman agents. A given text may use a range of strategies for figuring agent–environment interactions, presenting those interactions with different degrees of detail—that is, at different levels of granularity—over the course of an unfolding story. To adapt the terms of metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson), insofar as they employ the representational strategies found at the left end of the continuum, narratives map the source domain of human experience more or less fully onto the target domain of nonhuman minds. Hence in animal allegories such as Aesop’s or Spiegelman’s, nonhuman characters function as virtual stand-ins for humans. In anthropomorphic projection, relative to animal allegory there is an ostensible shift of focus away from the human to the nonhuman; but human motivations and practices continue to serve as the basic template for interpreting nonhuman behavior in texts ranging from E. B. White’s children book Charlotte’s Web (1952), to Disney films such as Bambi (1942) and Lady and the Tramp (1955); to the fan-generated stories about nonhuman animals produced by members of what has come to be called furry fandom, or communities of fans of anthropomorphic fictional characters (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Furry_fandom). Moving further rightward along the continuum to what I have termed zoomorphic projection, animal experiences and capabilities are again translated into human terms, but now for purposes of comparison rather than explanation; this narrative strategy shows what it would be like for human characters to take on nonhuman attributes. Thus, in texts ran-

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ging from the Animal Man comic series (whose protagonist absorbs the powers of nonhuman animals in his immediate environment) to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, human practices and experiences become a way of modeling, by analogy, what it is like for nonhuman agent to engage with the opportunities for action presented by their larger environments. Finally, in what I have termed Umwelt exploration, there is a further shift away from more human-centric strategies for engaging with nonhuman agents. Jakob von Uexküll, a German–Estonian philosopher-biologist whose work proved foundational for the field of ethology, coined the term Umwelt to refer to “an animal’s environment in the sense of its lived, phenomenal world, the world as it presents itself to that animal thanks to its sensorimotor repertoire” (Thompson 59; see also Nagel).6 Hence, my label for this fourth strategy is meant to suggest how it places an emphasis less on the translation of the nonhuman into the human than on the lived, phenomenal worlds of nonhuman animals themselves—and on how a concern with nonhuman ways of encountering the world can reshape humans’ own modes of encounter.7 As I discuss below in connection with Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats, narratives can focus on interspecies or intraspecies variations in phenomenal experience—or both. But in any case, the strategies I group under the heading of “Umwelt Exploration” are methods used to project a model that, with as much granularity or detail as possible, represents what it’s like for intelligent agents to engage with their surrounding environment. Any aspect of the narrative system can be recruited for the purpose of exploring how different sorts of beings encounter the world. Thus, my analysis suggests how Reklaw’s text uses aspects of narrative time to call into question human-centric ways of figuring nonhuman experiences. Hughes’ Bye, Bye Birdie, for its part, posits variation across human and nonhuman Umwelten as a basic feature of the storyworld, and uses as-

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Or, in Uexküll’s own words: “The Umwelt of any animal that we wish to investigate is only a section carved out of the environment [Umgebung] which we see spread around it—and this environment is nothing but our own human world. The first task of Umwelt research is to identify each animal’s perceptual cues among all the [potential] stimuli in its environment and to build up the animal’s specific world with them….As the number of an animal’s performances grows, the number of objects that populate its Umwelt increases. It grows within the individual life span of every animal that is able to gather experiences” (13, 48). In this connection, compare Shapiro’s suggestive analysis, which draws on ideas from phenomenology and the philosophy of mind to outline how humans are capable of developing “kinesthetic empathy” with nonhuman animals—in ways that allow for at least a partial fusion of ways of experiencing the world.

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pects of narrative space to stage conflicting paradigms for understanding such differences.8 Rethinking Narrativity: Zoonarratology and Critical Animal Studies A grounding assumption of zoonarratology is that moving rightward along the scale shown in figure 1—that is, an increasingly detailed engagement with the lived texture or ecology of nonhuman experiences— need not result in diminished narrativity. Rather, in stories figuring the moment-by-moment experiences of nonhuman animals, narrativity emerges from the attempt to imagine how a different kind of intelligent agent constitutes the world—and from using this imaginative engagement to prompt, in turn, a rethinking of the relationship between human and nonhuman experiences. There is now an extensive body of narratological literature devoted to the concept of narrativity, or “the formal and contextual features making a (narrative) text more or less narrative” (Prince 65). Although theorists have articulated a variety of positions on what features or factors are most salient (see Pier and García Landa for a comprehensive overview), many commentators share the presupposition that a key factor contributing to narrativity is a focus on human or human-like individuals experiencing events in storyworlds. As Monika Fludernik puts it, narrative “reflects a cognitive schema of embodiedness that relates to human existence and human concerns. The anthropomorphic bias of narratives and its correlation with the fundamental story parameters of personhood, identity, actionality, etc., have long been noted by theoreticians of narrative and have been recognized as constituting the rock-bottom level of story matter” (9).9 Likewise Werner Wolf argues that anthropomorphic characters, functioning as “promoters and ex8

9

Another relevant strategy is the portrayal of character transformations (or hybridizations) across species boundaries—that is, the portrayal of characters losing human traits and acquiring nonhuman attributes, or shape-shifting from the nonhuman to the human domain, or straddling both realms, in the manner of the teenage girl whose mother, in Laurence Gonzales’ novel Lucy (2010), was a bonobo ape. Such transformations and hybridizations can be used to figure the human–nonhuman boundary as gradient and porous rather than clear-cut and impermeable. In the same study, Fludernik goes on to define narrativity as “mediated human experientiality” (26), suggesting that “human experientiality is the topic of narrative” (37) and that “the representation of human experience is the central aim of narrative” (37). Other theorists who make a focus on human or human-like characters criterial for narrative include Cohn, Kafalenos, and Ricoeur. By contrast, Richardson lifts the anthropomophic restriction, suggesting that a representation need not center on human or human-like characters for it to qualify as a narrative.

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periencers of multiphase actions that unfold in time,” constitute a basic building block of narrative (325). Gerald Prince, too, suggests that “[t] he degree of narrativity of a given narrative depends partly on the extent to which that narrative fulfi lls a receiver’s desire by representing oriented temporal wholes [that are] meaningful in terms of a human(ized) project and world” (65). Although I pursued a similar line of argument in previous work (Basic 105–36), the present chapter instead suggests that narrative has the power to model what it’s like for nonhuman others, as well as for human beings. Here it is important to emphasize how ideas from the field of critical animal studies afford foundations for zoonarratological research, even as inquiry into the forms and functions of narrative across periods, genres, and media can be leveraged by scholars concerned with the cultural and ontological status of nonhuman beings. In contrast with studies of nonhuman animals in the biomedical sciences, which use the term animal studies to designate “a wide range of investigative operations employing nonhuman animal bodies, [operations that posit] material resemblance and metaphysical incompatibility between researcher and object of research” (Benston 548), critical animal studies is an “interdisciplinary formation arising in the past three decades that views human/animal relations as a problem for historical, sociological, and cultural analysis—[and that intervenes] in biomedical animal studies by contesting assumptions of mentalistic and moral difference” (548). Scholars working in this field thus engage in a reassessment of ideas of the human—and of the nonhuman—in light of research undercutting earlier assumptions about the distinctiveness of humans vis-à-vis language and tool use, cognition, and complexity of cultural organization (Herzing and White; Wolfe). They also rethink the stakes of anthropomorphic styles of animal representation, whereby the specificity of the experiences of nonhuman animals is emptied out and replaced with experiences imported from the human domain (McHugh, “Literary”; but see Mitchell). Work in critical animal studies helps clarify the broader implications of making a focus on human ways of worldmaking a condition or requirement for narrativity. If that stipulation is lifted, narrative can be viewed as a resource for modeling the richness and complexity of what it is like for nonhuman others, and hence a means to underscore what is at stake in the trivialization—or outright destruction—of their experiences. In this way, by figuring how human projects are necessarily entangled with other forms of creatural existence, narratives can cut against the grain of practices and institutions based on assumptions about the primacy of the human. Zoonarratology, in turn, is the study of how stories relate to just

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these sorts of assumptions, whether by affirming and reinforcing them or by engaging with them in a more critical and reflexive fashion. Animal Comics as Test Case for Zoonarratology As this last formulation suggests, part of zoonarratology’s brief is to analyze narrative strategies by means of which storytellers position their texts vis-à-vis broader assumptions about the scope and nature of animal life. In this connection, questions about generic conventions, particular narrative techniques, and the way those techniques play out in different storytelling media are all relevant. Animal comics, in turn, afford an important test case for exploring these sorts of questions. Drawing on the work of Thierry Groensteen, Steve Baker (131) explores the proposition that animal comics (rather than literature or film) have come to be the favored site for fictional portrayals of nonhuman animals. Though Groensteen’s study predates the advances in computer-generated imagery that have led to a proliferation of animated films featuring (heavily anthropomorphized) nonhuman characters, from A Bug’s Life (2003) and The Lion King (1994) to Finding Nemo (2003) and Kung Fu Panda (2008), his explanation for why “fiction animalière” (‘animal fiction’) has found a home in graphic narratives still merits consideration. As Baker notes, Groensteen focuses on what he characterizes as the hybrid generic profile of animal comics (bande dessinée animalière); for Groensteen, this form of storytelling lies at the meeting-point of children’s literature, on the one hand, and satire and fable, on the other hand (10). Because of this confluence of generic traditions, animal comics allow for the expression of “animals’ disruptiveness in narrative”—since neither children’s literature nor satire “is bound by the ‘rules’ of orderly, rational narrative” (Baker 131). But a zoonarratological perspective provides means for refining this claim, and hence for developing a more focused research agenda when it comes to studying graphic narratives featuring nonhuman animals. Arguably, animal fiction finds a home in animal comics not because of the genre’s inherited tendency to violate the rules of orderly narrative, but because the genre exploits what figure 1 suggests are capacities built into narrative viewed as a representational system, i.e., a system for building storyworlds. Specifically, animal comics exploit narrative’s capacity to project storyworlds inhabited by nonhuman agents, and in some instances to situate the (imagined or hypothesized) texture of their moment-by-moment experiences at the center of narrative interest. Thus, rather than transgressing the rules of orderly narrative, the animal comics that I discuss in my next section use the narrative system, implemented on a multimodal “platform” of comics, to explore what

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it’s like for nonhuman others—and what such nonhuman experiences mean, in turn, for ways of conceptualizing the human domain. Reklaw’s and Hughes’ narratives focus special attention on (constructions of) the boundary between human and nonhuman worlds, and invite reflection on how cultural institutions and practices may be invested in maintaining and policing this boundary—whether by ignoring or actively suppressing consideration of the felt, qualitative experiences of nonhuman animals, or by separating out human experiences from the rest of creatural life.

Exploring the Human–Nonhuman Boundary in Thirteen Cats and Bye, Bye Birdie In graphic narratives in general, individual panels encapsulate time-slices of an unfolding storyworld, with the design of panels as well as panel sequences affording a more or less detailed, ground-level representation of what characters’ own encounters with the storyworld are like. The more fine-grained a graphic narrative’s portrayal of how an intelligent agent engages with its surrounding environment, the more fully the narrative aligns itself with the representational strategy that I have labelled “Umwelt Exploration,” located at the right end of the continuum in figure 1. In comics featuring human characters, story creators can focus on intraspecies variation in human Umwelten—as when Alison Bechdel, in Fun Home (2006), juxtaposes her family members’ different ways of experiencing the circumstances and events unfolding in the storyworld. Animal comics, for their part, can provide pathways to nonhuman worlds, by using words and images (or image-sequences alone, as in Hughes’ Bye, Bye Birdie) to project interspecies variation in Umwelten. In such comics, the focus can be on different nonhuman species’ ways of experiencing events in the storyworld or on the contrast between human and nonhuman Umwelten—or both, as in Hakobune Hakusho’s manga series Animal Academy (2005–8), in which the human protagonist attends a school where cats, foxes, and other animals are able to shapeshift into human form. The two case studies discussed in this section demonstrate how different narrative strategies can be used to explore contrasts among human and nonhuman worlds—as well as larger implications of those contrasts. In Reklaw’s autobiographical account of his experiences with the many cats adopted by his family during his childhood, Reklaw models the shifting relationship between human and nonhuman Umwelten via the fluctuating distance between the older, narrating I telling the story and the younger, experiencing I involved in the events being recounted; conversely, ways of orienting to the family cats function as a yardstick for gauging the

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distance between Reklaw’s past and present selves. Whereas Reklaw thus exploits temporal dimensions of stories and storytelling to investigate the human–nonhuman boundary, in Bye, Bye Birdie, Hughes exploits narrative space. More specifically, Hughes manipulates spatial imagery—in particular fluctuations in size or scale, and strategic conflations of contained and containing spaces—to map out mind-bending geographies in the storyworld. Her text uses such anomalous locales to suggest, in turn, the difficulty of situating the human–nonhuman boundary in logical space, despite cultures’ investment in establishing and maintaining a strict demarcation between these domains of animal life. Narrating I, Experiencing I, and Nonhuman Others in Thirteen Cats of My Childhood Uexküll wrote that “[t]he best way to find out that no two human Umwelten are the same is to have yourself led through unknown territory by someone familiar with it. Your guide unerringly follows a path that you cannot see” (50). Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats of My Childhood bears out Uexküll’s claim, using the resources of graphic narrative to project variation over time in the Umwelten experienced during the life-span of a single human being—namely, himself. Reklaw draws on such intraspecies (or intraindividual) variation to model interspecies differences, or rather relationships between species-specific ways of engaging with the world, even as his text suggests that learning to register the phenomenological specificity of nonhuman experiences has been instrumental in transforming Reklaw into the person he has become. Overall Reklaw’s text underscores how there can be more or less critical and reflexive ways of using stories to create pathways to other worlds—whether those worlds are ones inhabited by narrators’ own past selves or by the nonhuman agents that tellers encounter as part of the process of becoming who and what they are. Originally appearing in 2005 in volume 2 of his self-published series of minicomics titled Couch Tag (2004–6), Thirteen Cats is a retrospective account of Reklaw’s experiences with the cats adopted by his family, from the time he was a small child to his college years. The family moves houses frequently, and as the parents’ marriage comes unraveled, Jesse’s sister and he grow apart, and many other circumstances change, the family’s practice of adopting cats remains one of the only constants in Jesse’s life.10 In parallel with the fluctuating distance between the older

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For purposes of exposition, I will refer to the older narrating I as “Reklaw” and the younger experiencing I as “Jesse.”

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narrating I who uses words and images to tell the story of the thirteen cats, on the one hand, and the younger experiencing I’s encounters with those cats, on the other hand, Reklaw’s sequence of vignettes charts a complex, shifting relationship between human and nonhuman worlds, with those worlds sometimes converging, sometimes diverging, but never achieving complete congruence. The two panels reproduced as figure 2, which conclude the vignette titled “Gene,” indicate how processes of narrative worldmaking cut across engagements with human as well as nonhuman others, including the other persons we ourselves once were in the past.

Figure 2. From Thirteen Cats of My Childhood, page 241. Reprinted by permission of the artist.

The sequence focuses on the way Jesse and his sister, because they “couldn’t get enough cats,” “chronicled the events of [the cats’] backyard microcosm” (241). Here the text stages at a hypodiegetic level the way narrative itself affords resources for engaging with nonhuman worlds, with Jesse and his sister using stories to project Umwelten for the cats. In chronicling the cats’ behavior, the children rely on narrative to situate these intelligent agents in an unfolding action structure, ascribing to them a range mental states and dispositions—emotions such as jealousy, and localized intentions as well as larger plans—that constitute reasons for acting.11

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In this respect, compare Jesse’s and his sister’s narratives about the cats with what ethologists refer to as ethograms. An ethogram can be defined as “a behavioral catalog that presents information about an action’s morphology and gives the action a name” (Allen and Bekoff 40), or alternatively as “a time budget of the various activities in which [an individual animal or species engages]” (Ristau 132). A future task for zoonarratological

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In this connection, the wall beyond which Jesse is looking figures (in multiple ways) how narrative mediates even as it provides access to the experiences it represents. The wall allows Jesse to observe the cats without himself being seen and thus influencing their behavior. At the same time, standing between readers and the cats, the wall suggests the importance of stories for registering and mapping out Umwelten; the sequence emphasizes how Jesse’s and his sister’s acts of narration—refracted through the older Reklaw’s own act of narration—afford a blueprint for constructing what it was like for the cats to engage with their environment. And the wall also functions as a physical analog for the passage of time that separates Jesse’s experiences from Reklaw’s account. In a way that parallels Jesse’s and his sister’s story-within-the-story, the process of retrospective autodiegetic narration makes it possible to build a world in which the past self’s experiences can be situated—and thus made sense of. Hence, in both the human and nonhuman contexts, narrative affords an environment for Umwelt exploration, by means of story-enabled attributions of mental states and dispositions to intelligent agents inhabiting fundamentally other worlds. Granted, several aspects of Reklaw’s text point up the non-congruence of human and nonhuman worlds, and also the need to register that noncongruence. For one thing, in narrating his and his family’s encounters with the cats, Reklaw resists anthropomorphization. Hence, with the exception of one moment explicitly marked as an act of anthropomorphic projection, in which the older, narrating Reklaw fabricates a “romantic ending” for two lost cats (see figure 3), the cats do not possess the ability to speak. Nor does Reklaw draw the cats with human-like facial expressions (compare Keen). Further, both the verbal and visual tracks emphasize the disparity between his family’s stories about the cats and the cats’ own ways of negotiating their surrounding environment; in this manner, the text metanarratively signals the tension between human storytelling proclivities and the nonhuman experiences brought within the purview of those proclivities. Thus, in the first vignette of Thirteen Cats, “Black Star,” Reklaw’s sister’s story about Black Star’s magical ability “to disappear into darkness and change her size and shape at will” (233) conflicts with what Reklaw eventually learns through “secondhand stories and some photographs”: namely, that Black Star died after being hit by a

research is to investigate more fully the relationship between stories and ethograms—in particular, how narrative supports the construction and comparison of ethograms (see Mitchell; other contributions to Mitchell, Thompson, and Miles; and McHugh, Animal 211–19).

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Figure 3. From Thirteen Cats of My Childhood, page 247. Reprinted by permission of the artist.

car, and that, “afraid of how the death would affect us kids, mom got a new all-black kitty and secretly tossed out Black Star’s corpse.” By the end of the one-page vignette, the replacement cat, “Black Star II,” has become increasingly attracted to the woods until he is “completely absorbed into the wild”—indicating not just the failure of the mother’s ruse but also the extent to which companion animals (more generally) resist assimilation to human projects. Meanwhile, in the visual track Reklaw provides larger, more detailed images of the imaginary Black Star with magical powers and also the ersatz Black Star, as compared with the first Black Star, whether alive or dead. Here the sparser visualizations of the original cat suggest the difficulty of sorting through the narratives that grow up around and come to define animal companions, and of thereby identifying the storylines that most closely correspond to the experiences, and life-course, of the animals in question. Yet even as Reklaw registers the story-resistant or story-transcending aspects of the cats from his childhood—that is, the way they refuse to be contained within narratives that define them primarily in terms of the human domestic spaces they inhabit—he also indicates how narrative functions as a primary resource for accommodating and engaging with nonhuman animals on their own terms. Specifically, the text models how nonhumans can be situated in Umwelten that, fleshed out with narrative means, allow the storyteller to project what he or she hypothesizes it is like for an organism to experience the world. To put the same point another way, although Reklaw underscores that the cats’ experiences cannot be fully aligned with what it’s like for the human characters, his account traces pathways to the nonhuman worlds that intersect those inhabited by the Reklaw family. Again, the fluctuating distance between the present,

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narrating self and the other self of the past provides a model for representing nonhuman experiences—even as, reciprocally, interspecies encounters afford ways of understanding how a single human individual can encompass different selves over time. For example, the vignette titled “Frosty,” reproduced as figure 4, tells the story of “an indifferent all-white cat” that can’t hide “in our brown and gray suburb” (234). Though the cat keeps clear of “six-year-old-me and my toy-destroying experiments,” Reklaw’s narrative retrospectively accommodates the particularity of the cat’s experiences—in part by reframing the young Jesse’s and Frosty’s encounter as a narrative about two distinct ways of engaging with the world, an intersection of Umwelten that the older narrating I recognizes for what it is, and recounts in a way that explains the younger experiencing I’s lack of recognition. In telling this narrative, Reklaw attributes mental states both to his younger self and to Frosty: Jesse, himself imputing to the cat an interest in the Lego bricks, seeks to “bait” Frosty out into the rain; the cat, drawn with an expression of surprise, follows the Lego brick tied to a string, fails to be bothered by the rain, and then loses interest in Jesse’s ploy. But the sequence is bookended by panels in which Reklaw’s father “paced himself through a six-pack and the last of his stash [of marijuana], while flipping channels between two football games and a Godzilla movie.” In the final panel of the vignette, Jesse stares at the television screen, with the visual track suggesting that what he sees there is the reflection of his father with a beer can in his hand. (It remains an open question whether the young Jesse did in fact see his father’s reflection on this occasion, or whether his father’s image in the TV is what, in looking back on the episode involving Frosty, the older Reklaw sees in his mind’s eye.) When this panel is situated in the larger context of Reklaw’s father’s decline into alcoholism and the failure of his parents’ marriage, the narrating I’s synopsis of the film, in which Godzilla knocks “a turtle-monster onto his back, never to right himself,” takes on extra resonance. It suggests not only the parallels between the film and his father’s life story, but also that Jesse’s cruelty toward Frosty and some of the other cats (235, 240)—his failure to appreciate fully what it was like for them to experience the world as autonomous beings in their own right—derived in part from Jesse’s own uncertain position within the family, which was undermined by verbally abusive and sometimes physically destructive behavior on the part of his father (242, 248). In other words, Reklaw’s text is not only an attempt to document, retrospectively, the nonhuman experiences whose qualitative richness and phenomenological specificity the younger Jesse could only partially register; Thirteen Cats is also a narrative about how, precisely through the

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Figure 4. From Thirteen Cats of My Childhood, page 234. Reprinted by permission of the artist.

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circumstances and events recounted in the text, Reklaw has become a person who more fully appreciates such variation across Umwelten—and who orients to the otherness of his own past as both a model for and an outcome of interspecies encounters. To put the same point another way, using narrative to figure the domain of the human as marked by modes of otherness emergent in time, Reklaw thereby suggests how stories provide a basis for engaging with nonhuman worlds on their own terms. The Spaces of Species—and Species of Space—in Bye, Bye Birdie Whereas Reklaw’s autodiegetic account uses aspects of narrative time to model the variable nature—and partial permeability—of the human– nonhuman boundary, Bye, Bye Birdie narrates interspecies encounters heterodiegetically, and deploys narrative space to question the conceptual foundations of species difference itself. A wordless 32-page comic, Birdie was authored by Shirley Hughes, a British writer and illustrator of children’s books who however targeted an adult readership in this instance—what with the text’s recasting of (potential) sexual relationships in terms of predator–prey interactions and its use of sometimes violent imagery. What is more, by figuring a world in which the inside seems to be outside and vice versa—an M. C. Escher-like milieu in which humans control and contain nonhuman animals but also the reverse—Hughes uses species of space to destabilize the spaces of species. By projecting a byzantine storyworld geography, the text suggests the logical incoherence of attempts to categorize humans as segregated from other species of animal life. More than this, Hughes’ narrative figures the human–nonhuman boundary as the symptom of an anxiety—specifically, a human anxiety about the sustainability of efforts to locate, contain, and thereby control nonhuman others. The narrative opens with a man meeting and proposing marriage to what appears to be a woman wearing a hat with a bird on top of it and also carrying a stoll ostensibly made of dead birds. Even on the first page of the comic, however, the female character’s large, oval eyes suggest an unusual bodily morphology. When the man takes her home, carrying her over the threshold after the fashion of newlyweds, the female character reveals herself to be a bird in the guise of a human: the stoll of dead birds, which turn out to be alive after all, had been hiding her beak, and her “hands” (which had also been hidden by the stoll) are now shown to be talons. The bird-woman begins chasing the male character around the house, initiating the pattern of (nonhuman) pursuit and (human) flight that constitutes the basic action structure of the narrative as a whole (see figure 5).

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Figure 5. From Bye, Bye Birdie by Shirley Hughes, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

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The text thus features a double role reversal, with the gender and species attributes of the male human character, who is initially in the dominant position, becoming liabilities that not only diminish his status but also jeopardize his life. Indeed, in addition to using the bird-woman to portray a transformation across species lines, or rather an unmasking of species identity by a character whose ploy to hide that identity paradoxically calls it into question, Hughes also sketches complex mapping relationships between gender difference and (cultural paradigms of) species difference. As indicated in the Oxford English Dictionary, the term birdie functions in modern-day English as “a term of endearment for a child or a young woman” (the first attested instance of this usage is from 1889)—with this disjunctive definition, which suggests an equivalence between women and children, itself reflecting infantilizing conceptions of women in the broader culture. The title of Hughes’ text, coupled with the trope of the pursued female becoming the pursuer, may thus be an indictment of gender stereotypes and of their failure to capture lived realities.12 At the same time, it is significant that Hughes attributes nonhuman qualities to the female character, rather than the male. In this respect, the text can be read as reproducing longstanding cultural associations between the feminine and the physical or the “animalistic,” as explored by theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir and, in ways that have proved foundational for critical animal studies, Carol J. Adams.13 But as also indicated in the Oxford English Dictionary, birdie has been used in English (at least since 1790) to denote more literally a small bird—or as the OED puts it, “a dear or pretty little bird.” Given the dizzying shifts of scale deployed by Hughes in figuring the birds over the course of her narrative, the title of her text generates additional ironies, in this case ironies directly linked to questions of species difference. As should already be apparent, the primary bird-woman character is anything but “a dear or pretty little bird,” and the human character subsequently encounters, in succession, a bird that, many times his size, swallows him (9–10); a flock of blackbirds that (after the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence”14) is concealed within a pie and that pursues him aggressively 12 As Hughes put it in an interview with Nicholas Wroe published in The Guardian in March 2009: “And this notion of a little chap being pursued by a large predatory female bird with a sharp beak does seem to unnerve people. Particularly men.” 13 Another aspect of the text to explore from the vantage point of gender identities and how those identities map onto species differences: the relationship between Hughes’ narrative and the 1960 stage musical and 1963 fi lm adapation also titled Bye, Bye Birdie, which feature a character based on Elvis Presley and a small-town young woman from the American midwest. 14 It should be recalled that this nursery rhyme itself registers anxiety about the human–

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after the bird-woman cuts the pie open with a triumphant gesture (12); a group of characters in coats and hats that on closer inspection proves to be a cluster of human-sized birds, potentially threatening in their demeanor (15); a sculpture or monument that turns out to be a massive egg, from which the bird-woman emerges and re-engages in her pursuit of the human character (18); and another (or the same?) dinosaur-sized bird that, having apparently re-swallowed the character, flies high above the bird-woman, who now takes on a diminutive size because of the distance involved (25). In the context afforded by this sequence of encounters, the phrase bye, bye birdie could refer to the human character’s repeated attempts to get free of the birds that pursue and sometimes attack him. Alternatively the title could allude to the way the constant shifts in the birds’ scale, comportment, and locale compel the human character (the only human in the narrative) to abandon his original assumptions about how he himself relates to the birds—among other forms of animal life. In broaching issues of size or scale in Hughes’ portrayal of the birds, I have already touched on aspects of the storyworld’s complex geography. Indeed, that geography is not merely complex but difficult to conceptualize, let alone inhabit imaginatively. More specifically, the text engages in strategic deformations of everyday Euclidian space to challenge cultural paradigms for understanding the human–nonhuman boundary—and the logico-spatial relationships that those paradigms entail. Insofar as humans occupy the position of the dominant species in the cultural imaginary, the human domain can be seen as encompassing or containing nonhuman species, with those species subserving human ends. But this way of figuring the spaces of the human and the nonhuman—respectively, as containing and contained—is offset by understandings of humans as themselves members of the broader domain of creatural life, in which nonhumans participate on an equal footing. Hughes’ text stages the conflict or antinomy between these two ways of imagining the spaces of species, by manipulating—one might even say “cross-breeding”—species of space: namely, containing and contained spaces within the storyworld. Mark Johnson has characterized the contrast between containing and contained spaces as an “image schema,” which can be defined as a “recur-

nonhuman boundary, as well as issues of containment and control associated with that boundary. The four and twenty blackbirds are initially inside the pie, but by the end of the nursery rhyme a blackbird has come to occupy and indeed dominate the space that contains the pie as well as human pie-makers, pecking off the nose of a maid hanging out some clothes. For its part, Hughes’ text perhaps visually alludes to the maid and her clothes line via the telephone wires that appear late in the narrative (see pages 19–21, 25).

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ring, dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs [arising from ‘orientational feats’ that humans perform in spatial environments and giving] coherence and structure to our experience” (qtd in Dannenberg 75). Further, drawing on a range of such image schemata to explore aspects of space in fictional narratives, Hilary P. Dannenberg notes that containment or boundedness is an especially salient feature of fictional worlds: “This schema is used to evoke surfaces as walls containing or enveloping further areas of space and their contents....In narrative fiction the container schema often involves the depiction of rooms, interiors, and other walled structures” (75–76). Hughes’ narrative, however, conflates containing and contained environments, undercutting readers’ attempts to situate humans and nonhumans in one or the other species of space. Thus, in a striking sequence early in the narrative, when the gigantic, dinosaur-sized bird swallows the human character, he is portrayed as occupying successively larger and egg-like oval spaces inside the huge bird (next to worms also contained within the bird), until those spaces gradually morph into a human-scale sitting room that is then entered by the bird-woman, who re-initiates her chase of the human character—the same chase that previously took place in the “outer” world by which the giant bird was also contained. It is not just that Hughes uses shading to suggest continuity between the bird-internal and the bird-external, built spaces with which the human character is familiar and comfortable (see figure 6); what is more, given that the human character never exits the bird-internal space, the text, in the manner of a Möbius strip, situates the subsequent action as both containing and contained by the domain inside the bird. Additional layers of spatial ambiguity thus attach themselves to other sectors of the storyworld as the narrative continues to develop—for example, when the bird-woman cuts open the pie containing the blackbirds, when she hatches out of the scuplture or monument, or when the (or another) dinosaur-sized bird again swallows the human character, and he again finds himself contained within a small, egg-shaped space. In turn, the dream-like indeterminacy of the storyworld’s geography— the way the narrative underspecifies where human–nonhuman encounters should be situated in a nested structure of bounding and bounded spaces—can be read zoonarratologically, as a strategy for interrogating cultural paradigms of humans’ relationship with other species. If Reklaw uses narrative time to trace out the consequences of appreciating differences across as well as within species, Hughes uses narrative space to suggest the need to disentangle concepts of species difference from ideas of human exceptionalism, so that differences in kind do not get automatically translated into hierarchies of value. Arguably, in twisting storyworld space into a Möbius strip, and thus intertwining human and nonhuman

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Figure 6. From Bye, Bye Birdie by Shirley Hughes, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

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domains, Hughes counters the logic of what earlier epochs had figured as a Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy), which projected a “horizontal” axis of morphological difference onto a “vertical” (or hierarchical) axis of ontological status—and moral worth.

Zoonarratology: From Interdisciplinarity to Transdisciplinarity In this chapter, I have sought to lay conceptual groundwork for the approach to narrative inquiry that I have termed zoonarratology, and also to outline strategies for engaging with various kinds of storytelling practices from a zoonarratological perspective. In doing so, I have aimed to avoid two key problems that Pekka Tammi, in his pioneering work in the area of metanarratology, has identified in recent scholarship on narrative—namely, the tendency to rely on a hyperextended conception of narrative that erases the distinction between stories and other modes of representation, and the neglect of differences among specific ways of (and purposes for) telling stories (“Against” 25–29). Arguing against what I take to be over-restrictive accounts of the requirements for narrativity, I do not seek to abolish those requirements altogether—but rather to diversify the ecology of experiencing minds that can be situated in storyworlds. Further, my focus on animal comics is intended as a pilot-study for, rather than a representative example of, zoonarratological research. Other kinds of stories, presented in other media, genres, and communicative settings, will require different methods of analysis, and they are likely to afford different sorts of pathways to nonhuman worlds—and thus different ways of reconceptualizing the domain of the human. But what is more, a zoonarratological approach should not be assimilated to the emphasis on interdisciplinary research that has, as Tammi notes, become de rigueur in the field of narrative studies (“Against” 19– 21). Rather, in setting out a program for zoonarratological scholarship, I seek to emphasize the importance of a different concept: not interdisciplinarity but rather transdisciplinarity. A major goal here is to avoid the kind of unidirectional borrowing that, though commonly conflated with interdisciplinarity, in fact undermines efforts to foster genuine dialogue and exchange across fields of study. Thus, my suggestion is that scholars working within humanistic traditions of narrative research go beyond the adaptation of ideas originating in other disciplines. Those scholars should instead aim to co-fashion, at the ground level, the concepts and methods needed to coordinate work being done across a range of fields, encompassing what Jerome Kagan (updating C. P. Snow) has called the three cultures: the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.

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Because the concepts and tools needed to study them cut across all these domains of inquiry, nonhuman animals can be characterized as a transdisciplinary object of investigation. Granted, humanities research cannot exhaustively characterize the domain of the nonhuman; but by the same token it is impossible to engage fully with this or other field-transcending domains without substantial contributions from scholars working in the humanities. From this perspective, zoonarratology can be seen as an opportunity to situate humanistic scholarship on narrative in a transdisciplinary context. Zoonarratological research can demonstrate how the study of stories has the potential to enrich other frameworks for inquiry, and not just borrow from them.15

Works Cited Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist–Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990. Allen, Colin, and Marc Bekoff. Species of Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1997. Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. 1993. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Four Square Books, 1960. Benston, Kimberly W. “Experimenting at the Threshold: Sacrifice, Anthropomorphism, and the Aims of (Critical) Animal Studies.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 548–55. Braidotti, Rosi. “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 526–32. Brown, Lisa. “An Introduction to the Illustrated Animal.” Antennae 16 (2011): 3–6. Clark, Andy. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1997. —. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Dannenberg, Hilary P. Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Ewert, Jeanne. “Reading Visual Narrative: Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Narrative 8.1 (2000): 87–103. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Gibson, J. J. An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.

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I am grateful to Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre for their assistance with the research informing this essay, and to Jan Alber for his insightful and productive comments on an earlier draft.

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Groensteen, Thierry. Animaux en case: Une histoire critique de la bande dessinnée animalière. Paris: Futuropolis, 1987. Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. —. “Formal Models in Narrative Analysis.” Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. Ed. Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. 447–80. —. “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 156–81. Herzing, Denise L., and Thomas I. White. “Dolphins and the Question of Personhood.” Etica & Animali 9 (1998): 64–84. Hughes, Shirley. Bye, Bye Birdie. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009. Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Kafalenos, Emma. Narrative Causalities. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2006. Kagan, Jerome. The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Keen, Suzanne. “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy: Anthropomoporphism and Dehumanization in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 135–55. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Lovejoy, A. O. The Great Chain of Being. 1936. Cambridge, MA: Havard UP, 1964. McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. —. “Literary Animal Agents.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 487–95. Mitchell, Robert W. “Anthropomorphic Anecdotalism as Method.” Mitchell, Thompson, and Miles. 151–69. Mitchell, Robert W., Nicholas S. Thompson, and H. Lyn Miles, eds. Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974): 435–50. Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2004. —. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009. Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality, Vulnerability, and the Identity of Species. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Pier, John, and José Angel García Landa, eds. Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. 2nd edition. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. Reklaw, Jesse. Thirteen Cats of My Childhood. The Best American Comics 2006. Ed. Harvey Pekar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 232–51. Richardson, Brian. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1997. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. 3 vols. 1983–85. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984–88. Ristau, Carolyn A. “Cognitive Ethology.” The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. Robert C. Wilson and Frank C. Keil. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1999. 132–34.

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Shapiro, Kenneth J. “A Phenomenological Approach to the Study of Nonhuman Animals.” Mitchell, Thompson, and Miles. 277–95. Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures. 1959. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Tammi, Pekka. “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’).” Partial Answers 4.2 (2006): 19–40. —. “Introduction: Crossing the Boundaries? Or, the Most Typical Comic Book in World Literature.” Thresholds of Interpretation: Crossing the Boundaries in Literary Criticism. Ed. Markku Lehtimäki and Julia Tofantšuk. Tallinn: TLÜ Kirjastus, 2006. 10–29. Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Torrance, Steve. “In Search of the Enactive: Introduction to Special Issue on Enactive Experience.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4.4 (2005): 357–68. Uexküll, Jakob von. “A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds.” 1934. Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept. Ed. and trans. Claire H. Schiller. New York: International Universities P, 1957. 5–80. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. Wolf, Werner. “Music and Narrative.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 324–29. Wolfe, Cary, ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Wroe, Nicholas. “Shirley Hughes: A Life in Books.” The Guardian 7 March 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/mar/07/shirley–hughes–interview

Markku Lehtimäki (University of Tampere)

Watching a Tree Grow: Terrence Malick’s The New World and the Nature of Cinema In his famous travel narrative, A Map of Virginia (1612), Captain John Smith represents the New World as characteristically English, also seeing its nature through European eyes and conventions: “The country is not mountaunous nor yet low but such pleasant plaine hils & fertile valleys… watered so conveniently with their sweete brookes and christall springs” (3). In this article, I will focus on Terrence Malick’s film The New World (2005), which is a poetic rendering of one of America’s founding myths, the story the establishment of the first English colony in Jamestown, Virginia, as well as the romanticized story of John Smith and the native girl Pocahontas. The visual style of Malick’s film reminds us of the images of plain hills and fertile valleys, sweet brooks and crystal springs in John Smith’s original text, on which many of Malick’s images and voice-overs are based. The New World opens with historical maps charting the territory of Virginia, but the opening images also visually demonstrate an integration of the human and the natural, as—after the opening credits—Pocahontas is seen swimming underwater among colorful fish, and sky and clouds are reflected on the water. We also hear Pocahontas’s first words as voice-over: “Come, Spirit. Help us sing the story of our land. You are our mother, we your field of corn. We rise from out of the soul of you.” The beginning of the film appears to provide us with different (and yet combined) ways of telling this story: one through historical maps; another through spoken words; and the third, arguably the most basic way, through pure cinematic images. In his Film Narratology, Peter Verstraten states that “the altered nature of narration in cinema is an urgent reason to rethink filmic narrativity” (5). In their construction of seemingly discontinuous shots and their focus on details in the natural environment, the films of Terrence Malick present new challenges to the conventional understandings of cinematic

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narrative, as their primary concerns are not complex plots and psychological characters. Rather, Malick’s films are powerfully set apart by the pure beauty and poetry of their imagery. Malick’s poetic cinema draws attention to the film as a mode of presentation; thus, as it were, transcending the realm of representation, of framing the world in images, which is typical of classical narrative cinema. Malick’s films seem to pose philosophical questions about the world through different (and new) ways of viewing it. In this sense, the title of his fourth feature film, The New World, is also cinematically self-reflexive. Narratological theories of film generally provide us with a strongly textual and narrative interpretation of cinematic (re)presentation, as they approach films as literature-like “texts” without paying enough attention to the cinema-specific techniques and to the materiality of the medium. In contrast, other, more classical theories of film—including realist, formalist, and phenomenological ones—are less focused on narrative and more concerned with picture-centric formal aesthetics, relating cinema to painting and photography. As George Butte asks: “Should film narrative, as it cuts and juxtaposes pieces of film, emphasize fragments or larger wholes?” (280). This issue concerning cinematic devices—shooting, editing, montage, and suture—can be enlarged to a more general theoretical question about viewing and studying filmic narrativity. One of the governing questions of this article is the specific nature of cinema. As Meir Sternberg argues, narrative is “a rare natural category, indispensable to the real-life existence and activity of humankind” (“Narrativity” 607). He suggests that the universal naturalness of narrativity is grounded in the ongoing survival value of observing, plotting, and telling, but that cinema is “perceptually the most unsettling…of all our survival tactics” (“Telling” 158).1 Sternberg refers here to Viktor Shklovsky, for whom cinema exhibits a disregard for motivation of plot structure, since “the film does not tell but shows” (157). In this vein, it could be argued that the cinematic medium provides us with theoretical challenges in our attempt at a proper definition of narrative and narrativity.

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An “ecological” approach to cinema examines the ways in which the human perceptual system has evolved over the centuries to enhance our chance of survival in the real world (see Anderson; Bordwell, Poetics 335). It can be argued that narratives are a central means of making sense and surviving in the natural environment, and some fi lms powerfully simulate this idea (whether John Boorman’s gripping Deliverance [1972], Mel Gibson’s gruesome Apocalypto [2006], or Malick’s glorious The New World). Yet, as Sternberg implies, there is something “unsettling” in cinema (and other visual media), especially as it foregrounds disturbing, disorienting, and sometimes unmotivated images.

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Narrative Theory and Cinematographic Practice In the recent cognitivist film narratology, it has become customary to try to naturalize and normalize cinematic devices (Carroll, Theorizing 415) or to speak of authorial intentions underlying the filmic production (see Alber). These are valuable approaches, yet they seem to downplay the power of pure images in our experience of cinema. One of my theoretical touchstones in this article is the work of David Bordwell, the most influential of the narratologists of cinema. Bordwell proposes that narratives are designed to fulfill certain purposes, and those purposes can be conceived as aiming at certain effects. Criticizing what he calls the neo-structuralist orientation in recent narrative theories of cinema, Bordwell maintains that “isolated figures we discern in a narrative are not necessarily ends in themselves,” but “they are most fruitfully considered as a by-product of a holistic strategy, an effort after effect” (“Neo-Structuralist” 204). My own film-theoretical position is, however, situated between these two poles, one interested in photographed things in themselves and the other focused on the narrative whole. As I will attempt to show, it is short-sighted to try to ignore the small and disturbing details in favor of constructing narrative continuity; on the other hand, it is imperative to make sense of recurring images and plot motifs in order to reach a more comprehensive interpretation of the work in question. By focusing on functions, patterns, designs, purposes, and processes, Bordwell’s solution ties in nicely with rhetorical and cognitive approaches to narrative. Much in the style of Monika Fludernik’s “natural” narratology, Bordwell speaks of normalization of certain cinematic techniques in the course of film history. His cognitivist approach therefore attempts at giving meaning and coherence even to fragmented, disturbing, and indeterminate images and devices in cinema. In order to make sense of a cinematic narrative we need to deem some details insignificant, since they disturb our attempt at a coherent picture of the whole. Accordingly, viewers do not normally realize the anomalies of flashback, and consequently “devices that might seem anomalous from a featured-centered perspective may make sense from a design stance” (“Neo-Structuralist” 212). In his shrewd criticism of cognitive film narratology, John Mullarkey suggests that Bordwell aims at “the taming of the aesthetic dimension of cinema, be it in terms of transgression or excess,” and this “taming” is part of his attempt to narrativize, naturalize, and “cognitivize” cinema (35; see Bordwell, Narration 206). And yet there is some “excess” material to film, such as lights, colors, voices, and material objects. Mullarkey argues that what weakens Bordwell’s cognitivist paradigm is that it posits fragmented percepts or images as input that are then supplemented by

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certain interpretive frames leading to an output (45). For instance, in his analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Bordwell argues that we can choose not to construct a story world and instead savor random colors, gestures, and sounds. But to him, these “excessive” elements are “utterly unjustified, even by aesthetic motivation,” and they offer “little perceptual and cognitive pay off” (Narration 53). Compare, then, a critical overview of this approach: What is startling about this is the mechanistic way in which the experience of pleasure beyond narrative is perceived as a disturbing diversion, in opposition rather than symbiosis with cognitive and perceptual functions, as an additional burden that the spectator is incapable of carrying throughout the film. (Eleftheriotis 45)

Bordwell believes that some cinematic techniques such as abrupt and unmotivated flashbacks represent this kind of “disturbing diversion,” because they can be “too brutally disorienting for the classical Hollywood tradition” (“Neo-Structuralist” 216). However, these kinds of disorienting effects can be found from the “margins” of the classical Hollywood film, either from the early silent cinema or from modernist film narration. The films of Terrence Malick can be linked to the image-centered poetics of silent cinema, and it is here that they pose a potential challenge to narrative-oriented theories of film. Writing about the pioneering films of D. W. Griffith, a classic film theorist Siegfried Kracauer stresses the importance of their “indeterminacy,” because to Griffith “huge images of small material phenomena are not only integral components of the narrative but disclosures of new aspects of physical reality” (48). James Agee once wrote poetically about this dimension in Griffith’s nowadays notorious film The Birth of a Nation (1915): [Griffith] was a great primitive poet, a man capable, as only great and primitive artists can be, of intuitively perceiving and perfecting the tremendous magical images that underlie the memory and imagination of entire peoples.…There are many [other images] in that one film: the homecoming of the defeated hero; the ride of the Clansmen; the rapist and his victim among the dark leaves; a glimpse of a war hospital; dead young soldiers after battle; the dark, slow movement of the Union Army away from the camera, along a valley which is quartered strongly between hill-shadow and sunlight; these and still others have a dreamlike absoluteness which, indeed, cradles and suffuses the whole film. (312)

Indeed, Griffith’s lyrical films foreground human faces and natural objects as chief materials of their narrative.2 In the beginning of cinema, 2

In the early cinema of Griffith, “a close-up did not yet create narrative continuity but was an attraction in and of itself,” and “the close-up of a woman’s ankle in a shoe is a case

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spectators were fascinated by incidental details such as dark leaves, sunlit valleys and trees swaying in the wind, and the reason for this fascination was the way how the familiar—nature and the everyday—was “ghosted” by the unfamiliarity of film (Stern 339). It is not nature itself we see in those images but the specifically cinematographic rendering of nature, even to the degree that cinema makes strange the familiar by forcing us to pay close attention to that which we easily pass over in our everyday life. Instead of only emphasizing photographic and documentary realism, we need to understand the cinematic image and its capacity for rendering the material dimension of the everyday and to pay attention to the foregrounding of cinematic codes like color, editing, camera movement, acting, and so on (see Stern 323, 326; cf. Klevan 1–6).3 We can also think of Malick’s films here, with their combination of the pure imagery of nature documentaries and the almost experimental features of art cinema, which liken his style to that of the modernist Russian film poet Andrei Tarkovsky. In his essay “Pausing over Peripheral Detail” (1986), Roger Cardinal analyzes images of nature in Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1974), suggesting that these kinds of passages in film “embody the magic of real trees” (Stern 339). In her cinematographically sophisticated comment, Lesley Stern, however, contends that “in materializing [certain] objects the cinema invests them with pathos, renders them as moving”; and yet, “sometimes the cinematic thing has a capacity to touch us in a more mysterious and circuitous ways, as is the case with raindrops and…with leaves blowing in the wind” (335). The question, in the context of this essay, is whether we should try to give human significance to natural things projected onto the screen and whether our sense-making capacities sometimes fall short in the face of something inexplicable.4 Malick’s cinema typically cuts suddenly from

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of ‘pure exhibitionism’ without any narrative motivation” (Verstraten 228n; cf. Gunning 42). In this early cinema, “the presentation of unmotivated views (such as a close-up without prior establishment, within the diegetic universe, of the optical means for that view) would be cognitively disorienting for the audience” (Walsh 123). See also Murray Pomerance’s theory of “fi lm experience beyond narrative,” expecially his discussion of the cinema of attraction as compared to the classical narrative cinema (21–33). Lesley Stern discusses here Chantal Akerman’s famous feminist fi lm Jeanne Dielman (1975), which focuses on one woman’s everyday life in her apartment. See also Ivone Margulies’s study Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (1996). In his fascinating approach to Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo (1982), Richard John Ascárate focuses on one disturbing image of a “historical” map, which opens his analysis into a larger cultural analysis of nature and colonialism in South America. We may note certain similarities in Herzog’s and Malick’s cinematic poetics; as Noël Carroll notes, in their films “sights and events are portrayed as ‘too much there,’ resistant to satisfying description or explanation in terms of narration, psychology, and sometimes even physics” (Interpreting 285).

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the human action to pure images of nature which seem to resist narrative function and psychological explanation. In the words of Iain Macdonald, the alleged “problem” with Malick’s films “has to do with the long, speculative shots of water, grasslands, marshes, forests, fungus, insects, and so on that make up the film, punctuated by the dialogue and action that many people might expect to be more prominent” (88). In a way, The New World goes further than Malick’s previous films in its construction of nature as a central element of cinematic (non)narrative.5 A characteristic “Malick shot” is of a human figure, moving slowly through thick grass or forest, accompanied by bird song and insect sounds, and framed by earth, water, and sky. Malick’s use of nature images, natural sounds, and authentic shooting locations corresponds to his understanding of cinema as foremost a physical phenomenon that causes awe and wonder in the spectator even more than making him or her want to interpret it in terms of its narrative or meaning. In The New World, the words that Pocahontas and Smith teach to each other in their native languages—‘sun,’ ‘sky,’ ‘water,’ ‘wind,’ ‘eyes,’ ‘ear’—not only form the basic cinematic imagery of the film; foregrounding eyes and ears the narrative also points to the main senses and channels through which cinema itself is experienced. Similarly, the use of words such as ‘glory,’ ‘spark,’ and ‘radiance’ in the dialogue and voice-over of Malick’s previous film The Thin Red Line (1998) is matched by equivalent visual imagery, such as the shots of light streaming down past the trees (see Mottram 20; Critchley 25). The reality of nature is a miracle in itself, and The Thin Red Line ends in a poetic wonder and celebration of everything that is: “Oh my soul, let me be in you know. Look through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.” These are the last words of the film, and after those spoken words we see images of colorful parrots and a green water plant. In The New World the voiceovers are constantly cast in the interrogative mode: “Who are you, who I so faintly hear, who urge me ever on?”; “Mother. Where do you live? In the sky, the clouds, the sea?” John Smith also wonders and questions his own voice in his voice-overs: “What voice is this that speaks within me?”

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Of course, we may ask whether or not descriptions of nature and landscape qualify as narratives. According to philosopher Peter Lamarque, “‘the sun shone and the grass grew’ is a narrative” (394). Few narratologists would probably agree with this definition because of its sense of simultaneous events, but it captures the narrative world of Malick’s cinema quite well. Lamarque adds: “Some narratives are boring, rambling, disorganized” (401)—perhaps especially those which are most natural and lifelike (cf. Sternberg, “Narrativity” 535–38).

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Malick’s constant use of lyrical voice-over narration can be profitably analyzed with the help of structuralist film narratology (e.g. Chatman; Kuhn; Lothe), but there is still a peculiarly anti-narrative style to his use of sound and image. In his analysis of Malick’s first film, Badlands (1973), Seymour Chatman argues that the image track may contradict the soundtrack, producing a sense of unreliable narration as well as “a conflict between two mutually contradictory components of the cinematic narrator” (136). But here I agree with David Bordwell’s critique, presented in his Poetics of Cinema: “Why not simply say that we encounter an organized disparity of image and sound? From the standpoint of theoretical parsimony, what more does the virtual figure of the narrator add?” (129). As often is the case in cinema, a naïve or unreliable voice-over narrator, giving a rosy or romanticized vision of the world, clashes with images conveying a more real and believable picture of that world. Chatman thus reaches the conclusion that Holly (Sissy Spacek), the voice-over narrator of Badlands, is a naïve adolescent living in a fantasy world (136). And yet, as in Malick’s films, even the images can be unreliable, reflecting and illustrating as they do the subjective viewpoints in voice-over. We may think of the paradise imagery at the beginning of The New World or The Thin Red Line, imagery which becomes increasingly complicated as these narratives move on. It is characteristic of Malick’s cinema to dramatize the ontological difference between word and image. This can be seen in the fact that John Smith’s or John Rolfe’s potentially “unreliable” voice-over narration—based on historical documents—is juxtaposed with images of the natives and nature, both of which remain unintelligible to them, at least to a point. Thus, according to Smith’s romantic interpretation of the life of the natives, “they are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all trickery; they have no jealousy, no sense of possession”—and yet the images juxtaposed with these words seem to tell another version of reality. On the other hand, Smith and Rolfe’s respective voice-over segments give us vastly different views on the central character, Pocahontas: [Smith] “She exceeded the others not only in beauty and proportion, but in wit and spirit, too”; [Rolfe] “When first I saw her, she was regarded as someone broken, lost.” Here, however, these separate views on Pocahontas need to be related to the design and purpose of Malick’s cinematic narrative.

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Images of Nature in The New World In the opening montage of The New World, we see and hear both the natives’ belief in Mother Earth and the English colonists’ approach to that world from a very different perspective, including that of religious discourse (“Eden lies about us still”; “God has given us a promised land”). The New World evokes a sense of wonder not unlike that discussed by Stephen Greenblatt in Marvelous Possessions. Besides seeing maps and images of water, we hear music, which we may recognize as Richard Wagner’s prelude to the Rheingold, a sign of Malick’s partly ironic way of approaching the New World through cultural conventions. On the story level, The New World is finally not so very different from the Disney Company’s popular animation film Pocahontas (1995), since both films emphasize the historically implausible romance between Smith and Pocahontas (Morrison 204–05; Mottram 23; Richardson 20). The romantic relationship actually deviates from the historical reality on which Malick’s “naturalistic” cinema aims to base itself. Instead of a mimetic reading of the film, however, we need to recognize its self-conscious—and almost parodic—circulation of well-known cultural materials, including its cinematic commentary on previous representations of the Pocahontas story. On the discourse level, then, Malick succeeds in transcending the familiar material and transforming the Pocahontas story into the service of his own idiosyncratic cinematic philosophy.6 Instead of yet another romantic retelling of the Pocahontas legend, Malick constructs his film as a mythical story about the possible reconciliation of two different worlds (see Sinnerbrink 183). Adrian Martin suggests that Malick’s characters are less “flesh and blood” human beings than they are cinematic figures, created in the play of “contour and shadow, light and colour, rhythm and montage, image and sound” (213). Along these lines, it can be argued that The New World does not represent reality but rather creates its own filmic reality (see Rushton 3–9). In terms of cinematography, it is interesting to note that while Disney’s Pocahontas is an animated film and while James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)—another Pocahontas story in a digital disguise—makes use of three-dimensional techniques, Malick’s The New

6

It can be argued, for instance, that Malick’s cinematic approach to the love between Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher) and John Smith (Colin Farrell) or Pocahontas and her future husband John Rolfe (Christian Bale) is different from the Disney animation and other romanticizations. While these other representations foreground visuality—by making the beautiful Pocahontas an object of the male gaze (see Edwards 154)—Malick emphasizes “tactile vision,” touch of the skin, and listening (see Davies 50–56).

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World employs what may be called natural and analogical techniques. In The New World, the cinematic poetry is realized through the visual beauty of the widescreen images, Malick’s (and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s) use of the rather rare 65 millimeter film, which gives a richer image of photographed objects; his use of very long shots, which open the landscape in its entirety; as well as Malick’s characteristic use of lyrical voice-over narration. To these strategies, we could add Malick’s use of natural light, handheld cameras (instead of the more “synthetic” Steadicams), and authentic locations, whether in Jamestown, Virginia, or in Hampton Court, London. Therefore the set, shooting location, costumes, make-up, the reconstructed language of the Native Americans, natural elements on the soundtrack and the use of historical sources are central to the film’s life-likeness. In his phenomenologically grounded theory, André Bazin celebrates long takes, sustained shots and deep focus, which reveal the social and natural world in its entirety, thus “revealing” reality to us (28–33). For Bazin, the essence and very nature of cinema has to do with documenting and recording of the world, and “films record a world using the light that comes from that world” (Mullarkey 115).7 We should recognize photography’s remarkable ability to put the viewer in perceptual contact with the world (see Walton 49). The visual and material aspects of a photograph can also be seen to resist narrativization. Thus, we should be reflexive enough not to read narrative, plot, and progression into still pictures—that is, not to fall prey to “the easy imperialism of savage narrativization which reduces the specific material properties of the object to a mere springboard for narrative reception of unnarrative visual materials” (Baetens and Bleyen 170). While in a painting the artist chooses things that are included (according to his or her aesthetic vision), the photograph can be distinguished from other kinds of visual art in its recording of all the details that are present before the camera’s eye: The photograph works to alter our perception of the world by drawing attention to a marginal detail, one that would go unnoticed if it were not for the fact that it was photographed and thus framed. Ultimately, the automatic inclusion

7

In his classic essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin suggests that “the photographic image is the object itself ” and that “photography actually contributes something in the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it” (15). In my view, Malick is too conscious of the artificial (and sometimes distorting) elements of fi lm-making to make such a direct connection between photo-images and photographed objects themselves. More likely, our feeling that real objects (people, animals, trees, buildings, etc.) are actually distant from us make us mourn after them. In this sense, a photograph can never replace the real thing. See also Silverman 340; Walton 14–21.

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of daily, ordinary, even banal details within the photograph’s frame affects the way the world is seen. Through the everydayness of photographic aesthetics, the familiar (and oftentimes overlooked) aspects of the real world are more readily perceived and thus gain in importance. (Horstkotte and Pedri 14–15)

Cinematography—producing moving images as it does—raises different theoretical questions from those related to photography. Still, it is important to recognize that the main idea in Stanley Cavell’s philosophy of film is cinema’s photographic basis. Here we need to think of the photograph’s indexicality: the material objects are physically, chemically, and causally linked with their photographed images by particles of light that travel between them (a technique that does not apply to digital images). In this way, a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, for instance a tree or a bird, to mention but two things central to Malick’s cinema. Cavell argues that we have forgotten how mysterious things are, but that the cinematographic medium is able “to let the world happen, to let its parts draw attention to themselves according to their natural weight” (World 25). In his analysis of Malick’s second feature film, Days of Heaven (1978), Cavell writes that the director’s achievement is to explore, through the visual and specifically photographic aspect of cinematic representation, the play of absence and presence: [Malick has discovered] a fundamental fact of film’s photographic basis: that objects participate in the photographic presence of themselves. Objects projected on a screen are inherently reflexive, they occur as self-referential, reflecting upon their physical origins. Their presence refers to their absence, their location in another place. (viii) 8

In Cavell’s view, the photographed images on screen—the images of trees, water, birds, and sky in Malick’s films—force the viewer to acknowledge the reality of these things, that is, the fact of the object’s independent existence, as well as the necessity of its existence for the production of the image, while nevertheless recognizing its actual absence. The interaction between cinematic images and the spectator’s reflexive mind is the very basis of Cavell’s philosophy of film as well as Malick’s cinematic practice. As James Morrison and Thomas Schur poetically put it in their book on Malick, “the image resembles the physical world, but it neither imitates nor reproduces it—thus, to watch a film is to bear witness to our banishment from the mythical garden” (67), a notion that well captures the experience of viewing The New World. 8

Cavell is, in fact, Malick’s former philosophy teacher, who acknowledges Malick’s assistance in the acknowledgement section to the first edition of The World Viewed (1971). Soon after that, Malick made his fi lm debut with Badlands.

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Digital techniques in cinema seem to draw the spectator away from the experience of the real world and natural environment, a process visibly demonstrated in Cameron’s Avatar: the film attempts to create the experience of the natural world with its technically sophisticated three-dimensionality, but the depth, sound, and feel of the world appears clean and more digital than natural. Obviously, film technology has trained the spectators to inhabit or appreciate specific modes of seeing. In a totally digitized special-effects film there is no space for nature in the sense of the real, surprising, unintentional, and disturbing. The same is true of animated films such as Disney’s Pocahontas (cf. Whitley 82–95). It seems as if modern audiences, educated in the age of animation and digitalization, need the comfort and joy provided by non-natural cinematography, which does not allow the everyday and the inexplicable to come into the middle of theatres or living rooms. Thus, Berys Gaut suggests that in digital cinema the control over details is greater than in the traditional, photograph-based cinema and that the incidental detail is all but eliminated in the digital image (49–50). Digital cinema does not require any recording of reality, and consequently it creates its own synthetic and controlled version of the natural world. In The New World, only one shot was computer generated to reproduce the appearance of an extinct bird, and this solution may be read as Malick’s comment on the fashionable use of computerized images in recent cinema. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht interestingly suggests that the overwhelming presence of digital and computerized images in our contemporary cultural environment has resulted in a renewed fascination with and appreciation for the materiality of things (318). In photographic and cinematic terms, we can speak of the “grain” of the world, its “punctum” (306). When compared to the synthetic texture of digital cinema, Malick’s use of a rather grainy film stock gives a specific visual sense to his cinema, so that “the high-resolution images of nature [are] marked by sharpness of color and detail” (Morrison and Schur 69). Laura Marks speaks of the “skin” of the film, suggesting that “while optical perception privileges the representational power of the image, haptic perception privileges the material presence of the image” (162–63). She adds: “The haptic forces the viewer to contemplate the image instead of being pulled into narrative” (163). On the other hand, Malick’s self-conscious use of camera movement is likely to attract attention to itself and thus “disturb the self-sufficiency, naturalness and transparency of the diegetic world” (Eleftheriotis 42). It is part of the design of Malick’s cinema to produce reflexive images which make the spectator conscious of the simultaneous existence of the extratextual nature and its cinematographic rendering.

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Toward a Transcendence in Cinema While The New World is carefully based on John Smith’s travel narratives, it is also a work of cinematic philosophy that transforms the familiar Pocahontas legend by presenting the historical encounter between the Old and New World in a mythical framework. Malick’s films seem to pose philosophical questions about the world through different ways of looking at, listening to, and being in the world.9 It can of course be argued that films can philosophize, but even then we need to take into account film-specific features such as cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène. One of the film-philosophical perspectives on Malick’s cinema concerns its relation to the notion of transcendence. Stanley Cavell, for instance, writes how in The Thin Red Line “the tall grass…becomes, almost at once, brilliant with emerging sun, promising at once retribution and redemption” (Cavell 82). This scene, with signature Malick features—grass, trees, light—is, for Cavell, “a moment of transcendence” (283), and it emphasizes human beings’ spiritual relation to nature.10 The idea of transcendence in cinema actually goes back to Bazin’s notion of “the physical representation of the supernatural” and the “transcendence of grace” (see Nolan 11–12). In his controversial book Transcendental Style in Film, director-screenwriter-critic Paul Schrader suggests that cinematic style affects the experience of transcendence and that different filmmakers can use transcendental style “to express the Holy” (3). Schrader sees this—rather vaguely defined—transcendental style as consisting of three cinematic movements: firstly, the meticulous representation of the dull, mundane commonplaces of the everyday; secondly, the positing of disparity between humans and their environment; and thirdly, “a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it” (49). In my view, Malick’s cinematic imagination differs from religious (and, in Schrader’s case, explicitly Calvinist) expressions 9

10

The question of our being in the world is central to Malick’s cinematic thinking, and his subsequent fi lm-making is clearly influenced by his earlier work on the philosophy of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Michael J. Shapiro writes that “as is clear from Malick’s Heideggerian philosophical orientation, the problem of how we are in the world, and what ‘world’ can mean, given human temporality, is central to the way his fi lm thinks” (142). The complex relationship of Malick’s cinema to the ideas of transcendence has also been noted elsewhere. In The New World “the images of light shining through leaves and glancing off water, of wind blowing through wheat and grass, and of deep blue skies and sunsets suspended over the land function as a bridge to another world and as a sign of its existence” (Mottram 16). As Lloyd Michaels writes in his book on Malick, “the instances of cinematic plenitude seem to crystallize Malick’s vision of transcendent reality, replete with ‘the wonder of presence’ that defines the disorienting effect of his cinema” (15).

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of the transcendent, as he celebrates the natural world with its sunlight, plants, and animals. While Schrader does define “the transcendent” in cinema as “a deep ground of compassion and awareness which man and nature can touch intermittently,” his strict Calvinist world-view limits itself to the fixed “stasis” in the form of “the blinding light of faith” that often concludes a film by Robert Bresson or Carl Theodor Dreyer (48). In any case, Schrader’s three-step progress of cinematic transcendence can be employed in approaching The New World, even if in the sense of “flowing” and “growth” rather than structural hierarchy. The governing figure in The New World is Pocahontas, who—to employ James Phelan’s (4–6) terminology—is not only a mimetic character (a human being), or a thematic character (a link between the Old and the New Worlds), but also a synthetic character, a cinematic device (to put it technically). We can also think of the character of Pocahontas in terms of progression, as a figure which connects the film’s beginning, middle, and end (15–22). In the middle of the narrative of The New World, John Rolfe’s voice-over provides the spectator with an interpretation that it is Pocahontas who “weaves all things together,” in this way also suggesting that we need to see the figure of Pocahontas as the very center of the film. This somewhat romantic notion comes close to the Native Americans’ “holistic conception of life as an endless dynamic unity within which all things are connected,” as it has been said—incidentally—in an analysis of Disney’s Pocahontas (Ingram 51; cf. Schweninger 19). In addition to the images of water and weaving, we get a third, and the most powerful, image of movement and progression, that of a tree. Indeed, it seems to me that if there is movement in The New World—or in Malick’s more recent work The Tree of Life (2011)—it would be like watching a huge oak tree grow.11 Malick’s recurrent shots of trees at the beginning of the film give us an idea of their centrality in the narrative, and, in the middle of the narrative, Pocahontas’s English maid tells her to think of “a tree that forever reaches toward the light.” This appears to be a metaphorical description of not only Pocahontas but also the film itself, as it explores the possibilities of its own medium.12 11 12

Compare Gene Hackman’s legendary one-liner in Arthur Penn’s fi lm Night Moves (1975), according to which watching Eric Rohmer’s fi lms is “like watching paint dry.” Richard Walsh similarly speaks of the early cinema of attraction as an example of fi lms which are “reflexively probing the representational possibilities of their own medium” (123). Compare also Shklovsky’s classic analysis of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which progresses by reflecting on its own status and possibilities as a novel, being a highly selfconscious text where “the realization of the form constitutes the content of the work” (153). In this context, we may recall Shklovsky’s notion of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as a text where the actual plot is not the love story but “the story of the poet constructing a

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The physical and material basis of Malick’s cinema consists of, for instance, the use of certain film stock, photography, sound, light, and authentic locations in the natural world, but, in the words of Gérard Genette, the work of art always also exceeds its immanence, transcending its materiality: The other mode of existence of works, which I have christened transcendence, encompasses all the extremely diverse and by no means mutually exclusive ways a work can obscure or else surpass the relation it maintains with the material or ideal object it basically “consists” in—all the cases in which “play” of one sort or another springs up between the work and its object of immanence. (161)

As Genette clarifies in a footnote, he proposes to use the term ‘transcendence’ in its etymological and secular sense: to transcend is to go beyond a limit. Consequently, for Genette, “the work in transcendence is a bit like a river which has overflowed its banks and which is, for better or for worse, only the more powerful as a result” (11n). In my view, these images and metaphors taken from the natural world—a river overflowing its banks—aptly describe the organic and flowing effect of The New World, even though I doubt that the arch-structuralist’s taxonomies would help us to make sense of the emotional and spiritual wholeness of Malick’s achievement. Instead, what we need is a “holistic” theory of cinema, one which pays attention to the forms and functions of filmic narrative.13 I would suggest that Malick’s cinematic universe is one of organic growth, meaningful connections, and the idea of the sacredness of everything (“all things shining”). This also means that his seemingly fragmentary and affectless world-view is not one of nihilism, but one of belief, even if not necessarily religious as such. Meir Sternberg argues that for a discourse to make sense as narrative, it must make chronological sense; thus a movement toward narrativity may be seen to occur over the fragmented course of even the most ambiguous texts (“Narrativity” 545). He speaks of the natural order of happening and of narrative sequence as the icon of real life’s temporality, which means that there is “more to

13

narrative out of these materials” (170), a formalist conception which befits Malick’s way of utilizing the Pocahontas story as well. See also Tammi 15. As David Herman phrases it, “the whole landscape of narratological inquiry now displays a different topography” than the one mapped by structuralism (7), and, as he suggests, this reconfiguration and transformation can be described as a “shift from text-centered or formal models to modes that are jointly formal and functional” (8). In his formalfunctionalist fi lm theory, David Bordwell stresses an analysis of the artifact’s overall form and its explanation in light of the purposes we take it to be trying to fulfill. In this respect, Bordwell maintains, neo-structuralist narratology continues Genette’s taxonomic enterprise, whereas a functionalist perspective links to a tradition of Russian formalism as well as to studies by Meir Sternberg (“Neo-Structuralist” 203–04).

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chronology, in this light, than understood by its frequent dismissal as ‘merely post hoc,’ one damned thing after another” (544–45). We may note that David Bordwell’s “formal-functionalist” critique of (neo)structuralist film narratology clearly draws on Sternberg’s ideas. In his defense of the “holistic” strategies of cinematic narrative and its interpretation, Bordwell suggests that mounting a new, process-centered film theory “requires analyzing whole films to disclose their patterns of narration, not simply isolating devices and arranging them taxonomically” (211–12). Accordingly, even Malick’s seemingly discontinuous shots gain in significance as they occur one after another in the course of the film and as they meet the spectator’s reflexive mind. As often in Malick’s films, the opening/establishing shot, which initiates the spectator to the fictional world, may be ambiguous, distorted, or fragmentary, and may offer much less information about the narrative world than the spectator expects. Still, on the basis of his formal-functionalist theory, Bordwell writes: The beginning of the film, for instance, will characteristically insinuate us into the narrative world through a process of moving inward to explore an already developing chain of action.…By gradually initiating us into its world, the classical film orients the spectator to the situation, exposing essential information and highlighting certain motifs that will become important. The gradual movement inward also arouses curiosity: what is the target of this narrowing field of view? (“Neo-Structuralist” 209)

When speaking of the “organic” progression of The New World, one needs to pay attention to the ways in which images of certain natural phenomena—water, sky, trees, birds, and so on—recur in the course of the cinematic narrative. The film as a whole can be seen as the song of the earth that Pocahontas prays for at the beginning (see Mottram 23): as we hear her voice over the waters, it, in a way, asks the audience to participate in singing this story of the land. Malick also employs the Wagnerian leitmotif in his cinematic narrative. At the beginning, the prelude to the Rheingold celebrates the wonder of the New World; it returns in the middle of the movie as a lyrical expression of love and comradeship between Smith and Pocahontas as they teach and learn about the marvels of nature; and when we hear the prelude in the film’s concluding sequence, it provides a sublime musical interpretation to Pocahontas’s sense of nature, life, and death (cf. Sinnerbrink 188–92). The repetition of Wagner’s piece therefore reflects Pocahontas’s own experience of transformation while it also connects the beginning, the middle, and the end of the film. In the final sequence of The New World, Pocahontas says: “Mother, now I know where you live.” Pocahontas and the spectator have finally learned the answer to the big question: Mother/God lives everywhere,

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both in human and nonhuman nature, and it is here that the “new world” can be found. The final sequence is shown first from the perspective of Pocahontas’s son Thomas playing in the English gardens, with their strict geometrical symmetry constructing an opposite to the wilderness of Virginia; the sequence then cuts to Pocahontas’s sudden death. We hear the final voice-over of the film, presumably Pocahontas’s last words as written down by her husband John Rolfe: “All must die, yet ‘tis enough that our child should live.” The New World can be characterized as “a cinema of redemption,” which dramatizes “the struggle to achieve ethical transcendence by subordinating the self to the greater responsibility for the other,” but in doing this, it also demands a woman’s sacrifice for this transcendence (Girgus 5, 216).14 After Pocahontas’s death, we see a montage of images of sky, water, and trees, as the camera pans across the ocean and back to the New World. Beyond death, words and music cease; this is the area of non-representation. The film’s final images are of rushing water and trees swaying in the wind, such things of nature which are here allowed to present themselves without any visible narrative representation from a human viewpoint. And this is the final image of The New World: a low-angle shot of blue sky and sunlight piercing the tall trees. It is as if the story of Pocahontas had traveled from the deep waters (in the film’s opening) through meadows and forests (in the middle) to this final glory of sky and trees. In conclusion, I would like to suggest that The New World not only deals with the historical story of the colonization of America, nor is it only another retelling of the familiar Pocahontas story. Beyond its subject matter, it also stands as an example of cinematic poetry and transcendence, opening up new ways of seeing the world. It is as if Malick’s film tried to reveal the spiritual presence beyond the material reality that we see before our eyes, while at the same time powerfully asserting that this is the only world there is. The self-reflexive features of the film also reveal the simultaneously natural and artificial nature of cinematographic practice. In other words, Malick explores the idea of nature within the

14

The “frozen” final image of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996), with its heavenly church bells transcending the mundane and the commonplace, would probably correspond to Schrader’s theory, as does the fi lm’s “aesthetic of sparseness” (see Schrader 38–39). In von Trier’s fi lm, more clearly than in Malick’s, it is a woman’s sacrifice and death which gives life to men. We may also recall here the similarly plotted Ordet (1955) by Carl Theodor Dreyer, von Trier’s great Danish predecessor and one of Schrader’s case studies. However, Dreyer’s fi lm does not end in a woman’s death but her miraculous resurrection and in the heartrending celebration of human life.

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mode of his films, showing how cinematography functions as an organic part of the natural world.15

Works Cited Agee, James. Agee on Film: Criticism and Comments on the Movies. 1958. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Alber, Jan. “Hypothetical Intentionalism: Cinematic Narration Reconsidered.” Postclassical Narratologies: Approaches and Analyses. Ed. Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2010. 163–85. Anderson, Joseph D. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. Ascárate, Richard John. “‘Have You Ever Seen a Shrunken Head?’: The Early Modern Roots of Estatic Truth in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 483–501. Baetens, Jan, and Mieke Bleyen. “Photo Narrative, Sequential Photography, Photonovels.” Intermediality and Storytelling. Ed. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. 165–82. Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of Carolina P, 1967. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985. —. “Neo-Structuralist Narratology and the Functions of Filmic Storytelling.” Narrative across Media: Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2004. 203–19. —. Poetics of Cinema. London: Routledge, 2008. Butte, George. “Suture and the Narration of Subjectivity in Film.” Poetics Today 29.2 (2008): 277–308. Carroll, Noël. Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. —. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Cavell, Stanley. Cavell on Film. Ed. William Rothman. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. —. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged Edition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979. Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. Critchley, Simon. “Calm—On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” The Thin Red Line. Ed. David Davies. London: Routledge, 2009. 11–27. Davies, David. “Vision, Touch, and Embodiment in The Thin Red Line.” The Thin Red Line. Ed. David Davies. London: Routledge, 2009. 45–64. Edwards, Leigh. “The United Colors of Pocahontas: Synthetic Miscegenation and Multiculturalism.” Narrative 7.2 (1999): 147–68. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.

15

This article is part of my research project (128066) funded by the Academy of Finland. I am grateful to James Phelan for his insightful comments on an earlier draft.

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Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Gaut, Berys. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Genette, Gérard. The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence. 1994. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997. Girgus, Sam B. Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1991. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. “Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Worlds: Reclaiming an Unredeemed Utopian Motif.” New Literary History 37 (2006): 299–318. Gunning, Tom. D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994. Herman, David. “Introduction: Narratologies.” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Ed. David Herman. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 1999. 1–30. Horstkotte, Silke, and Nancy Pedri. “Introduction: Photographic Interventions.” Poetics Today 29:1 (2008): 1–29. Ingram, David. Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter: Exeter UP, 2000. Klevan, Andrew. Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Kuhn, Markus. Filmnnarratologie: Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. Lamarque, Peter. “On Not Expecting Too Much from Narrative.” Mind and Language 19 (2004): 393–408. Lothe, Jakob. Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Macdonald, Iain. “Nature and the Will to Power in Terrence Malick’s The New World.” The Thin Red Line. Ed. David Davies. London: Routledge, 2009. 87– 110. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. Martin, Adrian. “Approaching The New World.” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America. Second Edition. Ed. Hannah Patterson. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. 212–21. Michaels, Lloyd. Terrence Malick. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009. Morrison, James. “Making Worlds, Making Pictures: Terrence Malick’s The New World.” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America. Second Edition. Ed. Hannah Patterson. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. 199–211. Morrison, James, and Thomas Schur. The Films of Terrence Malick. London: Praeger, 2003. Mottram, Ron. “All Things Shining: The Struggle for Wholeness, Redemption and Transcendence in the Films of Terrence Malick.” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America. Second Edition. Ed. Hannah Patterson. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. 14–26.

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Mullarkey, John. Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Nolan, Steve. Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Religious Film Analysis. New York: Continuum, 2009. Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2007. Pomerance, Murray. The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience beyond Narrative and Theory. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2008. Richardson, Michael. Otherness in Hollywood Cinema. New York: Continuum, 2010. Rushton, Richard. The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2011. Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972. Schweninger, Lee. Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 2008. Shapiro, Michael J. Cinematic Geopolitics. London: Routledge, 2009. Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. 1929. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1998. Silverman, Kaja. “All Things Shining.” Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. 323–42. Sinnerbrink, Robert. “Song of the Earth: Cinematic Romanticism in Malick’s The New World.” Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy. Ed. Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall. New York: Continuum, 2011. 179–96. Smith, John. A Map of Virginia: With a Description of the Countrey, The Commodities, People, Government and Religion. 1612. New York: Da Capo, 1973. Stern, Lesley. “‘Paths That Wind through the Thicket of Things.’” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 317–54. Sternberg, Meir. “Narrativity: From Objectivist to Functional Paradigm.” Poetics Today 31.3 (2010): 507–659. —. “Telling in Time (III): Chronology, Estrangement, and Stories of Literary History.” Poetics Today 27.1 (2006): 125–235. Tammi, Pekka. “Introduction: Crossing the Boundaries? Or, the Most Typical Comic Book in World Literature.” Thresholds of Interpretation: Crossing the Boundaries in Literary Criticism. Ed. Markku Lehtimäki and Julia Tofantšuk. Tallinn: TLÜ Kirjastus, 2006. 10–29. Verstraten, Peter. Film Narratology. Trans. Stefan van der Lecq. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Walsh, Richard. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2007. Walton, Kendall L. “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism.” Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature. Ed. Scott Walden. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. 14–49. Whitley, David. The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Maria Mäkelä (University of Tampere)

Navigating—Making Sense—Interpreting (The Reader behind La Jalousie) senseless adj. 1 unconscious or incapable of sensation 2 without discernible meaning or purpose → lacking common sense; wildly foolish. (Concise OED)

Introduction: Whatever One Calls the Process For a humanist scholar, a choice of word is a choice of method. In this essay, of interest are the words used in describing the understanding of narrative. Here, we may notice, classical and postclassical narratology diverge considerably. The French structuralists, followed by many classical narratologists, cultivated the words signification, meaning, and—sometimes warily, at other times more offhandedly—interpretation. Such metaphysical catchwords have been replaced by much more down-to-earth vocabulary in postclassical narratologies1: readers navigate within storyworlds, get immersed in them; they try to frame and apperceive whatever textual strangeness befalls them. As Monika Fludernik writes in a recent article dealing with narrative mediacy, “[i]t makes perfect sense to contrast the messy text that one has in hand with an idealized chronological story, which the reader needs to piece together in order to understand the narrative” (“Mediacy” 109). Both structuralist and cognitivist narratologists speak of sense-making, but in considerably different senses. Correspondingly, two alternate reader figures emerge: the reader constructed from the classical-narratological discourse is an industrious and yet somehow doomed performer of higher thinking, reaching for the ultimately un1

Here I mainly speak of cognitive narratology and some recent approaches reacting to cognitive applications, including unnatural narratology. Rhetorical narratology, a prominent postclassical paradigm, will not be touched upon here; the rhetorical reader construct is a multi-layered structure determined more by ethical stances than by cognitive abilities.

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attainable (the “meaning”). We will call this type Reader 1. The other type—let us call him Reader 2—erected by some postclassical theories and analyses, is a languid “general reader” who opts for the primary, the likely, the coherent and the familiar.2 The common denominator for these reader figures is that they are both interpretive constructs, synthetic constellations of hypotheses about the actual reading process—agents that are only implied and reflected in the narratological discourse. The tendency to metaphorise reading instead of indulging oneself in the empirism of the reader-response is deeprooted in the narratological tradition. For classical narratology, a discipline determined by its appreciation for close reading (not “prototypical” or “schematic” reading), this abstention from messing with real readers is the only way to sustain the high standards for a valid interpretation. Jonathan Culler, for example, is after the imaginary “competent reader” (113–30). Menakhem Perry, in his classical analysis of the dynamics of reading, defines the reader as “a metonymic characterization of the text” (43). A textual analyst is on the safe side as long as he can reduce the readerly endeavors back to textuality. How about the postclassical approaches that seek their inspiration and vocabulary from the cognitive-scientific discourses? If we are to believe one of the leading theorists working in the field, Marie-Laure Ryan, nothing much has changed. [T]he kind of work that passes as cognitive narratology remains in spirit strictly speculative, and some narratologists interested in questions of cognition claim to be totally bored with experimental approaches. Furthermore, unlike the hard versions of cognitive science, cognitive narratology does not want to sacrifice an interest in texts, even though it often treats them as “tutor texts,” that is, as an instrument for the demonstration of ideas borrowed from the [cognitivepsychological] side. (“Narratology” 476)

Indeed, it seems that the reader construct is just as speculative in cognitive narratology as in classical-structuralist theorizing. Differences can only be perceived in words that describe the hypothetical reader’s mental operations. And perhaps a cognitive narratologist would not call his reader construct “a metonymic characterization of the text”—he will rather, as Manfred Jahn does, refer to it as “the cognitive mechanics of reading” (“Frames” 464). Yet to me it seems that narratological analyses are all camped at the same frontier between the narrative and its reader where both risk becoming the other’s metonymy. 2

I owe thanks to Tytti Rantanen who, in her most inspiring Master’s Thesis, gave an apt characterization of the Reader 2 type featuring in some current “unnatural narratology” applications: “a lost poor creature who has to be taken care of and who has to be helped across the bog of extreme and experimental fictions” (11).

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From a narratological point of view, the interpretive stances towards a storyworld, its actions and its inhabitants are multi-layered: there are interpretive agents at least on three different levels: that of the fictional world, that of narration, and that of reading. Yet one of the key players in narrative sense-making is always intangible and indefinite: the characters and the narrators, all tackling cognitive operations of different kinds, need to be constructed from the narrative, but at least they have a textual presence (and they are not required to transgress it); whereas the reader, assumed by the analyst, is a liminal pseudo-presence somewhere between the structure of the narrative and the analyst’s own interpretive method. This uncanny setting—the table is set for three but only two guests are demonstrably present—reminds one of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie (1957, Jealousy 1959), featuring a wife, a neighbor and arguably a jealous husband who nevertheless is not even once referred to. The default interpretation of the novel, established by the eminent Robbe-Grillet scholar Bruce Morrissette, posits the elusive husbandly presence in the place of a narrator: A first-person narrator who, however, never says “I” and whom one never sees or hears, draws us into an identification with him, installs us in the “hole” that he occupies in the center of the text, so that we see, hear, move, and feel with him. (7)

A narratologist, such as Mieke Bal, is more comfortable interpreting the third character as a focalizer since the lack of third-person reference in an internally focalized narrative (reported by a heterodiegetic narratorial voice) is not perhaps as troubling as would be the absence of first-person reference in a homodiegetic narrative (29). For some reason, Bal does not even hint towards the other possibility, that of reconstructing the third person as the narrator of the events. Yet she offers a perfectly plausible description of La Jalousie’s narrative situation in her definition of the external narrator: “When in a text the narrator never refers explicitly to itself as a character, we may…speak of an external narrator” (22). Thus it is not surprising that narratologists, both classical and postclassical, repeatedly use La Jalousie as an illustration of the different possibilities for narratorial and perceptual framing: the novel appears to represent several mutually contradictory types at once—and at the same time, is incompatible with each type (see also Cohn, Transparent 207; Richardson 8). Technically, both interpretations—the husband as narrator and the husband as focalizer—are valid. After a point, fussing about narrators and focalizers becomes senseless, however. Texts such as La Jalousie are not narrated or focalized by anyone, they can only be interpreted as doing the one or the other. As a writerly text, Robbe-Grillet’s novel foregrounds the

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use of those interpretive operations that are always at play when we read literary narratives. Furthermore, the insubstantial presence of the husband is an illustrative reflection of the reader as the hypothetical Third in literary sense-making, as the “‘hole’ in the center of the text” that literary analysts struggle to fill. In the following, La Jalousie will be analyzed as an allegory of Reader 1 and Reader 2 as they manifest in narratological reasoning. We may remember how Jonathan Culler characterized the process of “naturalization” in structuralist terms, well before cognitive narratology, and in terms that later inspired Monika Fludernik’s ‘natural narratology’: Whatever one calls the process, it is one of the basic activities of the mind. We can, it seems, make anything signify. If a computer were programmed to produce random sequences of English sentences we could make sense of the texts it produced by imagining a variety of functions and contexts. If all else failed, we could read a sequence of words with no apparent order as signifying absurdity or chaos and then, by giving it an allegorical relation to the world, take it as a statement about the incoherence and absurdity of our own languages. As the example of Beckett shows, we can always make the meaningless meaningful by production of an appropriate context. And usually our contexts need not be so extreme. Much of Robbe-Grillet can be recuperated if we read it as the musings or speech of a pathological narrator, and that framework gives critics a hold so that they can go on to discuss the implications of the particular pathology in question. (138)

In a nutshell, this is what I will do—recuperate Robbe-Grillet’s narration and extrapolate a mental agent from it, perhaps a “pathological narrator,” who, in turn, might reveal something about the processes of sense-making and signification both within and outside the storyworld. Narratological concepts under trial are (1) naturalization, signification and interpretation, all being principal concerns in classical-narratological discussions; as juxtaposed with (2) immersion, deictic shift, “sense-making” and narrativization, notions that infiltrate current narratological discourses.

Failure as Agency Contrary to some interpretations, La Jalousie should not be conceived as a mere chosisme, as an insipid monitoring of physical things, surfaces and architecture. As a description of perception, it also brings about a mind that adjusts to its environment. Moreover, as many critics have noted, the description of the immediate is interrupted by retrospection and hallucinatory visions. Already at the beginning of the novel, textual traces of a cognizer start to emanate. After a report on the movements of a shadow

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across a terrace (“Now the shadow of the column…”), a character referred to as “A…” enters the line of vision. Several details pertaining to A… attest that we are entering the storyworld in medias res. We are told that “[s]he still has on the light colored, close-fitting dress with the high collar that she was wearing at lunch when Christiane reminded her again that loose-fitting clothes make the heat easier to bear.” The references to earlier events and to characters without introduction are conventional indexes of character focalization. The sense of an interrupted flow of temporal existence is already created with the opening word “now” (maintenant). However, there are also introductory elements at the beginning of the narrative that contrast the frame of internal focalization and point more towards an authorial narrator who leads his readers inside the unknown storyworld: “This veranda is a wide, covered gallery surrounding the house on three sides.” Is this a description or a perception? One page further, the inventory “eye” is gradually beginning to gain discursive presence as well. This exercise is not much more difficult, despite their more advanced growth, for those sectors of the plantation on the opposite hillside; this, in fact, is the place which offers itself most readily to inspection, the place over which surveillance can be maintained with the least difficulty (although the path to reach it is a long one), the place which the eye falls on quite naturally, of its own accord, when looking out of one or the other of the two open windows of the bedroom. ( Jealousy 41)

The reader learns that in the storyworld, surveillance is something to be maintained, and places are mapped and evaluated as to the views they provide. The exposing “in fact” (en effet) marks the presence of a reflexive consciousness: as if there was someone making an argument for the naturalness of such stalking activities. Immediately after the quoted passage, A… appears for the second time. She is observed to read a letter and then to start writing one. Then a sensuous description emerges from the undergrowth of senseless listing of material minutiae. The lustrous black hair falls in motionless curls along the line of her back which the narrow metal fastening of her dress indicates a little lower down. (42)

The perceiver resumes his passive mode—till he brings along a fourth character, Franck. “Franck is here again for dinner, smiling, talkative, affable” (42–43). Now this, finally, could be a start of something thematically motivated, tellable and significant. Yet one is to learn that in La Jalousie, there is hardly any valid sequencing or causality that would postulate a start anywhere, neither in discourse nor in story time; just as the recurrent perception of the “deafening racket of the crickets” that can be heard— we are told—nightly in the garden surrounding the veranda: “as if it had

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never ceased to be there … for no beginning can be perceived at any one moment” (101). However, the descriptions of A…’s dress, “lustrous hair,” and the easy-going neighbor Franck coming for dinner “again” will inevitably launch interpretations that go beyond outlining the veranda and the balustrades of the colonial mansion, or counting the rows of banana trees – mental actions that nevertheless take up a majority of the narration. On what grounds can we extrapolate the reading process from the textual evidence, and how does this constructed readerly mind relate to the husband-qua-perceiver-or-narrator? This agent—let us call him “the husband,” not the “narrator” as in most analyses—embodies a failure of both narratological reader constructs. As Reader 2, he appears as incapable of immersion and of deictic orientation inside the storyworld. Moreover, due to the famous lack of psychological evaluation, intentionality, motivation and coherence in La Jalousie, the husband also fails in his role as Reader 1, as the one who would make the disunited bits and pieces signify. Seymour Chatman, in his short analysis of La Jalousie, points to Robbe-Grillet’s “intentional ‘failure’ to mention crucial events” (57). Yet I would emphasize that it is ultimately a readerly failure that makes the husband a narrative agent and a fixed point of psychological motivation; it is the failure to navigate, make sense and interpret that makes the assumed performers of these tasks—the husband and the narratological Reader—discernible.

Access Denied We will first look at the elements in La Jalousie that thwart readerly processes foregrounded by postclassical theories—processes that primarily pertain to orientation and ordering. David Herman represents these processes in a useful nutshell: [M]aking sense of a story entails situating participants and other entities in emergent networks of foreground-background relationships. Story comprehension also entails mapping the trajectories of individuals and objects as they move or are moved along narratively salient paths. (8)

Obviously, all this is what La Jalousie does not encourage. Determined by Robbe-Grillet’s narrative modus operandi, the represented spaces are anti-immersionist, reducible to surfaces and abstract schemes (Morrissette; Barthes). Anti-immersionism does not only concern the reader, for the husband does not seem to inhabit the narrated universe either. He does not walk around searching for a place to watch over his wife; rather, he seems to move from one fixed spot to another via teleportation, quite

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in the manner of Star Trek transporting, rematerializing sometimes on the veranda, sometimes at the bedroom window or in the dining room. In this regard, Marie-Laure Ryan’s characterization of Dans le labyrinthe holds true for La Jalousie as well: …setting is painstakingly described through a linear accumulation of details, but space is neither apprehended nor organized by a human consciousness, and details flow by the reader’s mind without coalescing into a stable geography. The text does not fail to achieve, it actively inhibits, spatial immersion… (Narrative 124)

Ryan’s analysis of Robbe-Grillet’s spatial poetics is apt, yet she ignores one agential level in her description: unlike in La Jalousie, in Dans le labyrinthe, there is an “I” at the beginning of the narrative. The amorphous description is preceded by the utterance “I am alone here now, under cover.” Yet Ryan states that “space is neither apprehended nor organized by a human consciousness.” Such a contradictory reading opposes the cognitive principles of primacy and recency effect as outlined by Sternberg and Perry, and later elaborated by Jahn (“Frames”): once the reader has established a narrative frame (“A-ha, this is a person telling about himself and his immediate perceptions”), he will hold on to it as long as he can, up to a point when it breaks under the weight of contradictory evidence (“Well, at least this is something he can’t possibly see / remember / understand / perceive”). If, in the course of reading, the primary frame proves erroneous, it will be replaced with a frame that is in accord with the latest textual evidence (thus, “recency”). Consequently, if there is an “I” and a “now” at the very beginning of the narrative, their flimsy existence inevitably casts a shadow of primacy over the subsequent narration, at least for a while. If this is the case, then it would be an overstatement to claim that the narration “actively inhibits” spatial immersion. Indeed, when reading Dans le labyrinthe, the reader will necessarily reframe the narrative situation (from personal to impersonal3), just as the novel, famously, loses the sense of embedment when the description of the surrounding world is replaced by a storyworld within a framed picture hanging on the wall. However, Dans le labyrinthe, La Jalousie as well as several other literary narratives persuade me to think that a crucial reading strategy is the simultaneous maintenance of contradictory frames (cf. Mäkelä).

3

The need for a readjustment of the narratorial frame emerges once again later in the novel as we are informed that a certain doctor playing a minor role in the narrative is in fact its narrator.

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In fact, recent narratological applications of blending theory are, in a way, also pointing towards this conclusion (Fludernik, “Naturalizing”; Alber in this volume). To naturalize Robbe-Grillet’s narration as “musings or speech of a pathological narrator”, as Culler has it, would arguably constitute a blend, a marriage of perception and (textual) invention. Indeed, the pedantic wall-to-wall description of the material storyworld literalizes the idea that “a work of fiction creates the world to which it refers by referring to it” (Cohn, Distinction 12–13). Thus the analogy between art and madness would result in a conventionally metaphorical frame of considering both as forms of non-referential world creation. My only quarrel with blending-theoretical applications is that they assume the reading of contradictory narrative signals to be an assimilative process that results in a new, stable frame, a well-amalgamated blend. Such a theory does not account for the persistent uncanniness resulting from two opposite impulses: in the case of La Jalousie, the impulse to internalize the perceptual stances and the impulse to dehumanize them. I suggest, instead of labeling the husband merely pathological or the descriptions radically anti-human and anti-immersionist, that the perceptual position and its disturbing Thirdness in La Jalousie signifies readerly failure. The husband’s disengagement with the storyworld is most prominent when both A… and Franck hit his radar. In the following passage, the couple is supposedly expecting Franck for lunch—again—but he does not appear. The husband’s gaze fixes on the view opening from the dining-room window. Although it is unlikely that the guest should come now, perhaps A… is still expecting to hear the sound of a car coming down the slope from the highway. But through the dining-room windows, of which at least one is half open, no motor hum or any other noise can be heard… The windows are perfectly clean and, in the right-hand leaf, the landscape is only slightly affected by the flaws in the glass, which give a few shifting nuances to the too uniform surfaces. But in the left leaf, the reflected image, darker although more brilliant, is plainly distorted, circular or crescent-shaped spots of verdure the same color as the banana trees occurring in the middle of the courtyard in front of the sheds. Franck’s big blue sedan, which has just appeared here, is also nicked by one of these shifting rings of foliage, as is A…’s white dress when she gets out of the car. She leans toward the door. If the window has been lowered—which is likely—A… may have put her face into the opening above the seat. (70–71)

From a cognitive-narratological perspective, what is especially striking here is the lack of spatial and temporal foregrounding. The characters, their bodies and actions, fade into the “uniform surfaces.” Correspond-

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ingly, the temporal shift from the lunch table to Franck and A…’s arrival in the blue sedan in the courtyard (seen from the dining-room window) is unmarked. The flat narrative texture weaves in arguably the most tellable event in the “narrative” of La Jalousie: A…’s homecoming after she and Franck have been forced to spend a night in a hotel in town due to some engine trouble. A reader who wishes to organize the temporal bits and pieces of the story is first likely to assume that Franck and A… have made several trips to town together, but in the course of narration she is bound to conclude that there has only been one journey to town, and furthermore, that the version with the engine trouble and the night at the hotel is debatable. It may appear that the events of A… and Franck making plans for the journey, the husband waiting for A… to come home late at night and A…’s stepping out of the car the following morning are only recounted several times. The effect of dispossession created by this spatial and temporal dislocatedness is both enchanting and pathetic. The helpless figure of the cuckolded voyeur emerges in contrast to the vigorous character of Franck: On the veranda, Franck drops into one of the low armchairs and utters his usual exclamation of how comfortable they are. They are very simple chairs of wood and leather thongs, made according to A…’s instructions by a native craftsman. She leans toward Franck to hand him his glass. (43)

Franck is the most embodied of the characters; the husband is incorporeal and A… is a metonymic constellation of heavy curls, long lashes and a slender back, but the minute Franck steps into the frame the narrative space becomes, for a short while, adjustable to bodily parameters. When Franck is in the picture, the armchairs are not only a texture of wood and leather thongs, they are immersive, the reader may almost feel how they bend as Franck drops into one. Manfred Jahn suggests that reading a narrative “possibly even requires ‘deictic shifts’ to imaginary co-ordinates and places” (“Focalization” 102; my emphasis). La Jalousie represents a narratorial or a perceptual agent that, instead of guiding the reader inside the storyworld via experiential mediation (Fludernik, Towards 48), thwarts any attempt at such a shift. As a paradoxical consequence, this agent becomes the allegory of the reader who covets mental assimilation with the storyworld. This interpretation resonates with Brian Richardson’s wonderfully apt characterization of La Jalousie as “present[ing] an unusual, extreme subjectivity with a minimum of mediation” (8). Yet this internalizing interpretation calls for a double framing: a psychological frame is maintained alongside with the non-immersive, impersonal frame. As Richardson argues, “[t]he work can be viewed…as the epitome of either narratorial objectivity or sub-

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jectivity” (8)—the only addition I would like to suggest to this wording is simultaneously. Zahi Zalloua translates this structural double bind into a sophisticated thematic interpretation: Analogous to fascination, jealousy—as it is staged in Robbe-Grillet’s novel—is a figure of dispossession; it is what robs the narrator’s gaze of its habitual sense of power, what makes the narrator’s objectivizing consciousness fail to contain the objects that fall within its horizon of intelligibility. (23)

Thus the mental and bodily failure to capture the storyworld is likened to jealousy. To contain a storyworld is a metaphor that goes beyond spatial and temporal orientation.

Missed Links In the index of a recent, important volume titled Postclassical Narratology, edited by Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, the word ‘interpretation’ can be found. A glimpse at the occurrences of this word attests to the fact that in postclassical narratology, interpretation is analogous to narrativization, in the sense established by Fludernik’s revolutionary natural narratology. Although Fludernik grounds her theory on Culler’s structuralist notion of naturalization, the differences are considerable: Culler states that we can make almost anything signify (138). Bluntly put: whereas structuralist narratology was, in essence, all about tracing out the logic of difference and relation, cognitive narratologists are after the automatically privileged “natural” mental model as foregrounded from its synthetic environment. Although the founding fathers of classical narratology, such as Hrushovski and Todorov openly excluded interpretation as a practice from the field of narratology, the classical theories nevertheless gravitate toward meaning instead of “story comprehension.” At the core, classical-narratological theories are relational. Both Culler and Fludernik speak of sense-making in the sense of form-finding; yet the implied notions of coherence in these theories are fundamentally different: in natural narratology, coherence means experiential familiarity, whereas in structuralist narratology, coherence is the result of a perceivable network of relations between semiotic patterns. The husband’s failure to “contain” the storyworld in La Jalousie should not be regarded merely as a failure to be-in-the-world; he also fails at comprehending the significant relations (not least the relation between his wife and Franck). This is all the more striking because the potentially significant episodes are recounted over and over again, such as the famous “squashing of the centipede”:

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The creature is easy to identify thanks to the development of its legs, especially on the posterior portion. On closer examination the swaying movement of the antennae at the other end can be discerned. … It is not unusual to encounter different kinds of centipedes after dark in this already old wooden house. And this kind is not one of the largest; it is far from being one of the most venomous. A… does her best, but does not manage to look away, nor to smile at the joke about her aversion to centipedes. Franck, who has said nothing, is looking at A… again. Then he stands up, noiselessly, holding his napkin in his hand. He wads it into a ball and approaches the wall. A… seems to be breathing a little faster, but this may be an illusion. Her left hand gradually closes over her knife. The delicate antennae accelerate their alternate swaying. Suddenly the creature hunches its body and begins descending diagonally toward the ground as fast as its long legs can go, while the wadded napkin falls on it, faster still. …Franck lifts the napkin away from the wall and with his foot continues to squash something on the tiles, against the baseboard. (64–65)

The husband provides a thorough analysis of the centipede while the vigorous Franck smashes it against the wall. Some cues also suggest that the husband tries to make a joke of A…’s “aversion to centipedes” (while Franck “has said nothing”). The ironic contradiction between the meticulousness of the husband’s perceptions and his incapability to draw the necessary conclusions and take action is related to his bodily insubstantiality and spatial disorientation. His incapability of immersion is reflected in his blindness to the meaning of the centipede. However, in the course of narration, the compulsive repetition of the potentially signifying events increases; towards the end of the novel, the pace at which the same elements—such as the centipede, A… not coming home for the night and Franck coming for dinner “again”—are repeated accelerates. The bedroom windows are closed. At this hour A… is not up yet. She left very early this morning, in order to have enough time to do her shopping and be able to get back to the plantation the same night. She went to the port with Franck, to make some necessary purchases. She has not said what they were. (119)

The more accelerated the temporal and spatial shifts and repetitions, the more striking becomes the absence of interpretive networking in the perceiver’s mind. Yet disturbingly, some potentially fantasized events, such as A… and Franck in the hotel and their car crashing on its way home, start to emanate from the texture of the repetitions. These sinister fantasies cannot be accounted for as results of logical inferences since

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the absence of a reflective mind is so tangible. In spite of the intensity of these reoccurring and imagined visions, the novel is an exemplar of underinterpretation. Networking is replaced by repetition and an analysis that dissolves into an inventory of disconnected minutiae. Relationality, the core of structuralism and classical narratology, is missing completely. Thus the husband represents a failure in both cognitive-narratological and structuralist reading. This allegorical position as a reader is reflected in one of the mise-en-abyme structures of La Jalousie, the characters’ reactions to an African novel that Franck and A… are reading but the husband seems to have no interest in. Nevertheless, the husband analyzes their interpretations of the novel, apparently discrediting them for their naïve reliance on referentiality. They have never made the slightest judgment as to the novel’s value, speaking instead of the scenes, events, and characters as if they were real…Their discussions have never touched on the verisimilitude, the coherence, or the quality of the narrative.… They also sometimes deplore the coincidences of the plot, saying that “things don’t happen that way,” and then they construct a different probable outcome starting from a new supposition, “if it weren’t for that.” Other possibilities are offered, during the course of the book, which lead to different endings. The variations are extremely numerous; the variations of these, still more so. They seem to enjoy multiplying these choices exchanging smiles, carried away by their enthusiasm, probably a little intoxicated by this proliferation… “But that’s it, he was just unlucky enough to have come home earlier that day, and no one could have guessed he would.” (74–75)

The African novel is an emblem of all the things that A… and Franck share but for the husband, remain unattainable. The fact that the husband has never read the novel, which, however, is a ruling conversation item at the dinner-table, metaphorizes both his inability to attend the storyworld and to make signifying relations. Paradoxically, he seems to criticize A…’s and Franck’s interpretations of the novel as too immersive, as being stuck on the level of navigation and ordering of events or on questions of probability. Intoxicated by the “proliferation” of story-logical possibilities, A… and Franck are like a pair of enthusiastic possible-world theorists. All of their readerly concerns are relevant for cognitive narratological studies; they are the concerns of a “general reader” (Reader 2). The interpretive questions raised by the husband, on the other hand, remind one more of the analytical foci of classical narratology: questions of coherence, motivation and vraisemblance (the interests of Reader 1). Ironically, however, the clue of the mise-en-abyme cannot be found on the level of formal realizations but is revealed in the banal possible-world interpretation blurted out by Franck: “But that’s it, he was just unlucky enough to have come home

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earlier that day, and no one could have guessed he would.” The African novel is a story of cuckolding, but La Jalousie would not necessarily have been if the husband would have read the novel.

Conclusion When I attended my first analytical workshop in Comparative Literature at the University of Tampere—the course was titled “On Interpretation”—my mentor-to-be, Professor Pekka Tammi painted an illustrious metaphor that “clings to the retina” (as the narrator of La Jalousie describes the effect of A…’s illuminated profile): he asked us to imagine different interpretations of the same text to be juggling balls and told us to learn how to keep several of them in the air simultaneously. As today’s narratologists, we might replace balls with frames, and the lesson would remain essentially the same. Cognitive narratology has radically revised the prerequisites of and suppositions about the process of reading narratives. Especially Manfred Jahn has revealed the counter-cognitive logic behind some classical analyses: structuralist narratologists have constructed inhuman readers whose logic of inference has very little to do with the human brain. As Jahn notices, Seymour Chatman has rather self-critically put this unnaturalness in words in the context of his own reading of Joyce’s “Eveline”: “this laborious and unnatural way of reading is not, of course, what the reader actually does but only a suggestion of what his logic of decision must be like” (206; quoted in Jahn, “Frames” 461–63). This inhuman cognizer bears a striking resemblance to La Jalousie’s detached husbandly presence and his “laborious and unnatural way of reading.” The smooth, adjustable and naturalizing approach to reading as “navigation” promoted by cognitive narratology is definitely appealing (and properly executed, will inevitably lead the navigator to a “goal”). Yet I believe there are different and even contradictory readerly paths in narratives, and especially in literary narratives. The construction of such ultimately unattainable reader figures is, admittedly, a “laborious and unnatural way of reading.”

Works Cited Alber, Jan, and Monika Fludernik, eds. Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2010. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Third Edition. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997.

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Barthes, Roland. “Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet.” Two Novels by RobbeGrillet: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth. Ed. and trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1965. 11–25. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1978. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. —. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Fludernik, Monika. “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization: The Squaring of Terminological Circles.” Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Ed. Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2010. 105–33. —. “Naturalizing the Unnatural: A View from Blending Theory.” JLS 39 (2010): 1–27. —. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2002. Jahn, Manfred. “Focalization.” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Ed. David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 94–108. —. “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology.” Poetics Today 18.4 (1997): 441–68. Morrissette, Bruce. “Surfaces and Structures in Robbe-Grillet’s Novels.” Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth. Ed. Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1965. 1–10. Mäkelä, Maria. “Cycles of Narrative Necessity: Suspect Tellers and the Textuality of Fictional Minds.” Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative. Ed. Lars Bernaerts, Dirk de Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P (forthcoming 2013). Perry, Menakhem. “Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates its Meanings [With an Analysis of Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’].” Poetics Today 1.1–2 (1979): 35–64, 311–361. Rantanen, Tytti. Täyttä ymmärrystä vailla. Epäluonnollisia teoreettisia kohtaamisia Marguerite Durasin Intia-syklissä. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. U of Tampere, 2010. Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2006. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. La Jalousie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1957. —. Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth. Ed. and trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. —. “Narratology and Cognitive Science: A Problematic Relation.” Style 44.4 (2010): 469–95. Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Zalloua, Zahi. “Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie: Realism and the Ethics of Reading.” Journal of Narrative Theory 38.1 (2008): 13–36.

Mari Hatavara (University of Tampere)

History Impossible: Narrating and Motivating the Past I might…expect that the cause of excluding me from England should be frankly and fairly stated for my own consideration and guidance. However, I will not grumble about the matter. I shall know the whole story one day, I suppose; and perhaps, as you sometimes surmise, I shall not find there is any mighty matter in it after all. (29)

The protagonist of Walter Scott’s novel Redgauntlet (1824), Darsie Latimer, writes this to a good friend, Alan Fairford, from a journey he makes to the borderland between Scotland and England. Darsie, who lives in Edinburgh and turns out to be an Englishman, is on a mission to find out his family past. The quest for Darsie’s personal past evolves into a study of British history, and of the possibilities to write history altogether. Darsie yearns for proper motivation, “frankly and fairly stated,” for the instructions he has been given never to visit England, although he also realizes there might not be “any mighty matter in it after all.” This thematizes the core feature of the novel, its persistent discussion on the motivation, tellability and epistemology of its own story. The reader encounters both explicit commentary on and implicit allusions to the past events for her “consideration and guidance” to make sense of. I have nothing to grumble about about that, but rather to investigate what the mighty matter here might be. The reader of Scott’s novel, much like Alan in the storyworld, finds her expectations both confirmed and subverted at times—a feature once suggested as accounting for the fascination of fiction (see Tammi 47). But there is more for the reader to encounter than for the protagonist Alan. As Henrik Skov Nielsen has pointed out, narrative fiction contains an inherent tension: whereas narrative etymologically suggests knowing, fiction rather alludes to invention (275). This question is, of course, even more pressing as far as historical fiction is concerned. The genre is defined by the reference the storyworld has to historical knowledge (see Maxwell 545). As I have suggested elsewhere (Hatavara, “Contested”), this reference is far from straightforward, and, for example, contesting a known version of history is one of the possible ways to make the reader

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of historical fiction pay attention to the storyworld and its connection to history. Furthermore, I indicate that despite the link the storyworld has to reality, the modes of narrating do not correspond with those in real life storytelling situations. This matter, only touched upon in my previous article, is the main focus here: what are the distinctively fictional means of narrating used in historical fiction. These, if compared to face-to-face communication and everyday storytelling situations, include narrative acts with idiosyncratic impossibilities or illogicalities for the reader to enjoy and investigate. The question about the (possible, some would say) distinctiveness of fiction has been addressed lately in the context of natural or unnatural narratives and narratology. The natural/unnatural-distinction has been defined in several ways. Some of the known advocates for the unnatural narrative discussion, namely Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Brian Richardson, have in a joint article divided unnaturalness into three aspects: unnatural storyworlds, unnatural minds and unnatural acts of narration (116). The first one is not my interest here, but the second and third ones are—these two are also intertwined, which can be detected in the very reasoning of Alber and the others. The biggest issue concerning unnatural minds they wrestle with is the coherence and continuousness of a constructed human mind in fiction, which in the mentioned article pretty much boils down to the question of the relationship between the narrating and the narrated self in first person narrative (121, 123–24). Then again, according to Alber, Iversen, Nielsen and Richardson, acts of narration may become unnatural by being physically, logically, mnemonically or psychologically impossible (124). According to many theories of mind, the psychological impossibility would also include the breaking of the continuous consciousness assumption between the narrating and the narrated self, which is the aspect number two in the argumentation of Alber and the others. Thus, both second and third versions of unnaturalness are about the relationship between discourse and story, and more precisely between enunciators and existences. The rule of thumb is, I believe, the statement clearly formulated by Dorrit Cohn according to which “a work of fiction itself creates the world to which it refers by referring to it” (Distinction 13). This entails the synchronicity and interdependence of the act of telling and the existence of the told. This rule does, however, come with a twist in historical fiction: the synchronous story–discourse relation is supplemented by the intertextual link the reader builds between the story and the previously encountered representations of the same historical events. Hence the narrative motivation may take forms associated with historical writing. This does not, however, prevent the use of narrative modes alien to histori-

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ography proper and distinctive to fictional discourse. My examples in this article are Scott’s Redgauntlet and I, Claudius (1934) by Robert Graves. The two novels both have a narrator posing as a historian, even though they otherwise manifest narrative strategies far apart: Redgauntlet has a third person narrator with varying focalization, but also contains many letters and journal entries. I, Claudius is narrated solely by one first person narrator, who identifies himself as an autobiographer already at the beginning. Redgauntlet is set in history fairly close to the time of writing the novel, during the summer of 1765, and actually describes conjectural history, a Jacobite rebellion that never took place. Claudius the self-acclaimed autobiographer recounts the history of the Roman Empire from Julius Caesar’s assassination to Calicula’s assassination around the beginning of the Christian era. In this article, I will concentrate on the narrative means with which these novels are offered as historical narratives. Epistemological verification and the ensuring of reader engagement in these novels revolves around three questions, which will be addressed in the following order: firstly, narrative embedding, secondly, the relationship between the narrating and the narrated, and thirdly, the question of narrative communication. Although my discussion is genre and case specific, I believe these novels pose questions with broader relevance to narrative theory about the specificity of fictional narrative and the ways of studying it. Telling, experiencing and reflecting past and history offer the reader a rich interpretative range of insights into fiction’s communicative structure.

Narrators and Narrative Levels It is a critical commonplace to distinguish fiction from history by pointing out that whereas in historiography the narrator and the author are the very same person, in fiction they are undoubtedly separate (see Genette, Fiction 69–78; Cohn, Distinction 123–31). This does not prevent many fictional narrators from presenting themselves as authors, as the narrators of Redgauntlet and I, Claudius do. In historical fiction this is, one could think, an easy strategy to offer a natural frame of telling: a historian giving an account of true events. Yet fictional embeddedness, be it in the form of many manifest narrators or incorporated in one explicit narrative instance, is crucial to historical fiction. The multiplicity of the past can be conveyed through the indirect communication involved: narrators and characters speak to different narrative audiences on different narrative levels. It is the reader’s task and privilege to navigate through different audience positions offered in the text.

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In Redgauntlet the third person narrator comments on the different narrative modes as he makes his first appearance. This occurs in the novel only after thirteen letters, and the narrator points out the advantages of epistolary narration, but maintains that third person narrative is needed to inform readers: The advantage of laying before the reader, in the words of the actors themselves, the adventures which we must otherwise have narrated in our own, has given great popularity to the publication of epistolary correspondence, as practiced by various great authors, and by ourselves in the preceding chapters. Nevertheless, a genuine correspondence of this kind (and Heaven forbid it should be in any respect sophisticated by interpolations of our own!) can seldom be found to contain all in which it is necessary to instruct the reader for his full comprehension of the story. (141)

Redgauntlet and its use of authorial narrator’s commentary has been discussed by Harry E. Shaw in an article about historical fiction. Shaw calls for serious, realistic description of history, and deems the use of the narrator’s self-reflexive, metafictional commentary in the quoted extract to be Scott’s way of undermining himself as an author (179, 182–83). According to this interpretation, Scott flaunts his shifts from one narrative mode to another and emphasizes the way in which they may undermine reliability. It is true that the fabricated element of the letters is emphasized here—the reader is reminded that these letters are designed to tell a story. But does that indicate a failure to take plot and narration seriously, as Shaw sees it? In this regard, a discussion by James Phelan on unreliability provides another angle. Phelan makes evident that the focus has too much been on the estranging effects of unreliability, and the contrary effects of bonding unreliability have been overlooked. This is the kind of unreliability which brings the unreliable narrator closer to the authorial audience. Phelan introduces six types of bonding unreliability, and the second type is of special interest here (“Estranging” 226–32). Phelan calls it “playful comparison between implied author and narrator.” In Redgauntlet the third person authorial narrator’s expressed doubt about the ability of the modes used to convey a full picture of the past for the reader does raise the question of reliability. But it also makes the authorial audience sympathetic towards the narrator, as he admits his inability to depict the characters as accurately as they appear in their own words.1 Furthermore, the narrator strongly expresses his commitment to giving his audience 1

Richard Walsh has discussed Scott’s way of negotiating authorial control especially in his prefaces (136–37). In The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), for example, he finds Scott practicing pre-emptive self-criticism. This is another means to build and maintain the narrator–audience relationship.

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the best possible insight into the events depicted. This makes it evident that the narrator is aware of the epistemological problems inherent in both homo- and heterodiegetic modes of narration and will do his best to overcome them for the benefit of the readers. This good-will creates a bond between the narrator and the authorial audience. Thus self-reflection serves to build and maintain a mimetic interpretation of the storyworld as something to be reflected upon. This bond between the narrator and the authorial audience is, of course, subject to the reader’s interpretation of other elements in the novel. Phelan’s model for narrative communication suggests a difference between the narrative audience, who trusts the narrator and takes the world depicted as real, and the authorial audience, who concentrates on the artistic means, the synthetic element of fiction, and the interplay between different aspects in an artistic whole (Reading 5–6, 8; Living 18–21). Both audience positions with corresponding mimetic and synthetic interpretive inclinations are needed in order for the reader to participate in the illusion of the storyworld and to understand the novel as a literary artifact. It is evident that in Redgauntlet the narrator’s declaration about the originality of the letters and the absence of modifications only holds true inside the mimetic language game of the novel. Moshe Ron characterizes literary language as bearing semblance to true discource, and from time to time as simulating the truth conditions of truth-oriented statements in a probable way (18–20). Ron refers to realistic motivation, which warrants any aspect of the story to be explainable in terms of why and how. He points out that such motivation typically is not present in the text. This agrees with Gérard Genette’s formulation on vraisemblance and motivation (240–43). According to Genette, the further away from the common understanding of a supposed audience the motivation of a story is, the more it requires explicit motivation in the form of overt comments—and vice versa: events that follow shared maxims do not need explicit motivation. Ron’s argumentation vis-à-vis Genette’s argumentation has an important difference: whereas Genette concentrates on how a story with unusual story contents is motivated, Ron adds two other probability factors besides characters and events: epistemic motivation, which calls for perceivers and perception, and semiotic motivation, which calls for writers and texts (20–25). To follow Ron’s line of thought, the third person narrator in Redgauntlet very openly calls for semiotic, and secondarily also epistemic motivation: he has quoted, and will continue to quote, letters and journals by the people who are in the midst of the action. Hence the letters both function as pieces of evidence about the source of the story, and are able to provide a perspective on the past experience.

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The letters, on their part, often include epistemic motivation, as the writer explains from whom and on what occasion he has got the information he delivers—while he at the same time freely capitalizes mnemonic overkill (see Cohn, Transparent 162) with word by word citations from long dialogues. This is particularly striking when Darsie writes to Alan, and includes in the letter a tale orally told to him by a man called Wandering Willie: the story imitates Willie’s dialect, and it includes itself parts of a dialogue Willie had heard, where the enunciators are occasionally marked only by their name, typographically separated by italics and placed at the beginning of a row. The tale is, according to Darsie, faithfully quoted: “I will not spare you a syllable of it” (102), he writes. Thus the narrative utilizes modes mnemonically impossible, while at the same time remarking the origin of each piece of information. The conventional unnaturalness here lies in the ability of both Willie and Darsie to reiterate word for word conversations and stories they have heard. Thus the content is warranted by epistemic motivation, but the textual specificity is not—it has to be reckoned under the fictional tradition of impossible sentences and perhaps also impossible typography: the italics that indicate the name of the speaker do not originate from Willie experiencing them or telling them, but are solely a feature of Darsie’s text. Redgauntlet builds up into a manifold construction of embedded narratives, where the origin of each piece of information is openly laid out—that is, the epistemological motivation is carefully given. The whole novel becomes epistemologically motivated at the end, where a scholar named Dr. Dryasdust turns out to be the founder and provider of the letters and diaries quoted in the novel.2 The novel ends with a chapter titled “Conclusion by Dr. Dryasdust in a Letter to The Author of Waverley” (400–02). It is addressed to the author of the novel (Scott used the pseudonym Author of Waverley) by a professional historian, who, besides referring to the written material he has sent to the author, verifies many of the events of the novel and gives some information about events that succeeded the end of the narrative. Yet, on many occasions, the textual delivery in the story world (Willie quoting dialogues in his oral story and Darsie writing the whole story afterwards) surmounts normal human capacity. Additionally, the letters of the characters manifest features like redundant telling (cf. Phelan, Living 12), which will be analyzed in the next chapter.

2

Jonas Dryasdust appears in several novels by Scott, including The Antiquary (1816), Ivanhoe (1819), and Peveril of the Peak (1823). The last mentioned is discussed by Walsh (137–38).

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The letters at the beginning and at the end of Redgauntlet are several steps apart in narrative levels. The novel opens with a direct quotation of thirteen letters by the first person narrators, continues as the third person narrator’s explanation, and then in the form of journal entries and focalized narratives, and ends with the last letter’s narrator’s assertion of this all being collected and provided by a historian. On the contrary, I, Claudius has a symmetrical beginning and end with the same narrator. The novel starts with this assertion: I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles), who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as ‘Claudius the Idiot’, or ‘That Claudius’, or ‘Claudius the Stammerer’, or ‘Clau-Clau-Claudius’, or at best ‘Poor Uncle Claudius’, am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fiftyone, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the ‘golden predicament’ from which I have never since become disentangled. (9)

The enunciating “I” with the many names, nicknames and titles—some of them not disclosed—claims here the authorial position of the following narrative. He also addresses the reader in a friendly manner as “you,” the direct addressee, and declares he will refrain from burdening her with too much information. At the same time this withholding of information provokes, anticipation: what are the titles not yet disclosed, and this “golden predicament” mentioned. This play is, of course, only illusionary, because the reader will have the historical knowledge of the missing title “Caesar.”3 Claudius the narrator outlines a communicative situation in the first chapter. A few pages after declaring his intention to write his history, Claudius tells about a prophecy according to which this book of his will be discovered about 1900 years after it is written, and that he addresses the book accordingly—in this way the book is claimed to be written by Claudius, but still to be addressed to the reading public of the time Graves wrote the novel. The novel declares an unusual communicative situation, where the intended audience is marked, but behind a long temporal distance. Claudius the historian both has his cake and eats it: he is

3

Leona Toker has discussed reticence as gaps in fabula information: narrative gaps depend on the reader’s estimation of the completeness of the information given at any moment of reading (5–7). As stated above, the dynamics of withholding information change in historical novels, where the reader’s intertextual historical knowledge plays a significant part (see also Hatavara, “Rhetoric” 32–35).

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a contemporary witness to the events, and yet self-consciously speaks to the generations to come—seemingly to the reader of the novel. According to the same manner I, Claudius ends with Claudius’ declaration of himself as a historian. He has now involuntarily been made Caesar, but finds solace in the opportunities this provides for reaching all the archives and finding out the truth about many events and “twisted stories”. He concludes: What a miraculous fate for an historian! And as you will have seen, I took full advantage of my opportunities. Even the mature historian’s privilege of setting forth conversations of which he knows only the gist is one that I have availed myself of hardly at all. (396)

This conclusion pairs with the beginning: whereas the beginning motivates the narrative as being based on lived experience, which creates epistemic motivation, this end conjures semiotic motivation through historical documents. Yet the assertions of telling about one’s own life and not conjuring up discussions do not hold to the narrative practice of the novel. These comments suggest historical accuracy and documentation, but the narrator does not, however, confine himself to the role of a character narrator, but has several extraordinary abilities, which I will study in the next chapter. The discrepancies between explicit commentary and narrative modes are essential in the interpretation of both these novels. Just as unreliability may be estranging or bonding, other narrative means may take on multiple functions.

Narrating and the Narrated The beginning of the novel I, Claudius discloses an important feature of the narrating I: his many roles and masks, indicated by the many mock-names. The historical figure Claudius, who became emperor at a fairly late age, is believed to have suffered from cerebral palsy or Tourette’s syndrome: he limped, he drooled, stuttered and was constantly ill. Family members mistook these physical disabilities as reflective of mental infirmity, and kept Claudius mostly out of the social life. It has also been suspected that Claudius magnified these symptoms in order to appear harmless and avoid being killed as a rival to the throne. Accordingly, the novel’s Claudius is a master of disguises and a utilizer of multiple narrative modes. The readerly expectations raised by the opening of the novel are surpassed in terms of the story content. The reader is led to look for an autobiographical narrative about Claudius’ life (“this strange history of

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my life” [9]). This is, however, not the case, since the story begins well before Claudius’ birth, and mostly depicts important events in the public life, which Claudius is not much part of. Most emphasis is put on many conspiracies during the reign of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula. Only on few occasions does Claudius tell about his feelings or thoughts, but mostly relates the events like a historian, distanced from these events. Throughout the novel Claudius in many ways resembles a heterodiegetic narrator, with similar epistemological and discursive possibilities over the other characters. Claudius the narrator possesses all but one of the traits of an omniscient narrator William Nelles lists. Nelles suggests omniscience to be a flexible notion with several features an author may use to her ends (119–21). These features include omnipotency, omnitemporality, omniprecency and telepathy. Claudius is not omnipotent: actually quite the opposite, he has very little power over what happens to himself or to others, and does on many occasions lament that. According to Nelles, omnipotent narrators present themselves as creators of the fictional world, and hence have the ability to make happen anything they want. As Nelles himself points out, omnipotency really isn’t an attribute of omniscience, but entails it (120). It may also be noted, that the extradiegetic narrators in I, Claudius and in Redgauntlet may not want to pose as the inventors of the storyworld, as they are doing their best to assert the reader of historical accuracy. Thus this lack of omnipotency is not a restriction imposed upon these narrators, but a strategy adopted to maintain the illusion of semiotic motivation of the storyworld. An analogical structure in biblical narratives, where the role of the creator needs to be allotted to God, has been pointed out by Meir Sternberg (”Omniscience” 691). As far as concerns the freedom of moving in space, time and minds of other characters, Claudius is well equipped, and only rarely motivates his sources of information. On one occasion Claudius narrates at length his grandmother Livia’s thoughts about her husband Augustus, and even openly declares this in the end: “How many mere kings paid tribute to Augustus!…Had not Apis, the sacret bull of Memphis, uttered a bellow of lamentation and burst into tears? This was how my grandmother reasoned with herself” (29). The form of this passage follows free indirect discourse (FID) as the narrating Claudius apparently partly follows the emotive and expressive language of his grandmother. But where does this language originate from? We are told that these are the private thoughts of Livia, who “reasoned with herself.” So we have a textbook example of the literary paradox: narrative fiction obtains its greatest realistic illusion when it narrates in ways unattainable to real human beings, such as depicting the inner thoughts of another person (Cohn, Transparent 5–9). Possibly Livia

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told Claudius later about her reasoning, and Claudius again later wrote them down. A little earlier in the novel Claudius explains he has heard many things about the actions of his grandmother from herself on her death bed (25). But despite this possible epistemological motivation, the violations against human knowledge and narrative abilities are as apparent as were the ones in Wandering Willie’s tale in Redgauntlet: How could the dying Livia remember word for word her thoughts years before? And how could Claudius then remember the same words, again years later? These questions, however, are not the essential ones. More important is that Claudius the narrator is free from the subject position of a common man, and the novel utilizes fiction’s possibility to free the discourse from the normal anchoring to a stable narrating entity and position—even though the narrating Claudius is explicitly homodiegetic (cf. Fludernik, Towards 269–310). Monika Fludernik considers this mind-hopping capacity of a first person narrator an infringement of natural story-telling parameters (“New” 621). Yet, as demonstrated by Pekka Tammi’s (41, 47) analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Recruiting,” this is possible and even plausible in fictional narratives: their distinction, and appeal, lie in the transposition between disclosing and transgressing the natural functions of our minds. What is more, the representation of Livia’s thoughts is overtly literary and foregrounds its own representational power: it abounds with expressivity in its use of exclamations and questions, and openly voices that these are the private thoughts of another character. Cohn has pointed out that FID (narrated monologue in Cohn) may at times resemble a mock-quotation, where the narrator partly imitates the words of the character (Transparent 119–20). The rather ironic mock-quotation of what Claudius’ grandmother supposedly thought opens up several interpretative possibilities and thematizes the blurry relations between voice, knowledge and narrative positions. The freedom to move in time and place is evident in the next example. Claudius tells about an incident where an esteemed senator, Calpurnius, sues Urgulania because of an unpaid debt. Urgulania has a superior position as a favourite of Livia, who is wife of the late Augustus, and mother of Caesar Tiberius. When Urgulania read the summons, which was for her immediate attendance at the Debtor’s Court, she told her chair-men to take her straight to Livia’s Palace. Calpurnius followed her and and was met in the hall by Livia, who told him to be off. Calpurnius courteously but firmly excused himself, saying that Urgulania must obey the summons without fail unless too ill to attend, which clearly she was not. Even Vestal Virgins were not exempt from attendance at court when subpoenaed. Livia said that his behaviour was personally insulting to her and

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that her son, the Emperor, would know to avenge her. Tiberius was sent for and tried to smooth things over, telling Calpurnius that Urgulania surely meant to come as soon as she had composed herself after the sudden shock of the summons, and telling Livia that is was no doubt a mistake, that Calpurnius certainly meant no disrespect, and that he himself would attend the trial and see that Urgulania had a capable counsel and a fair trial. (223)

This extract, without the frame of Claudius posing as a first person narrator, would fall into a conventional heterodiegetic narration, with epistemological and discursive privileges such as FID, mixing the narrator’s discourse with the discourses of Calpurnia, Livia and Tiberius in turns. An interesting observation may also be made about the storyworld: Tiberius the Emperor is talking to two people separately and in secrecy from each other, even if they all share the same space. Like characters in a play, Tiberius changes his tone from one to another, and the other characters don’t see or hear what happens under their very eyes. Furthermore, what Claudius declares Tiberius to have told to Calpurnius includes an assumption about Urgulania’s thoughts and intentions. The last sentence does not actually manifest a mind-reading ability of Tiberius, but an intentionally false depiction of Urgulania’s aims and motivations. Still this false mock-quotation, heavily modified by the teller (cf. Cohn, Transparent 119–20),4 suggests an original—even though never existent—feeling of Urgulania: the ”sudden shock,” which again Tiberius tries to convey she ”surely” had, and now needs to recover from. Here the question of unnatural acts of narration or unnatural voices comes in layers and penetrates diegetic levels: not only the narrating Claudius but also other characters allegedly know and represent each other’s thoughts. In some cases, Claudius refers to himself as Claudius, alternatively with I: “You may be sure, though, that it caused poor Claudius the greatest possible grief,…How was I to know that it was Clement who had been killed” (171). Claudius the teller is clearly separated from Claudius the character, although the pronoun “I” refers to both. The epistemologically privileged position of the narrating I over the narrated younger self is prominent as the ignorance of the latter is emphasized by a rhetorical question. This discursive and epistemological anchoring into the moment of telling is further emphasized by addressing the extradiegetic audience directly as “you.” Then again, many passages, where Claudius speaks about his earlier self as I blend the frames of telling and experiencing. In the next extract Caligula the emperor has just ordered Claudius to marry

4

See also Daniel P. Gunn about the prevalence of the narrator in FID.

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a young girl called Messalina, and Claudius relates this to his long time companion, the prostitute Calpurnia. I told her [Calpurnia] that the marriage was forced on me and that I would miss her very much indeed. But she pooh-poohed that: Messalina had twice her looks, three times her brains, and birth and money into the bargain. I was in love with her already, Calpurnia said. I felt uncomfortable. Calpurnia had been my only true friend in all those four years of misery. What had she not done for me? And yet she was right: I was in love with Messalina, and Messalina was to be my wife now. There would be no place for Calpurnia with Messalina about. She was in tears as she went away. So was I. I was not in love with her, but she was my truest friend and I knew that if ever I needed her she would be there to help me. I need not say that when I received the dowry money I did not forget her. (381)

Claudius speaks to several audiences here. In terms of classical speech category approach (see Palmer 9–13, 53–57) the first sentence could loosely be interpreted as indirect discourse, where the telling I is summarizing what he said in the past—or as free indirect discourse, especially in the light of the (excessively) reassuring choice of words “very much indeed.” The second sentence again comes close to FID, with the words of the telling I mixed with the words or thoughts of either Calpurnia or the experiencing I. It is most probably Calpurnia who points out the superior qualities of Messalina, her looks, brains, birth and money, as she has just “pooh-poohed” Claudius’ attempt to assure her of his affection for her. The second paragraph, from the second sentence on, comes closest to FID in this passage, if we consider—which I, Claudius seems to suggest—FID to be possible in first person narration. The telling I and the experiencing I act as a narrator and a character. The narrator changes the tense to the past, but remains an “I,” only a later version. One deviation from traditional FID can be discerned: the change from a presumable original of “these four years” to “those four years.” Whereas the persistent pronoun “I” reduces the narrator’s visibility and perspective here, this change of pronoun, on the contrary, brings the narrator again to the fore. This categorization makes clear that the narrating I and the experiencing I both differ from and intermingle with each other in many ways. Thus Claudius discursively shifts not only between first and third person modes of narrating, but also between dissonant and consonant first person narrative (see Cohn, Transparent 143–72). From a cognitively inspired narratological point of view, the frames of experiencing and telling (cf. Fludernik, “Natural” 244–47) are of interest here. In the first paragraph, does the narrator read the mind of Calpurnia or does he cite her words? The second paragraph is even more interesting:

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is it the experiencing I organizing his thoughts at the moment when he “feels uncomfortable,” or is it the telling I reflecting his former thoughts and speculations? It seems like the experiencing I is trying to grasp the reality by narrativizing it, organizing his thoughts by rational reasoning, and that the telling I is at least trying to reach his former thoughts and feelings. This indeterminacy and overlapping of the frames of telling and experiencing has been discussed by Maria Mäkelä in some short stories by Richard Ford. Her important observation is that literary minds always merge the representation with the represented. In Claudius’ case this means that experiencing and telling are simultaneously present in both the past and the present of telling. But how about rhetorics—and who are the audiences? Who is the narrator telling to at which point? In the first two paragraphs, it seems like he is reasoning with himself, or trying to explain his reasons to an audience who would read his history later. In the last paragraph, especially at the end, the audience is addressed more directly and from a later time point, as the narrator refers to later events. Claudius is overtly and self-declaredly a protean character, someone, who at the beginning defines himself in terms of how people used to call him. This also includes an overt assertion of dissonance: “I was known” (9; my emphasis). Throughout the narrative Claudius not only exercises narrative liberties associated with omniscient narration, but he also takes two roles in the storyworld and oscillates between them: Claudius, the man of letters, who is witty and knowledgeable—and a capable historian—and Claudius the clumsy stutterer, who feels alienated in the world and is incapable of expressing himself. The story of the novel illustrates and thematizes the need to understand the occasion and to adjust one’s story accordingly. The circumstances in the court are ever-changing with mentally unstable emperors, who have declared themselves to be Gods or semi-Gods. On many occasions Claudius survives because he is able to draw quick conclusions about bizarre situations – and also to lead others to interpret situations in a manner favorable to him. In this sense the story thematizes the power of narrative as a cognitive tool for mastering reality. But, on the other hand, this is all just a game (also) in the storyworld, and the characters quickly change their narratives whenever necessary. Thus the story mocks efforts to make sense of the reality by narrativizing it, and depicts those efforts as momentary and even meaningless. Redgauntlet openly discusses the freedom of subjectivity and of speech in a line by Redgauntlet himself. Redgauntlet, who turns out to be Darsie’s uncle, declares to Darsie his deep belief in the forces of destiny—even though he himself has gone to great trouble to control his nephew’s life and future.

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Yes, young man, in doing and suffering, we play the part allotted by Destiny, the manager of this strange drama, stand bound to act no more than is prescribed, to say no more than is set down for us; and yet we mouth about freewill, and freedom of thought and action, as if Richard must not die, or Richmond conquer, exactly where the Author has decreed it shall be so! (212–13)

Taken literally, this would all but ridicule the mimetic language game of the novel: how is the novel to portray characters with motifs and aspirations, if they are fully aware of being but masks for the voices the author wants to contest. Still, a sounder interpretation takes Redgauntlet not really to be aware of himself being a literary character, but to dramatize his faith in the powers of destiny by this allusion between people and characters in a drama. The reader may interpret this as another joyful undermining of authorial privileges, or as a reminder to stay on guard for the next move in the mimetic game. Both Redgauntlet and I, Claudius have a narrator who wavers between the position of a character and that of a narrator. This obscurity has an impact on the communicative structure of the narrative.

Narrative Communication I have demonstrated how Redgauntlet surpasses the natural abilities of its narrators by mnemonic (cf. Cohn, Transparent 162) and discursive overkill for example in Wandering Willie’s tale. As the novel begins with private letters, redundant telling with disclosure functions (cf. Phelan, Living 12) is recurrent. The thirteen letters between Darsie and Alan at the beginning of the novel are drafted in a manner that ensures the reader gets the relevant information about the characters and events introduced. The first letter is rhetorically quite heated, as the protagonist Darsie is irritated by the fact that his friend did not join him to an adventure. This gives him the opportunity to go over their relationship in past and present, his own personal history, and also his hopes for the future. (13–15) These disclosure functions in the embedded narrative level, followed by the extradiegetic reminder of authorial powers—consciously refraining from “interpolations”—question the mimetic communicative telling-frame, which Phelan has characterized as “somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (Living 18). The subjects, occasions and purposes do not always neatly meet at the same diegetic level. The characters, who are made to carry redundant information in their letters, are also made to give excuses for it, like Darsie in the first letter: whereas the rendering of their shared past is communicatively motivated by Darsie feeling upset about Alan’s behavior,

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in the case of Darsie’s past the redundancy needs to be overtly motivated. This is achieved, as Darsie explains his repeated telling of the story with his effort to “wring some sense out of it.” He also hopes Alan will consider his story and its significance. (17) In this manner Redgauntlet’s letters thematize the epistolary effort to create a shared space for the writer and the addressee (see Herman 531–32). As Vimala Herman argues, epistolary writing itself has a communicative structure at one remove: the presence of the addressee is illusionary (529–30, 539–40). The letters in Redgauntlet use abundant reference to this epistolary communicative situation, for example in the form of addressing ”you,” the receiver. The content is however, directed to the reader of the novel. Tamar Yacobi’s discussion of these instances—redundant telling or disclosure function in Phelan’s later terms—adds another important observation. Yacobi separates rhetorical and fictive content in a speaker’s discourse: the latter follows the given communcative situation in the storyworld, the former denotes the disclosure functions (”Fictional” 123– 26). She sees these disclosure functions as deviating from communicative symmetry, and forming overlapping communication, where the embedded speaker addresses not only the addressee within the fictional world but also, even if unwittingly, the reader of the novel. Thus the asymmetric communication structure may either be incomplete—there may not be a receiver5 —or excessive: there are several receivers to one sender. Like Redgauntlet, I, Claudius also rejects the mimetic, symmetrical telling-frame. Both novels defy the definition of narrative as communication with symmetrical sender–receiver pairs. Claudius argues that his contemporaries do not understand what he wants to say, but he hopes that the future generations several hundred years later will appreciate his history. This address from the narrator does not have a corresponding narratee in the fictional world—the narrator actually denies the sole possibility of a contemporary audience. What is more, Claudius as the narrator has a variety of teller-functions that cannot be reduced to a single sender person, and where the receiving end of the communicative continuum may also be lacking: Claudius vacillates between homo- and heterodiegetic positions, and occasionally reasons with himself in between those. Whereas Yacobi used the terms ‘fictive’ and ‘rhetorical’ to denote narration which either follows or does not follow given communicative situation, Phelan in his treatment of redundant telling specifies between narrator functions and disclosure functions, where the former is constrained by the narrative situation, and the latter is not (Living 12). While

5

See also Phelan’s discussion on lyrical narrative (Living 158).

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I find this division to be useful, I still think the terminology is in need of revision. With regard to Yacobi’s choice of words, the later development of the theory and conceptualization has brought along a risk of confusion: the more recent argumentation around the concepts fictive, fictional and rhetorical makes her theory hard to access today. What Yacobi labels fictive, would be more clearly defined under mimetic today—whereas mimetic thirty years ago would have been a term too wide to use in this meaning, as referring to interpretation faithful to the overt communicative situation. Phelan’s terminology, to my mind, has two possible problems. Firstly, this distinction between narrator and disclosure functions is at risk of being mixed with the distinction between narrator and character functions, which is a separation on a completely different level of narrative. Secondly, and what is more important here, this distinction indicates too narrow an understanding of narrative and narrator, equalizing narrator with teller. My suggestion is to make the separation between communicative and informative functions. I would then propose the overall concept to be narratorial functions, and that we divide these into communicative and disclosure functions, the first ones abiding to the rules of communication, the latter defining them. This also gets me back to the discussion about natural and unnatural narratives, since the communicative may be called natural and the disclosure unnatural narrative functions. Here my argument comes close to Nielsen’s claim that “one does not have to consider all forms of narration as report and communication” (279). I do agree, and hope I have demonstrated what this means in the novels analyzed in this essay. The reader does not only have possible audience positions to choose between, but is confronted with voices whose sender–receiver positions are lacking or fuzzy if compared to communicative models. Nielsen suggests a definition for unnatural narrative as narration which is not communication, as opposed to natural oral narratives. This seems a plausible move, and one that supplements the idea of fiction’s language being able to displace the origin of the speaker deictically, which is discursively exemplified in free indirect discourse. Fiction’s discursive potential, due to its embedded narrative structure, has not always been welcomed by theorists of the historical novel. Shaw alleges Redgauntlet to be marked by Scott’s frivolous use of history and narrative. This is supposedly due to the novel’s use of various narrative modes which do not constitute a distinct and coherent story. I claim quite the opposite. There is nothing frivolous in using several narrative modes in order to convey history; on the contrary, these modes enable a fuller picture of the past depicted, and encourage reader evaluation of the story and discourse. From my position, the problem—if there is one—with

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Redgauntlet is precisely the opposite from what Shaw is concerned about. The problem is that towards the end of the book the third person narrator increasingly takes over the narrative. The narrative mode moves from letters to a journal, then to internally focalized third person narrative and finally to third person narrative with zero focalization. This has a negative impact on the bond which the authorial audience has formed with the first-person narrators, who as characters also act as focalizers. In Redgauntlet the reader is first acquainted with the past world through and with the people who experience it. Then, step by step, the narrative moves away from the experienced story-time to the retrospective discourse-time. This development culminates in the last chapter’s letter to the author of the narrative just presented. Thus the audience positions gradually move closer to the position of the real reader, who, in the end, is left at the same point where she started. After forming a bond with the characters as narrators and actors in the past, the authorial audience is taken back to the distant temporal and epistemological position. It seems like the novel, after all, demonstrates mistrust in the reader’s capacity to navigate between different points of time and different audience positions in the process of making sense of the past and participating in the understanding of history. Still, Redgauntlet exemplifies the possibilities of fictional embedding and several narrative voices to mediate, and also to thematize, different temporal positions involved in writing history. As Jonathan Culler has indicated, knowing is a very relative or even irrelevant issue as far as fiction is concerned (23–24). Fictional discourse may or may not be assigned to a dramatized teller person, but always originates in the implied author. Character-narrators represent the storyworld they live in, but all kinds of narrative voices, I claim, convey information that constitutes the storyworld and its characters. In this creation, even if the aim is to compose an illusion of a storyworld mimetically resembling our own, the unnatural or synthetic elements of fiction are crucial.

In the End According to natural narratology, the process of narrativization, making sense of narrative fiction, is founded not only on our experience of everyday life, but also on our experience with fiction’s generic properties (cf. Fludernik, “Natural” 244). This is a feature of the theory worth more attention than it has received so far. Fiction, be it natural or unnatural, is part of our everyday life and experience. Both Redgauntlet and I, Claudius present a protagonist who is not only a conscious teller character

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but also an experiencer and reflector of his life through literary models. Claudius takes the majority of his examples from historical literature, enriched by stories like the Horse of Troy (325). Darsie mostly resorts to Shakespeare and romantic literature, folk tales and sayings of famous contemporary people, but also to general ideas about, for example, the functions and centrality of plot—for instance, by proclaiming “[t]he plot thickens, Alan” (90). These or other explicit comments by the narrators do not, however, indicate that either of the novels would be solely or even mostly about metafictional play—rather they are attempts to narrate history in a meaningful fashion. The reader’s effort to interpret the text with incongruences between explicit commentary and the narrative tools implemented requires the same kind of activity the characters utilize in testing different models of understanding, be their origin in the reader’s lived or read experience. Yacobi’s suggestion for interpreting self-contradictions in a given text includes five principles: the genetic, the generic, the existential, the functional and the perspectival (“Fictional” 114–19). In recent narratological argumentation the existential (the fictive world) and to some extent the perspectival (the observer of the fictive world) have gained much attention—compare, for example the signs of unnatural narrative quoted at the beginning of this article. What seems to be perhaps the one master principle above the others is the functional one. As Yacobi maintains, “[t]he work’s aesthetic, thematic and persuasive goals invariably operate as a major guideline to making sense of its peculiarities” (117). She also makes evident that the principles she gives do not operate separately but come in mixtures and as interpretative options. Formal patterns can serve a number of different effects, and vice versa (Yacobi, “Package” 223; Sternberg, “Proteus”; “Omniscience” 687–88; cf. Phelan, Living 68), which has been eloquently exemplified by Phelan’s discussion on bonding unreliability (see also McCormick 324–34). But, what is more, it is not the product but the process of making sense of narrative fiction which is of essence. Tammi demonstrates how fiction may “teeter between mutually exclusive, impossible narrative options” (51); likewise, Cohn calls for recognizing the certain “two-mindedness” inherent in the interpretation of fictional narratives, where the reader is left wavering between two possible solutions (”Discordant” 309). This teetering and wavering I have tried to demonstrate in my analyses of Redgauntlet and I, Claudius. It applies to the position and the abilities of the narrators, be they in relation to the narrated or to the audiences, and is precisely the reason for the analysis. Darsie the correspondent writes to Alan:

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I continue to scribble at length, though the subject may seem somewhat deficient in interest. Let the grace of the narrative, therefore, and the concern we take in each other’s matter, make amends for its tenuity. We fools of fancy, who suffer ourselves, like Malvolio, to be cheated with our own visions, have, nevertheless, this advantage over the wise ones of the earth, that we have our whole stock of enjoyments under our own command, and can dish for ourselves an intellectual banquet with most moderate assistance from external objects. (118)

Narratives like Redgauntlet or I, Claudius offer rich material for literary scholars, who may go on to dish themselves one intellectual banquet after another, even upon the smallest detail in these narratives. This scribbling is what we do, more or less gracefully. This is why, even though I agree with Nielsen’s observation about the need to exclude the necessity of communication from narrative (296–99), I disagree with his suggestion that this would make the real flesh-and-blood author pivotal. Nielsen concludes that “[t]o realize the full potential of authors, we should rather ‘employ’ than ‘imply’ them” (299). I would much rather have us literary scholars realize our full potential as readers of the endlessly intriguing and never fully explainable fiction, be it natural or non-natural, schematic or strange, logical or impossible—or all this together.6

Works Cited Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.” Narrative 18.2 (2010): 113–36. Cohn, Dorrit. “Discordant Narration.” Style 34.2 (2000): 307–16. —. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. —. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Culler, Jonathan. “Omniscience.” Narrative 12.1 (2004): 22–34. Fludernik, Monika. “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003. 243–67. —. “New Wine in Old Bottles?: Voice, Focalization and New Writing.” New Literary History 32.3 (2001): 619–38. —. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Genette, Gérard. Fiction & Diction. 1991. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993.

6

This article was written during my stay at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the spring of 2011.

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—. “‘Vraisemblance’ and Motivation.” 1969. Trans. David Gorman. Narrative 9.3 (2001): 239–58. Graves, Robert. I, Claudius. 1934. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953. Gunn, Daniel P. “Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma.” Narrative 12.1 (2004): 35–54. Hatavara, Mari. “Contested History, Denied Past: The Narrator’s Failure in Ralf Nordgren’s Det har aldrig hänt (1977).” Disputable Core Concepts of Narrative Theory. Ed. Göran Rossholm and Christer Johansson. Bern et al.: Peter Lang, 2012. 83–98. —. “The Rhetoric of Narrating Communal History in the Nineteenth-Century Finnish Historical Novel.” Intertexts 14.1 (2010): 21–40. Herman, Vimala. “Deictic Projection and Conceptual Blending in Epistolarity.” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 523–41. Maxwell, Richard. “Historical Novel.” Encyclopedia of the Novel I. Ed. Paul Schellinger. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998. 543–47. McCormick, Paul. “Claims of Stable Identity and (Un)reliability in Dissonant Narration.” Poetics Today 30.2 (2009): 317–52. Mäkelä, Maria. “Cycles of Narrative Necessity: Suspect Tellers and the Textuality of Fictional Minds.” Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative. Ed. Lars Bernaerts, Dirk de Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P (forthcoming 2013). Nelles, William. “Omniscience for Atheists: Or, Jane Austen’s Infallible Narrator.” Narrative 14.2 (2006): 118–31. Nielsen, Henrik Skov. “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration.” Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Ed. Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2010. 275–301. Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2004. Phelan, James. “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita.” Narrative 15.3 (2007): 222–38. —. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005. —. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1989. Ron, Moshe. “Free Indirect Discourse, Mimetic Language Games and the Subject of Fiction.” Poetics Today 2.2 (1981): 17–39. Scott, Walter. Redgauntlet. 1824. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Shaw, Harry E. “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott’s Redgauntlet)?” Rethinking History 9.2–3 (2005): 173–95. Sternberg, Meir. “Omniscience in Narrative Construction: Old Challenges and New.” Poetics Today 28.4 (2007): 683–794. —. “Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Discourse.” Poetics Today 3.2 (1982): 107–56. Tammi, Pekka. “Against ‘against’ Narrative: On Nabokov’s ‘Recruiting.’” Narrativity, Fictionality, and Literariness: The Narrative Turn and the Study of Literary Fiction. Ed. Lars-Åke Skalin. Örebro: Örebro University, 2008. 37–55. Toker, Leona. Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 1993. Walsh, Richard. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2007.

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Yacobi, Tamar. “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem.” Poetics Today 2.2 (1981): 113–26. —. “Package Deals in Fictional Narrative: The Case of the Narrator’s (Un)Reliability.” Narrative 9.2 (2001): 223–29.

Jan Alber (University of Freiburg)

Unnatural Temporalities: Interfaces between Postmodernism, Science Fiction, and the Fantastic In postmodernist texts, time can attain an incredible flexibility.1 As Ursula K. Heise has shown, “postmodernist narrative time is detached from any specific human observer, and in some cases is not meant to represent any temporality other than that of the text at all.” In most such texts, “representation…exists in a temporality of its own which is not dependent on the time laws of the ‘real’ world” (64, 205). More generally, Mark Currie argues that “fiction is capable of temporal distortion which cannot be reproduced in lived experience” (85). In this article, I discuss three unnatural, i.e., physically or logically impossible (Alber, “Impossible” 80), temporalities of postmodernism, namely (1) the fusing of distinct historical periods in Ishmael Reed’s novel Flight to Canada (1976) as well as (2) the reversed causality and (3) the impossibly quick ageing of characters in D. M. Thomas’s novel The White Hotel (1981). In a second step, I present an overview of unnatural time lines in postmodernist narratives. Finally, I try to explain the disconcerting or defamiliarizing effects (Shklovsky 12) of the unnatural temporalities of postmodernism by arguing that postmodernist texts transfer impossible timelines that are common in science-fiction and fantasy narratives to realist contexts. This article is a contribution to the new field of unnatural narratology (Richardson, Unnatural; Alber, “Impossible”; Alber et al, “Unnatural”; Alber and Heinze; Alber et al., Poetics), which, for me, is not unnatural in itself but rather a narratology of the unnatural. What unnatural narratology, as I understand and practice it, does is to look at the various ways

1

According to Brian McHale, “the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological ” (Postmodernist 10). That is to say, postmodernist fiction self-reflexively problematizes the existence of the projected fictional world. One central strategy is the depicting of unnatural, i.e., physically or logically impossible, scenarios and events.

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in which narratives transcend real-world parameters, and, in a second step, it then tries to interpret these ‘deviations.’ From my perspective, the primary goal of unnatural narrative theory is the systematic development of new narratological tools and modeling systems which are designed to capture the extravagance of the unnatural.2 While most unnatural narratologists focus on postmodernist narratives, I also have a diachronic outlook: I show that many unnatural scenarios and events have already been conventionalized, i.e., turned into perceptual frames during the course of literary history (for example, everybody knows that time travel is possible in science-fiction narratives or that animals can speak in beast fables) (Alber, “Diachronic”). In this article, I want to illustrate that postmodernist narratives use impossible time lines that have already become part of the generic conventions of fantasy and science-fiction stories and then fuse them with realist contexts.

Unnatural Temporality I: The Merging of Historical Periods Even though Ishmael Reed’s slave narrative Flight to Canada is set in the United States and Canada of the 1860s (or what the slaveholder Arthur Swille calls “the pre-technological pre-post-rational age” [35]), numerous forms of modern technology and commodity culture exist.3 The novel thus superimposes the technologically advanced twentieth century over the second half of the nineteenth century.4

2

3

4

Examples of such categories would be the temporalities discussed in this article but also the dead narrator (as in Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones [2002]), the transforming character (as in Sarah Kane’s play Cleansed [1998]), or the architecturally impossible setting (as in Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves [2000]). Further examples of such ‘chronomontages’ (Yacobi 104, 98), that merge incongruous temporal zones at the level of the story, can be found in Ishmael Reed’s novels Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) (Ludwig 192–93) and Mumbo Jumbo (1972) (Elias 119–23) as well as in Julio Cortázar’s short story “The Other Heaven” (1966) (McHale, Postmodernist 47). These examples differ from John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) and Stanley Elkin’s novel George Mills (1982), where the fusing of incongruous temporal zones concerns only the level of the narrative discourse; in these two novels, the narrator offers commentary on the historical events of the text from the perspective of his or her contemporary world-view. The two most important historical figures in the novel are Abraham Lincoln, who was President of the United States during the Civil War (1861–65), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96), who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and “borrowed” the story from Josiah Henson (Flight 8). Christine Levecq argues that by satirizing these two figures, the novel implies that “neither the political nor the sentimental appeal to solidarity with the slaves constitutes a valid way of effectively constructing a new nation” (284).

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Flight to Canada is about three slaves—Raven Quickskill, 40s, and Stray Leechfield— who escape from Arthur Swille in Virginia to the north of the United States only to discover that they did not manage to actually leave slavery behind. For instance, when Quickskill tells his friend 40s, “we’re not in Virginia no more,” 40s responds: “That’s what you think. Shit. Virginia everywhere. Virginia outside. You might be Virginia” (76). Later on, in Buffalo, New York, Quickskill sees slavery everywhere: “Slaves judged other slaves like the auctioneer and his clients judged them. Was there no end to slavery? Was a slave condemned to serve another Master as soon as he got rid of one? Were overseers to be replaced by other overseers? Was this some game, some fickle punishment for sins committed in former lives? Slavery on top of slavery?” (144). Quickskill and his girlfriend, the Native American Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, ultimately make it to Canada (156–57). However, they soon learn that Canada is not really that much different from the U. S.: Carpenter tells them that the “Americans own Canada” and that “they just permit Canadians to operate it for them” (161). The novel also tells the story of two “house slaves”—Uncle Robin5 and Mammy Barracuda—who do not escape and remain in Virginia until the end. At the beginning of the novel, Quickskill’s poem, which is also called “Flight to Canada,” confronts us with the first instance of the unnatural. More specifically, the poem informs us that the nineteenth-century character of Quickskill took a plane to go to Canada: “flew in non-stop / Jumbo jet this A.M.” (3). Furthermore, despite the setting in the United States of the 1860s, we learn of the existence of yachts (12); “sunglasses” (12); “bubble gum” (26); laundromats (26); telephones (30); “a carriage which featured factory climate-control air conditioning, vinyl top, AM/ FM stereo radio, full leather interior, power-lock doors six-way power seat, power windows, white-wall wheels, door-edge guards, bumper impact strips, rear defroster and soft-ray glass” (36); tape recorders (53–54); penthouses with giant waterbeds and TVs (56); and elevators (136). In this strange world, people go “scuba diving” and “deep-sea fishing” (61), and at one point, we are presented with a live television report of President Lincoln’s assassination (103). Nineteenth-century Canada is similarly technologically advanced: Ford, Sears, and Holiday Inn exist; and one can

5

Uncle Robin declines Harriet Beecher Stowe’s offer to write his biography (174). Instead, it is Quickskill who “would write Uncle Robin’s story in such a way that, using a process the old curers used, to lay hands on the story would be lethal to the thief. That way his Uncle Robin would have the protection that Uncle Tom (Josiah Henson) didn’t” (11). For more on intertextuality and the process of rewriting in the novel, see Moraru.

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see “neon signs with clashing letters advertising hamburgers, used car-lots with the customary banners,” and modern “coffee joints” (160). By merging two distinct historical periods, Flight to Canada suggests that we might learn something about the present by looking at the past. In other words, the novel’s ‘chronomontage’ alerts us to contemporary forms of slavery. The domination of human beings by others is not a problem of the past but continues to play a role in the present. In this context, it is also worth noting that the character called the Immigrant points out that “there are more types of slavery than merely material slavery. There’s a cultural slavery” (67). Also, Quaw Quaw Tralaralara argues that “slavery [is] a state of mind” (95). In an interview, Ishmael Reed commented on his earlier novel Mumbo Jumbo in the following words: I wanted to write about a time like the present, or to use the past to prophesy about the future—a process our ancestors called ‘Necromancy.’ I chose the ‘20’s [sic!] because [that period was] very similar to what’s happening now. This is a valid method and has been used by writers from time immemorial. Using a past event of one’s country or culture to comment on the present. (Dick and Sigh 60–61)

Flight to Canada clearly follows the same idea.6 Furthermore, the novel accentuates that there has been technological progress but no real spiritual or moral development: the latter lags behind the former. One might even argue that the novel construes technological progress as a modern form of slavery. Similarly, the German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno argue that the enlightenment and the idea of technical progress revert to mythology: The enslavement of people today cannot be separated from social progress. The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The individual is entirely nullified in face of the economic powers. (xvii)

Timothy Spaulding writes that by incorporating temporal incongruities into Flight to Canada, “Reed links the impulses behind the American slave system with the ways contemporary mainstream culture appropriates, commodifies, and consumes black identity and African American aesthetic production” (26). 6

Glenda R. Carpio points out that Reed’s later novel draws from Voodoo (which—etymologically speaking—means “introspection into the unknown”): “Voodoo practitioners do not regard the past as a set of events neatly sealed off from the now; instead, the past informs and intermingles with everyday reality” (564). On the Voodoo aesthetic in Reed’s novels, see also Walsh (67–68).

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As I have shown, in fictional narratives, it is not always the case that the borders between the past and the present are fixed and impenetrable. In the world of fiction, we can merge distinct temporal zones or historical periods in what Tamar Yacobi calls a chronomontage, in which “elements belonging to different…periods combine within the fictive world at a single point in time to form an action, a scene, a context of utterance” (104, 98), or in what Brian Richardson calls a “conflated temporality,” in which “apparently different temporal zones fail to remain distinct, and slide or spill over into one another” (50–51).

Unnatural Temporality II: Reversed Causality, or, the Future Causes the Present D. M. Thomas’s magical-realist7 novel The White Hotel contains another unnatural time line, namely a “temporal version of reversed causality” (Ryan, “Temporal” 155): feelings of pain in the present are (impossibly) caused by a maltreatment that happens in the future. In Thomas’s novel, it is not always the case that “we remember the past but not the future” (144), as Stephen Hawking puts it; rather, in this novel, the future can be ‘remembered’ (or perhaps foreseen), and the present is actually determined by the future (rather than the past). From the beginning of the novel on, the Jewish Lisa Erdman (the central protagonist) suffers from “severe pains in her left breast and pelvic region, as well as a chronic respiratory condition” (Thomas 83). Lisa is being treated by a fictitious version of Sigmund Freud who, as one would expect, interprets the pain as a symptom of a traumatic event located in the patient’s past. Among other things, he suspects that “Anna G.,” as he calls Lisa in his case study, suffers from repressed “knowledge of her homosexuality” (123) or from “hysteria” (83, see also 171). However, “Anna’s/Lisa’s pain is not the trace of a past trauma, but rather the anticipatory illumination of a future one” (Herman 252). The novel disrupts conventional cause-and-effect patterns as the body of the

7

According to Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, “the supernatural in magical realism does not disconcert the reader”; it is simply accepted as a part of reality, and the two world views—the magical and the rational—are “equally valid” (24, 30). Magical realists (such as Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, D. M. Thomas, and Derek Walcott) typically employ “ontological disruption [to represent] political and cultural disruption: magic is often given as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation” (Zamora and Faris 3). Magical realism is a subcategory of postmodernism.

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major protagonist can literally feel the future, namely Lisa/Anna’s brutal murder at Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev, in 1941. It is perhaps worth noting that “her knowledge defies not only the linear logic of cause and effect but also the classic oppositions between mind and body: her body rather than her mind carries her knowledge” (Michael 71). In one of the novel’s most important scenes, Lisa/Anna and Kolya, her step son, who “pant[s] for breath” (217) out of fear, jump into Babi Year, where the Nazis killed over 33,000 Ukrainian Jews. Kolya dies immediately after the jump while Lisa/Anna lies dying in the ravine. Before Lisa/Anna is subjected to a horrifying bayonet rape, she is maltreated as follows: An SS man bent over an old woman lying on her side, having seen a glint of something bright. His hand brushed her breast when he reached for the crucifi x to pull it free, and he must have sensed a flicker of life. Letting go the crucifi x he stood up. He drew his leg back and sent his jackboot crashing into her left breast. She moved position from the force of the blow, but uttered no sound. Still not satisfied, he swung his boot and sent it cracking into her pelvis. Again the only sound was the clean snap of the bone. Satisfied at last, he jerked the crucifi x free. (218–19; my emphasis)

The maltreatment by the SS man caused Lisa/Anna’s earlier pains in the left breast and the pelvic region, or, to put this slightly differently, her body (impossibly) foresaw these future events.8 Throughout the novel, Lisa/Anna is in a position to foresee things (20, 33, 40, 77, 101–02, 112), and in reference to the treatment by Freud she states that she was not so much interested in talking “about the past”: “I was more interested in what was happening to me then, and what might happen in the future” (171). For me, the novel’s reversed causality subverts the hierarchical relationship between psychoanalyst and patient, and thus implies a kind of psychoanalysis of Freud’s theory. In other words, Lisa/Anna’s unnatural ability to literally feel the future, which Freud fails to understand, draws our attention to the question of what the analyst can learn from the patient, or, in other words, what psychoanalysis represses in its failure to cure. Steve Vine comments on the functions of the reversed causality as follows:

8

According to David Herman, the novel contains another example of what he calls polychronic narration. For him, The White Hotel projects “a storyworld in which events themselves are coded as irreducibly temporally multiple” (219). From my perspective, however, the situation in Thomas’s novel is better described as a reversed causality because the present is, at least partly, determined by the future (rather than the past).

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The White Hotel performs a task of anamnesis on Freudian theory…by working through what psychoanalysis forgets—Jewish suffering—and by bearing witness to the historical terror that it cannot anticipate: the Shoah. In this novel twentieth-century history becomes the scene of Freudianism’s own psychoanalysis—the disclosure of its disavowed terror. (199)

Freud is incapable of healing Lisa/Anna because he fundamentally misconstrues the causes of her pain from the perspective of his theory, which is based on the belief that our essential truth is to be discovered in a trauma in the past.9 Thomas’s novel thus undermines the authority of psychoanalysis as a “metanarrative” in the sense of Jean-François Lyotard (xxiv), i.e., a theory that purports to offer a global or totalizing explanation of the phenomena it deals with (that is, the human psyche in the case of psychoanalysis). In contrast to Lisa/Anna, Freud is so obsessed with the ideas of traumata in the past and repressed memory that he fails to take into account his patient’s Jewishness and the potential dangers related to the rise of anti-Semitism. In this sense, Lisa/Anna turns out to be wiser than the psychoanalyst Freud: she refuses to bear children because she anticipates the anti-Semitic horrors of National Socialism—and not because she is homosexual or hysterical, as he has it. Hence, in the spirit of Lyotard’s postmodern “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv), The White Hotel uses its reversed causality to undermine the authority of Freudianism and perform some kind of psychoanalysis of Freud’s totalizing theory. Notably, there is no room for Lisa/Anna’s Jewishness in Freudian psychoanalysis. Therefore, “the novel’s critique of the character Freud becomes by implication a critique of all twentieth-century Western discursive practices that enabled the rise of fascism and its murderous consequences” (Michael 73).10 Inferential chains—a caused b; c is an effect of b, and so forth—play an important role with regard to our understanding of narratives. Even E. M. Forster’s classical example of a minimal plot (“The king died and then the queen died of grief” [87]) relies on our knowledge of cause-and-effect patterns: in this particular case, the death of the king causes the queen’s grief and her subsequent death. However, as I have shown in this section, narratives may also counteract our tendency to construe causes as anterior to effects by presenting us with reversed causalities. In this context, it is worth noting that readers of detective fiction are at least used to the tem-

9 10

It is perhaps worth noting that Sigmund Freud was actually Jewish himself and had to flee from the Nazi terror in 1938. Marie-Laure Ryan argues that the novel reverses causality in order to construct Babi Yar as that which defies understanding: “you can no more imagine Babi Yar than you can conceive a world where time and causality run in opposite directions” (“Temporal” 156).

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poral reversal of causes and their effects because they typically discover causes (such as the motivation for the murder) after they learn about the effects (such as the murder).11 The White Hotel takes the temporal reversal of cause and effect one step further and reverses even the causal chains by presenting us with a reversed causality.

Unnatural Temporality III: Co-Existing Story Times As David Herman has shown (259), The White Hotel contains yet another unnatural temporality. At one point, Lisa/Anna observes the ageing of concentration camp inmates who are about to be shot at Babi Yar as follows: Lisa found she could not take her eyes off the scene which was being enacted in front of them. One group of people after another came staggering out of the corridor, screaming, bleeding each of them to be seized by a policeman, beaten again and stripped of clothes. The scene was repeated over and over again. Some were laughing hysterically. Some became old in minutes. When Lisa’s gift or curse of second sight had failed her so miserably and her husband was snatched away in the dark, her hair had gone grey overnight—the old saying was true. But now she saw it happen in front of her eyes. In the next group but one after theirs she saw Sonia; and her raven hair turned grey in the time it took for her to be stripped and sent away to be shot. Lisa saw it happen again and again. (213; my emphases)

Here, time accelerates and attains an incredible velocity. I would like to argue that the impossibly quick ageing of Sonia and others literalizes an old saying (“worrying so much will make your hair turn gray”), thus imitating the ways in which the Nazis literalized figural speech. Phil Joffe observes that between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis “literalized metaphors” when humans of Jewish descent came to be seen as a form of “contamination” of the German people: “Germans were habituated to thinking of Jews, not as human beings, but as…lice, as vermin, as diseases such as typhus against which Germans needed to be inoculated” (3). The concentration camps constituted the horrifying culmination point of this process of literalizing: in concentration camps, Jews were actually treated and exterminated like lice or vermin. The unnatural temporality in The White Hotel reflects upon the Nazis’ literalizing of metaphors, perhaps in order to underline the inhuman horrors of the Nazi terror: what happens here is something that defies understanding. 11

According to Tzvetan Todorov, the whodunit is the story of “the days of the investigation which begin with the crime, and the days of the drama which lead up to it” (“Typology” 227).

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Narrative theorists typically assume the existence of a uniform story time (the fictional time taken up by the action) that can be related to the discourse time (the time it takes an average recipient to read or view the narrative) in five different ways.12 However, it is worth noting that narratives may also confront us with different types of story time that pertain to the same storyworld. More specifically, slow-downs and speed-ups may also occur at the level of the story: characters can actually and objectively age more quickly (and also more slowly) than other inhabitants of the projected world.13 Tamar Yacobi refers to this unnatural phenomenon in terms of “telescoping” (95) while Brian Richardson speaks of a “differential temporality” (50).

An Overview of Unnatural Temporalities At this point, I would like to turn to more general remarks about the unnatural temporalities of postmodernist narratives. As I have shown, Flight to Canada defies our knowledge that the borders between the past and the present are fixed and impenetrable, while The White Hotel deconstructs our real-world knowledge of causality and the fact that the flow of time cannot be sped up. As Tamar Yacobi, Brian Richardson, and Marie-Laure Ryan (“Parallel”; “Temporal”) have also demonstrated, postmodernist narratives undo various aspects of our real-world knowledge of time and temporal progression. Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow (1991), for instance, deconstructs the directionality of time: the first-person narrator actually and objectively experiences a retrogressive version of the events and dialogues of the central protagonist’s life, as if “the film is running backward” (Amis 8). Second, narratives such as Samuel Beckett’s play Play (1963) counter the linearity of time through circular stories that function like eternal loops: in this particular case,

12

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(1) In scenic presentations (such as dialogues), story time and discourse time are approximately equal; (2) in speed-ups (such as summaries), the discourse time is considerably shorter than the story time; (3) in slow-downs, the discourse time is significantly longer than the story time; (4) in ellipses, a stretch of story time is not represented at the level of the discourse at all; and (5) in pauses, the discourse time elapses on description, while the story time stops (Genette 87–112). Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine (1979) confronts us with a scenario in which the characters age more slowly than the society that surrounds them. More specifically, the first act of the play “takes place in a British colony in Africa in Victorian times,” while the second one is set “in London in 1979.” Interestingly, even though about one hundred years pass between Act One and Act Two, “for the characters,” it is only “twenty-five years later” (Churchill 243).

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the characters—M, W1, and W2—are doomed to the eternal retelling of their lives in a strange purgatorial world.14 Third, narratives can also project stories that consist of mutually exclusive events or event sequences. Robert Coover’s short story “The Babysitter” (1969), for example, violates the principle of non-contradiction by presenting logically incompatible storylines, and refuses to establish an ontological hierarchy between them (see also Alber et al., “Unnatural” 117–19). Fourth, Samuel Beckett’s “Lessness” (1969) has no story time at all because this short prose work completely immobilizes temporal progression at the level of the story,15 and, fifth, in Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman (1967), some of the characters take a lift to hang out in “eternity.”16 The following chart juxtaposes our real-world knowledge about time with the ways in which postmodern narratives deconstruct this knowledge: our real-world knowledge about time

unnatural temporality

the borders between the past, the present, and the future are fi xed and impenetrable

time travel stories or ‘chronomontages’ that yoke chronological incompatibles together

causes always precede their effects

reversed causality (in which the present is caused by the future)

the flow of time cannot be sped up or slowed down

characters age at a different speed (or in a different way) than other inhabitants of the storyworld

14

15

16

With regard to Beckett’s Play, Katherine Weiss observes that there is “a repeat built into the play, giving the impression of an endless performance” (191), while Ruby Cohn argues that in Play, “time dissolves in repetition” (195). Indeed, Beckett’s stage directions inform us that “the repeat may be an exact replica of first statement or it may present an element of variation. In other words, the light may operate the second time exactly as it did the first (exact replica) or it may try a different method (variation)” (Beckett 320). According to Steven Paton, “Lessness” conveys “the impossibility of time within the fiction” (363), i.e., at the level of the story: “Beckett’s combination of non-finite verbs which refer to unbound activities; the near complete omission of tensed statements…; the omission of formal features which imply sequence (such as connectives and subordinate clauses); the cancellation of the iconic relationship which usually holds between sentence/phrase order and story order; and a high degree of repetition and parallelism (in structure, in syntax, in vocabulary, and in sound patterning) lead to the creation of a radical formal timelessness, which parallels the text’s description of a timeless situation” (361). More specifically, the unnamed first-person narrator and a Sergeant take a “lift” (146) to reach “the entrance to…eternity” (139–42). The Sergeant explains that “you don’t grow old here. When you leave here you will be the same age as you were coming in and the same stature and latitude” (149). Furthermore, we learn that eternity “has no size at all…because there is no difference anywhere in it and we have no conception of the extent of its unchanging coequality” (149).

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184 our real-world knowledge about time

unnatural temporality

time moves forward (the directionality of time)

retrogressive temporality (time objectively moves backward at the story level)

time resembles a line or stream (the linearity of time)

circular temporality or eternal loop; the narrative’s ending is also its beginning (and vice versa)

it is impossible for an event to happen and not happen at the same point in time

ontological pluralism (the projection of logically incompatible storylines)

we cannot interrupt the flow of time

the immobilization of temporal progression at the level of the story

eternity is unreachable and ungraspable

narratives that represent eternity

Perhaps one can explain the unnatural temporalities of postmodernism as blendings (Fauconnier and Turner) of two encyclopedias in the sense of Lubomír Doležel. Mark Turner explains the process of blending by arguing that “cognitively modern human beings have a remarkable, species-defining ability to pluck forbidden mental fruit—that is, to activate two conflicting mental structures [such as tree and person] and to blend them creatively into a new mental structure [such as speaking tree]” (117). Furthermore, Doležel defines encyclopedias as “shared communal knowledge” and argues that “the actual-world encyclopedia is just one among numerous encyclopedias of possible worlds. Knowledge about a possible world constructed by a fictional text constitutes a fictional encyclopedia” (177). Most of the unnatural time lines of postmodernism are strikingly similar to (or perhaps even identical with) those that occur in fantasy17 or science-fiction18 narratives, where they have already been conventionalized, i.e., turned into basic cognitive categories (Fludernik, “Natural” 256). 17

18

In contrast to Tzvetan Todorov, who argues that fantastic texts oblige the reader “to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described” (Fantastic 33), Nancy H. Traill (12–16) argues that in what she calls “the fantasy mode,” supernatural entities dominate the narrative as a whole, while the realist (or ‘natural’) only occurs at the beginning and the ending. Traill’s fantasy mode is virtually identical with what Todorov calls “the marvelous,” where we simply have to accept the supernatural as a given of the projected storyworld (Fantastic 41–42). Furthermore, W. R. Irwin characterizes fantasy fiction as being “antinatural” and goes on to define it as stories “based on and controlled by an overt violation of what is generally accepted as possibility; it is the narrative result of transforming the condition contrary to fact into ‘fact’ itself ” (4). Similarly, Roger C. Schlobin sees fantasy fiction as “that corpus in which the impossible is primary in its quantity or centrality” (xxvi). Brian Stableford points out that “science fiction is a special case, in that its dealings with impossibility are restrained by a real or pretended determination to feature ideas and events that, although presently impossible in the actual world, might be possible if circumstances were to change in the future according to a possible pattern of development” (245).

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To put this slightly differently, when we read a fantasy or science-fiction narrative, impossible time lines do not strike us as being odd, strange, or defamiliarizing because they can be explained through the conventions of the genre. In other words, they have become an integral part of one of the two genres. In the case of fantasy narratives, impossible temporalities can be explained through the use of magic or through other supernatural interventions, while in the case of science fiction, they can be explained through the setting in the technologically advanced future (or through interventions by aliens). For instance, in both science-fiction and fantasy narratives, characters permanently travel to different time zones (see also Booker and Thomas 15–27). In Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” (1953), which is set in 2055, time machines enable American citizens to travel back sixty million years to shoot dinosaurs. Similarly, in L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall (1939), a thunderstorm magically transports archaeologist Martin Padway from the year of 1938 to sixth-century Rome, where he, among other things, develops the printing press to make sure that the Dark Middle Ages never take place. From my perspective, these instances of time travel into the past are similar to the merging of the present and the past in Flight to Canada. While the ‘chronomontage’ in Reed’s novel, where twentieth-century technology is superimposed over the nineteenth century, merges distinct time zones at the level of the story, time travel stories present us with a character from one temporal realm that travels to a different one: in all cases, the borders between the past and the present are no longer fixed and impenetrable; rather, these borders can be transgressed so that the past and the present merge. Furthermore, in Robert A. Heinlein’s disconcerting science-fiction story “All You Zombies” (1959), an intersexual man, who had his sex changed to male, uses a time machine to travel to the past to impregnate his younger female self (before she underwent a sex change). The result of this impregnation is that s/he paradoxically becomes both his father and his mother. This causal loop in which an instance of time travel in the narrative present determines the past (and vice versa), bears at least some structural resemblance to the reversed causality in The White Hotel, where the present is determined by the future. Moreover, time dilation is a very common phenomenon in sciencefiction narratives. This form of temporal displacement can typically be explained through the relative velocity between two characters, one of which travels near light speed, or through interventions by extraterrestrials. In Heinlein’s novel Time for the Stars (1956), for instance, Tom Bartlett, a member of a starship crew, ages more slowly than his twin brother William, who remained on Earth. Similarly, in Joe Haldeman’s novel

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The Forever War (1974), William Mandella, fights an interstellar war against the Taurans, an alien species, and he ages more slowly than those who stayed on planet Earth. Also, in Robert Wilson’s novel Spin (2005), aliens tamper with the flow of time so that time on Earth passes much more slowly than it does in the rest of the universe.19 Again, from my perspective, these three instances of time dilation are very similar to the two co-existing story times in The White Hotel: in all four cases, characters age at a different rate than other inhabitants of the same storyworld. As my second chart illustrates, other science-fiction and fantasy narratives have anticipated further unnatural temporalities of postmodernism: postmodernist narratives

fantasy or science fiction

time travel and ‘chronomontage’

Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976); Guy Davenport’s “The Haile Selassie Funeral Train” (1979); Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2004)

H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895); L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall (1939); Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” (1953); Stephen Fry’s Making History (1996); J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)

reversed causality

D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981)

Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (1941); Charles L. Harness’s “Time Trap” (1948); Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” (1959); David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself (1973)

time dilation and other games with the speed of time

J. G. Ballard’s “Mr. F. is Mr. F.” (1961); Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979); The White Hotel (1981); Paula Vogel’s Hot ’n’ Throbbing (1993)

Robert A. Heinlein’s Time for the Stars (1956); Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974); Robert Wilson’s Spin (2005)

19

These instances of time dilation in science-fiction narratives have in turn been anticipated by medieval texts that involve supernatural creatures. For example, in Walter Map’s twelfth-century De Nugis Curialium (Courtiers’ Trifles), a pygmy king approaches the Briton King Herla and they agree to attend each other’s weddings. When King Herla leaves the pygmy’s otherworld after the latter’s wedding, Herla discovers that he has actually spent “two hundred years” there, while in his own experience the lapse of time seems to have encompassed only “three days” (Map 27, 31). King Herla also realizes that he has lost his kingdom because the Saxons took possession of it. The interesting thing here is that (through a supernatural intervention) Herla ages at a different rate than other inhabitants of the same storyworld.

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postmodernist narratives

fantasy or science fiction

retrogressive temporality

“Mr. F. is Mr. F.” (1961); Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991)

Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (1889); Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World (1967); Brian Aldiss’s Cryptozoic (1967)

eternal temporal loop

Samuel Beckett’s Play (1963); Gabriel Josipovici’s “Mobius the Stripper” (1974)

E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922); W. B. Yeats’s Purgatory (1939); Philip K. Dick’s “A Little Something for Us Temponauts” (1975)

contradictory temporality

Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” (1969); John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969); Clarence Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure (1975); Caryl Churchill’s Traps (1978) and Heart’s Desire (1997)

Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time” (1934); Larry Niven’s “All the Myriad Ways” (1971); Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971); Philip K. Dick’s Now Wait for Last Year (1975)

narrating eternity or timelessness

Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967); Samuel Beckett’s “Lessness” (1969)

J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and Lord of the Rings (1954–5); Eric Frank Russell’s Sentinels from Space (1953); Jack Vance’s To Live Forever (1956); James Gunn’s The Immortals (1962); Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985)

Conclusion As a thesis that needs further testing, I would like to suggest explaining the defamiliarizing effects of unnatural time lines in postmodernist narratives by arguing that they blend impossible temporalities that have been conventionalized in science-fiction or fantasy narratives with a realist context or setting.20 It is perhaps worth noting that my use of the term 20 Brian McHale has already investigated the mutual exchanges between postmodernism and science fiction. On the one hand, he argues that there has been “a tendency for postmodernist writing to absorb motifs and topoi from science fiction writing, mining science fiction for its raw materials” (Postmodernist 65; see also Constructing 229). On the other hand, McHale shows that the newer cyberpunk science fiction “tends to ‘lit-

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‘realism’ is not restricted to the nineteenth-century movement of Realism but rather refers to a narrative …which appears to provide an accurate, objective, and confident description or authentic impression of reality. This semiotic effect, which rests on the assumption that language is an undistorted mirror of, or transparent window on, the ‘real,’ is based on a set of literary conventions for producing a lifelike illusion. (Palmer 491)

In other words, realism closely correlates with the use of ‘natural’ cognitive parameters which are derived from our real-world experience of time, space, and other human beings. Realism in my sense involves the “mimetic evocation of reality both from a sociological and a psychological perspective” (Fludernik, Towards 37) and is identical with ‘natural’ frames and scripts.21 The unnatural temporalities of postmodernism contradict our ‘natural’ (or real-world) knowledge of time and temporal progression but the rest of these narratives is (more or less) verisimilar. I argue that what strikes us as being odd or strange in the case of the unnatural temporalities of postmodernism, is the occurring of physically or logically impossible time lines within realist frameworks (rather than the magical framework of fantasy narratives or the futurist projections of science-fiction narratives). Hence, one might argue that what postmodernist narratives do is to blend our actual-world encyclopedia with our science-fiction and/or fantasy encyclopedias by using their temporalities against the foil of otherwise perfectly realist narratives. The ulterior goal of my larger project is to qualify the argument concerning the playful extravagance of postmodernism. On the one hand, I show that the postmodern project consists in the systematic undermining of our ‘natural’ cognition of the world. But on the other hand, I also illustrate that the unnatural has always played a crucial role in literary history, and that numerous unnatural scenarios have been anticipated by

21

eralize’ or ‘actualize’ what occurs in postmodernist fiction as metaphor” (“Elements” 150). Furthermore, Christine Brooke-Rose argues that “science fiction has its roots in the marvellous” (72). However, what is still needed is a systematic investigation of the interrelations between fantasy, science fiction, and postmodernism. I do not think that the frequently posited contrast between the unnatural and ‘natural,’ i.e., spontaneously occurring oral, narratives really works. ‘Natural’ (oral) narratives are far less conventional and well-ordered than is commonly assumed. For example, the tall tales analyzed by Richard Bauman are full of physically impossible elements which are presumably supposed to make these stories more entertaining and anecdotally tellable. Tall tales are oral narratives of personal experience “in which the circumstances of the narrated event are stretched by degrees to the point that that they challenge or exceed the limits of credibility” (Bauman 582; my emphasis). Hence, I would like to argue that the unnatural in my sense can of course also occur in ‘natural,’ i.e. oral, narratives.

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earlier narratives. Indeed, the unnatural is everywhere, and it is about time for narrative theory to embrace it.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. 1987. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Alber, Jan. “The Diachronic Development of Unnaturalness: A New View on Genre.” Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology. Ed. Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2011. 41–67. —. “Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 1.1 (2009): 79–96. Alber, Jan, and Rüdiger Heinze, eds. Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2011. Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.” Narrative 18.2 (2010): 113–36. Alber, Jan, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State UP (forthcoming). Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence. New York: Vintage, 1991. Bauman, Richard. “Tall Tale.” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 582. Beckett, Samuel. “Play.” 1963. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. 305–20. Booker, Marvin Keith, and Anne-Marie Thomas. The Science Fiction Handbook. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially the Fantastic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Carpio, Glenda R. “Conjuring the Mysteries of Slavery: Voodoo, Fetishism, and Stereotype in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada.” American Literature 77.3 (2005): 563–89. Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy. New York and London: Garland, 1985. Churchill, Caryl. Cloud Nine. 1979. New York: Methuen, 1985. 243–320. Cohn, Ruby. Back to Beckett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1973. Currie, Mark. About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Dick, Bruce, and Amrjit Sigh, eds. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Elias, Amy. “Oscar Hijuelo’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.” Critique 41.2 (2000): 115–28. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

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Fludernik, Monika. “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2003. 243–67. —. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. London: Penguin, 1990. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. 1972. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980. Hawking, Stephen W. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Toronto et al.: Bantam Books, 1988. Heise, Ursula K. Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. Irwin, W. R. The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1976. Joffe, Phil. “Language Damage: Nazis and Naming in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow.” Nomina Africana 9.2 (1995): 1–10. Levecq, Christine. “Nation, Race, and Postmodern Gestures in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada.” Novel 35.2–3 (2002): 281–98. Ludwig, Sämi. “Grotesque Landscapes: African American Fiction, Voodoo Animism, and Cognitive Models.” Mapping African America: History, Narrative Formation, and the Production of Knowledge. Ed. Maria Diedrich, Carl Pedersen, and Justine Tally. Hamburg: Lit, 1999. 189–202. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Explained. 1979. Trans. Don Barry et al. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. —. “Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk.” Critique 33.3 (1992): 149–75. —. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen, 1987. Map, Walter. De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles. Ed. and trans. M. R. James. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Michael, Magali Cornier. “Materiality versus Abstraction in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel.” Critique 43.1 (2001): 63–83. Moraru, Christian. “‘Dancing to the Typewriter’: Rewriting and Cultural Appropriation in Flight to Canada.” Critique 41.2 (2000): 99–113. O’Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman. 1967. London: Flamingo, 2001. Palmer, Alan. “Realist Novel.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 491–92. Paton, Steven. “Time-Lessness, Simultaneity and Successivity: Repetition in Beckett’s Short Prose.” Language and Literature 18.4 (2009): 357–66. Reed, Ishmael. Flight to Canada. New York: Random House, 1976. Richardson, Brian. “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction.” Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Ed. Brian Richardson. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2002. 47–63. —. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2006.

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Ryan, Marie-Laure. “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative.” Poetics Today 27.4 (2006): 633–74. —. “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative.” Style 43.2 (2009): 142–64. Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” 1917. Russian Formalist Criticism. Ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 3–24. Schlobin, Roger C. The Literature of Fantasy: A Comprehensive, Annotated Bibliography of Modern Fantasy Fiction. New York: Garland, 1979. Spaulding, A. Timothy. Re-Forming the Past: History, the Fantastic, and the Postmodern Slave Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2005. Stableford, Brian M. Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge, 2006. Thomas, D. M. The White Hotel. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1981. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland and London: The P of Case Western Reserve U, 1973. —. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” 1966. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. London and New York: Longman, 2008. 226–32. Traill, Nancy H. Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. Turner, Mark. “Double-Scope Stories.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2003. 117–42. Vine, Steve. “Sublime Anamnesis: Hysteria and Temporality in Thomas’s The White Hotel.” Twentieth-Century Literature 56.2 (2010): 196–220. Walsh, Richard. Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Weiss, Katherine. “Perceiving Bodies in Beckett’s Play.” Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’ hui: An Annual Bilingual Review/Revue Annuelle Bilingue 11 (2001): 186–93. Yacobi, Tamar. “Time Denatured into Meaning: New Worlds and Renewed Themes in the Poetry of Dan Pagis.” Style 22.1 (1988): 93–115. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris. “Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham: Durham UP, 1995. 1–13.

Sanna Katariina Bruun (University of Tampere)

The Imperfect Is Our Paradise: Intertextuality and Fragmentary Narration in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

The last chapter of Alias Grace (1996) begins with a quotation from Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Poems of Our Climate” (1938). Consisting of but a single line, “The imperfect is our paradise,” the quotation captures exceptionally well one of the pivotal themes of the novel: how to return to the events of either your own or someone else’s past, and how to form a coherent story from the discontinuous and often contradictory fragments of that past. Alias Grace tells the story of Grace Marks, a 16-year-old maid living in 1840’s Canada, who was accused of double murder alongside her lover. She was found guilty and sentenced to death but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. The known facts about the historical Grace are relatively scarce. The double murder was, in its day, a scandalous media event and the historical material concerning Grace is mainly composed of sensational depictions of illicit sex and violence. In Alias Grace Atwood utilizes actual historical documents but rewrites Grace’s story from a completely new angle. For the most part, the narration alternates between Grace’s first-person narrative and that of the third-person narrator. Grace tells the story of her life to Dr. Jordan, who intends to find out whether Grace really is guilty or not. The narration moves back and forth between Grace’s reminiscence and her present, where Dr. Jordan and a group of enthusiasts hope to get Grace pardoned. The narration, however, neither forms a coherent or contiguous story of the events nor offers unambiguous answers or solutions to the mysteries surrounding Grace. Grace’s life story is constructed from Grace’s own selective memories, the often blatantly biased or embellished viewpoints of people around her,

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and the numerous quotations from various historical and fictional sources preceding each chapter. Sharon R. Wilson contends that Atwood’s novels can be described as quest-romances because in addition to other typical features of the genre they invite the reader to join in the quest for understanding self, identity and the past (219–20). In this sense, the quotation from Stevens’s poem reflects not only one of the central themes of the novel but also the novel in its entirety. The intermingling of historical and fictional material, the various points-of-view and the fragmentariness of the story seem to make the past events peculiarly present. Alias Grace invites, or even forces, the reader to ask what kind of a story and identity is hidden behind the imperfect surface. It is not surprising that Atwood scholars have made avid use of Linda Hutcheon’s well-known concept of historiographic metafiction (see Howells 139–40; Michael 425; Palumbo 73; Staels 428). Hutcheon herself regards Atwood’s novels as prime examples of postmodernist fiction that both utilizes and parodies the dominant realist form of fiction and its conventions (Canadian 146, 138–59). She contends, among other things, that historiographic metafiction asks both epistemological and ontological questions about the nature of the past, the records and stories recounting it, and the ways in which the past is available to us. It reminds the reader that we may know the events of the past only through their discursive inscription, in other words, through texts that are themselves artificial constructions (Poetics 50, 97). To my mind, the description of historiographic metafiction befits Alias Grace exceedingly well.1 However, the most useful contribution of Hutcheon’s theory to the analysis of Alias Grace is, I believe, the recognition of the importance of intertextuality. Hutcheon maintains that the concept of intertextuality is essential to the analysis of the ironic allusions, re-contextualized quotations, and doubleedged parodies of specific genres or texts characterizing both modernist and postmodernist texts (126). To Hutcheon, postmodern intertextuality is “a formal manifestation of both a desire to close the gap between past and present of the reader and a desire to rewrite the past in a new context” (118). This kind of postmodernist or poststructuralist definition of intertextuality is extremely broad compared to the more structurally orientated study of subtexts. Pekka Tammi has articulated and developed formalist subtext analysis not only as an analytic tool but also as an interpretative model (see 1–16 et passim). Tammi points out the ultimate futility of

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Not all Atwood scholars agree that Alias Grace is fundamentally a postmodernist work. See, for example, Howells 149–50; Staels 430; Wilson 225.

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simply identifying subtexts or literary influences and concludes that “at some point we must stop…and start looking for some thematic justification behind the intertextual play” (15). In insisting on the significance of meaningful links between a text and its subtexts as a part of the reader’s overall interpretation, Tammi’s approach forms an antithesis to postmodern and poststructuralist theories informed by a more general and metaphorical conception of intertextuality—theories which view the intertextual play as an end in itself. But whether we are talking about intertextuality in the broad sense or in the sense of a particular network of subtexts behind a text, its formal and thematic significance in Alias Grace is easy to detect. Atwood utilizes other texts very explicitly, and the various passages from both historical and fictional sources create an intricate intertextual network by referring back and forth to one another. In the following, I will examine some of the intertextual connections and narrative fragments in Alias Grace with regard to the overall interpretation of the novel.

(Re)constructing Grace Atwood has repeatedly pointed out that reality is a construct. However, as Klaus Peter Müller notes, she also talks about authenticity and the importance of avoiding arbitrariness (231). These ideas are clearly visible in Alias Grace. Although the novel accentuates the artificial nature of reality—whether historical, contemporary, social, or personal—it also strives to give voice to the historical Grace and to reach at least a relative truth about her life. The possibility of authenticity and truth is created precisely in the complex interaction of different texts—an interaction that Magali Cornier Michael describes aptly when she writes that the texts “create a dynamic web of intricate but never authoritative patterns” (426). The very form of Alias Grace in its puzzle-likeness highlights the novel’s constructedness and underlines its attempt to question the idea of textual authority and unequivocal truth. The novel is divided into fifteen sections, each of which opens with a set of quotations. In addition, each section is divided into numbered chapters, which are composed of three alternating narratives: 1. Grace’s narration in which she tells the story of her life from childhood up until the murders, 2. third-person narration describing Grace’s present, and 3. letters written by various characters in the novel. As Michael points out, a traditional structuralist analysis of Alias Grace would soon collapse into its own impossibility. Although the disjunctive narrative pieces form a seemingly orderly pattern, it is impossible to attach any conventional meaning or logic to that

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pattern because its order is spatial rather than linear (429–30). The idea of space or spatiality as a model for both modernist and postmodernist novels has been suggested by many (see Bridgeman 56; Dannenberg 78), and it seems especially pertinent with regard to history/historical novels. As Amy J. Elias notes, many metahistorical texts imply that the deconstruction of the biases and silences of Western history requires that we see it multidimensionally, “in terms of its spatial modeling” (103–04). This kind of spatiality, combined with the fragmentariness of narration and the narrating subject, challenges the hierarchical models of structuralism and calls for new ways of conceptualizing the form of such narratives, but it also calls for new strategies of reading. As David Mickelsen puts it, “[d]espite its disjunctive organization, spatial form possesses an underlying coherence based on thematic analogies…and associative cross-references, but this coherence must be established by the reader” (555). The task of connecting the disjunctive narrative pieces of Alias Grace to one another and evaluating the complex relationships between them is left almost entirely to the reader. As Hutcheon notes with reference to Roland Barthes and Michael Riffaterre, postmodern intertextuality shifts the focus from the relationship between the author and the text to the relationship between the reader and the text, which in its turn accentuates that texts obtain their meaning and significance only as part of prior discourses (Poetics 126). Despite the disjunctive narrative pieces and the central role of the reader in constructing the text, the reader of Alias Grace is not left to grope blindly in a net of irrelevant or unrelated texts. Sometimes the various pieces refer to one another quite explicitly. In addition, the quilt motif that pervades the entire novel acts as an interpretative guideline to the reader while she makes her way through the fragments of the narrative and tries to put the different pieces together. I will return to the quilt metaphor later on. The relationships between the historical quotations and Atwood’s text are fairly easy to notice, since the quotations at the beginning of each section often deal with the same events or themes as the chapters that follow them. For example, when Grace tells Dr. Jordan her recollections of the murders, the chapters are preceded by passages from the historical confessions of Grace Marks and James McDermott (her supposed lover), in which they recount their own versions of one of the murders. At times the relationship between the texts also works the other way round. The first section of the novel begins with a quotation from Susanna Moodie’s autobiographical work Life in the Clearings (1853). Moodie writes about the visit she made to the Provincial Penitentiary in Kingston “to look at the celebrated murderess, Grace Marks” (3). Only a few pages later Grace

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ponders on the reasons why middle-class ladies—such as Moodie—want to come and see her in prison: The reason they want to see me is that I am a celebrated murderess. Or that is what has been written down.…Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word—musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. (25)

Grace and Dr. Jordan even talk about Moodie. The doctor tries to evaluate the descriptions Moodie wrote about Grace by asking Grace what she thought about the visit. During the conversation Grace and Dr. Jordan refer in detail not only to the excerpt from Life in the Clearings mentioned above but also to earlier ones from the same book (416–18). The historical quotations at the beginning of each section are invariably followed by ones from fiction. In addition to establishing a relationship with Atwood’s text, the fictional quotations enter into dialogue with the historical sources, questioning their reliability and ability to represent reality. The relationship between the historical and fictional quotations is often ironic, and it is particularly interesting that irony is produced not only by contrasting the quotations to the author’s text, but also by juxtaposing them to one another. For example, immediately below the above-mentioned excerpts from the confessions of Grace and McDermott there is another quotation from Edgar Allan Poe: “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (332). Thus, a short quotation from fiction effectively questions the reliability of the historical sources: is that what really happened or are we simply reading a version of one of the most poetic and intriguing subjects. The excerpts from the two confessions are also an example of the generally acknowledged ability of historical texts to contest each other’s versions of the same events. Atwood utilizes this ability to question history’s claim to truth by repeatedly juxtaposing historical quotations to one another. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the origins of the confessions are in themselves somewhat dubious. Grace’s confession has been copied from a contemporary newspaper and McDermott’s has been filtered through two additional narrators (his lawyer and Susanna Moodie) before ending up as a part of Atwood’s novel. The quotations from fiction are also a useful reminder of how similar non-fiction and fiction may appear to be. When Moodie’s description of Grace in prison is full of metaphors and vocabulary of the same kind as contained in the poem next to it, “The Prisoner” (1845) by Emily Brontë, one needs to ask which of the texts gets closer to reality or whether there really is any difference between them.2 2

In the Author’s Afterword Atwood mentions that it was Moodie’s Life in the Clearings

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Michael makes a relevant observation regarding the quotations when she notes that they also question the conventional borderline between a text and its paratexts (431–32). According to Gérard Genette, paratexts act as reinforcements and accompaniments to the actual text, as thresholds “between the inside and the outside” of the text (“Introduction” 261, 265; see also Paratexts 1–2), but in Alias Grace they enter into an active and even discordant relationship both with the actual text and with one another. Michael sees this as a result of the spatial form of the novel, which drives the texts into a dialogue, disrupts their (what we might here call structuralist) hierarchy, and also undermines the distinction between fiction and nonfiction (433). It is nevertheless important to note that although the dialogue between the historical and fictional sources and Atwood’s text is an important element of Alias Grace, the novel not only compares and contrasts different texts but also blends them together and obscures their origins. Interesting examples of this are the letters that comprise one section, “The Letter X,” in its entirety, and appear here and there elsewhere in the novel. The letters are for the most part written by Atwood herself. However, in the Afterword the author reveals that one of the characters writing the letters, Dr. Workman, is a historical figure and that although the letter is addressed to a fictional character, “most of the words in Dr. Workman’s letter are his own” (540; my emphasis). Atwood complicates the question of the letters’ origins even further when she adds that she invented another letter-writing character, Dr. Bannerling, to express opinions attributed to Dr. Workman that the author believes “could not possibly have been his” (540).3 As regards form, Alias Grace clearly meets the criteria outlined for postmodernist fiction or historiographic metafiction. It is nevertheless good to note that compared to the examples Hutcheon gives of histori-

3

that first introduced her to Grace, and Moodie’s book is indeed one of the most frequently quoted historical sources in Alias Grace. Atwood also explicitly questions the reliability of Moodie’s account: “Moodie’s retelling of the murder is a third-hand account.… Moodie can’t resist the potential for literary melodrama, and the cutting of Nancy’s body into four quarters is not only pure invention but pure Harrison Ainsworth” (538). One of the most interesting texts in Alias Grace is a broadsheet ballad describing the murders and their aftermath that forms one of the sections of the novel. The origins of the ballad are never mentioned and the reader is left wondering whether it is an authentic historical document or a creation of the author. It is significant that the tension between fiction and non-fiction is inscribed in the history of broadsheet ballads themselves. According to Lennard J. Davis the broadsheet ballad had an informative function as a kind of newspaper, and the ballads often explicitly claimed to be true (46, 107–08). Davis sees the ballads as a part of what he calls the “news/novels discourse” in 17th and 18th century English literature (xii et passim) not only because of their vacillation between fact and fiction but also because of the popularity of the crime/murder theme (125–27).

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ographic metafiction and to some of Atwood’s other novels (such as The Handmaid’s Tale [1985]), it is possible to regard Alias Grace as a more traditional historical novel. While it highlights the constructed nature of reality and while it is formed of various texts referring to one another, the novel nevertheless tells a story—and a gripping one at that—with a beginning and an end. However subjective or unreliable the narration might be, the reader gets to follow Grace’s story from her childhood to the murders and up until her eventual release from prison and the beginning of her new life. Perhaps it is precisely the possibility to discern a relatively linear story behind the various narrative fragments that has led some scholars to define Alias Grace as a historical novel pure and simple. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that Hutcheon’s theory is only one possible way to approach the complex and often contradictory phenomenon of postmodernism in literature. Elisabeth Wesseling, for instance, criticises Hutcheon’s all-inclusive theory of postmodernist culture and points out that the main weakness of Hutcheon’s theory is the way in which she always ends up with the same answers, no matter what the question was (11). Eric L. Berlatsky voices a similar criticism when he warns against the inclination to believe that all texts with certain characteristics imply a particular attitude towards historical referentiality or reality (8). In fact, Berlatsky criticizes the whole “withdrawal of the real” thesis that underlies most theories of postmodernism ranging from philosophical and social arguments to aesthetic or strictly literary analysis (3–8 et passim). He argues that certain postmodernist texts problematize the possibility of historical reference “in order to suggest a subtler, and therefore more compelling, model of mimesis” (8). In Berlatsky’s analysis of one such text, Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), the questions of spatiality and fragmentariness discussed above are combined in a way that—to me—illustrate not only Kundera’s novel but also Alias Grace. Berlatsky notes that in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting the spatialized account of the recovery of the past is contrasted with the textual/ sequential segments to imply that “the real cannot be found in narrative ordering but only in the contingent and the fragmentary” (18–19). It is possible that Alias Grace suggests just that. The fragmentary narration does not dissolve the real, but allows us to reach it.

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A Quilt of Stories In her narration Grace both tells the story of her life to Dr. Jordan in the past tense and reflects on her situation in the present tense. The reader not only sees the events through Grace’s eyes but is also allowed to follow her inner thoughts and feelings. The third-person narration focuses primarily on Dr. Jordan’s life while he is trying to find out the truth about Grace, and these sections are often coloured by his perspective. Like the structure of the novel, the narration does not form a coherent whole. It is more like a jigsaw puzzle of Grace’s selective memories. Furthermore, Grace is anything but a reliable narrator, and from time to time she explicitly questions her own reliability or tells different versions of a particular chain of events, trying to find the one that would please her listener the most. For example, when Grace is waiting for Dr. Jordan’s next visit, she ponders on what to say to him: What should I tell him, when he comes back? He will want to know about the arrest, and the trial, and what was said. Some of it is all jumbled in my mind, but I could pick out this or that for him, some bits of whole cloth you might say, as when you go through the rag bag looking for something that will do, to supply a touch of colour. I could say this: (410)

After the paragraph quoted Grace picks up the story she was telling Dr. Jordan the last time they met. For a while the reader might be able to forget that the story is preceded by the conditional “I could say this,” but after Grace has told him how she fainted and hurt herself during the trial, she ends the story by saying “I could show him the scar” (420). Coral Ann Howells points out that in the context of Atwood’s novels Grace is a rather typical duplicitous narrator who regards narrating as a self-conscious reconstruction designed for the benefit of the listener (152). Likewise, Barbara Hill Rigney notes the general untrustworthiness of Atwood’s character narrators and wonders whether the heroines actually “lie” or are unreliable simply because they are mad, evil, or guilty. She also regards Grace as the most duplicitous of all of Atwood’s female protagonists (157).4 It is true that the paragraph quoted above is only one of the numerous instances where Grace markedly reconstructs her life story 4

Rigney’s analysis is somewhat marred by the fact that she does not make a proper distinction between the character-narrator and the author. Sometimes she talks about the deceitful games and fabrications of Grace, and at other times she attaches the same attributes to Atwood, suggesting that readers are “victims of Atwood’s trickery and pawns in her narrative games” (157–58). She does, however, conclude that “what finally redeems [Atwood’s] tricks and games is her political sensibility” (164). Compare also Richard Walsh who, criticizing Linda Hutcheon’s postmodernist way of blurring the boundaries,

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for the benefit of the listener(s) in question. It is not, however, obvious that the unreliability or the self-conscious reconstruction of the narration should necessarily mean that the narrator is insincere. As Müller argues, what all Atwood’s protagonists need to learn is that they—not others— are the ones who can construct their identities. For Grace, it is more important to preserve at least some dignity and self-respect than to tell the absolute truth—assuming she knows it herself (235–36). Hence, the unreliability and the contrived and fragmentary quality of Grace’s narration can be seen not as signs of her deceitfulness or guilt, but as her way of protecting herself and of reclaiming her own story. In the end, Grace is paradoxically both a very unreliable narrator and one of the most reliable voices in the novel, since she makes no truth claim and acknowledges the problems inherent in memory and in narrating the past (and present).5 To describe Grace’s narration as deceitful is slightly amusing if compared to the conversation Dr. Jordan and Grace’s lawyer have in the novel. As they are assessing the truth value of the stories Grace tells, the lawyer suggests that Grace might secretly be in love with Dr. Jordan: …did Scheherazade lie? Not in her own eyes; indeed the stories she told ought never to be subjected to the harsh categories of Truth and Falsehood.…Perhaps Grace Marks has merely been telling you what she needs to tell, in order to accomplish the desired end. (438).

The two men feel that Grace’s mysteriousness and the possible unreliability of her stories is a threat—a threat they seek to eradicate with a rather conceited theory of male charms—but the reader has little reason to feel so. The paragraph in which Grace contemplates the story she is going to tell and the following account of the arrest and trial also illustrate why it is occasionally possible to read Alias Grace like a more traditional historical novel. In between the conditional clauses it is easy to get absorbed in the story and to forget that it is only one possible, and maybe consciously fabricated, version of the events. According to Michael, paragraphs like

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makes the crucial distinction between the author’s “rhetorical stance” and the parodic games played by a fictional narrator (41–42). James Phelan makes a useful distinction between estranging and bonding unreliability. Phelan argues that in cases of bonding unreliability the discrepancies between the narrator’s report and the inferences of that report made by the authorial audience paradoxically reduce the distance between the two parties. It is possible that the impression of Grace’s reliability stems from this type of bonding unreliability. As Phelan writes, “although the authorial audience recognizes the narrator’s unreliability, that unreliability includes some communication that the implied author—and thus the authorial audience—endorses” (“Estranging” 225).

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these entice the reader into a seemingly linear narrative and into an “illusion of ‘reality’ that masquerades as ‘truth’” (435). This illusion is nevertheless only temporary because of Grace’s repeated reminders of the self-conscious and deliberate constructedness of the story. Michael also notes that Grace recognises not only her control over the story she tells, but also “the multiple ways in which others have constructed versions of her story and, thus, of her” (436; my emphasis). Michael’s observations are analogous to Müller’s notion of Atwood’s protagonists striving towards control over their own self-images. Grace acknowledges the various and contradictory ways in which her story has been told and the different identities that these versions create for her: I think of all the things that have been written about me—that I am an inhuman female demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced against my will…that I am well and decently dressed, that I robbed a dead woman to appear so…that I am a good girl with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me, that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once? (25)

The fragmentariness and the flaws in Grace’s narration can thus be seen as the narrator’s effort to participate in creating her identity. Grace, if anybody, is well aware that identity is always a construct, whether it is created by the person herself or by the people around her. Consequently, the level of narration reflects the novel’s aim of giving voice to a previously silenced historical figure. The above-mentioned aspects of Grace’s narration and especially the recurrent conditional (as in “I could say this”) invite the reader to wonder what the historical Grace would have said if she had had the chance. The narration of Alias Grace repeatedly draws attention to its constructed nature and the potential unreliability of all narration, whether the words belong to Grace, to the third-person narrator, to one of the other characters, or to the historical and fictional sources. An illustrative example of this is the almost page-long passage in which Grace’s narration starts simultaneously to resemble both stream-of-consciousness and historical narration speculating on the character’s thoughts and actions. In the passage, one of the most characteristic narrative devices in fiction merges with one of the most characteristic narrative devices in historiography (see Cohn, esp. chapters 2 and 7). For a moment, it seems as if there were two simultaneous voices, and it is almost impossible to decide who is making the guesses and asking the questions: Did he say, I saw you outside at night, in your nightgown, in the moonlight?… Did he say, do not worry, I will not tell your mistress, it will be our secret? Did he say, You are a good girl? He might have said that. Or I might have been

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asleep.…Was I crouching behind the kitchen door after that, crying? Did he take me in his arms? Did I let him do it? Did he say Grace, why are you crying? Did I say I wished she was dead? Oh no. Surely I did not say that. Or not out loud.…Did he say I will tell you a secret if you promise to keep it? And if you do not, your life will not be worth a straw. It might have happened. (343)

The notion of identity as a result of contradictory impulses and the idea of the multiple and limited nature of postmodernist narrators are descriptive of Grace’s narration. The passage quoted is not, however, just an interesting example of the thematics of double voice or the postmodernist narrator/subject. It also raises far more particular questions about the source of the point of view and the narration. James Phelan offers one viable way of approaching passages like this, where the narrator’s voice seems to double or multiply so that it is difficult to determine who is narrating. Phelan challenges the traditional view—articulated, for example, by Seymour Chatman and Gerald Prince—that narrators cannot be focalizers. The view is based first and foremost on the idea that the story/ discourse distinction sets limits to narrators’ powers and, hence, they can only present, not perceive, the story world (“Why” 56; Living 114). According to Phelan, however, it is impossible to maintain a distinction between perceiving and reporting (or remembering), since a human narrator “cannot report a coherent sequence of events without also revealing his or her perception of those events” (“Why” 57). In other words, to Phelan focalization is determined only by who is perceiving, the narrator or the character (57–58; Living 115–16). In regard to the passage quoted above, the crucial idea is nevertheless not the notion that the narration can be focalized either through narrator-Grace or character-Grace, but the idea that it is possible for the narrator and the character to perceive simultaneously. Phelan contends that in cases like these the character’s point of view and the narrator’s point of view merge into what he calls dual focalization (“Why” 60; Living 118). Phelan’s concept of dual focalization offers a workable way to explain the multiple voices of the passage. Narrator-Grace is reporting/perceiving the events of her past and trying to evaluate her conduct—or the conduct of others—from the point of view of the present (“Oh no. Surely I did not say that. Or not out loud”), but at the same time the repeated questions and guesses of the narrator form a kind of stream of consciousness through which the reader is able to see the events also through character-Grace’s eyes while she is crouched behind a door and lets McDermott console her. The notion that narrators can and indeed necessarily do perceive the story world substantiates the idea of a double voice and in this case the “doubling” of Grace. Narrator-Grace acts as the biographer of her own life and uses the narrative devices typical of historiography, but

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at the same time the narrative devices typical of fiction allow the point of view of character-Grace to infiltrate the narration. Grace is not simply narrator-Grace remembering the past events or character-Grace experiencing those events, because the past and the present exist simultaneously. Identity is not equivalent to ‘I now’ or ‘I then’ but is constructed through the interaction and co-existence of the two. The idea that identity is formed and exists spatially instead of a linear continuum reflects the idea of the spatial form of the novel itself.

Reclaiming the Past Phelan contends that determining the degree of narratorial self-consciousness affects the reader’s understanding of the relationship between the narrator and the implied author (“Why” 61). Using Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) as an example, he argues that the reader’s decisions about Humbert’s self-consciousness and the sincerity of his remorse entail decisions about the extent to which Nabokov shares the character’s point of view. If, for example, the reader decides that despite the remorse Humbert is blind to the ways in which he still objectifies Lolita, the reader will also have to determine the extent to which Nabokov recognises or shares that blindness (62; see also Living 120–122). Phelan’s example is especially illustrative in the present context because Alias Grace and Lolita, despite their obvious differences, share some interesting features. In both novels, the reader meets a first-person narrator reminiscing about the past with exceedingly subjective overtones. Furthermore, both novels focus on the determining of the protagonist’s guilt. However, the central question in neither of the novels is what the narrator-protagonist actually did or did not do, but to what extent he or she believes him- or herself to be guilty and — as Phelan points out — to what extent the implied author thinks that he or she is guilty. The relationship between the narrator-protagonist and the implied author adds another dimension to the discursive ambivalence of the passage quoted above. Perhaps in addition to the voices of narrator-Grace and character-Grace the questions echo a third voice that reflects the authorial position: “It might have happened.” But even more important than the narrator/implied author relationship is Phelan’s claim that a narrator who is aware of the distance between her present and past self is most likely also aware of herself constructing the story between those selves (“Why” 61). Phelan continues to use Lolita to demonstrate that the narrator’s discourse is as much a part of the story as the narrated events and that this overlap of story and discourse obfuscates the evaluation of the narrator’s self-consciousness (63).

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The notions of the discourse as a part of the story and of the narrator’s self-consciousness have an interesting connection to Wesseling’s ideas of self-reflexivity in modernist historical novels. Wesseling takes as her starting point the common conception in the philosophy of history that the term ‘history’ refers to two different levels of reality, namely the actual events and the narrative about those events. In an ideal situation the latter would reflect the former. Self-reflexivity, then, is a group of narrative devices or strategies that disrupt the “supposedly direct relation between these two levels of reality” and highlight the autonomy of historiography in relation to the actual events of the past (82–83). Wesseling also argues that modernist writers such as Faulkner and Woolf emphasize self-reflexivity and “metahistorical interest” to the extent that their works no longer merely represent the past, but also the search for that past (83). The search for the past is one of the pivotal themes of the novel, and Grace’s narration, in its turn, is the central instrument of that search. Grace does not merely recount the past events. Her narration is a self-conscious attempt to gain access to her own past and, hence, as much a part of the story as the events themselves. That Alias Grace displays several features typical of (post)modernist historical novels substantiates both Wesseling’s and Hutcheon’s arguments that postmodernist fiction deals with epistemological as well as ontological questions. It also illustrates nicely the way in which novels like Alias Grace balance between modernist and postmodernist impulses. Wesseling argues that postmodernist historical novels not only continue the modernist experiments, but also introduce a new type of self-reflexivity, which scrutinises the making of history instead of the writing. Novels that use this type of self-reflexivity treat the making of history as if it were the writing of a story and present the making of history “as the imposition of a plot on a plotless reality” (119–20). She also refers to Theodor Lessing’s proposition that historiography answers our basic need for an identity, and that historical narratives are always mirror-images of the narrating subject (120–21). In Alias Grace this type of postmodernist self-reflexivity manifests itself especially in the characters surrounding Grace and the third-person narration that mainly describes Dr. Jordan’s hopeless attempts to find meaning and causality in Grace’s life or identity. Dr. Jordan tries to impose a plot on the events of the past (and also the present) and the only thing that the resulting plot tells about is Dr. Jordan himself. In the end, all the interpretations that the characters make about the events tell us more about the characters themselves than they do about Grace or her identity—whether we are talking about Dr. Jordan and his psychoanalytical aspirations, Reverend Verringer, who regards Grace as an innocent victim in need of salvation, or the Penitentiary Governor’s

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daughter to whom Grace is above all a romantic figure. The way in which historical narratives mirror the image of the historian can also be seen in the historical sources quoted in the novel. For instance, it is fairly easy to see the melodrama-loving and exaggeration-prone figure of Susanna Moodie in her lively descriptions of Grace. According to Wesseling, one of the significant ways in which postmodernist historical novels emphasise the subjectivity of all sources and interpretations is the use of collage. Because novels of this kind are constructed almost entirely of simultaneous and contradictory, pseudo- and authentic, and fictional and non-fictional materials, the reader’s attention is drawn to the act of representing the past instead of the actual events (123–25). In Alias Grace, the use of collage is evident not only on the level of the form and narration, but also on the level of the story and its themes. The best indication of the use of collage is nevertheless the quilt motif that is present on all levels of the novel. Each of the novel’s fifteen sections is named after a quilt pattern, as if to underline the idea that all stories are amalgams of different bits and pieces and that the narrator of a story—like the maker of a quilt—has the power to choose the pieces and join them together in any way she likes.6 Quilts are often present in the stories that Grace tells and their connection to Grace’s narration is even more apparent because Grace herself is sewing a quilt while she talks to Dr. Jordan. Like the stories she tells, the quilts that Grace makes are always meant for someone else. Not until the last chapter of the novel is Grace able to sew a quilt just for herself: While I am sitting on the verandah in the afternoons, I sew away at the quilt I am making. Although I’ve made many quilts in my day, this is the first one I have ever done for myself. It is a Tree of Paradise; but I am changing the pattern a little to suit my own ideas. (533)

Several scholars have drawn attention to the centrality of the quilting motif in Alias Grace and, as Howells points out, associated it firmly with a feminine autobiography (152). Grace’s storytelling and the making of quilts are paralleled as activities that both produce aesthetic patterns. Michael, for one, argues that the quilting functions as a metaphor for an alternative, spatial way of reconstructing the past and that in this way the novel participates in the reconceptualization of both historiography and a form of expression that has usually been associated with women and excluded them from the official realms of history and art (426). According

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The names of the sections are also followed by a stylized version of the quilt pattern in question, so that even an unaccustomed reader can make the connection.

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to Michael, quilting has been traditionally regarded as a domestic chore despite its cultural and social dimensions, and it has thus been doubly marginalised from the public and aesthetic realms. Although many feminist scholars have argued that in 19th century America quilting was one the most important outlets for the creativity of women and that quilts also function as “texts” because they are often articulate expressions of women’s lives, the traditional view still prevails (426–27). The idea of quilts as texts is particularly attractive because it sets the quilt motif in Alias Grace into a completely new intertextual domain and binds the novel not so much to the social or cultural history of quilting, but to other texts that liken the making of quilts (or sewing in general) to autobiographical narration. In fact, Alias Grace includes quotations (although they do not concern the subject directly) from Emily Dickinson in whose poetry sewing and writing are frequently associated with each other.7 Associating the quilt metaphor with feminine self-expression and autobiographical narration helps us understand Atwood’s novel as a whole. It is fairly easy to continue Michael’s notion of the quilting motif as a reflection of the novel’s spatial form with the juxtaposition of patriarchal/linear historiography and feminine/spatial autobiography.8 Alias Grace aims to give voice to a woman whose story has been forgotten by official historiography or whose point of view it has considered unacceptable. Wesseling states that one of the reasons why certain voices have been eliminated from official history is political, since “historiography tends to write the history of the victors, while those who suffered…are quickly erased from our historical memory” (126). It is no doubt quite obvious that those suffering have, in the course of history, often been women. Grace, however, is not only a woman but also a criminal, and thus doubly marginalised. Official historiography and canonical literature might still give a voice to a particularly impressive male criminal (e.g. Macbeth), but female criminals are either declared as incarnations of evil or silenced—in 7

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The connection between sewing and feminine self-expression in literature is very old, Penelope from The Odyssey being one of the earliest examples. A more contemporary example of a parallel between self-expression and sewing can be found, for example, in William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which Judith Sutpen describes the meaninglessness of life as follows: “…you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them…like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can’t matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better…” (105). Marleen Barr writes that “women reconceive narrative space by refusing to live their lives through patriarchal texts, by making new fictions—and new realities” (183). She also adds that Atwood’s “protagonists create female narrative in response to the loss, or breakdown, of the ability to structure their own experiences” (185).

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Grace’s case first the former, then the latter. Grace’s narration does, in fact, indicate that she is well aware of her own marginal position as a female criminal. In the end she nevertheless claims that she would rather be a murderess than a murderer: Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor. Murderer is merely brutal. It’s like a hammer, or a lump of metal. I would rather be a murderess than a murderer, if those are the only choices. (25)

Female self-expression and autobiographical narration are nevertheless not the only feasible interpretation for the quilt metaphor. The metaphor may also reflect the collage-like structure of the novel and the storyteller’s power to join the separate pieces together to produce particular meanings. The various quilt patterns also reflect the events and themes of the fifteen sections of the novel: the section called “The Letter X” consists of letters, in “Pandora’s Box” Grace is hypnotized so that the horrible secrets supposedly locked in her brain might be revealed, “Young Man’s Fancy” focuses on Dr. Jordan and his interest in Grace, and so forth. Another way of interpreting the names of the quilt patterns is to see them as references to a wider context of mythological intertexts, as Sharon R. Wilson suggests. The connections between the allusions in the names such as Solomon’s Temple, Pandora’s Box, and Tree of Paradise are nevertheless for the reader to puzzle out (225). Wilson adds another intriguing dimension to the interpretation of the quilt metaphor when she notes that “whether quilt spells guilt is left entirely up to the reader” (225).9 Like the author, the narrators, and the characters, the reader has to combine the different pieces of the puzzle together and ultimately come to her own conclusions.

Making the Tree of Paradise When Grace finally gets to make a quilt of her own, she attaches to it pieces from her own clothes and from those of Mary Whitney (Grace’s dead childhood friend and/or possibly her alter ego) and Nancy Montgomery (the housekeeper Grace was accused of murdering). She says that she will embroider the pieces with red feather-stitching to blend them

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Wilson’s observation creates—curiously enough—yet another association between Alias Grace and Nabokov’s Lolita, in which the name of Clare Quilty and the word guilty yield more than one possible interpretation. Nabokov plays with the similarity of the words several times, but one of the most illustrative examples is nevertheless Humbert’s comment after he has killed Quilty: “I was all covered with Quilty” (298).

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into the pattern: “And so we will all be together” (534). The name of the pattern is “Tree of Paradise,” but Grace says she is altering it a little: On my Tree of Paradise, I intend to put a border of snakes entwined; they will look like vines or just a cable pattern to others, as I will make the eyes very small, but they will be snakes to me; as without a snake or two, the main part of the story would be missing. (534)

The quilt that Grace makes with its pieces of clothes and a border of entwined snakes can be interpreted in several contrasting ways. On the one hand, as Howells points out, it is possible to argue that through the making of the quilt Grace is finally able to reclaim her traumatic past and that the quilt functions as a symbol of reconciliation or perhaps atonement (153). Even the snakes are consistent with the idea of reclaiming and reconciliation if they are regarded as an essential part of a harmonious whole: “It [the Bible] says there were two different trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge; but I believe there was only the one, and that the Fruit of Life and the Fruit of Good and Evil were the same” (534). The intermingling and interdependence of opposite elements also reflects the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. Alias Grace demonstrates that because our reality is in itself a combination of fact and fiction, narrating that reality is possible only if we cross the hierarchical boundaries between different types of texts. On the other hand, Grace’s quilt can be seen as a sign of her guilt. Grace never claims to be innocent. She only says that she has forgotten what happened. When Grace tells about her own quilt, the pieces of clothes from Mary and Nancy, and the changes that she is making to the pattern, the reader cannot help but wonder whether Grace really does remember what happened and whether the quilt is Grace’s way of piecing together the contradictory sides of her identity or personality. Then again, it is possible to regard the quilt as a challenge to traditional and rigid designs. After years of making quilts and constructing her story according to established models and the demands of others Grace gets to formulate her own and much more jagged interpretation of herself. Her challenging of traditional models also brings to mind the biblical connotations of the Tree of Paradise and the snakes Grace adds to the quilt, as if she were presenting her own version of the story of the Fall and thus resisting the notion of only one correct interpretation. Furthermore, questioning the traditional interpretation of the story of the Fall draws attention to the unavoidable imperfection inherent in all narration: The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong. (533)

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It is also possible to interpret the snakes in Grace’s Tree of Paradise not as signs of a harmonious whole—as I previously suggested—but as a deliberate imperfection pointing to the impossibility of achieving perfect harmony in any paradise or any story. The idea of imperfection also connects Grace’s quilt to the quotation from Stevens’s poem: “The imperfect is our paradise.” The perfect retrieval of the past is not possible, but maybe the way to paradise can be found in the imperfect nature of the past—a past that can be constantly recreated and through the fragments of which we might just catch a glimpse of the truth. The final truth about Grace remains a mystery, but in Atwood’s novel the historical events, the author, the reader, and the texts create their own temporary and subjective reality—their own imperfect paradise.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. 1996. London: Virago, 2002. Barr, Marleen S. Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1992. Berlatsky, Eric L. The Real, the True, and the Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2011. Bridgeman, Teresa. “Time and Space.” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Ed. David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 52–65. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Dannenberg, Hilary P. Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. 1983. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996. Elias, Amy J. Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982. Genette, Gérard. “Introduction to the Paratext.” 1987. Trans. Marie Maclean. New Literary History 22 (1991): 261–72. —. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. 1987. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Howells, Coral Ann. “Transgressing Genre: A Generic Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels.” Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. New York: Camden House, 2000. 139–56. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. —. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Michael, Magali Cornier. “Rethinking History as Patchwork: The Case of Atwood’s Alias Grace.” Modern Fiction Studies 47.2 (2001): 421–47. Mickelsen, David J. “Spatial Form.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 55–56.

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Müller, Klaus Peter. “Re-Constructions of Reality in Margaret Atwood’s Literature: A Constructionist Approach.” Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. New York: Camden House, 2000. 229–58. Palumbo, Alice M. “On the Border: Margaret Atwood’s Novels.” Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. New York: Camden House, 2000. 73–86. Phelan, James. “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita.” Narrative 15.2 (2007): 222–38. —. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005. —. “Why Narrators Can Be Focalizers—and Why It Matters.” New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Ed. Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman. Albany: State U of New York P, 2001. 51–64. Rigney, Barbara Hill. “Alias Atwood: Narrative Games and Gender Politics.” Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. New York: Camden House, 2000. 157–65. Staels, Hilde. “Intertexts of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” Modern Fiction Studies 46.2 (2000): 427–50. Tammi, Pekka. Russian Subtexts in Nabokov’s Fiction: Four Essays. Tampere: Tampere UP, 1999. Walsh, Richard. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2007. Wesseling, Elisabeth. Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991. Wilson, Sharon R. “Mythological Intertexts in Margaret Atwood’s Works.” Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. New York: Camden House, 2000. 215–28.

Jakob Lothe (University of Oslo)

Fragile Narrative Situations: Conrad Compared to Sebald By story we mean at least two things. First, the word is often used synonymously with narrative. Second, inspired by narrative theory, we can consider story as a chronologically ordered summary of the action or plot of a fictional or non-fictional narrative. This second sense of story—story as summary or paraphrase, corresponding to Gérard Genette’s definition of récit—is often contrasted with discourse, i.e. the narrative presentation of the story. Broadly, the distinction between story and discourse is critically useful. Still, like many terminological distinctions, this one too is often less obvious in practical criticism than it appears to be in narrative theory. For instance, even though the narrative situation of a literary text tends to disappear in a story version of that text, it can be important for the plot—including the plot’s characters and events that are also constituent elements of the story. Located at the crossroads of story and discourse, the narrative situation in a short story or novel is related to Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope or the chronotopic motif, marking a zone of narrative formation and transition in which the literary dimensions of time and space are curiously compressed, and which for that reason becomes significant both structurally and thematically (248). Sometimes the narrative situation seems to be curiously, even problematically, fragile. Signalling the narrative situation’s narrative and thematic significance, such fragility can be possessed of an ethical dimension. This is certainly the case in several of the texts by W. G. Sebald, not least the novel Austerlitz (2001). It is also the case in several of the major novels by Joseph Conrad, including Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900). In this essay I will consider important narrative situations in Heart of Darkness and Austerlitz, arguing that these situations not only introduce key elements of narrative structure but also shape significant thematic patterns. One premise for my argument is that the way in which the narrative situations simultaneously depend on and highlight what Bakhtin calls “the chronotope of threshold” (248)

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serves to emphasize the problems of identity and identity formation. In the narrative situations under consideration here, we can see how both Conrad and Sebald establish a basis for constituting, exploring, questioning, and possibly reconstituting human identity, thus forming, to borrow a phrase from Terence Cave’s discussion of fictional identities, “a locus of tension and unease” (118). In Heart of Darkness, the narrative situation is necessary yet fragile and unstable, thus furthering and reinforcing a growing sense of fragmentation and disintegration. In common with the attempts at identity-formation and identity-positioning, this sense of loss of coherence and of meaningful progression—felt not only by Marlow as narrator and main character but also by the frame narrator and by Kurtz as the second main character—is closely related to variants of narrative distance and perspective. A similar point can be made about Sebald, whose last book, published in 2001 and entitled Austerlitz, is a curiously unclassifiable narrative. Combining the genres of the novel, the memoir, the fragment, and travel writing, Austerlitz tells, or rather attempts to tell, the story of Austerlitz. As several critics have observed and as few readers fail to notice, there are important thematic links between this generically unstable text by Sebald and the novella which Conrad wrote almost exactly a hundred years earlier. The main reason why Heart of Darkness is one of the strongest intertexts in Austerlitz, however, is that these thematic connections, which include variants on a search for European origin and identity formation, are supported by structural and narrative ones. It is significant that Sebald uses a frame narrator, as does Conrad in both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Moreover, Sebald too makes his frame narrator meet a character who also becomes a narrator—and whose story, imparted to the frame narrator as narratee, is then passed on by the frame narrator to the reader. In both texts, the fragility of the narrative situation has the paradoxical effect of making it stronger, or at least more urgent. Since the narrative communication is complicated and may threaten to collapse, it becomes more important to grasp what the main narrator says: there is, is seems to the frame narrator as narratee and by implication to the reader, a link between the fragmentation of the narration and its potential significance. As many readers will know, Heart of Darkness begins thus: The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. The Sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting

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up with the tide seemed to stand still in clusters of canvas, sharply peaked with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.… The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway—a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” (3, 5)

This opening presents two narrative beginnings. Both of them are inseparable from the narrative situation, and one important constituent element of this narrative situation is the chronotope of threshold. In this chronotope, as in related ones such as the staircase, the front hall and the corridor—and, in our texts, the Nellie and the railway station of Antwerp—“time is essentially instantaneous; it is as if it has no duration and falls out of the normal course of biographical time” (Bakhtin 248).1 The first beginning consists of the whole quotation except Marlow’s opening remark. Marlow, who is one of the five characters aboard the Nellie, is to perform crucial functions in the story both as narrator and as character. However, it is significant that not Marlow but an anonymous first-person narrator is narrating here. When in the second beginning Marlow is introduced and embarks on his act of narration, the frame narrator’s function becomes more complex, since he also becomes a narratee in the group Marlow addresses (cf. Lothe, Conrad 22–28). To put this another way: in accordance with the narrative conventions employed, once Marlow has started telling his story the frame narrator functions first as a narratee, and then as a first-person narrator relaying Marlow’s story to us as readers. The phrase ‘narrative convention’ is necessary because the time of traditional, simple narratives is over in Heart of Darkness. At first sight, the novella’s narrative situation seems to resemble what Wolfgang Kayser in his still valuable Das sprachlice Kunstwerk calls “die epische Ursituation” (349)—“the epic proto-situation” in which a narrator tells a group of listeners something that he or she has experienced. The resemblance is nonetheless superficial—not only because the concept of the epic proto-situation excludes the device of the frame narrator but, 1

Bakhtin’s accompanying observation that the chronotope of threshold “can be combined with the motif of encounter” (248) applies to the narrative situations of both novels considered in this essay.

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more importantly, because in Heart of Darkness both the act of narration, its motivations, and its thematic implications are much more fragile and problematic than in the epic proto-situation. The narrative situation’s fragility is highly significant thematically. Two aspects are particularly important here. First, there is the difficulty of communicating this kind of story—Marlow’s account of his journey towards and meeting with Kurtz—in a meaningful and reliable way. Kurtz “was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation…that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams….” He was silent for a while. “…No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone…” (27)

We all know the difficulty of accurately remembering and adequately presenting our dreams—and not seldom it is precisely what seems potentially significant that turns out to be particularly hard to communicate to a listener. That Marlow still makes an attempt to do so is a strong indication of his, and Conrad’s, belief in verbal narrative as a powerful mode of explanation and exploration. Second, apart from the difficulty of narrating this particular kind of dream-like story there is the fragility of the narrative situation itself. We know that once the tide has turned, Marlow’s narration will for practical reasons be over, even though he may not have reached the end of his story. There is a sense in which the demands of the profession are stronger than the need to listen to a sailor’s yarn. This kind of demand is linked to the difficulties and challenges of initiating and sustaining meaningful narrative communication in the modern era—the era after that of the epic proto-situation. Reading and rereading the beginning of Heart of Darkness, we increasingly appreciate the way in which the narrative situation’s fragility is balanced by constituent elements of narrative, and vice versa. Here as in the main narrative situation of Austerlitz, a narrator tells an engrossing story to a listener who serves as frame narrator. In the classic frame narrative, the frame narrator tends to be the most authoritative and knowledgeable of the narrators. This is not so in Heart of Darkness, nor is it the case in Austerlitz. For although the frame narrator passes on Marlow’s story, and although it is important that he appears to be reliable (an impression

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formed, interestingly, not least by his relative naïvety), his insights prove to be distinctly inferior to Marlow’s. We note his use of the superlative when describing London: for the frame narrator, the capital of the British Empire is not only “the biggest” but also “the greatest” town on earth. Moreover, having finished his introductory description, he goes on to ask, “What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth?…The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires” (5). Considered in isolation from its context, the answer to the rhetorical question sounds like a piece of imperialist rhetoric. The frame narrator has just been referring to explorers such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Franklin—“the great knights-errant of the sea” (4). As Anthony Fothergill has noted, such references “imply a certain sort of reader, one whose competence enables the correct decoding of the historical referents and more importantly one who endorses the positive judgments made on these ‘heroic’ figures” (15). References and allusions of this kind remind us of the connections between Marlow’s audience, of which the frame narrator is a member, and Conrad’s readers, on whose interest and goodwill he was dependent as an author. Even though the narrative’s second beginning is contrasted with the first, they are both part of the novella’s narrative situation, and they both constitute the basis for the story to follow: “‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth’” (5). The frame narrator’s reference to London’s “greatness” increases the impact and suggestiveness of Marlow’s first words. Exposing the frame narrator’s relative naïvety and limited insight, Marlow’s remark prefigures the sombre implications of the tale he is about to tell. The comment anticipates his later reflections on the arrival of the Romans in Britain, “nineteen hundred years ago—the other day…” (5). For the Romans, Marlow plausibly goes on to suggest, Britain must have seemed an inhospitable wilderness “at the very end of the world” (6). Although they “were men enough to face the darkness…They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others” (7). Obviously referring to the Romans, this generalizing statement also includes a proleptic reference to the narrative Marlow is starting. Marlow’s observations indicate key characteristics of his first-person narrative: a reflective rhetoric designed to impress and persuade, a blend of personal and intellectual curiosity, and a tendency to generalize on the basis of individual experience. Yet although Marlow is clearly the more important narrator in Heart of Darkness, the effect of his narration is inseparable from, and depends in large part on, the function of the frame narrator. There is a close connection between the stasis of the narrative situation

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and the movement, including travel, of the story told by Marlow. As Susan Jones has shown, in Heart of Darkness “movement and stillness, the use of active gestures and silent poses operate not just as isolated descriptive moments, but form part of a complex relationship between physical and narrative movement that contributes in significant ways to the author’s predominantly skeptical mediation of the story” (101). This kind of sceptical mediation is linked, albeit indirectly, to the narrative situation’s fragility: not only does Marlow’s story further the implied author’s scepticism and doubt, his resigned attitude is also strengthened by the difficulty of communicating it in a meaningful way—consider Marlow’s comparison of his story to a dream in the quotation above. If Heart of Darkness presents a series of fragments of the history of European imperialism, the reader’s inclination to consider the various elements of the story as fragments depends in no small part on the narration’s sophisticated, and strangely rhythmical, interplay of narrative movement and progression on the one hand and variants of stillness, pause, and ellipsis on the other. Marlow makes it clear that there is a lot he cannot tell, or is unable to tell; he also signals that transitions are frequently blurred between an event and his interpretation (and hence narration) of that event. As Paul B. Armstrong puts it, “Marlow demonstrates the power of linguistic innovation—especially through metaphor and analogy—to open us up to new worlds at the same time as he dramatizes how the creation of figurative language is necessarily circular and hence potentially self-enclosing” (441). There is a significant link between Marlow’s “linguistic innovation” and the narration’s fragmentation. This kind of fragmentation extends into the narrative situation—in the form of ellipses, typographically indicated by three dots, in the passage where Marlow compares his story to a dream. The use of a narrator is a defining feature of narrative fiction. It is a distancing device, and in Heart of Darkness Conrad accentuates this distancing process by using two narrators rather than one. The frame narrator and Marlow are key narrators, two indispensable narrative instruments that Conrad uses in order to construct Heart of Darkness as a piece of prose fiction. As Wayne Booth reminds us in The Rhetoric of Fiction, one of the strongest conventions of fiction is that as readers we trust the narrator, until or unless the narrative discourse signals that he or she is unreliable (4). Since, at least according to some critics, Marlow’s reliability is questionable,2 it becomes crucially important to trust the frame narrator. His conventionality, which is linked to his sense of identity as

2

The question of whether Marlow is a reliable narrator or not is closely linked to Conrad’s

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a British citizen, makes it easier for us to do so. As the frame narrator becomes intrigued by Marlow’s story, this facet of his identity contributes to the tale’s peculiarly tentacular effect—the narratees are also British (see Watts 22–47). As a corollary, this passage brings out the affinity between Marlow’s motivation to narrate and the narratees’ (including the frame narrator’s) motivation to listen, indeed to remain listening for a long while. “It is plausible to assume,” notes Ross Chambers in Story and Situation, that at bottom the narrator’s motivation is like that of the narratee and rests on the assumption of exchanging a gain for a loss. Where the narratee offers attention in exchange for information, the narrator sacrifices the information for some form of attention. Consequently, there is a sense in which the maintenance of narrative authority implies an act of seduction, and a certain transfer of interest (on the narratee’s part) from the information content to the narrating instance itself. (51)

Illuminating if related to Heart of Darkness, this observation equally applies to the main narrative situation of Sebald’s Austerlitz. In both narratives, there is a productive correlation between Marlow’s and Austerlitz’s first-person narration, which takes the form of an ordering and existentially motivated re-experience, and those of the frame narrators, which proceed from an unexpected involvement and surprising understanding. In both novels, the frame narrator’s insight appears to increase as a result of the impressionist narrative that he first listens to and then transmits, thus suggesting that in these texts not just the plots but also the narrative presentations of them are unusually unstable yet also exceptionally engrossing. In both cases, much of the effect depends on the frame narrator’s combined function as narrator and narratee. In several ways Conrad and Sebald are of course very different writers. Yet Sebald is a particularly interesting example of an author who, searching for his own identity as a German and a European at the turn of the twenty-first century, looks to Conrad for inspiration—partly perhaps because of a sense of similar destiny, revolving (in both cases) round an uneasy combination of voluntary and involuntary exile (cf. Brooke-Rose 291). In his wonderful essay on Conrad in the essay collection The Rings of Saturn, Sebald stresses the importance of Conrad’s Polish background (103–34). Thus Sebald is an illustrative example not only of Conrad’s continuing significance for contemporary writers but also of how, as Ian Watt puts it in his Epilogue to Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, “Consophisticated use of irony in Heart of Darkness. As J. Hillis Miller puts it, “The novella is ironic through and through” (466).

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rad may be said to have inherited much of his modernity—perhaps his post-modernity—from his Polish past” (359). There is a sense in which Sebald’s situation as a German living after the Second World War, and after the Holocaust, can be described as “post-modern.” Austerlitz begins thus: “In the second half of the 1960s I travelled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks” (1). On a first reading, we perhaps think that the first-person narrator, the “I” who travels “repeatedly from England to Belgium,” is identical with Austerlitz. However, this beginning is actually a frame narrative whose function is to establish a narrative situation in which he and Austerlitz can meet, and in which Austerlitz can talk. Here as in Heart of Darkness, the main narrator is introduced by a frame narrator, who then becomes a keenly interested narratee. As readers we are intrigued by the narrative in a manner comparable to the way in which the frame narrator is irresistibly attracted to Austerlitz’s account. We recall Ross Chambers’s observation that, at a deep and frequently unthematized level, the narrator’s motivation to narrate is complemented by the narratee’s readiness to listen, and that, for both parties, possibilities of gain as well as risks of loss are involved. The narrative situations in Austerlitz offer ample illustrations of this important point. For example, by telling fragments of his story Austerlitz risks confirming his sense of loss and estrangement, yet his narration may enable him to negotiate than loss. By listening, the narratee risks losing, or being drawn out of, a position of relative ignorance about the effects of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Yet the fact that he not only listens but also retells what Austerlitz has told him suggests a learning process, and thus the possibility of gaining essential knowledge about the disastrous and far-reaching consequences of these events.3 The first, and perhaps the most important, narrative situation in the novel occurs in the “Salle des pas perdus, as it is called, in Atwerp Centraal Station…constructed under the patronage of King Leopold II” (4), who at the end of the nineteenth century claimed all of Belgian Congo, 76 times the size of Belgium and the location of the plot of Heart of Darkness, as his personal property. Austerlitz is introduced thus:

3

This narrative aspect is strengthened by the fact that while Austerlitz is a Jew, the frame narrator is German. See Lothe, “Forgiveness” (185).

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One of the people waiting in the Salle des pas perdus was Austerlitz, a man who then, in 1967, appeared almost youthful, with fair, curiously wavy hair of a kind I had seen elsewhere only on the German hero Siegfried in Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen film. That day in Antwerp, as on all our later meetings, Austerlitz wore heavy walking boots and workman’s trousers made of faded blue calico, together with a tailor-made but long outdated suit jacket. Apart from these externals he also differed from the other travellers in being the only one who was not staring apathetically into space, but instead was occupied in making notes and sketches obviously relating to the room where we were both sitting…Once Austerlitz took a camera out of his rucksack, an old Ensign with telescopic bellows, and took several pictures of the mirrors, which were now quite dark, but so far I have been unable to find them among the many hundreds of pictures, most of them unsorted, that he entrusted to me soon after we met again in the winter of 1996… (6–7)

Once the frame narrator approaches Austerlitz, the latter almost immediately starts talking, thus establishing a narrative situation “in the restaurant facing the waiting-room on the other side of the great domed hall” (8). They meet again several times, and Austerlitz refers to these meetings as “our Antwerp conversations” (8). One notable difference between the two narratives, and also between their basic narrative situations, concerns the original way in which Sebald incorporates black and white photographs into the verbal narrative of Austerlitz. Even though both the frame narrator and Austerlitz are presented as fictional characters, the pictures which Austerlitz takes—and at least some of which, the reader assumes, are presented in the book—seem to refer to the same physical reality as those included in, for instance, the collection of essays entitled Luftkrieg und Literatur. And yet we read the pictures in Austerlitz differently: it is as though they simultaneously oppose and are coloured by the fictional verbal discourse in which they are embedded, and from which Sebald makes it exceedingly difficult to disentangle them. While in Heart of Darkness the threshold of the Nellie simultaneously constitutes and characterizes not only that of the act of narration but also that of the narrative (Marlow’s story, because it was literally a boat that took Marlow out to the Congo and back to Europe), in Austerlitz the railway station similarly assumes the form of a threshold: a public space distinguished by restless movement, it is also a hall in which the frame narrator’s meeting with Austerlitz immediately, apparently irresistibly, blends into a narrative situation in which the former is captivated by the latter’s narrative. Tzvetan Todorov has said of Marlow’s narration that it spirals towards a thematic centre which, however, turns out to be empty (167, 169). In a way this description applies to Austerlitz’s narration too. In Heart of Darkness, this empty centre becomes indistinguishable

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from the protagonist; compare Kurtz’s two powerful exclamations: the handwritten “Exterminate all the brutes!” (50) and the spoken “The horror! The horror!” (69). In Austerlitz, the empty centre, repeatedly hinted at but never expressed directly, is a narrative and thematic element as well as a historical event: Auschwitz—both as the destination of countless deportations and as a symbol of the Holocaust (cf. Lothe, “Narrative, Genre” 117–19). While Austerlitz, a Czech Jew, escaped from the Nazis thanks to a so-called Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, his father, Maximilian, fled to France. His mother, Agáta, remained in Czechoslovakia together with Věra, a non-Jewish friend of the family. As Austerlitz’s search for his parents take him “further and further east and further and further back in time” (262–63), his conversations with Věra, with whom he resumes contact, make him believe that his mother was interned in the ghetto of Terezín (the German name is Theresienstadt) in late 1942 (281), and then “sent east in September 1944” (287). His father, he thinks, was possibly deported from another threshold: Gare d’Austerlitz, the railway station in Paris whose name is identical with his own. One particularly important paragraph here establishes a link to the main narrative situation presented at the beginning of the novel: Curiously enough, said Austerlitz, a few hours after our last meeting, when he had come back from the Bibliothèque Nationale and changed trains at the Gare d’Austerlitz, he had felt a premonition that he was coming closer to his father. As I might know, he said, part of the railway network had been paralyzed by a strike last Wednesday, and in the unusual silence which, as a consequence, had descended on the Gare d’Austerlitz, an idea came to him of his father’s leaving Paris from this station, close as it was to his flat in the rue Barrault, soon after the Germans entered the city. (404–05)

“I imagined,” says Austerlitz to the frame narrator serving as his narratee at the Gare d’Austerlitz, “that I saw him leaning out of the window of his compartment as the train left…” (406–07). As Austerlitz connects this railway station with his father, it becomes a catalyst of his memories. And as the threshold of the novel’s beginning is extended to include the ending as well, there is a strong sense in which both the main narrator, the frame narrator and the reader return to the point where he or she began narrating, listening, reading, or remembering. Reaffirming the importance of the narrative situation, this returning movement stresses its potential as well as its fragility. Although we now know more than we did when we started reading, the possibility of gaining essential knowledge seems dependent on a fragile narrative situation in which meaningful narrative communication can collapse at any moment. The passage under consideration here is accompanied by this visual image:

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Fig. 1: Austerlitz pp. 410–11.

In an essay on Sebald’s use of visual images in Luftkrieg und Literatur and Austerlitz,4 I note that reading these lines and looking at this picture, the reader has a sense of the narrative coming full circle, for one of the first images in Austerlitz is also one of a railway station. Combined with and linked to Austerlitz’s story of his unsuccessful search for his parents, the visual image presented here, at the end of the novel, suggests that there is little narrative progression in it. The reader’s sense of a circling movement approximating stillness or stasis is strengthened by the name of the railway station in Antwerp, Salle des pas perdus (Hall of Lost Steps), which can equally be linked to the Gare d’Austerlitz. As we can see, there are no people in this photograph—just a large hall and two trains, one on each side of the hall. We assume that it is a photograph of the Gare d’Austerlitz, and, since we know that Austerlitz took pictures in the Salle des pas perdus, he may have taken this one too.

4

Lothe, “Narrative, Memory.” See also Horstkotte. A helpful collection of essays on Sebald’s use of visual images is Patt.

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But we cannot be sure. This kind of ambiguity is thematically productive: inviting us to reflect on the Gare d’Austerlitz as one of many sites of deportation, the visual image also induces us to think of Austerlitz imagining his father escaping from the Nazis in 1940 (and yet, we suspect, ending up in a concentration camp a few years later) and of Austerlitz’s own escape on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939. The German words Zug and Bahn/Eisenbahn are semantically loaded: although, for Austerlitz, they signal voluntary travel and possible escape, they symbolize the transport of Jews to the concentration and extermination camps. As we well know, trains performed a key role in the logistics that enabled the Nazis to carry out the Holocaust. Giving a visual anchorage to one of the novel’s most important leitmotifs, the photograph of the Gare d’Austerlitz is a strong reminder of the importance of the narrative situations in the novel. If Austerlitz is drawn to railway stations, and this one in particular, the frame narrator is too: it is as though this place, this particular segment of space, not only facilitates but is a constituent element of the narrative situations on which the narrative communication from Austerlitz to the frame narrator, and from the frame narrator to the reader, depend. Hans Belting argues that “in their own right, images testify to the absence of that which they make present.” If, following Belting, we consider the inherent nature of images as “the presence of an absence” (6), that presence of an absence is curiously doubled in this visual image: not only is the real object of the railway station absent from the photograph, within the photograph itself people, including Austerlitz’s father, are absent (because they have been deported). In different ways the combinations of visual image and verbal text underline the same larger point about the absence in Austerlitz’s knowledge—and in his life. Does such an absence indicate the limits of narrative, and of narration produced in the narrative situations discussed here? Perhaps it does, and yet both Heart of Darkness and Austerlitz richly illustrate narrative’s potential and resource as a powerful mode of exploration—a mode so powerful, in fact, that protagonist, narrator, and reader are taken to the point where narration threatens to break down. This kind of threat is closely linked to the fragility of the two texts’ narrative situations. And yet, in both narratives, this is a fragility imbued with a peculiar strength—the strength of telling, of listening, and of reading and rereading.

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Works Cited Aristotle. Poetics. Ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Armstrong, Paul B. “Reading, Race, and Representing Others.” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul Armstrong. New York: Norton, 2006. 429–44. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. 1975. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second Edition. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1983. Brooke-Rose, Christine. “Exsul.” Poetics Today 17.3 (1996): 289–303. Cave, Terence. “Fictional Identities.” Identity: Essays Based on Herbert Spencer Lectures Given in the University of Oxford. Ed. Henry Harris. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1995. 99–127. Chambers, Ross. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. New York: Norton, 2006. Fothergill, Anthony. Heart of Darkness. London: Open UP, 1989. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. 1972. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980. Horstkotte, Silke. “Photo-Text Topographies: Photography and Representation of Space in W. G. Sebald and Monkia Maron.” Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 49– 78. Jones, Susan. “‘She walked with measured steps’: Physical and Narrative Movement in Heart of Darkness.” Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre. Ed. Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, and James Phelan. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2008. 100–17. Kayser, Wolfgang. Das sprachlice Kunstwerk: Eine Einführung in die Literaturwissenschaft. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1971. Lothe, Jakob. Conrad’s Narrative Method. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989. —. “Forgiveness, History, Narrative: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” The Ethics of Forgiveness: A Collection of Essays. Ed. Christel Fricke. New York: Routledge, 2011. 179–96. —. “Narrative, Genre, Memory: The Title of W. G. Sebald’s Novel Austerlitz.” Comparative Approaches to Nordic and European Modernisms. Ed. Mats Jansson, Janna Kantola, Jakob Lothe, and Hannu Riikonen. Helsinki: Helsinki UP, 2008. 110–27. —. “Narrative, Memory, and Visual Image: W. G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur and Austerlitz.” After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future. Ed. Jakob Lothe, Susan R. Suleiman, and James Phelan. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2012. 221–46. Miller, J. Hillis. “Should We Read ‘Heart of Darkness’?” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul Armstrong. New York: Norton, 2006. 463–74. Patt, Lise, ed. Searching for Sebald: Photography after W. G. Sebald. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007.

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Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. 2001. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin, 2002. —. Luftkrieg und Literatur. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999. —. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. Todorov, Tzvetan. “Connaissance du vide: Coeur des ténèbres.” Les Genres du discours. Paris: Seuil, 1978. Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. London: Chatto & Windus, 1980. Watts, Cedric. Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”: A Critical and Contextual Discussion. Milan: Mursia, 1977.

PART III Shadow of a Tail: Problems of Authorship

Leona Toker (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Name Change and Author Avatars in Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi This essay discusses the meaning of the overlap between name change and heteronymy in documentary prose, in terms of the truth-value of the literary works of testimony, that is their relationship to what for all practical purposes we can call reality. By heteronymy I mean a writer’s signing his different works by different names, pseudonyms as well as the real name, e.g., Vladimir Nabokov’s signing his pre-war Russian-language works by the pen-name V. Sirin and, occasionally, by other pseudonyms (see Tammi, Problems 6; Subtexts 151) and his post-war English-language works by his real name. Name-change is the use of fictional names for characters based on real people: “Lenski,” for instance, was not the real name of Nabokov’s tutor mentioned in his autobiography Speak, Memory—it was a name chosen not so much as an allusion to the young Romantic poet in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as for the sake of the symbolism of optical “lens,” thus raising the issue of symbolism in factography. In this essay my examples are, indeed, factographic works—survivor testimonies on Nazi and Soviet concentration camps: Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, also known under the title Survival in Auschwitz, and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. Both Shalamov and Levi wrote about their central subjects under their own names. However, when Primo Levi eventually decided to publish some science fiction, he did so under the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila, in order not to compromise the status of his veridical writing.1 Shalamov’s stories bore his own name on the author line when they were submitted to Soviet publishers (in vain, during his post-camp lifetime), when they flowed out to the Samizdat, and when they were published abroad and, posthumously, in Russia. On one occasion, however, Shalamov wrote a

1

For the history of this pseudonym see Thomson 294–95. See also Speelman for a discussion of the thematic continuity between the stories in this collection and Levi’s works on Auschwitz.

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piece called “Letter to an Old Friend” directly for a Samizdat publication (see Shalamov); that text remained anonymous, though its authorship was well known among Moscow dissidents. Shalamov broke with the dissident circles shortly afterwards, unwilling to be, as he felt he was, used. In February 1972 his own name became a mask, a sign of a toppled idol, when he wrote what I believe to be his coded letter to Literaturnaia Gazeta, condemning journal publications of his stories abroad (see Toker, “Samizdat”). The coincidence of the name in the author line of a text with the name of the first-person participant-narrator is a mandatory feature of what Philippe Lejeune called “the autobiographical pact” (13–15), the other main clauses being retrospective narration in prose and coincidence of the narrator and the protagonist.2 Adherence to the autobiographical pact can be seen as “the guarantee of the transaction of reference” (Eakin 15). The coincidence between the author, the narrator, and the main character doubles as a public verification landmark, along with other landmarks such as precise references to location, calendar time, or documentable persons (see Toker, “Towards”). Yet, even when the first-person narrator’s name is not the same as the name on the author line, a narrative may be read as veridical if extra-textual information is available about the author having been a “flesh-witness” (see Harari) of the historical circumstances in which the story is set.3 A narrative may retain the status of “flesh-witnessing” even when it breaks the autobiographical pact by employing the distinctive techniques of fiction—for instance such “signposts of fictionality,” discussed by Dorrit Cohn (109–32), as quoting thoughts that are not the narrator’s own, rendering a scene through the eyes of a figure present on the scene but

2

3

Lejeune does not lay the law in Le Pacte autobiographique; rather, he formalizes the existing twentieth-century reading conventions. In the ancient world, for example, third-person narrative, as in the case of Julius Caesar’s De bello Gallico, was accepted as the reliable form of autobiography (I thank Yoav Rinon for this remark). Conventions may, in principle, be modified in the modern reading experience as well, but this requires a shift in the criteria of reliability similar to a code-switch. Indeed, the third-person discourse in Roland Barthes’s autobiography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, signals to the reader that the book demands an even more radical reorientation. As Paul John Eakin shows in Touching the World (4–23), Barthes actually defeats Lejeune’s “attempt to bring autobiography, always a wayward and contrary animal, to heel” (6). It is important to note that Lejeune does not insist on the first-person narrative as part of the autobiographical pact: he demands a distinction between the use of the grammatical first or third person and the actual identity between the narrator and the protagonist (15 ff). For the concept of “the veridical” in this connection I am indebted to Adam Rovner, in conversation. Rovner applies this concept to narratives, fictionalized as well as factographic, about spheres of life which the author knew first-hand.

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not coinciding with the narrator, and other expressions of “the constitution freedom of fiction from referential constraints” (130), e.g., the non-coincidence of the author and the narrator or the author and the internal focalizer, and the privilege of the so-called “omniscient” narrator to “know” what happens at different places at the same time. In Shalamov’s story cycles, first-person narratives alternate with third person center-of-consciousness narratives. The latter constitute a departure from the conventions of eyewitness factography in that they present the inside views of characters who are distinct from the narrator. In the story “An Individual Assignment,” for instance, the center of consciousness is a prisoner who is supposed to be shot after the last full stop. However, most of Shalamov’s third-person protagonists—Andreev, Krist, Golubev, Sazonov, Merzliakov, Potashnikov—tend to share the features of their author: they are victims of purges, intellectuals who have retained humanistic values and basic integrity, and most of them are, like Shalamov himself, tall men, what in the camp conditions is a disadvantage. As a result, these third-person protagonists tend to be perceived as authorial personae, as avatars of the author (see Jurgenson 278–96), especially in view of the fact that long camp experience largely erases the less prominent individualizing features of the inmates. The stories about them are perceived as fictionalized and yet veridical, and as combining the non-referentiality of separate details with the reliable representation of the practices which these details instantiate. Shalamov’s first-person narratives are of three kinds. In most, the first-person narrator, the “I,” is anonymous: no other character is given an occasion to mention his name—in such cases it is practically impossible to decide whether the autobiographical pact is operative; whether the stories represent specific events that happened to Shalamov himself, or whether the “I” of the story is a conventional narrative device. The situation is further complicated by the second kind of first-person narratives—those in which the events are documentably autobiographical but the name of the first-person narrator, mentioned in one way or another, is “Andreev” or “Krist.” The penultimate story of the first cycle of Kolyma Tales is “Andreev’s” first-person narrative; the last story is a direct sequel to the penultimate one, but it is given in the third-person, Andreev being the protagonist. In Shalamov’s corpus, “Andreev” is not just a wide-spread Russian name, a version of Smith or Jones. Rather, this name replicates that of a “real person” mentioned in several of Shalamov’s more directly autobiographical stories such as “The Best Praise.” The Social Revolutionary Aleksandr Grigor’evich Andreev (see Leontiev and Iunge 122, 126, 293) was Shalamov’s prison mentor, and paid him what he regarded as the greatest compliment of his life—“You can do jail time.” That “real” An-

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dreev, who never returned from his last camp term (1937), was to a large extent Shalamov’s role model. Hence, the fictional Andreev, a purified extension of Shalamov’s own experience, is often the focalizer of stories where the protagonist evinces stoical endurance, especially in relationships with the authorities, and where he draws programmatic conclusions from his own experience. This internalized figure may be like Fernando Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro, the Master,4 but in ethical rather than aesthetic terms. By contrast, the alias “Krist,” which can be read as an allusion to a dialectal pronunciation of “cross” or else an allusion to Christ,5 is mainly reserved for the stories in which the protagonist manages to survive by some still acceptable compromises, still acceptable departures from primafacie moral principles. But this alias is mostly used in third-person rather than in first-person narratives. As to Shalamov’s first-person narratives, it is their third group that raises the issue of heteronymy. In these (few) stories the protagonist narrator is addressed or referred to as “Shalamov” by other characters.6 Here not just the spirit but also the letter of the autobiographical pact is observed. Such stories may be read as the end point in the continuum between the fictionalized and the factual. They signal to the reader that all the Kolyma Tales are a part of this continuum, that all the narratives of this volume need to be read with a double agenda: accepting their representation of the regularities of camp life as testimony but asking of them the kind of questions that one asks of fiction, of texts with a marked aesthetic function—questions about symbolism, the function of details, the reasons for the collocation of events, the meaning of the recurrence of motifs. For example, in the story “The First Tooth” (from the cycle “The Artist of the Spade” and belonging to the group of the stories where the first-person character-narrator ultimately remains anonymous), a criminal convict breaks the window of the prison cell as soon as he enters it because 4 5

6

On Pessoa’s heteronymy, see Aslanov. One of the centrally important stories in Shalamov’s corpus is the story “The Cross,” based on his parents’ experience: a blind priest, driven to starvation under the Soviet regime, hacks his gold cross to pieces in order to sell them for food. The key sentence of the story is the priest’s response to his horrified wife’s protests: “Is God in this?” By contrast, Franciszek Apanowicz reads Krist’s name as standing for God the Son and sees Andreev and Golubev (a name derived from the Russian for “dove”) as standing for the other two terms of the Holy Trinity, God the Father and the Holy Spirit. For a systematic and context-sensitive discussion of Krist and Andreev as protagonists of different stories, see Young (“Recalling 360–64). In the first three cycles of Kolyma Tales the protagonist narrator is referred to as “Shalamov” only in the story “My Trial.” In other story cycles, in particular The Glove, or KT-2, this happens more often.

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he knows that the stream of freezing fresh air from the outside will be life saving after the whole huge transport of prisoners is stuffed into the same cell. Yet the act of breaking and the resulting untidy gap later combine with another disruption of the conventional order of things: the convoy commander knocks out the protagonist’s tooth in punishment for his attempt to protect another prisoner, a sectarian, from beatings. The two acts create a symbolic continuum between the semiotic proficiency of an experienced convict, who knows that things are not what they seem, and the naïve idealism of a novice, who still feels compelled to protest against abuses. The breaking of the window and the loss of the tooth appear in the story because the two events may, indeed, refer to an actual sequence some time back in 1929, yet we are fully within our rights inquiring into their collocation, into the ambivalences to which it gives rise, into the symbolism of violent disruption of conventional surfaces and patterns which cannot be pinned down to unambiguous practical and intellectual consequences. To complicate things, as we start reading the story, its first-person narrative seems to unfold along what James Phelan calls the “narrator-authorial audience track,” but a perspectival twist at the end makes us reroute it to the “narrator-narratee track” (12). The novice who has starred in his own tale now turns from a first-person narrator into a third-person character by the name of Sazonov, who has just told the story that we have been reading to a different first-person narrator, an unnamed authorial one; together, they discuss the suitability of the three possible endings of the story, endings that are artistically alternative yet complementary in terms of the further details to which they refer.7 From the broader contexts of the story in the Shalamov corpus we can find out, however, that the episode with the sectarian reflects Shalamov’s own personal experience during the first of his two prison terms. While reading the story as testimony to the kind of things that used to happen in the camps, we are also within our rights inquiring into the meaning and effects of its structure and point of view—that is, asking the kind of questions that we pose to fiction rather than to factography. Name-change itself, including shifts in attribution of actions to agents, or one-letter difference between the names of these agents (e.g. Lunin and Kunin; see Young, “Recalling” 358–59) becomes one of the techniques that challenge text analysis.

7

Sarah Young interprets this perspectival twist, along with the fact that the story’s central event occurred during Shalamov’s own first transport, as metanarrational: it “brings to the foreground the narrator’s process of learning how to turn such experiences into stories” (“Convict” 62).

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I believe that Shalamov’s choice of avatars as well as of the point of view is associated with his estimation of reading conventions and expectations. His first-person narration is often used in stories that involve explicit or implicit self-criticism on the author’s part—indeed, readers usually place more trust in the truthfulness of those memoirs where the author is self-critical rather than self-congratulatory. He uses third-person narrative in those stories where first-person narration may have sounded notes of self-pity. There are also local, specific cases of a judicious relationship between the narrative content and stance. For instance, the story “Handwriting” shows how the third-person protagonist, Krist, survives the murderous winter of 1938 by working one night a week as a copyist for the secret police operative in the camp; the day after he is let off from physical labor; moreover, at a critical moment, the operative saves him from execution by destroying his ad hoc file. Here the use of the third-person narrative takes advantage of the well-known reading convention: we implicitly trust the third person narrator’s authority. Had the story, which is believed to be based on Shalamov’s own experience, been told in the first person, it might have aroused suspicions of the authorial narrator’s attempt to explain away his strange visits to the police operative’s hut (see Toker, “Testimony”). The relationship between the plot and the point of view is thus often associated with the kinds of reader response that the author, or rather the narrative know-how (see Herman), may have sought to elicit or to preempt. In principle, the name change that breaks the autobiographical pact allows for and signals inroads of fictionalization—even in the case of Elie Wiesel’s Night, where the protagonist narrator is called not Elie but Eliezer. The same, however, is true of the changed names of the other characters, provided the reader is made aware of the change. Shalamov, indeed, alerts the reader to name change by frequently referring to the same incidents but giving the characters involved different names. In general, one reason for the name change may be the need to protect those who are still behind the barbed wire or the iron curtain when the memoir is being published—in the memoirs of Margarete Buber-Neumann and Elinor Lipper, such people are simply left unnamed and therefore inescapably generalized, which can be seen as the price for maintaining the claim to absolute and literal adherence to the truthfulness and referentiality of the recorded detail. Another reason may be the author’s unwillingness to embarrass a fellow survivor, or to confront him or her with a portrait that may painfully conflict with this person’s self-image (this is discussed in the story “Lorenzo’s Return” in Primo Levi’s Moments of Reprieve). Whatever the cause for the change of the names of the people who populate a memoir, this change, just like the heteronymous change of

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the protagonist-narrator’s own name, subverts the autobiographical pact. It signifies that other details of the narrative may likewise be non-referential. If one wishes to protect the still living fellow-survivors, one will change not only their names but also some of their identifying features. On the other hand, with the people’s names changed, the features and actions attributed to them may be dictated not by the contingent flow of the remembered reality but by an artistic patterning that allows the narrative to achieve the kind of formal coherence that reality itself may have failed to attain. The truth value of the statements whose referentiality is uncertain may be suggested by the influential 1966 paper by Keith S. Donnellan, which discusses the difference between definite statements of the attributive kind and of the identifying kind.8 One of Donnellan’s examples is the question “Who is the man drinking a martini?” If this question is asked at the gathering of a teetotaler association, the action of drinking a martini may be attributive: someone is breaking the rules; the identity of that person is a secondary issue. But if this question is asked in a bar, its purpose is to identify a specific male—perhaps because his looks have attracted the speaker’s attention; in this case such a question may well be substituted by the question “Who is the man in the blue shirt?” (Abbott). Shalamov’s heteronymy can be understood in these terms. Features, actions, states, and events attributed to his characters are serial: they all have happened, in one way or another, to one person or another, whether typically or by way of exception that confirms the rule.9 We can safely assume that someone would, in Donnellan’s words, “fit the description” (291). It is this serial attribution that is signalized by the protagonist-narrator’s heteronyms. By contrast, the point of the stories where the protagonist narrator is “orthonymic” (to use the Pessoa-studies term for the use of the author’s real name rather than a pseudonym, though in Pessoa studies this is largely a matter of the paratext), is a quasi-legal identification. In the story “Moi protsess” (“My Trial”), that deals with Shalamov’s third sentence, given him in camp in 1943, the policeman who comes to arrest him (that is transfer him from the general-works camp to the

8

9

“A speaker who uses a definite description attributively in an assertion states something about whoever or whatever is the so-and-so. A speaker who uses a definite description referentially in an assertion, on the other hand, uses the description to enable his audience to pick out whom or what he is talking about and states something about that person or thing” (Donnellan 285). For insightful remarks on different specific cases of the blurring of borderlines between characters, and between characters and the “real people” on whom they are modeled, see Mikhailik 131–38.

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in-camp pre-trial detention prison), asks him “Shalamov, that’s you?” thus reestablishing the autobiographical pact with the reader. Indeed, one of the main purposes of this story is to identify, by name, three people who made depositions against Shalamov and, serially, against others. Two of these people, Krivitsky and Zaslavsky, the latter a survivor, are fairly well known metropolitan personalities. What distinguishes this narrative from Shalamov’s heteronymous tales is that the latter signify “such things used to happen” whereas the orthonymic tale says “this, exactly this, with these specific people involved, happened to me.” The speech act involved here is not only generalized testimony to prevailing conditions but also a deliberate, pointed, specific accusation. The guard’s question, “Shalamov, that’s you?” given prominence by the use of the author’s real name, foregrounds the agenda of identification. This distinction is also operative in If This Is a Man by Primo Levi, though here the narrative is orthonymous and does not signal to the reader which names of other people are real and which have been changed. Works of documentary prose are never self-sufficient—one item on their tacit agenda is to make the reader read more, retrieve further information, keep asking. And so, with the help of external sources, we can distinguish between people who appear in the narrative under their own names and those whose names are changed. The real names are kept for the people whom the author loved—his friend Alberto10 and the free worker Lorenzo Perrone, who helped him to survive and who, as Levi shows in a later story, “Lorenzo’s Return,” though not a prisoner in Auschwitz, died after the war of the survivor’s disease.11 That story, written after Lorenzo’s death, presents a more detailed warts-and-all portrait of this man, drier and more sober than his sketchy portrait in If This Is a Man, but it is not to be forgotten that Levi named his daughter Lisa Lorenza, and his son Renzo. The real names are also kept in the opposite cases—the cases of people to be identified for accusation, the specific Nazi characters—usually not the dumb SS guards but the intellectuals, scientists, engineers, such as Wilhelm Pannwitz, of whom certain traditional humanistic expectations could have been entertained. The statements made about those people are identifying, directly referential. By contrast, names are changed when the statements are of an attributive nature. This is the case with portraits of prisoners or, as in The 10 11

Sometimes the representation of these “named” people departs from historical truth for psychological reasons (see Thomson [259] on Levi’s portrait of Alberto Dalla Volta). For a moving account of the after-history of Primo Levi’s relationship with Lorenzo Perrone, see Angier 421–25.

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Truce, former prisoners, who represent various kinds of adaptation to their predicament—sometimes less-than-admirable ones. What matters here is the sociology of camp experience rather than the testimony about specific people: Levi is not interested in embarrassing Henri of If This Is a Man or Cesare of The Truce should they read his narrative or should this narrative fall into the hands of those who know them.12 Ironically, Levi’s protectiveness of these people is eventually undermined by his biographers, as if in the framework of an ethical statute of limitation. Yet name change may sometimes belong strictly to the Aristotelian agenda of art correcting the oversights of reality. Indeed, there is no need to protect the image of an admirable Hungarian Jewish prisoner, an officer of the German army in World War I, who tries to teach Levi to wash and discipline his body not because the camp rules require it but for the sake of his own dignity. Levi’s biographers tell us that the name of this former officer was Eugenio Glücksmann (see, for instance, Thomson 160, 259), and that he did not survive the death-march out of Auschwitz (188). Primo Levi, however, gives him the name Steinlauf, whose connotations of “stone” and “running” can be interpreted in a variety of rather obvious ways. Apparently, the semantics of luck in Glücksmann (“lucky man”) was inappropriate in view of his fate; more importantly, the connotations of lucky dice clashed with the dignity of this man’s agonistic self-control. In fact, it is Primo Levi himself who had repeatedly played dice with the camp rules and regulations, and who had made away, magically, with some of the luck from Glücksmann’s name. By way of conclusion I shall fine-tune my statement that the change of names in documentary narratives opens the door for further fictionalization. If we adopt Wolfgang Iser’s definition of fiction as selection and recombination of material against the background of the “as if” convention (4–10), we shall see that selection is inevitable and recombination natural because of the seriality of the camp victims’ fate. The change of names may strike us as creating the “as if” convention, and it is, indeed, partly the case—yet not when the people or episodes described serve the purpose of exemplification. When the name change occurs in cases of attribution rather than identification, the sample convention (Toker, Re-

12

“Of course, his real name isn’t Cesare,” says Levi in an interview with Pier Maria Paoletti, “but don’t write what he’s really called, please; he lives in Rome now and has a position of some moral and financial responsibility. My book could do him damage. Once, he wrote to me saying that Romans are too shrewd, that you can’t work anything in Rome, you know, ‘work’ in his sense of the word…After The Truce he hasn’t written to me any more. Maybe he didn’t understand what I was trying to do, maybe he’s upset. But please don’t put his name in, I wouldn’t want to cause any offence” (Belpoliti and Gordon 82).

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turn 131–34), that is, the convention of exemplification, goes a long way towards neutralizing the fictionalizing effect of the “as if.” Thus, in documentary prose, the overlap between name change and heteronymy stages a tension between the sample convention (the convention of exemplification) and the “as if” convention, between attribution as testimony to serial events and the inroads of fictionalization. It also connects with another overlap — that between the aesthetic and the pragmatic functions of literary testimony.13

Works Cited Abbott, Barbara. “Specificity and Referentiality.” 2003. https://www.msu. edu/~abbottb/spec&ref.pdf. Oct. 12, 2008. Angier, Carole. The Double Bond: Primo Levi. A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Apanowicz, Franciszek. “Soshestvie v ad (Obraz troitsy v Kolymskikh rasskazakh).” Shalamovskii Sbornik III. Ed. V. V. Esipov. Vologda: Grifon, 2002. 129–43. Aslanov, Cyril. “Pessoa’s Heteronymy between Linguistics and Poetics.” Partial Answers 10.1 (2012): 121–32. Belpoliti, Marco, and Robert Gordon, eds. The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961– 1987. Primo Levi. 1997. Trans. Robert Gordon. New York: The New Press, 2001. Buber-Neumann, Margarete. Under Two Dictators. 1945. Trans. Edward Fitzgerald. London: Victor Gollancz, 1950. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Donnellan, Keith S. “Reference and Definite Descriptions.” Philosophical Review 75 (1966): 281–304. Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Harari, Yuval Noah. “Scholars, Eye-witnesses, and Flesh-witnesses of War: A Tense Relationship.” Partial Answers 7.2 (2009): 213–28. Herman, David. “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance.” Partial Answers 6.2 (2008): 233–60. Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Jurgenson, Luba. L’expérience concentrationnaire est-elle indiscible? Paris: Rocher, 2003. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Leontiev, Ia, and M. Iunge, comps. Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo politkatorzhan i ssyl’noposelentsev: Obrazovanie, razvitie, likvidatsiia, 1921–1935. Moscow: Obshchestvo “Memorial”/“Zvenia,” 2004.

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Work on this article has been supported by Israel Science Foundation, grant 435/04.

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Levi, Primo. If This Is a Man / The Truce. 1947/1963. Trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Abacus, 1990. —. Moments of Reprieve. 1978. Trans. Ruth Feldman. London: Abacus, 1987. Lipper, Elinor. Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps. 1950. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951. Mikhailik, Elena. “Nezamechennaia revoliutsia.” 2009. Shalamovskii sbornik IV. Ed. V. V. Esipov and S. M. Soloviev. Moscow: Litera, 2011. 115–42. Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005. Shalamov, Varlam. “Pis’mo staromy drugu” (“Letter to an Old Friend”). Russkaia mysl’ #3608, Feb. 14 (1986): 10–11. Speelman, Raniero M. “Primo Levi’s Short Stories: A Modern Midrashim.” The Legacy of Primo Levi. Ed. Slanislao G. Pugliese. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 23–31. Tammi, Pekka. Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1985. —. Russian Subtexts in Nabokov’s Fiction: Four Essays. Tampere: Tampere UP, 1999. Thomson, Ian. Primo Levi: A Life. 2002. New York: Henry Holt, 2003. Toker, Leona. Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. —. “Samizdat and the Problem of Authorial Control: The Case of Varlam Shalamov.” Poetics Today 26.4 (2008): 735–58. —. “Testimony and Doubt: Varlam Shalamov’s ‘How It Began’ and ‘Handwriting.’” Real Stories, Imagined Realities: Fictionality and Non-fictionality in Literary Constructs and Historical Contexts. Ed. Markku Lehtimäki, Simo Leisti, and Marja Rytkönen. Tampere: Tampere UP, 2007. 51–67. —. “Towards a Poetics of Documentary Prose—from the Perspective of Gulag Testimonies.” Poetics Today 18.2 (1997): 187–222. Young, Sarah J. “The Convict Unbound: The Body and Identity in Gulag Narratives.” Gulag Studies 1 (2008): 57–75. —. “Recalling the Dead: Repetition, Identity, and the Witness in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy.” Slavic Review 70.2 (2011): 353–72.

Marina Grishakova (University of Tartu)

Stranger than Fiction, or, Jerome David Salinger, Author of Lolita: Real, Implied and Fictive Authorship Introduction The title of my paper refers to a mystifying article in The Village Voice, revealing that J. D. Salinger was Lolita’s ghostwriter and that Salinger’s story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was its companion piece (Park). The Village Voice mystification playfully contaminates the names of two authors famous for jealously guarding their privacy and the inviolability of their work. In his copy of the New Yorker’s anniversary volume, Fiftyfive Short Stories from The New Yorker (1949), Vladimir Nabokov graded each story and awarded only two stories an A+: Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and his own “Colette” (Frazier). Nabokov’s “Colette,” published in The New Yorker in 1948, is a story of the Nabokov family’s summer journey from St. Petersburg to the French resort Biarritz and the narrator’s childhood love for a French girl Colette (whose real name was Claude Deprès). Later Nabokov incorporated the story in his autobiography Speak, Memory. The childhood passion served as a prototype for Lolita’s “progenitor” Annabel in Lolita, a “child-bride” and the epitome of unattainable desire. Salinger’s Seymour Glass is also attracted to “childbrides,” such as Charlotte, whom he meets at the age of twelve and whom his wedding guests find to be similar to his “adult” bride Muriel (in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters). In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Seymour’s suicide seems to be mysteriously related to his affection for young girls and his disappointment with the “normal” institution of marriage. Whatever the autobiographical connection, the motif is rooted in the literary tradition of romantic infatuation and travel with a child-bride (see Freeman). The Biarritz recollection in Nabokov’s “Colette” also disguises a literary allusion. The narrator uses a penholder decorated by a crystal with a photographic view of the bay, cliffs and lighthouse inside, to recall the name of Colette’s dog. The narrator of the French poet, novelist and chess enthusiast Raymond Roussel’s poem “La Vue” (1904) employs

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a similar optic device: to restore a picture of a seaside beach with two children playing on it, he contemplates a tiny image inside a crystal lens fit into a penholder. Arguably, Nabokov borrowed the technique of the stylized or vicarious recollection from Pushkin. At least, he identifies Pushkin as a master of the disguise technique in his “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” originally published in Partisan Review in 1955: Pushkin masks an autobiographical allusion under the disguise of a literal translation from André Chénier, whom, however, he does not mention in any appended note…Chénier’s curious preoccupation with the whiteness of a woman’s skin…and Pushkin’s vision of his own frail young mistress, fuse to form a marvelous mask, the disguise of a personal emotion. (80–81)

The fictive and the autobiographical detail merge inconspicuously: as if disputing Buffon’s famous dictum Le style est l’ homme même, Nabokov considers a writer’s individual style as a form of mimicry (protection, disguise, or illusion) that “transcends the crude purpose of survival” by extending to the sphere of aesthetics (the 1969 interview for Vogue; Nabokov, Opinions 153) rather than a form of self-expression. However, the average reader hardly attends to the subtleties of style and authorial mimicry: he needs to see the person behind the text.1 The more secretive the author, the more rampant the compensatory fantasies the public imagination begets. For the average reader, the Salinger–Nabokov connection has a pedophiliac tinge. The fictional motif was projected on the biographical context during Salinger’s affair with 18-year old Joyce Maynard, invoking Lolita-esque associations. On the other hand, as Véra Nabokov’s biographer Stacy Schiff observed, the public was surprised to see the 50-year old Mrs. Nabokov, instead of a twelve-year old “nymphet,” escorting the writer during his visit to Paris in 1959: “‘Madame Nabokov is 38 Years Older than the Nymphet Lolita,’ screeched one front-page headline” (254). Literary scholars Brandon Centerwall and Joanne Morgan flabbergasted the public by a new revelation. While construing vague traces and ambivalent hints as indubitable proofs, they found that Nabokov himself was the prototype of Lolita, or, to paraphrase Flaubert’s dictum, Lolita, c’est moi. Arguably, not unlike Lolita, Nabokov was abused by a pedophiliac relative (Uncle Ruka) in his childhood. According to

1

Salinger’s biographer Paul Alexander, who considered fascination with young girls a key to Salinger’s writing and life, argues that “in many cases, the writer cannot necessarily divorce himself from the work he creates. The obsessions that dominate his life often present themselves as subject matter for his work” (29).

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Centerwall and Morgan, Lolita originates in Nabokov’s childhood experience. Amalgamation of fact and fiction into autofictional patterns in Nabokov’s and Salinger’s writing as well as both authors’ unwillingness to reveal the “real self” and aversion to publicity prompted journalists, readers, critics and biographers to seek a “real person” behind the text. However, the technique of disguise and concealment practiced by both authors as a textual and autobiographical strategy made it difficult to distinguish between “involuntary revelation” and “deliberate simulation” (Genette 142–44) as a means of constructing and communicating the author’s image to the reader.2 In this article I argue that 1) there is a connection and overlap between author-constructs, such as an author’s self-image (a “legend” or “persona” constructed not only in the writer’s fictional and nonfictional writing, but also manifested in his behavior), the “career author” and the “implied author.” This is not a straightforward causal connection, however: the author-construct is not a mere “reflection” of certain aspects of the author’s empirical personality or a manifestation of its inner properties, insofar as “personality” itself is not a stable or self-sufficient entity. 2) The author-construct should be considered in relation to what it affirms or negates as part of a wider cultural and social communicative situation, as a reaction to its affordances and restrictions, as a socio-cultural strategy rather than merely a textual construction; moreover, like any identity construction, it should be considered in its performative capacity. In this capacity, identity markers, i.e. distinctive discursive or behavioral signs attributed to a single persona, may be enacted by several narrative agents that activate different virtual aspects of communication. Identity performance is co-enacted by the participants of a communicative situation: it aims at altering or transfiguring the situation, transmitting a message, even if indirect or distorted, and eliciting a desired response (see Grishakova). From this perspective, theoretical concepts such as “literary persona” or “implied author” may be subjected to further revision, which would emancipate them from essentialist connotations.

2

Indeed, an author’s public image often depends on whether his behavior is deciphered as “involuntary revelation” or as “deliberate simulation.” Paul Alexander tends to read Salinger’s behavior as deliberately provocative. For him, Salinger was a writer who withdrew from the public eye to stay in it.

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Implied Author or Literary Persona? Russian formalists (particularly Tynyanov and Eikhenbaum) have been aware of the relational value of the author’s image or literary persona. In the late 1920s, Tynyanov and Eikhenbaum sidestepped the initial formalist agenda of a purely immanent study of literature and focused on the interaction between literature and other domains of culture and society (or, in Tynyanov’s terms, between literary series and other series). For Tynyanov, literature is a dynamic construction, which permanently experiences systemic shifts due to the translation and transfer of nonliterary (social, linguistic, rhetorical, etc.) elements to the literary series or, vice versa, transfer of literary elements to non-literary domains where they emerge in a new guise, such as “literary” behavior or other aestheticized forms of everyday life. This kind of inter-systemic exchange manifests itself as a “speech orientation” or constructive function of a literary work. For instance, a work’s orientation to rhetorical, confessional, epistolary or other documentary genres, such as memoirs, news coverage or crime chronicles, may serve as a constructive, organizing function of literary writing. Tynyanov’s ustanovka (German Einstellung) means simultaneously “orientation” and “arrangement” corresponding to this orientation: it embraces both inter-systemic relations and intra-systemic functions but excludes the teleological import of “intention.” The author’s creative intention (namerenie) serves as a catalyst for his writing, yet is not identical with it: the author meets the resistance of the system, which actively transforms and modifies his intention, yet, in its own turn, also becomes modified by it. For Tynyanov, the literary persona is an agent of this modifying and modeling activity, i.e. the objectified form of authorial intention, which often provokes inter-systemic shifts, engenders new principles of writing and extends to the sphere of everyday life. There are authors who actively or even rather aggressively build their literary persona (such as Rousseau or Byron)—and other authors for whom the literary image is less relevant (Tynyanov). Whereas Tynyanov was concerned about the relative autonomy (system or order) of literature, Eikhenbaum was less afraid of contaminations and tended to view areas of overlap between literature and society as a special sphere of social-literary communication (literaturnyi byt) where writers, readers and publishers interact and the author becomes a public figure, or, from the 1830s, a professional writer. Eikhenbaum’s works of the time provided a basic outline for literary sociology. Scholars associated with Formalism but not belonging to the Formalist circle, such as Tomashevsky and Vinokur, considered personal life as a particular form of cultural creativity. In his treatise Biography and Culture,

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Vinokur draws on the German hermeneutic and phenomenological tradition, particularly Dilthey’s works and E. Spranger’s book Lebensformen (1925). Vinokur argues that everyday habits, family relations, intimate life and gossip that make the subject matter of the traditional literary biography are merely external manifestations of the “inner” life-story as a dynamic whole, a gradually unfolding structure of the historical process, where external events become inner, biographical facts endowed with individual meanings: the external reality is interiorized and experienced as an individual life-story, whereas the individual life-story becomes objectified as a personalized part of history (25). Vinokur adopts the notion of the “style of life” (cf. Spranger’s Lebensform) that involves the reflexive construction of a life-story as a certain meaningful whole. The concept of literary persona corresponds in part to the notion of the implied author. The “literary persona,” as construed by Formalists, mainly denotes the activity on the authorial “end” of literary communication as manifested in his writing and/or behavior, but also refers to the role of suprapersonal (social, generic etc.) factors in the authorial selfconstruction. Vinokur’s and Tomashevsky’s phenomenologically tinged theories consider “literary persona” as an instantiation of an individual life practice that embraces “internal” (self-reflection) and “external” (writing, speech, behavior) aspects. The “implied author” has been introduced by Wayne Booth “as a cover term for several concepts or variants of a single concept” (Kindt and Müller 7). In various readings, it may refer to 1) the real author’s “second self” as part of his writing; 2) a set of values, judgments and principles as a rationale of a work of fiction against which a narrator’s and character’s speech and acts are to be judged and which defines its rhetorical structure (James Phelan); 3) the abstract principle of a work’s aesthetic organization defining the whole meaning and structure of the work (Wolf Schmid’s “abstract author”); 4) a hypothetical image of the author inferred and formed by the reader. Different readings emphasize either part of Booth’s concept: “author” (the implied author as the real author’s alter ego) or “implied” (the author-image as constructed by the reader). Obviously, the ethical aspect, i.e. a continuity between the empirical author’s judgments and the implied author as a textual construction, was particularly important for Booth. Opponents of ethical criticism contest the idea that the writer writes in order to advance a particular judgment or articulate a certain principle; once reduced to a set of judgments or propositions, a work of literature becomes redundant. They refer to Iris Murdoch’s passage from her essay “Against Dryness” (“Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention, not of will”) to contend that the “literary” kind of attending that

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involves “receptiveness, wise passiveness” and “constant activity of mind” differs from moral philosophy’s “prejudicial categorising tidiness” (Adamson 98). What a work of fiction offers is a specific mode of awareness or vision rather than a set of judgments (Adamson; Diamond, “Losing” and “Nussbaum”). Recent studies tend to highlight the interpretational work by the reader, which constructs the implied author from textual evidence: indeed, the modifier “implied” always suggests reader involvement. The “hypothetical author” coined by Kindt and Müller as a correlate for the implied author is a readerly construction: the author is hypothetical from the reader’s perspective. Kindt and Müller draw on the philosophy of hypothetical intentionalism, as developed by Jerrold Levinson. In Levinson’s system, the category of “the informed or competent contemporary” whose reception of the work is subject to the principle of charity (i.e. a sympathetic reader) is taken as a reference point for interpretation (Kindt and Müller 173). This is a valid descriptive category, though empirical readers have different social, political and cultural agendas that may engender a variety of controversial interpretations as well as different versions of the hypothetical author. Some works marginalized and forgotten by an author’s contemporaries may be activated due to distant agendas years or ages after. Critical choices and judgments are also morally loaded. Booth used his own, liberal-humanist agenda as the yardstick for ethical readings and underestimated a whole complexity of social, political and cultural negotiations that a work of fiction may involve (see e.g. Foley; Phelan). The mixed nature of the implied author prompted some scholars to try to get rid of it altogether (Nünning), others to promote close reading as the best method of tracing the authorial presence in the text (cf. Lanser; the procedure which threatens to become a vicious circle, however), still others to view the implied author as a dynamic image originating in the process of negotiation between author’s self-presentation, text, context and reader, with the central role ascribed to the reader (Herman and Vervaeck). David Herman argues that storytelling activity is grounded in intentional systems rather than in the minds of the storytellers: it is not necessary to postulate an intentional agent, such as implied author, between the author and the text. Though readers and critics entertain the “intentional stance” whenever and wherever possible, ascribing beliefs, judgments and intentions to the author, treating him as a rational agent abiding by certain principles, intentionality is distributed across the storytelling environments: “…rather than being localized in particular minds, intentionality in narrative contexts is built into the doing, the activity structure, of storytelling and story-interpretation” (Herman 256).

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While the emancipation of storytelling from straightforward dependence on authorial will and intention seems to be productive, the author image, even if it is “an encoded protocol for attributing intentional states,” is a steady convention or a template of fictional storytelling understood as an individual act (257). For these reasons, the concepts of the implied author or literary persona can hardly be altogether discarded, but they can be updated by placing literary communication in a broader socio-cultural interactional context where it belongs (the practical part of Herman’s and Vervaeck’s paper actually suggests this move). The update accounts for the social aspects of literary communication as outlined by Russian Formalists as well as other systemic theorists, yet it replaces the systemic principle with an interactive one. From the perspective of interactional theory, information exchange is of secondary importance in communication. The interactional model “suggests that what is communicated is inherently situated, and often situated (in an interpretive sense) in different ways for different people” (Schiffrin 401). Communication involves self-presentation, mutual adjustment and management but never direct transmission of intention.

Salinger’s and Nabokov’s Literary Personae The formation of a writer’s literary persona and reputation is always a matter of interaction and controversy between various agendas. For instance, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and the development of a youth counter-culture gave a new impetus to the emphatic reception of Salinger’s work, whereas the critical response in the 1950s was hesitant and revealed a considerable degree of skepticism. The stories which seemed to show a growing degree of density and sophistication, such as “Franny,” “Zooey,” and “Seymour: An Introduction” that received Susan Sontag’s and Ihab Hassan’s positive response in the early 1960s, were condemned in the 1950s by many other critics as “appallingly bad,” “turgid” and “boring” (see Weber 112–13). In 1959, George Steiner severely blamed what he called “the Salinger industry”: Salinger flatters the very ignorance and moral shallowness of his young readers. He suggests to them that formal ignorance, political apathy and a vague tristesse are positive values.…Zen is in fashion. People who lack even the rudiments of knowledge needed to read Dante, or nerve required by Schopenhauer, snatch up the latest paperback on.

Younger critics, however, praised Salinger as a spokesman of the lost generation. John Seeley labeled The Catcher in the Rye a “subliminal war

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novel” written in the shadow of WWII and prospectively casting light on the Korean and Vietnam War experience: But it was the Vietnam War that gave final shape and purpose to Salinger’s tour de force, much as it lent fierce motion to a teenage mode validated and valorized by Holden’s passive avoidance of phoniness, a generational nihilism waiting for something that would give it specific motive. It was the Vietnam War that converted Salinger’s novel into a catalyst for revolt, converting anomie into objectified anger. (24)

Readers who tended to view Holden Caulfield as Salinger’s self-projection were disappointed by the portrait of the “real man” in Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World and Salinger’s daughter Margaret A. Salinger’s Dream Catcher. For instance, Gerald Rosen, a fiction writer and the author of Zen in the Art of J. D. Salinger (1977), for whom Salinger’s novel was a personal teenage revelation and who enlisted Salinger among the great thinkers and favorites of the 60s generation, “willing to move beyond the bounds of the conventionally accepted view of reality,” was surprised to discover a man who seemed to support corporate culture, loathed hippies and black music and watched movies of the 30s and 40s (Kubica and Hotchman 121–31). No doubt, Joyce Maynard’s or Margaret Salinger’s Salinger was just another projection rather than a “real man.” Considerable differences in reception of an author’s work and personality are unavoidable due to the fact that the author-construct does not belong solely to the author: rather, it is a result of several factors. The author’s active construction of his literary persona has an impact on the reader’s reception and construction of the implied author as the subject behind the text: the reader takes the literary persona to be the author’s “second self.” If the author’s persona is absent, hidden or indeterminate, the reader often constructs the author’s image by default, projecting the narrator’s or character’s images on the empirical author. Starting in the 18th century, the professionalization of literature, e.g. the introduction of a system of honoraries and intellectual property, made the author a public figure. Adepts of Modernism and the New Criticism reacted by propounding the thesis of the autonomy of literature. However, the development of mass media and mass culture in the 20th century led to the multiplication and appropriation of authorial public images, the “author function” (Foucault) eventually shared by agents, critics, readers, journalists, interviewers, biographers, commentators and translators. The phenomena of celebrity and stardom were extended to the sphere of literature, and a popular interest in the author’s life story and person increased (see e.g. Cawelti). Authors were expected to reveal themselves to the public and were rewarded for responding to the public interest.

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Nabokov occupied an intermediate position between the authors actively constructing their autobiographical “legend” and incorporating it into their books (such as Jack Kerouac or Norman Mailer) and “disappearing authors,” such as Salinger or Thomas Pynchon: employment in the academy entailed a certain degree of publicity. However, Nabokov always insisted that the author’s image may be induced only from his writing. Not unlike Salinger, Nabokov demonstrated an aversion to publicity, an unwillingness to share his authorial function with critics and biographers, a writerly arrogance toward his predecessors and contemporaries (in Ian Hamilton’s words, Salinger was sure that “no really good American writers existed before the advent of Salinger” [101]), as well as a presumption of the author’s exclusive rights to his creation and life. On the one hand, Nabokov’s literary image owes a lot to modernist aesthetic conventions and manifestos (art as illusion, enchantment or a form of conjury); on the other hand, Nabokov shares with Salinger negative principles of self-construction, such as the struggle against the appropriation of the authorial image by critics and the reading public, the tactics of the selective or prepared interview, control over biographers, and the invisibility or opacity of the private self. In his foreword to the 1973 collection of interviews Strong Opinions, Nabokov justifies the tactics of the prepared interview (“The interviewer’s questions have to be sent to me in writing, answered by me in writing, and reproduced verbatim”) by emphasizing his perception of oral speech as just an imperfect image of writing, as “a first draft.” He immodestly states: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child” (xi). The perception of oral (“outward,” casual, uncontrollable) speech as a “betrayal” of writing is, again, common for reclusive authors, such as Salinger or Pynchon: “For them, talking, with its instantaneousness and simplification, is the exact opposite of writing fiction” (LeClair 50). No doubt, authorial reticence only incites readers’ and writers’ desire to re-write, interpret or continue the works of famous authors. The examples are numberless: Lo’s Diary by Pia Pera, a retelling of Nabokov’s Lolita told from Lolita’s point of view3 ; the anonymous publication of a story with the “Salingeresque title” From Rupert—With No Promises by Esquire’s fiction editor Gordon Lish (Weber 88); the collection Letters to J. D. Salinger, whose contributors were solicited by the editors to address Salinger in a monologic way, without any hope for response, and so on.

3

Dmitri Nabokov threatened legal action to prevent publication, yet, finally, the Nabokov estate and publishers agreed on publication, provided a 5% royalty would be paid to the estate and the book would be accompanied by Dmitri Nabokov’s foreword.

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As if trying to prevent the vogue of mystifications and the emergence of spurious doubles, both Nabokov and Salinger introduced substitute authors in their works, using characters and narrators as the author’s alter egos: Buddy Glass, whom Salinger admitted to be his second self, is presented as the author of the Glass family chronicle and some of Salinger’s short stories; Ada and Van Veen in Nabokov’s Ada write their own story; Sebastian Knight and V. V. in Look at the Harlequins! are imaginary authors of Nabokov’s own works. Nabokov was concerned with the “authorial presence” in his works, i.e. the presence of the implied author or the authorial narrator—insofar as the speaking function is ascribed to the narrator—and created an intense authorial dimension in his novels by overcoding the intradiegetic narrator’s message and exercising authorial control over it.4 Moreover, Nabokov practiced Hitchcockian authorial intrusions into the fictional world. Thus, in Bend Sinister, the character hears “the cautious crackling of a page” thrown into the author’s wastebasket (the page of the novel in which the character itself is created) and, having been shot to death in the fictional world, is nevertheless saved on the highest, extradiegetic level of reality. While introducing the authorial dimension in his works, Nabokov warned against the critic who “when reviewing a work of fiction keeps dotting all the i’s with the author’s head” (Nabokov, Opinions 18), i.e. against the naturalization of fictional agents and drawing a parallel between a fictional agent and the empirical author. The warning was not in vain: Nabokov scholars and critics often found themselves ensnared in the traps created by the author. The naturalization of Nabokov’s metaphor of the Author as invisible deity behind the text led to a rather obsessive search for the “ghostly” presences and “otherworldly agents” in Nabokov’s novels.5 Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire makes critics ponder over the issue of authorship, specifically over the authorship of Pale Fire: who is the real author of the text, after all?6 The title from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (“The moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun”) refers to the literary “thieves,” such as critics, commentators and biographers, who feed on other people’ inspiration and fame, like Kinbote striving to appropriate Shade’s poem in Nabokov’s novel. However, the relation is reversible: maybe, indeed, Kinbote, who believes himself to be the ex-king of the mysterious Zembla, inspired Shade and made him 4 5 6

See Tammi (Problems 318 ff) on the authorial codes in Nabokov’s fiction. See the critiques of Brian Boyd’s “occult interpretation” in Kuzmanovic and Naiman. See Tammi (Problems 201–21) on the narrative agents rivaling for the authorship in Pale Fire.

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incorporate numerous details of Zembla’s history in his poem. After all, “it is the commentator who has the last word,” according to Kinbote. Kinbote seems to epitomize the critic’s self-imposed mission of mediating between the reader and the author, taking on responsibility for the text, filling the gaps and explaining the text for the reader. Kinbote takes his adherence to the author to an extreme, while besieging Shade’s house and watching Shade through the binoculars. Nabokov and Salinger were likewise besieged by reporters and fans. The quest for Salinger became particularly intense at the time of his reclusion and invisibility when “Salinger’s characters looked more real, more plausible than their author” (Hamilton 175). The critic functions as an author’s proxy, yet, in the long run, the author becomes a critic’s shadow, veiled by multiple interpreters and biographers from the reader. Tammi sees a similar dynamics in Pale Fire: There are indices in the text suggesting that Kinbote may indeed have invented Shade (and much else besides). And there are intriguing hints of Shade’s having invented Kinbote. As the narrative keeps oscillating between these alternatives, the result is a vertiginous infinite regress. (“Pale” 576)

The critic’s and biographer’s presumed congeniality and co-authorship paves their way to immortality, where they enter hand-in-glove with their author. At the end of Salinger’s biography, Hamilton describes the lawsuit that Salinger initiated to compel his biographer to remove citations from unpublished letters included in the text. Hamilton concludes: The book I fell for has at last broken free from its magical author. But even so, I can’t rejoice that, whatever happens, my name and J. D. Salinger’s will be linked in perpetuity as those of litigants or foes, in the law school textbooks, on the shelves of the Supreme Court, and in the minds of everyone who reads this, the “legal” version of my book. (214)

No doubt, Nabokov used his own experience of working on Eugene Onegin’s translation and commentary when pondering over the commentator’s shadowy existence. But Pale Fire also reflects on the favorite Nabokovian idea of the writer’s life originating in fiction (see Tammi, “Pale” 582). Both Nabokov and Salinger invested their characters with the hidden or transformed autobiographical details disguising the real self as the fictional, artefactual self (see Richardson). Nabokov injected his distrust for the “average” reality in the reader and highlighted the reversibility of mimetic relations, where the “reality” becomes infused with fiction and fiction infi ltrated by “reality.” This distrust is akin to the Salingeresque neglect of the visible forms attainable in Eastern practices but unattainable in everyday life, suffused with poetry which is difficult to separate from visible things, “the main current of poetry

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that flows through things, all things” (Seymour’s diary in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters): Followed purity is the way of Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way. But for a discriminating man to achieve this, it would mean that he would have to dispossess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry. That is, he couldn’t possibly learn or drive himself to like bad poetry in the abstract, let alone equate it with the good poetry. He would have to drop poetry altogether. I said it would be no easy thing to do. (Salinger 72, 74)

For Nabokov, the relationship between fact and fiction, reality and poetry is that of communicating vessels: whereas reality is partially fictionalized and devoid of its incontestable obviousness, fiction reveals a potency of becoming real and acquires either the miraculous or threatening solidity of fact. Thus, in his novel The Gift, the fictional space suggests a real physical space by imitating other fictional spaces: a street begins with a post office and ends with a church, “like an epistolary novel” (12); a sequence of shops on the street follows “its own law of composition” or forms “a typical line” (13); “a long dotted line of beautiful days” is interrupted “by the interjection of a thunderstorm” (310); the St. Petersburg of memory is “restored here and there according to the best pictures of our national painters” (26); the blue in a poem is “hardly inferior to remembrance of blueness” (33), and so on. Nabokov produced a number of fictionalized autobiographies as well as mock or pseudo-biographies, as if defending himself from the future inept biographers pretending to know the “real author” behind the text or appropriating the authorial image for their own purposes. Thus, Look at the Harlequins! is a parodic text written in response to Nabokov’s biography by Andrew Field, unsatisfactory from Nabokov’s viewpoint: “Field’s distorted ‘VN’ inspired the real Nabokov to make his next novel [Look at the Harlequins!] a deliberate travesty of his own life and Speak, Memory in particular” (Boyd 614). The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a fictional attempt at a biography. Sebastian Knight and his biographer, Sebastian’s half-brother, may be regarded as two aspects of Nabokov’s personality, its Russian and English halves. Tracking down the evasive “real” Sebastian, reading the signs and symbols of his life, making desperate attempts to reach his personality via his books or his mistresses— the biographer’s effort seems to prove the impossibility of the biography. There is, however, another biographer in the story who managed to complete Sebastian’s biography, Mr. Goodman, Sebastian’s former secretary, a self-confident, active and ignorant fact collector. The quest form of biography has its precedents in the modernist tradition, such as A. J. A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo (1934), a biography

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of the English eccentric, writer and artist Frederick Rolfe. Interestingly, both Nabokov’s and Salinger’s biographers employed this form. Zinaida Shakhovskoy’s The Search for Nabokov (1979) is not unlike the Kinbotean effort to reach for the “real,” authentic Nabokov modeled according to the biographer’s beliefs and expectations: for Shakhovskoy, only the Nabokov of the Russian period is “real.” On the contrary, Ian Hamilton’s second version of Salinger’s biography, In Search of J. D. Salinger (1988), is a rather skillful attempt to cope with the legal prohibition on the publication of its first version and to construct Salinger’s “persona” from scratch. Hamilton mentions Symons’ quest form of biography as his model, yet the scarceness of partially banned evidence and a great deal of reconstruction makes Hamilton’s fictionalizing gesture generically akin to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Symons argues that his work is a description of a biographical quest for its subject rather than a traditional biography: Among the privileges of the biographer is an assumption of omniscience in respect of his subject.…In the present study a different method has been employed. So far, I have set before the reader (not an analysed summary of my researches but) an account of the search itself. (101)

In reality, however, Symons’ text displays several traditional features of academic biography: tracing and accumulation of documentary evidence, citations and references to documentary sources or witnesses’ accounts, drawing connections and observing relations between the biographical facts, not too-far-reaching hypotheses about meanings of these facts, etc. Hamilton, on the contrary, overtly resorts to fictional techniques to highlight the hypothetical nature of the biographical genre. Hamilton’s narrator narrates in first person plural, referring to the biographer’s split personality, which comprises two imaginary biographers. One tends to see the biography as a spoof and the subject of the biography as a fictional character, a “patchwork apparition” (53). However, he is cautious not to mistake the “gossip sort of fictional identities most of us have to live with” for the “image that attaches itself to the personality that has voluntarily gone public” (112), i.e. not to mix non-intentional and intentional “fictions”. As documentary data is scarce and recourse to fictional materials inevitable, the discovery of Salinger’s authentic letters in the archival files of Story magazine produces an effect of reality within a fictional text: “it was as if a fictional character we’d invented had been suddenly supplied with lines invented by himself” (53). Indeed, in Hamilton’s description, Salinger’s authorial persona subsumes both Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass; the biographer ascribes Holden’s nonconformist habits to the author and reads even innocent data as “tongue-in-cheek” talk (43).

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A second imaginary biographer, or the first biographer’s double, tends to treat a biography as “a police record” (66) and avidly looks for “real facts.” Hamilton’s two biographers-narrators, one skeptical about the possibility to write a biography, admitting his inability to catch the evasive author’s image, another a positivist and hard-working fact collector, correlate with Nabokov’s biographers, Sebastian’s brother (aka first-person narrator of the novel) and Mr. Goodman. Hamilton’s first biographer apparently dominates: he states that the biography is a “semispeculative portrait” (196); he sadly observes that Holden’s figure has a retrospective effect on the author’s public image: the author is “burrowing into the fictional world and disappearing,” his life finally made one with art.

Conclusion The fictionalizing gesture, i.e. disguising an autobiographical detail as a fictional one and vice versa, is employed by Nabokov and Salinger as both a textual and an autobiographical strategy—as a reaction to the presumed or, rather, imposed publicity and accessibility of the author’s persona. The author is not totally free while constructing his public image: literary communication is part of a broader interactional context where each participant’s intention becomes modified, repressed or enhanced by other participants’ intentions. There is always a gap between intention and accomplishment, the “self” and the “other,” which can only be bridged via indirect, mediated forms of communication, both textual and extratextual. Communication has a different meaning for each participant, and an author’s ability to manage his public image and to gain control over other participants’ intentions determines the fate of his literary image. The author often makes the audience believe and enact biographical fictions, yet the audience also appropriates an authorial function by extending fictions into the “real life” of the author. While revealing the Salingeresque motif in Lolita, Salinger’s biographer Paul Alexander almost inconspicuously places Nabokov among fictional characters such as Humbert Humbert and Seymour Glass: “Perhaps Nabokov identified with Seymour Glass’s unusual fondness for a young girl he meets on the beach…” (176).

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Works Cited Adamson, Jane. “Against Tidiness: Literature and/versus Moral Philosophy.” Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory. Ed. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 84–110. Alexander, Paul. Salinger: A Biography. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999. Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. Cawelti, John. “The Writer as a Celebrity: Some Aspects of American Literature as Popular Culture.” Studies in American Fiction 5 (1977): 161–74. Centerwall, Brandon S. “Hiding in Plain Sight: Nabokov and Pedophilia.” Texas Studies in Literature & Language 32.3 (1990): 468–84. Diamond, Cora. “Losing Your Concepts.” Ethics 98.2 (1988): 255–77. —. “Martha Nussbaum and the Need for Novels.” Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory. Ed. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 39–64. Foley, Barbara. “Wayne Booth and the Politics of Ethics.” Rhetoric and Pluralism: Legacies of Wayne Booth. Ed. Frederick J. Antczak. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 1995. 135–52. Frazier, Ian. “Marginal.” The New Yorker 28 Jun. 2010. Freeman, Elizabeth. “Honeymoon with a Stranger: Pedophiliac Picaresques from Poe to Nabokov.” American Literature 70.4 (1998): 863–97. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. 1983. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988. Grishakova, Marina. “The Voices of Madness: Performativity and Narrative Identity.” Disputable Core Concepts of Narrative Theory. Ed. Göran Rossholm and Christer Johansson. Bern et al.: Peter Lang, 2012. 131–47. Hamilton, Ian. In Search of J. D. Salinger. London: Faber & Faber, 1988. Herman, David. “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance.” Partial Answers 6.2 (2008): 233–60. Herman, Luc, and Bart Vervaeck. “The Implied Author: A Secular Excommunication.” Style 45.1 (2011): 11–28. Kindt, Tom, and Hans-Harald Müller. The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2006. Kubica, Chris, and Will Hotchman, eds. Letters to J. D. Salinger. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002. Kuzmanovic, Zoran. “‘Splendid Insincerity’ as ‘Utmost Truthfulness’: Nabokov and the Claims of the Real.” Nabokov’s World. Vol. I. Ed. Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 26–46. Lanser, Susan. “The Implied Author: An Agnostic Manifesto.” Style 45:1 (2011): 153–60. LeClair, Thomas. “Missing Writers.” Horizon, Oct. (1981): 48–52. Morgan, Joanne. Solving Nabokov’s Lolita Riddle. Sydney: Cosynch Press, 2005. Nabokov, Vladimir. The Gift. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963. —. “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English”. 1955. The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2000. 71–83. —. Strong Opinions. London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1973. Naiman, Eric = Найман Э. Литландия: аллегорическая поэтика “Защиты Лужина”. Новое литературное обозрение 54 (2002): 164–204.

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Nünning, Ansgar. “Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Implied Author: The Resurrection of an Anthropomorphicized Passepartout or the Obituary of a Critical Phantom?” Anglistik 8.2 (1997): 95–116. Park, Ed. “Humbert: An Introduction (Jerome David Salinger, Author of Lolita).” The Village Voice 1 Nov. 2005. Phelan, James. “Pluralism, Politics, and the Evaluation of Criticism.” Rhetoric and Pluralism: Legacies of Wayne Booth. Ed. Frederick J. Antczak. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 1995. 119–34. Richardson, Brian. “Nabokov’s Experiments and the Nature of Fictionality.” Storyworlds 3 (2011): 73–92. Salinger, Jerome David. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. Seymour: An Introduction. New York: Bantam Books, 1965. Schiff, Stacy. Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). New York: The Modern Library, 1999. Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994. Seeley, John. “Holden in the Museum.” New Essays on the Catcher in the Rye. Ed. Jack Salzmann. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 23–34. Steiner, George. “The Salinger Industry.” 1959. Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait. Ed. Henry Anatole Grunwald. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. 82–85. Symons, Alphonse James Albert. The Quest for Corvo. 1934. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1955. Tammi, Pekka. “Pale Fire.” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov. New York: Garland, 1995. 571–85. —. Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1985. Tynyanov, Jurii. “O literaturnoi evolucii.” 1927. Poetika. Istorija literatury. Kino. Moscow: Nauka, 1977. 270–81. Vinokur, Grigorii. Biografia i kultura. Moscow: GAHN, 1925. Weber, Myles. Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don’t Publish. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2005.

Hannu Tommola (University of Tampere)

Translators, Scoundrels and Gentlemen of Honor: Problems of Nabokov’s Loyalty … Nabokovian fiction becomes unintelligible if we do not uncover its hidden links. (Tammi, Subtexts 8)

This paper is a translatological case study, originally inspired by the narratological paper by Pekka Tammi on the problematic borderlines of free indirect discourse. Following Tammi, I draw most of the empirical material from Vladimir Nabokov’s (not very short) story “An Affair of Honor,” but whereas Tammi’s approach to the topic is strictly narratological, mine is devoted to an analysis of self-translation.1 Nabokov is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, but he was also a merciless critic, an original translation theorist, and, at times, an active translator himself. In this paper, I explore a certain discrepancy between the Russian and the English versions of Nabokov’s own work, particularly in the story “Podlec” (‘The Scoundrel’ [1927] / “An Affair of Honor” [1966])2, as well as his literary views on translation in general. Considering Nabokov as a translator, Jane Grayson singles out two aspects: “There is, firstly, the problem of ‘cultural translatability’.3… Secondly, there is the problem of translating formal stylistic effects, such as word play, alliteration, and assonance” (168). Grayson has shown that both in his early translation into Russian of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and in his English translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, “Nabokov adheres fairly consistently to his chosen approach.” This does not mean that

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I had not made acquaintance with Nabokov’s short stories until the newly formed Tampere FID team took a trip to Germany in 2003. In his brief introduction to the English translation republished in the collection A Russian Beauty and other stories Nabokov translates the Russian title “Podlec” as ‘The Cur’ (Russian Beauty 82), although the word that the author picked out as the title of the original is repeated several times in the course of the story translated as ‘scoundrel.’ In a footnote Grayson remarks that the term was used in Catford.

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the strategies would have been identical; no, they were quite different. In Alice he transposed the setting to Russia, changed names and places, as well as “historical and literary allusions.” Nabokov’s well-known case of Eugene Onegin bears witness to an entirely different strategy, where any transposition is excluded and explanatory descriptions are given in the extensive notes. While Nabokov’s understanding of “loyalty” to the original author implied faith with the latter’s supposed intentions, at the same time it apparently implied the right of the readers in the target culture to know everything that the source text suggested. In modern translation theory this corresponds to a foreignizing strategy, rather than a domesticating one. The dualistic concepts of literalness and freedom have been discussed and set in opposition through the known history of translation debates. I shall not be dwelling on the development of translation theory at any length; it suffices to mention that under different labels the dichotomy of formal vs. dynamic or functional (equivalence) has been employed. Though the question is not restricted to “strange” vs. fluent or idiomatic language (lexicon, syntax, discourse) or visibility vs. invisibility (transparency) on the linguistic level; domesticating and foreignizing (exoticization, estrangement) strategies can be applied to cultural and other levels as well. In Gideon Toury’s initial norms terminology, translations are located along the continuum between the extreme requirements of adequacy (towards the source text and culture) and acceptability (as a text in the target culture) (54).4 Andrew Chesterman—who warns of the dangers if adequacy is used in this sense—finds “Nabokov’s equation of literalness and absolute accuracy” “at the literal extreme” of the continuum (64, 12). Nabokov’s Onegin clearly comes close to the fidelity end, striving for maximal equivalence between the source and the target texts. Therefore, it is not astonishing that so many critics found Nabokov’s English rendering of Pushkin’s masterpiece odd, its language hardly acceptable as English: (1) …Nabokov produced a controversial rendering of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in 1964. He engaged in a kind of witful antitranslation, and the result is indecipherable without consulting the original Russian text and Nabokov’s lengthy commentary. (May, “Russian” 1208)

A foreignizing effect in translations can be achieved, quite paradoxically, by means of two opposite methods: 1) simply leaving source text/culture elements at various levels “untranslated” (cf. the example with X. B. Lambovsky below in [6]); and 2) providing the target text reader with in4

Most translation theorists have used the term equivalence in the sense Toury in his 1980 book used adequacy (and some use adequacy for his acceptability).

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formation on the foreign text/culture facts which remain implied in the original.5 This latter foreignizing type of translation practice that requires explications and lengthy commentaries, making the implicit explicit, has been recognized and described at least since the 1970s as explicitation (cf. Toury 601). The tendency to increased explicitness compared with the original has been observed in translations in general, and is regarded as one of the suggested translation universals (laws in Toury; observable behavioural regularity in Chesterman 40). It is obvious that, while domesticating Alice and (in a way) foreignizing Onegin, Nabokov did not adhere to either of these two opposing strategies when translating and correcting his own works, nor did he in practice stick to his theoretical views on translation (which in general favored fidelity and literalness). See Grayson’s testimony: (2) However, his translations of his own works reveal neither the same extremism nor the same consistency of method. He does not set out to transpose the setting and anglicize or russify his narrative; nor does he rely on notes to convey his full meaning. A good deal of explanation is incorporated in the text, and he sometimes abandons the original reference and substitutes an equivalent drawn from the culture of the ‘target’ language. In no translation does his practice appear to be governed by rigid principles. His methods seem rather to be dictated by the value in context of each individual example. (168) 6

The Setting of the Story and dramatis personae As an introduction to Nabokov’s story “Podlec” see (3) offered as a content description on a German literary Internet site (but you’d better see Tammi [Problems 77–79] as well). (3) Ohne es zu wollen fordert Anton Petrowitsch den Liebhaber seiner Frau zum Duell, flüchtet jedoch im letzten Moment vor seinen Sekundanten. Entehrt und einsam sitzt er in der leeren Wohnung und weiß nicht mehr weiter. Dann isst er ein Schinkenbrot.7

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The translator’s (in)visibility is similarly a paradoxical notion: the less s/he “translates,” the more s/he is visible. Again, the harder s/he works (i.e., attempts to find relevant equivalents and to replace odd realia with familiar ones, to avoid exotisms and barbarisms etc.), the less s/he is visible for a target culture reader. In all the examples, the bold emphasis has been added by me. ‘Not wishing to do it, Anton Petrovich challenges his wife’s lover to a duel, but takes to flight from his seconds at the last moment. Dishonoured and lonely, he is sitting in the empty appartment not knowing what next. Then he eats a ham sandwich.’ [my translation] Mesch, Stefan. “Vladimir Nabokov: Die Kurzgeschichten.” Ratgeber, lit06.

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Admittedly, the ham sandwich plays a certain role (a trivial detail typical of Nabokov) in the hero’s subconscious reflections at the end of the story, though this concise account perhaps rather recalls Daniil Kharms’ Incidents than Nabokov.8 Observe also the misleading leere Wohnung ‘empty apartment’ instead of the room in the squat little hotel. The original “Podlec” came out around 1927 in Berlin in the émigré journal Rul’ (‘Steering wheel’), and was reprinted in 1930 in the collection Vozvraščenie Čorba (‘The Return of Chorb’). The English version was first published in The New Yorker in 1966 as “An Affair of Honor,” translated by Dmitri Nabokov, with the father as a co-translator and supervisor. In the foreword to the collection A Russian Beauty and other stories the writer says: “Most of these thirteen pieces were translated by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. All are given here in a final English form, for which I alone am responsible” (xi).9 Neither the characters’ national status (expatriates), nor the time (after the Revolution) or the venue (Berlin) of their adventures that are mentioned in the very outset of the story in the translation have counterparts in the original. Some names of places and other details that occur in the flow of the narration may by aficionados be identified as Berlin and its surroundings, yet the story told could happen virtually anywhere. There is not much local color: even the remark by one of the characters on what German law says about duels is merely a literary joke (the more telling as it is not meant to be a joke by the author of the utterance).10 Nabokov’s protagonists here are a bunch of recently emigrated Russians living in Berlin. The main hero Anton Petrovich and his rival Berg are both engaged in some sort of business; Anton Petrovich’s seconds Mityushin and Gnushke remain quite obscure figures as to how they earn their living; Leontiev is “a journalist or something of the sort,” while the Kurdyumovs mentioned in passing “remained the paupers they had become after the Revolution.” The opponents Anton Petrovich and Berg are different in almost every respect known to us: Berg “loved to crack jokes,” was a good shooter with an athletic figure, while Anton Petrovich was “short-legged, rather plump,

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de. Magazin für Literaturkritik und literarische Öffentlichkeit, 2006 (http://www.lit06. de/archiv_rat/head/thema/rez_zu0606/thema0606_21rez.html) By the way, in “A Russian Beauty” Nabokov abruptly ends the narration proper in a very Kharmsian way with “That’s all ”—to finally conclude the story with a parable. Anyway, it is not reasonable to assume that the additions (see below) would have been inserted by a Lže-Dmitri. “As far as the German laws are concerned,” said Gnushke, “if you kill him, they’ll put you in jail for several years; if, on the other hand, you are killed, they won’t bother you.”

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and wore a monocle,” and had a scar on his cheek. We learn nothing of the characters’ backgrounds, except that they are Russian emigrants and that Berg is a veteran from the White army cavalry. It could be inferred that Berg is an ethnic German having his roots in imperial Russia—like Gnushke, who is reported to be a “Russified German.” Without really suggesting any other parallels between Nabokov’s Berg and Goncharov’s Stolz in Oblomov, what they share are German names and a pragmatic disposition. While the reader is given a seemingly admirable picture of Berg, it is intriguing that Nabokov named him Berg, as one of the figures in literature he referred to as examples of pošlost’ (Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol; see below) is the nouveau riche Berg from Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Anton Petrovich keeps being reminded of Berg during the last night before the notorious duel, for instance, by the title of the book the hero in vain tries to focus his attention on and to read: The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg [1924], of course). There is an indistinct reference to the author added in the English translation: “by some German writer or other,” which intensifies the impression of an unobservant hero. Behind the main developments in “Podlec” a couple of women play quite prominent roles, even though they are scarcely shown in action. It is Anton Petrovich’s wife Tanya who surprises his husband with her adultery and causes the whole problem, although she does not even appear live before the reader – she is taking a shower off-stage and then leaves the house without either the hero or the narrator. But she intrudes into Anton Petrovich’s mind, and the picture the reader gets of her is drawn by the hero’s thoughts. Another notorious femme fatale is Anna Nikanorovna (aka Adelaide Aleksandrovna), conspicuous, as it were, mainly thanks to the sight of her generous back while she is sleeping. She has one single line to say in the story (“You fellows better stop drinking”), but she is significant in a way to be discussed below.11

11

Tanya’s sister Natasha is seen shortly visiting Anton Petrovich after the catastrophe, and there is a point in the incident that enriches the impression of the hero’s nature and state of mind: he “suddenly found it strange to be saying ‘ty’ (thou) to Natasha. After all, he was no longer married to her sister.” Finally, the maid Elspeth (in Russian Elsbet, and in the translation into German Elsbeth), makes a short but impressive minor role as the only native Berliner(in) with spoken lines cited.

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Irreparable Losses…and More or Less Indispensable Changes The discrepancies between the Russian “Podlec” and the English “An Affair of Honor” can roughly be divided into two types: on the one hand, there are irreparable losses and indispensable changes resulting from the process of transfer of the text from one code to another, and considered normal translation shifts; on the other hand, there are more or less optional changes, additions and deletions, which could, theoretically, stem from a conscious translation strategy. In two cases some connotative information contained in the Russian original was lost, even though the translator did not “leave anything untranslated.” One of these omissions is due to grammar: the system of personal pronouns in Russian enables—indeed, enforces—a speaker to distinguish different levels of formality and status when addressing people. Like in many other languages, a single person can in Russian be addressed either using the 2nd person singular (ty), or the 2nd person plural (vy) pronoun (or the distinction is expressed by verb inflection), which reflect different grades of intimacy, politeness, status and the like. In modern English one can only employ you. In “Podlec”, the appalled Anton Petrovich is formal when on coming home he finds his companion Berg in his own bedroom, while the self-possessed Berg addresses Anton Petrovich by the first name and ty ‘thou’. A certain aspect of the characters’ different attitudes is lost together with the transfer to a linguistic code where all the relevant traces in their sociolinguistic behavior are eliminated.12 There are culturally triggered connotations and intertextual connections that may be unintelligible in another culture. The second case in “Podlec” involves an allusion effectuated by culture-bound connotations that require knowledge of the content in particular key texts of the source culture. In example (4) a reference to “The Queen of Spades” by Pushkin is embedded, namely to the episode where Herman sees that the playing card that appears—the queen of spades—winks (“slits”) an eye at him, as it were.13 12 Cf. Roman Jakobson’s frequently quoted observation that “languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” which also implies that it is the Russian translator who is in real difficulties facing a similar situation, having to decide between ‘thou’ and ‘you’ for English you. 13 Apropos playing cards, they are involved in several ways in Nabokov’s fiction. Tammi, investigating Nabokov’s numerological fi xation, finds that there are thirteen stories not only in Nabokov’s Dozen (1958), but in each of the four collections published during the author’s lifetime (Subtexts 94). Adding these up to 52, a “signal figure” in Nabokov’s “mythical system” arises (111; figure 3). This is, in fact, what a pack of cards also consists

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(4) “Best thing is to get some sleep,” he said aloud. But as soon as he closed his eyelids, Berg’s grinning face would appear before him, purposively slitting one eye.

Of course, this kind of allusion need not necessarily get lost; there are sophisticated readers, and there are less informed readers—also beyond translations. Further, there are a number of overt changes in the translation motivated by the inadequacy of simple replacement of linguistic material with equivalent material of the target language to produce metalinguistic jokes or the like. In many instances not much else could have been done—as translations “inevitably perform a work of domestication” (Venuti, Scandals 5), but often changes and omissions could be regarded as a deliberate domesticating strategy. In fact, if the reader is conscious of Gnushke being a Russified German, s/he would expect the name being spelled Gnuschke; and again, s/he would not accept the consideration of the nickname Gnut being derived from Gnushke (see below). It is in no way extraordinary if Nabokov in his advanced years was not in all respects satisfied with everything that the young man of the 1920s wrote. He seems to put even more weight on seemingly trivial details in his later years. This is evidenced by the writer’s comment on “The Passenger” (“Passažir” [1927]) when it was published in English: “By the end of the story everybody seems to have forgotten about the burnt match in the wineglass—something I would not have allowed to happen today” (Details 72). Nevertheless, he seems to have found his definite flair as early as in 1927. As Tammi rightly expressed it, “An Affair of Honor” presents “the author already at his shrewdest” (Problems 132), and both “The Passenger” and “The Doorbell” (“Zvonok”) are also empty of any exaggerated sentimentality or moral teaching. I assumed initially that the changes in the English version, primarily additions and insertions, were first and foremost due to a different audience, the American one. Of course, Nabokov’s writings have to a great extent undergone transportation “from one cultural milieu to another” (Tammi, Problems 251). But the changes and additions in the English translations do render the reference more explicit not just to Russian, but precisely to a Russian émigré background that was shared by the readers of the original:

of: the four suits—hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades—each set comprises thirteen cards, a Nabokov’s dozen.

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(5) In prefacing Glory he expressly laments the disappearance of “the unconscious precision of the common knowledge [held] by the Russian intelligent who was the main reader of [his] books [throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s]”. (251–52)

This background is often reflected in “brief utilitarian phrases” and “routine Russian matters”—as acknowledged in Nabokov’s Introduction to Mary (1970)—that are “obvious to fellow-émigrés but incomprehensible to foreign readers” (qtd in Tammi, Problems 252). However, not only the English translations contain trivial details; in “The Passenger” the writer-protagonist concedes: “It may seem strange, in a general way, that such trifles should bother me but, per contra, is not every writer precisely a person who bothers about trifles?” (Details 75), and this is an exact recounting of the original “Passažir.” Anticipating the onomastics issue I discuss below, note the example provided by Grayson to illustrate how Nabokov modified names in order to transfer a particular effect: (6) Where, again, names have humorous associations or involve wordplay, Nabokov sometimes substitutes names which convey analogous comic effects. Here is an example from Dar: я почему-то особенно ясно запомнил фигуру этого генерала (Х. В. Барановского – в нем было что-то пасхальное)… This becomes: ‘for some reason I can recall especially clearly the figure of this general (X. B. Lambovsky—there was something Paschal about him). Scammel suggested: ‘Kh. V. Baranovski—there was something Paschal about him’. (170)

The remark “there was something Paschal about him” is identical both in Michael Scammel’s and in Nabokov’s own version in the translation of Dar (1938; The Gift [1963]). However, Scammel’s suggestion with a mere transliteration of the name ruins the pun, of course, and makes the remark of “something Paschal” unintelligible for a reader without knowledge of Russian language and culture. But Nabokov’s version is intriguing: it does not only “translate” the surname, rendering Baranovski (baran ‘ram, sheep, lamb, mutton’) as Lambovsky, but at the same time it preserves the initials written in Cyrillic.14 It may not be of importance that there is no Russian male name that could give the Latin initial X,15 yet the point is more intricate: while the X as a not very plausible initial

14 15

This—total rejection of any translation—would be an extremely foreignizing translation method (which in its non-transparency reminds of the wish uttered by a president of Finland that his sayings should not be interpreted). Even if it is hard to imagine what this general’s name could be—Ksenofon?

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does not bother non-Russian readers, it is exactly the readers familiar with Russian culture that are able to enjoy the pun: X.B. associated with Easter. The shorthand X.B. is widely used in Paschal greetings: Христос Воскресе! ‘Christ is Risen!’ This example from Nabokov’s novel The Gift is a startling one; it leads me to revise my conclusion of the (consistent) translation strategy applied in “An Affair of Honor” (Tommola, “Nabokov’s Podlets”). Whereas Lambovsky alone is meant to refer the non-Russian reader to Easter, the retention of the Cyrillic initials is definitely for the connoisseurs—Nabokov wants to have his cake and eat it too. The many additions pertaining to Russian cultural background in the English translations are not always defendable from the point of view of adding “information,” or increasing exoticisms for the non-Russian reader in general. In some cases these additions sooner seem to be an expression of a certain nostalgia, inducing the author to “crack jokes.” For a reader familiar (and satisfied) with the original narrative, these additional details may seem unnecessary and have an irritating effect of exaggeration when accumulated. Unlike additions, which are frequent, omissions are rare in “An Affair of Honor.” The part omitted, demonstrated (and marked with boldface) in (7), has nothing to do with cultural differences. Instead, its elimination makes the reader’s job simpler and requires no guesses at this stage of reading. (7) Перед глазами у Антона Петровича мелькнула страничка в записной книжке, исписанная крестиками, а еще кроме этого: картонная фигура, которая вырывает у другой картонной фигуры зуб. Before Anton Petrovich’s eyes flashed a notebook page covered with Xs: diagram of a cemetery. [‘and additionally: a cardboard figure yanking off another cardboard figure a tooth’]

Whereas the episode with the notebook is motivated since it was told to the reader when Berg was introduced, the cardboard figure must remain a mystery for the reader, until s/he comes to the point later in the story (8) where the source of this picture in Anton Petrovich’s memory (Berg demonstrating his shooting skills) is unveiled. (8) A ferocious cardboard dentist bending over a panic-stricken patient of cardboard—this he had seen such a short time ago, on a blue, green, violet, ruby night, shot with fireworks, at the Luna Amusement Park. Berg took a long time aiming, the air rifle popped, the pellet hit the target, releasing a spring, and the cardboard dentist yanked out a huge tooth with a quadruple root.

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The omission exemplified in (7) is in agreement with the observed tendency to reduce the burden of the reader by minimizing his efforts to follow the story in all its complex interrelations. At the same time the translator (Dmitri Nabokov supervised by his father) has deviated from the principle which Nabokov is proud of in his otherwise apparently quite modest and reconciled confessions in the Russian Lolita’s postscript: (9) As a translator, I am not vain, I’m indifferent to the experts’ corrections, and pride myself only on the iron hand with which I checked the demons who incited me to deletions and additions. (Nabokov, “Postscript” 192)16

Changing Names The main heroes—Anton Petrovich (whose surname is never mentioned) and Berg (who is never referred to by his first name or the patronymic), and Anton Petrovich’s seconds in the announced duel, Mityushin and Gnushke—do not change their names in the translation. They all keep these names in the English version, but a domesticating strategy is applied in that Mityushin calls Gnushke in the translation Henry, instead of Genrik of the original, and eventually the German translation also rehabilitates him as Heinrich (Nabokov, Nachbar). Additionally, there is a brief metalinguistic discussion of the surname Gnushke reflecting Anton Petrovich’s thoughts. Russians’ connotations go to the adjective gnusnyj ‘wicked, obscene, scurrilous, foul, vulgar’; so the original tells that Mityushin’s friend has an ‘extremely vulgar surname,’ whereas the English translation replaces it with a domesticating (and bleaching) remark: “He was nicknamed the Gnut.” Another change is made in the names of Mr. Berg’s seconds (who never come to the scene). Both are first referred to by Mityushin incorrectly, in the Russian original as Malinin and Burenin, in the English version as Marx and Engels (!). Mityushin is corrected by Gnushke who, in the original, states that they are Burenin and Colonel Magerovski, whereas in the translation they are Markov and Colonel Arkhangelski. “Marx and Engels” is hardly a plausible memory disorder, nor meant to be interpreted merely as an accidental blunder.17 With “Marx and En16 17

Как переводчик, я не тщеславен, равнодушен к поправкам знатоков и лишь тем горжусь, что железной рукой сдерживал демонов, подбивавших на пропуски и дополнения (“Лолита” 537). These two fellows, Mityushin and Gnushke, play a most hilarious part in the story: one is occasionally sarcastic, produces laconic remarks without bothering to demonstrate too much accuracy, the second corrects him seriously all the time. They give the impression

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gels” Mityushin’s character is given an entertainer’s hallmark, he becomes funnier. “Angel” as short for Arkhangelski intrudes on Anton Petrovich’s mood (perhaps deriving from Mityushin’s “Engels”) as he anticipates the duel during the sleepless hours of the night. The Russian original simply refers to the seconds that would start counting: (10) Пистолет возьмет так. Секунданты начнут считать. ‘He’ll take the pistol so. The seconds will start counting.’ He would grasp the pistol like this. Colonel Angel would wave a handkerchief or count till three.

In “Podlec” Anna Nikanorovna is the lady encountered sleeping on the couch when Anton Petrovich comes to Mityushin’s place in a puzzled state of mind (he has just found Berg in his bedroom and tried to throw him a glove). The sleeping beauty’s name is of some importance for the attentive reader who is supposed to observe the subtle hints inserted here and there: Anton Petrovich’s journalist acquaintance Leontiev refers to his wife as Anna Nikanorovna, in the English version as Adelaida Albertovna. (11) “Adelaida Albertovna, of course, has a quick temper herself,” he added with a sigh. He was one of those middle-class Russians who use the patronymic when speaking of their spouses.

Grayson notes that Nabokov usually leaves the proper names unchanged except that the Russian patronymics are omitted in narrative passages, whereas “[t]he patronymic is often retained when it is used in conversation as a form of address” (169). In the translation, Nabokov’s narrator adds a comment upon the Russian usage of names. The addition in (11) may be motivated by the assumed non-acquaintance of the reading audience with the Russians’ use of patronymics. Another thing is that the use of the patronymic itself—which in no way seems odd to Russian readers—is required for the readers to draw the conclusion that Leontiev’s wife must be the lady who in the earlier episode at Mityushin’s place was found sleeping with her back turned to the company. Leontiev is one of the several characters provided with the quality of being “ridiculously unobservant” in Nabokov’s production (Tammi, Problems 127). Commenting specifically on this episode in “An Affair

of a double act, though without being a classical comic duo: Mityushin seems to be the leader, even if not necessarily reasonable or serious, while Gnushke is in a way both the straight man and the funny man. After all, he is serious, humorless, and consequently, unintentionally comic.

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of Honor,” Tammi recognizes that “the hero himself misses the connection,” and reasons that “[h]ad Anton Petrovich discerned in time that his spouse was not the only deceitful lady in the tale…he would surely have desisted from the farcical duel, and the ultimate dishonor might have been avoided” (132). Thus, here two “ridiculously unobservant” men meet. Meanwhile, it seems a riddle why Anna Nikanorovna was “derussified” into Adelaida Albertovna in the English translation. However, there might be a Nabokovian hidden Gogol popping up again. In his lectures on Russian literature Nabokov did not neglect to observe Gogol’s onomastic fireworks, for example, in chapter 9 of Dead Souls: (12) “There appeared a certain Sysoy Pafnutievich, and a certain Macdonald Carlovich, about whom nobody had heard before; …” Gogol cannot stop the two voluble ladies whom he sets chattering about the Chichikov mystery from divulging their names as if his characters actually escaped his control and blurted out what he wished to conceal. (“Nikolay Gogol” 23)

And here, in Gogol’s Government of Simbirsk, we encounter a certain Adelaida Sofronovna, too, and one of her sister-in-laws, Adelheida Gavrilovna. And it doesn’t stop there: in Gogol’s Igroki (The Gamblers) the object of the protagonist’s passion is a pack of cards called Adelaida Ivanovna.

The Duel Above, I referred to two issues explained for the readers in the very beginning of “An Affair of Honor.” More evidence of an explicitating tendency is provided by a number of realia present only in the English version. To Russian readers the conflicts in the Crimea need not be explained as the Russian civil war; the enemies Berg had fought against were, of course, Reds, and everybody knew Denikin was a (White) general. In an introductory comment on the English version of “Podlec” (set in Berlin of the 1920s) the writer characterizes the story as follows: “The story renders in a drab expatriate setting a belated variation on the romantic theme whose decline started with Chekhov’s magnificent novella Single Combat (1891)” (Russian Beauty 82). While the preparations and the waiting for the duel indeed are a central topic in the story, it is the English version that abounds in remarks on the conventional customs and supplies (trivial) details usually attached to duels in Russia. There was no need to explicate the relevant connotations for the Russian readers, whereas the protagonist’s inherited knowledge is not left implied in the English version. Meanwhile, the increased references and hints to the old

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duel culture through the consciousness of the “hero” causes the ironic effect of him becoming (even more) banal and ridiculous. In (13), an extract from Anton Petrovich’s thought flow in the night before the duel, all the parts (from [a] to [d]) that were inserted as new in the translation accentuate Russian cultural knowledge that the subconscious of the hero is dwelling on. The first addition (“they always do in books”) shows that when writing the original the author relied more on the readers to catch the irony, whereas the new readers of the translation are given the source where the protagonist could have got the silly idea of the opponents arriving at the duel place before himself. Thus, the explication reinforces Anton Petrovich’s naivety. (13) Berg and his seconds would probably be waiting there already, [a] they always do in books. Now, there was a question: does one salute one’s opponent? [b] What does Onegin do in the opera?…[c] Somebody (in a Pushkin story?) ate cherries from a paper bag. Yes, but you have to bring that bag to the dueling ground—looks silly.…[d] The tenor Sobinov crashed down so realistically that his pistol flew into the orchestra.18

Anton Petrovich has a faint feeling that it was in Pushkin that a hero ate cherries: in fact, in “The Shot” (one of the five short stories in Pushkin’s The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin), count B** is eating cherries from his cap (replaced by a paper bag in Anton Petrovich’s memory) and spitting around their stones while his opponent is aiming at him.19 All the added sentences [a], [b], [c] and [d] work similarly; they underline some “exotic Russianness.” The same applies to the addition in the translation a bit later, when Anton Petrovich in the morning tries to recollect the name of the last victim in dueling history: “Who was the last person killed in a duel in Russia? A Baron Manteuffel, twenty years ago.” Further, in an earlier episode where Anton Petrovich’s seconds report on the expedition that they had undertaken together with the rival’s to choose a place for the fight, Mityushin tells that they have found an ideal spot. The English version additionally refers to Lermontov’s duel: “…although, of course,

18

19

There is a narratological point in (13) worth a comment: the hero’s monologue consists of a kind of dialogue with himself (the question–answer structure). Whereas the English translation is a mixture of free indirect discourse (FID) and elements of direct speech, the Russian original is more homogeneous, but this is due to the linguistic properties of FID in Russian, rather than the translator’s choice: there are constraints on backshifting of tenses in North Slavonic languages, which make the identification of a “prototypical” FID difficult (see Tommola, “Almost”). In the original Russian story, the cherries are čerešni, fruits of the Prunus avium (wild/ sweet cherry), whereas in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard the trees bear višnju (Prunus cerasus).

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you don’t get the grand mountain decor as in Lermontov’s fatal affair.” This looks very much like a trick to promote the tale by adding some Russian exoticism. Duels are mentioned also in “Krasavica” (“A Russian Beauty”). I am inclined to claim that duels are mentioned two times (ex. 14 and 15) in the Russian original, although the first occurrence (14) has received a deviant interpretation in the English version.20 (14) А была в ее жизни пора, – на исходе шестнадцатого года, что ли, – когда, летом, в дачном месте близ имения, не было гимназиста, который не собирался бы из-за нее стреляться, не было студента, который... Одним словом: особенное обаяние, которое, продержись оно еще некоторое время, натворило бы... нанесло бы... Yet there was a time in her life, at the end of 1916 or so, when at a summer resort near the family estate there was no schoolboy who did not plan to shoot himself because of her, there was no university student who would not.…In a word, there had been a special magic about her, which, had it lasted, would have caused…would have wrecked… (15) Однако, в нее самое никто не влюблялся, и потому запомнился хам, который на благотворительном балу залапал ее, и плакал у нее на голом плече, и был вызван на дуэль маленьким бароном P., но отказался драться. But as for herself, no one fell in love with her, and this was why she long remembered the boor who pawed her at a charity ball and afterwards wept on her bare shoulder. He was challenged to a duel by the little Baron R., but refused to fight.

The verb streljat’sja (стреляться) with the reflexive marker -sja (-ся) has at least two readings. Firstly, and that is the reading resulting in the meaning ‘shoot him/herself’ presented in the English translation in (14), the marker is used in its ordinary reflexivizing function. Secondly, the Russian -ся marker has a reciprocal function as well (like the reflexive pronoun sich in German), and it triggers the meaning ‘shoot at each other’, which I think is the sense in the Russian “Krasavica” (1934). In “Podlec,” we have a series of synonyms Anton Petrovich considers for the fight in the night before the duel, and streljat’sja is one of them:

20 As the only one of the thirteen stories in the collection A Russian Beauty and other stories “A Russian Beauty” was translated by Simon Karlinsky. (Thus, there are a dozen stories translated by Dmitri Nabokov, and one by Karlinsky that completes the Nabokovian dozen.) Anyhow, Vladimir Nabokov adopted responsibility for all the thirteen stories (see above).

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(16) Дуэль. Здорово это звучит: дуэль. У меня дуэль. Я стреляюсь. Поединок. Дуэль. “Дуэль” – лучше. ‘A duel. It sounds superb: a duel. I am having a duel. I am shooting [reflexive / reciprocal]. Single combat. A duel. “Duel” is better.’ A duel. What an impressive word, “duel”! I am having a duel. Hostile meeting. Single combat. Duel. “Duel” sounds best.

Faithful Betrayers Another writer with views on translation—notably, on translations of his own work—is Milan Kundera. Whereas Nabokov was active in translating not just his own œuvre, but also works of other writers that he appreciated (albeit maybe not as much as himself), Kundera has, as a matter of fact, had opinions mainly of how he should not be translated—or that he should not be translated at all. In his essays Kundera has many interesting observations, some of which give a reason to compare his attitudes to Nabokov’s thinking. In their destinies as exiled writers with—even if very different—Slavic backgrounds they have a lot in common, beginning from the decision to change the language they produce their art in. It did not happen often in their generations, not in the 1980s when Kundera gradually adopted French, let alone earlier when Nabokov “turned his coat” (Grayson 2). In Les testaments trahis (1993) Kundera touches on an exiled artist’s problem when working in an alien culture. He points out that the situation is different depending on whether emigration takes place at a young or an adult age. It is interesting in comparison with Nabokov’s biography and literary memoirs to note what Kundera has to say of the significance of an artist’s early years: (17) …the subconscious, memory, language, all the understructure of creativity, are formed very early; for a doctor, that won’t make problems, but for a novelist or a composer, leaving the place to which his imagination, his obsessions, and thus his fundamental themes are bound could make for a kind of ripping apart. He must mobilize all his powers, all his artist’s wiles, to turn the disadvantages of that situation to benefits. (Testaments 94–95)

Further, Kundera’s concrete metaphor of emigration from his personal standpoint shows us “the pain of estrangement”: a woman to be “picked up” contrasted with a woman that once “belonged to us”: (18) We experience that estrangement not vis-à-vis the new country: there, the process is the inverse: what was foreign becomes, little by little, familiar and beloved. The shocking, stupefying form of strangeness occurs not with

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an unknown woman we are trying to pick up but with a woman who used to belong to us. Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence. (95)

Nabokov never returned to his native land, but Kundera’s words remind us of Nabokov’s feelings when he again approached his mother tongue while translating Lolita: (19) The history of this translation is a history of disillusionment. Alas, that “wondrous Russian tongue” that, it seemed to me, was waiting for me somewhere, was flowering like a faithful springtime behind a tightly locked gate, whose key I had held in safekeeping for so many years, proved to be nonexistent, and there is nothing behind the gate but charred stumps and a hopeless autumnal distance, and the key in my hand is more like a skeleton key. (“Postscript” 190)21

The self-translator’s feelings expressed in (19) are in quite a contrast to the writer’s afterword to Lolita’s first American edition (1958), where he looks back nostalgically to his first language as a preferred instrument. In the Russian postscript he compares Russian and English in favor of the latter with its subtle understatements and developed vocabularies, for example in the fields of technology, fashion, sport and science; in comparison with Russian, English is a mature modern language with fully-fledged terminologies in many special areas of the contemporary world; and notably having “freedom of the spirit!” (“Лолита” 535). Among Nabokov’s translations the most famous and contentious is his English rendering of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, with an abundant commentary. In theorizing about translation he appreciated loyalty and an accurate transmission of the source text. In connection with Nabokov’s Onegin we could speak of Theo Hermans’ “creative genius” problem: (20) If the literary artist is viewed as a uniquely gifted creative genius endowed with profound insight and a mastery of his native language, the work he produces will naturally come to be regarded as exalted, untouchable, inimitable, hallowed. (Qtd in May, Translator 167–68)

This oddly recalls the strategy usually applied in early translations of the Bible and often in other religious texts as well. Andrej Fyodorov called this ideal practice of literal translation svjaščennyj trepet ‘holy tremble’,

21

In the original: “История этого перевода – история разочарования. Увы, тот «дивный русский язык», который, сдавалось мне, всё ждет меня где-то, цветет, как верная весна за наглухо запертыми воротами, от которых столько лет хранился у меня ключ, оказался несуществующим, и за воротами нет ничего, кроме обугленных пней и осенней безнадежной дали, а ключ в руке скорее похож на отмычку” (“Лолита” 534).

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which was not a theoretically substantiated principle, but rather something that was felt to be necessary respect, piety before the sacred texts and devotion to the words of God.

The Unbearable Smoothness of Translation Mais c’est très mauvais de lire Hemingway comme un écrivain français! (Kundera, L’art du roman 150)

In his interpretation of Flow (couler in French) as one of 63 words explained in The Art of the Novel22 Kundera quotes Chopin, who reports in his letters how exasperating he considered the delighted admirers’ reactions to his music, expressed as: “Ah, how beautiful! It flows like water!” (Art 130–31). Kundera takes the same position to the “partisans of ‘flowing’ translation,” replying to their critics: “It’s not the way to say it in Czech either!,” and quotes his Italian publisher, Roberto Calasso: “The mark of a good translation is not its fluency but rather all those unusual and original formulations that the translator has been bold enough to preserve and defend” (131).23 This is, in principle, the way Nabokov transferred Pushkin into English. And Venuti’s protest against the demand of the translator’s invisibility can be applied to the “fluent” translations Englishing Russian literature as well, thus defending Nabokov’s “distortion” of the English language (“Invisibility”; Invisibility). Nabokov’s theoretical formulations come close to Kundera’s. Grayson aptly cites a few characteristic points of Nabokov’s translation ideology as it appears in the Foreword to Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, which he translated together with his son: (21) There he contrasts the ‘experienced hack’, with his malpractices of ‘judicious omission, amplification and levigation’, with the ‘honest translator’, whose principal virtue is faithfulness and who will, like himself, ‘gladly sacrifice to the requirements of exactness a number of important things— good taste, neat diction and even grammar’. He inveighs against the idea that a translation ‘should read smoothly’ and ‘should not sound like a translation’, and insists that the good translator should not shrink from rendering faithfully the inelegancies of Lermontov’s style—its dry drabness, its redundancies, its hackneyed epithets. (Grayson 15)

22 The French original contains 73 words (L’art 143–85). 23 «On reconnaît une bonne traduction non pas à sa fluidité mais à toutes ces formules insolites et originales que le traducteur a eu le courage de conserver et de défendre» (L’art 150).

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Nabokov’s hostility towards the smoothness of an ideal translation corresponds exactly to Kundera’s antipathy towards the requirement of flow. The same goes for one of the “malpractices” of an “experienced hack” criticized by Nabokov, namely, levigation, as well as good taste and neat diction—the “important things” Nabokov says he is ready to “gladly sacrifice.” In the etymology of levigation we have the Latin adjective lēvis, which means ‘smooth’ and ‘light’, and is akin with the English level (Chambers). Incidentally, leveling is one of the proposed universal hypotheses in translation (Pym; leveling out in Baker 184); and, as for “good taste,” compare Kundera’s definition of kitsch as the “absolute non-shit” («Le kitsch est la négation absolue de la merde»; L’art [99]). Nabokov delivers in the third chapter of Nikolai Gogol a famous popular phonetic description of the sound structure in the word pošlost’, or rather the auditory impression given by the Russian word to an attentive listener. The fact itself is of course no Russian specialty, even if, in Nabokov’s opinion, (educated) Russians used to be sensitive to the phenomenon. The notion of “smug philistinism” may have lexicalized in Russian, “because of the cult of simplicity and good taste in old Russia” (313). The concept of kitsch discussed by Kundera is unmistakably related to pošlost’.24 For Nabokov pošlost’ means something “falsely important,” “falsely beautiful,” “falsely clever,” and “falsely attractive” (313). Perhaps there is too much beauty and perfection in the art of Tchaikovsky and Repin that made them impossible for Nabokov to appreciate too much: (22) …Russians themselves are responsible for the two greatest insults that have been hurled at Pushkin’s masterpiece [Evgenij Onegin]—the vile Chaykovski (Tschaykowsky) opera and the equally vile illustrations by Repin which decorate most editions of the novel. (“Problems” 78)

Nabokov’s sarcastic antipathy towards Tchaikovsky is shared by Kundera; moreover, the latter also dislikes Rachmaninoff. However, Kundera does not show overt hostility to Pasternak: mentioning Doctor Zhivago among Hollywood films exemplifying kitsch, he adds in the brackets: ô pauvre

24 In Valentin Kiparsky’s opinion Kitsch is included in pošlost’ (x). He referred to the latter in terms of bad reproductions of Ferdinand von Wright’s oil-painting “The Fighting Capercaillies” (1886) hanging in homes all over Finland, and of the smug Gartenzwerge populating the good Bürgers’ yards in Germany. Olavi Paavolainen, in his war time diary (30), did not use the word, but the contemporary illustrated magazines L’Illustration, Illustrated London News and Match he was annoyed with clearly represent kitsch. His irritation was obviously shared by Nabokov, who considered ads as one of the examples of American pošlost’, and characterized a philistine as a faithful reader of Saturday Evening Post (“Art” 311–14).

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Pasternak! ‘poor Pasternak!’ (L’art 161). Nabokov, in turn, cannot hide his disapproval of either of the two Soviet Russian Nobel laureates, Sholokhov and Pasternak, while hinting at Russian émigrés who “read Soviet novels enthralled by cardboard Quiet Don Cossacks …or by that lyrical doctor with his inclinations toward a vulgar mysticism” (“Postscript” 192).25 Gauti Kristmannsson maintains that it is in their attitude towards translation that both Kundera and Nabokov reveal their bourgeois properties, although they definitely refuse to accept the bourgeois idea of the novel’s task to convey a message. The moral control of the author’s spiritual property, which both writers defend, derives according to Kristmannsson from the bourgeois values that they reject in requiring absolute freedom of art. However, where the art of translation is concerned, they do not tolerate this freedom. And, it is here, concludes Kristmannsson, that Kundera and Nabokov betray their bourgeois roots. (26–27) Still, if Nabokov was constantly preoccupied “with artistic considerations in the translations which he has made or supervised” (Grayson 167), then Kundera is obsessed by controlling translations of his own work (see Sabatos; Woods). Admittedly, “[t]he author’s rights are absolute”, as Grayson (167) says, and “[i]t would be meaningless and irrelevant to lay the charge of otsebyatina against a translator who intervenes in his own creation”, but whereas Nabokov was “simply exercising his prerogative as an author”, Kundera seems to manipulate not only his own work but his readers as well—but that is another story.

Nabokov’s Hat-Trick The musical metaphor of polyphony was seriously applied to literature by Mikhail Bakhtin. Contrary to the narrative in Kundera, who has himself accentuated the role of polyphony (without a reference to Bakhtin) in the composition of his books (L’art 94–95), the voices of Nabokov are not that easy to explain in terms of Bakhtinian dialogism. Tammi, having analyzed Nabokov’s Dar/The Gift (where the hero and the narrator seem to be competing for the right to take the point of view the narration is conducted from) asks rhetorically whether the line of analysis that he started, when borrowing the structure of the title for his monograph from 25

[Зарубежные же русские запоем] читают советские романы, увлекаясь картонными тихими донцами [на картонных же хвостах-подставках] или тем лирическим доктором с лубочно-мистическими позывами, [мещанскими оборотами речи и чаровницей из Чарской, который принес советскому правительству столько добротной иностранной валюты] (“Лолита” 537).

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Bakhtin, could be continued in Bakhtin’s sense of polyphony (Problems 97).26 However, the answer is negative: Bakhtin’s and Nabokov’s concept of voices are contrasted and the supervising role of Nabokov’s narrator is argued for in depth, and, consequently, the anti-polyphonic nature of Nabokov’s poetics is shown (97–101). Thus, Nabokov can be said to display a triple anti. Nabokov’s books were called antinovels by Sartre (7), and his Eugene Onegin gained the title of an anti-translation (see the quotation in [1]). Finally, in his narratological analysis Tammi has shown that Nabokov is an anti-polyphonist rather than a Bakhtinian “dialogist.” Unlike Kundera, whose production in Czech and in translations into French and English is laborious and problematic—due to the changed originals (see Sabatos; Stanger; Venuti, Scandals 5–6), Nabokov left his Russian originals untouched (possibly because he did not see any substantial market for them). Therefore, translators and publishers considering bringing Nabokov’s early production to new readers face a delicate decision: which of the two coherent versions, the Russian original, or the English “ultimate” one, should be chosen as the source text. A non-compromising solution would be to publish two separate translations, which would, incidentally, differ more (but less critically!) from each other than the “male” and “female” versions of the Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) by Milorad Pavić. Another one would be an option that honors Nabokov and his work on Eugene Onegin: foreignizing and explicitating translations of the originals provided with discussion and explanations of all changes and additions observed in the English versions.

Works Cited Baker, Mona. “Corpus-Based Translation Studies: The Challenges that Lie Ahead.” Terminology, LSP and Translation: Studies in Language Engineering in Honour of Juan C. Sager. Ed. Harold Somers. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1996. 175–86. Bakhtin, M. M. = Бахтин, Михаил Михайлович. Проблемы творчества Достоевского. Ленинград: Прибой. 1929. [2-е изд. Проблемы поэтики Достоевского. Москва: Советский писатель, 1963]

26 In titling his monograph Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics Tammi paid homage to Bakhtin, whose seminal work was reissued in 1963 with the title Problemy poètiki Dostoevskogo (‘Problems of Dostoyevski’s poetics’). However, with the title of his book Tammi did not refer to Bakhtin’s idea of polyphony, but the part of the title that was changed in the second edition: poetics (Tammi, Problems 3–5). The original of 1929 bore the title Problemy tvorčestva Dostoevskogo (‘Problems of Dostoyevski’s creative production’).

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Catford, J. C. A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. London: Oxford UP, 1965. Chambers English Dictionary. Cambridge: Chambers, 1989. Chesterman, Andrew. Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997. Fyodorov, Andrej = Фёдоров А. В. Основы общей теории перевода (лингвистические проблемы). 1953. 4-е изд., перераб. и доп. Москва: Высшая школа, 1983. Grayson, Jane. Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov’s Russian and English Prose. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” On Translation. Ed. R. A. Brower. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1959. 232–39. Kiparsky, V. [Preface]. Nikolai Gogol, Valitut teokset 1. Ed. and trans. Juhani Konkka. Porvoo: WSOY, 1959. vii–xiv. Kristmannsson, Gauti. Damit wir wissen, was sie geschrieben haben? Übersetzungskriterien bei Kundera und Nabokov. Vaasa and Germersheim: University of Vaasa / Johann Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 1998. Kundera, Milan. L’art du roman: Essai. 1986. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. —. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. London: Faber & Faber, 1999. —. Les testaments trahis: Essai. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. —. Testaments Betrayed. Trans. Linda Asher. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. May, Rachel. “Russian: Literary Translation into English.” Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, vol. 2. Ed. Olive Classe. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000. 1204–9. —. The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1994. Nabokov, Vladimir = Сиринъ, В[ладимир]. Возвращеніе Чорба. Рассказы и стихи. Берлинъ: Слово, 1930. Nabokov, Vladimir = Набоков, Владимир. “Лолита. Постскриптум”. Избранные произведения. Москва: ЭКСМО, 2002. 534–38. —. “An Affair of Honor.” A Russian Beauty and Other Stories. 81–115. —. “The Art of Translation.” Lectures on Russian Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982. 315–21. —. Details of a Sunset and Other Stories. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976. —. Der neue Nachbar: Erzählungen 1925–34. Trans. Jochen Neuberger, Blanche Schwappach, Rosemarie Tietze, Thomas Urban, and Dieter E. Zimmer. Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, 1999. —. Nikolai Gogol. 1944. New York: New Directions, 1961. —. “Nikolay Gogol.” Lectures on Russian Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982. 15–62. —. “Postscript to the Russian Edition of Lolita.” Trans. Earl D. Sampson. Nabokov’s Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on His Life’s Work. Ed. J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. 188–94. —. “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English.” 1955. The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2000. 71–83. —. A Russian Beauty and Other Stories. New York and Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1973. Paavolainen, Olavi. Synkkä yksinpuhelu: Päiväkirjan lehtiä vuosilta 1941–1944. 1946. Helsinki: Otava, 1982. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse. Vol. 1. 1964. Trans. Vladimir Nabokov. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

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Pym, Anthony. “On Toury’s Laws of How Translators Translate.” Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury. Ed. Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Daniel Simeoni. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008. 311–28. Sabatos, Charles. “Shifting Contexts: The Boundaries of Milan Kundera’s Central Europe.” Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia. Ed. Brian James Baer. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011. 19–31. Sartre, Jean-Paul. [Preface.] Nathalie Sarraute, Portrait d’un inconnu: Roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1956. 7–16. Stanger, Allison. “In Search of The Joke: An Open Letter to Milan Kundera.” New England Review 18.1 (1997): 93–100. Tammi, Pekka. Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1985. —. “Risky Business: Probing the Borderlines of FID. Nabokov’s ‘An Affair of Honor’ (Podlec) as a Test Case.” Linguistic and Literary Aspects of Free Indirect Discourse from a Typological Perspective. Ed. Pekka Tammi and Hannu Tommola. Tampere: University of Tampere, 2003. 41–54. —. Russian Subtexts in Nabokov’s Fiction: Four Essays. Tampere: Tampere UP, 1999. Tommola, Hannu. “Almost Free: Tense and Time Reference in Slovak and Hungarian FID.” FREE language INDIRECT translation DISCOURSE narratology: Linguistic, Translatological, and Literary-Theoretical Encounters of FID. Ed. Pekka Tammi and Hannu Tommola. Tampere: Tampere UP, 2006. 51–87. —. “Nabokov’s Podlets (‘The Scoundrel’) vs. An Affair of Honor.” MikaEl 3 (2009). http://www.sktl.net/mikael/vol3.php Toury, Gideon. In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: Porter Institute, 1980. Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. —. “The Translator’s Invisibility.” Criticism 28 (1986): 179–212. —. The Translator’s Invisibility. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Woods, Michelle. Paths in the Fog: Translating Milan Kundera. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2006.

Brian McHale (The Ohio State University)

Affordances of Form in Stanzaic Narrative Poetry In this paper I pursue some further aspects of a topic I addressed in “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry.”1 I argued there that poetry is crucially distinguished from other forms of verbal art by its foregrounding of segmentivity—the spacing of language. If this is so, then a priority for narratological approaches to poetry—which I advocated in that paper—is analysis of the potential for interaction between poetry’s segmentation and the segmentation proper to narrative. I adopt my notion of segmentivity, and the related notions of measure and counter-measure, from Rachel Blau DuPlessis and John Shoptaw, respectively. Poetry, DuPlessis writes, involves “the creation of meaningful sequence by the negotiation of gap (line break, stanza break, page space).” Poetry “is the kind of writing that is articulated in sequenced, gapped lines and whose meanings are created by occurring in bounded units…operating in relation to…pause or silence.” “These bounded units,” DuPlessis goes on, “can be made in varying sizes and with a varying semantic goal”: Line terminations may be rounded off by rhyme, or by specific punctuation marks, but they are basically defined by white space.…These segmented units can be organized into the larger page-shapes of fi xed stanza, or into other pagespace thought units with their termini of various kinds.…All the meanings poetry makes are constructed by segmented units of a variety of sizes. The specific force of any individual poem occurs in the intricate interplay among the “scales” (of size or kind of unit) or comes in “chords” of these multiple possibilities for creating segments. (“Manifests” 51)2

1

2

A version of this paper was presented in the Contemporary Narratology Workshop at the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, Birmingham, England, 4–6 June 2009. Some parts of the paper appeared in the South African journal Literator 31.3 (2010): 1–12. In “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry” I asserted that DuPlessis had not reprinted her one-page “Codicil on the Definition of Poetry” when she reprinted “Manifests,” the essay to which it had been attached, in Blue Studios (73–95). While this is strictly speaking correct, the “Codicil” does in fact appear elsewhere in Blue Studios, folded into an essay on George Oppen (198–99).

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Shoptaw defines a poem’s measure as “its smallest unit of resistance to meaning” (212). Measure determines where gaps open up in a poetic text, and a gap is always a provocation to meaning-making. It is where meaning-making is interrupted by spacing, where the text breaks off and a gap opens up—even if only an infinitesimal one—that the reader’s meaning-making apparatus must gear up to bridge the gap and close the breech. Shoptaw specifies the scales or levels of measure that are possible in poetry. Poetry can be word-measured, as it is, for instance, in certain modernist one-word-per-line poems, e.g., by William Carlos Williams or e. e. cummings; it can be measured at the scale of the phrase, as it is, for instance, in Emily Dickinson’s poetry; it can be measured at the scale of the line, as it normally is in most lyric poetry; it can be measured at the level of the sentence, as in prose-poetry or in the Language poets’ practice of the “New Sentence” (239–51); and it can be measured at the level of the section, as in sonnet cycles or in sequences like The Waste Land (251–55). Moreover, although Shoptaw neglects this possibility, it can also be measured at the level of the stanza, as in the stanzaic narrative forms I propose to begin considering here. Poetry is not only measured, but typically countermeasured, so that spacing at one level or scale is played off against spacing at another level or scale: line against sentence, as in enjambed blank verse; phrase against line and stanza, as in Dickinson’s poems; and so on. But narrative poetry can also be countermeasured against the segmentation that is specific to narrative. Narrative is itself segmented at various levels and scales: into events, scenes, plot-moves and episodes at the level of story; into shifting voices and micro-shifts of focalization; into segments of time, space and consciousness; and so on. Gaps abound, of all kinds, on all levels. In poetic narratives, narrative’s own segmentation interacts with the segmentation “indigenous” to poetry to produce complex interplays among segments of different scales and kinds—“chords,” as DuPlessis calls them (“Manifests” 51). A program of research into narrative in poetry—to which the present paper, like its predecessor, aspires to contribute—would focus on these interactions. It might begin by distinguishing provisionally among three broad types of narrative poem: poems in continuous forms, such as the classical hexameter, terza rima, the alexandrine, blank verse, and the closed “heroic” couplet; poems in discontinuous stanzaic forms; and modernist and postmodernist narrative poems in free or irregular forms. Of course, even continuous-form poetry is segmented, that is, spaced, otherwise it would not function as poetry at all; nevertheless, there are degrees of discontinuity, ranged along a spectrum of possibilities. On that spectrum, narrative stanzaic poems are likely to be more interrupted, “gappier,” than poems in blank verse or terza rima.

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One part of this research program would explore a family of longer, relatively complex stanza forms featuring interlaced end-rhymes, including ottava rima, rhyme royal, the Spenserian stanza, and the Onegin stanza, and their variants. Each of these forms uses end-rhyme to group lines into smaller potential units that might interact in various ways with narrative units—concordantly, where formal units and narrative units coincide, or discordantly, where they diverge, or in various types of counterpoint. Here a useful tool might be the concept of affordances, borrowed from software designers and media theorists, and ultimately from perceptual psychology (see Gibson; Varela, Thompson and Rosch). Each of these stanza forms offers different affordances, different potentials for use; each encourages or discourages certain interactions with narrative segments. I am choosing my words carefully: encourage and discourage, rather than constrain or inhibit or determine. Narrative structure is free to override the stanzaic structure of narrative poems; it may ignore the promptings or resistances of form. The affordances of form are only options, not mandates.

The Faerie Queene stanza (ABABBCBCC) Here I want to turn to the first of my three examples: the affordances of Edmund Spenser’s stanzaic form in his long narrative poem, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). I will be taking advantage of Claire Regan Kinney’s excellent analysis of Spenser’s narrative poetics. Kinney draws special attention to two of the opportunities for narrative segmentation afforded by the nine-line stanza form that Spenser devised for his poem (see Appendix One). The interlaced end-rhyme scheme yields two potential quatrain units—ABAB and BCBC—plus a final line that rhymes with lines six and eight; but it also yields what Kinney calls a “displaced couplet” near the middle of the stanza, lines four and five. This displaced couplet throws emphasis on line five, which consequently often functions, Kinney says, as “a pivot about which the stanza doubles back on itself” (70). I am not in a position to say how often in the course of the poem line five’s function is pivotal, in Kinney’s sense, but certainly it is ambiguous in its affiliation, sometimes aligning itself with the first quatrain, to form a five-line unit, sometimes with the second quatrain. The other affordance of the Spenserian stanza is, of course, its strong closure: the terminal alexandrine decisively ends the unit—so decisively, indeed, that there is essentially no enjambment across stanzas anywhere in The Faerie Queene. Again, because this is an affordance, not a mandate or prohibition, it would be misleading to claim that it was impossible to construct a narrative segment that straddles adjacent stanzas, but the

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formal resistance to such overriding of stanza segmentation is so strong that Spenser himself almost never ventures it. To illustrate the narrative affordances of the Spenserian stanza, I have isolated a sequence of six stanzas from Book III, canto 1 (stanzas 14–19; see Appendix One) that constitute a compact narrative episode comprising several tightly integrated events. This is the first and paradigmatic instance of a plot motif that recurs multiple times throughout Book III and its companion, Book IV: a damsel on horseback—in this case Florimell—dashes across the field of vision, with a would-be ravisher in hot pursuit. Major narrative segmentation throughout this miniature sixstanza episode coincides with the intervals between stanzas, reflecting the form’s strong closure and resistance to stanza-to-stanza enjambment. Weaker, less decisive narrative segmentation falls variably around midstanza, reflecting the affordances of the “displaced” central couplet. Events in stanza 14 are recounted in summary: the fairy knight Guyon, Prince Arthur and his squire Timias, and the female knight Britomart travel Long and At length through a wilderness landscape. The change of narrative pace to scene is signaled at the beginning of stanza 15: All suddenly Florimell streaks across the knights’ field of vision. The likelihood that this stanza reflects their collective focalization of her is confirmed by the last phrase, her passing to behold. (There is also a trace of embedded focalization: they see that she is seeing something—her eye she backward threw, stanza 16—though what she is seeing does not actually appear until stanza 17.) The substance of the knights’ vision in stanza 15 is, in effect, a partial blason of Florimell, presumably foreshortened by the speed of her passage: they first register her horse (milk-white), then her face; then her garments and her horse’s trappings. Here line five has been absorbed into the first unit (horse and damsel); the shift to garments and trappings occurs from line six (with its C rhyme). The mid-stanza shift in stanza 16 occurs a line earlier than in stanza 15: the first quatrain unit continues the blason (her hair); the second quatrain shifts to an epic simile at the discourse level (All as a blazing starre and so on): her passage (and especially her hair streaming out behind her) is like a comet. I identify this as a shift to the discourse level on the assumption that this simile is attributable directly to the poet, who does not belong to the poem’s storyworld, but it might just as plausibly be construed as reflecting what is passing through the knights’ minds, and in that sense to belong to the level of the storyworld. At the beginning of stanza 17, the object of the knights’ focalization changes. Florimell has passed out of sight, and in her place they see her pursuer: So as they gazed after her a while, / Lo where a griesly Foster forth did rush. Here the mid-stanza shift that the form affords is overridden,

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and the description of the Forester’s abuse of his mount extends from line three to seven, without regard to the groupings proposed by the rhyme scheme. The knights’ focalization of the Forester is reiterated at the beginning of st. 18—when those gentle knights did see—and now they spring into action, riding off to rescue Florimell. Or more exactly, they all ride off except for Britomart, the Knight of Chastity, who, refusing to be swept up in the passions of the moment, keeps her wits about her and stays put. Stanza 19 shifts to her individual point of view, and we get a glimpse of what is passing through her mind. At this point, the plot of Book III splits into several strands, and the interlacement of plot-strands that Spenser learned from Ariosto and medieval romance begins. We continue to follow Britomart through the rest of this canto and most of the next three, only resuming Prince Arthur’s thread three-quarters of the way through canto iv, and Timias’s part-way into canto v. (Unless I am mistaken, Guyon disappears from this Book altogether.) In this example, the formal segmentation afforded by the rhyme-scheme and the strong closure of the stanza’s final alexandrine generally coincide with narrative segmentation. Apart from one instance (stanza 17) where narrative continuity overrides the segmentation afforded by the form, the relation between stanza form and narrative here is generally concordant, which is typical of Spenser’s poetics throughout The Faerie Queene.

Ottava rima (ABABABCC) For my second example, I am relying on Catherine Addison’s brilliant account of what she does not quite call—though she might have—the narrative affordances of the ottava rima stanza. Organized by its end-rhymes into an interlaced sestet (ABABAB) and a separate couplet (CC), the ottava rima stanza, Addison argues, is predisposed by its verse design— its affordances—to accommodate novelistic discourse. The alternating rhymes of the sestet means that these lines tend to “lean forward” (133), encouraging narrative progress, while the couplet breaks sharply from the sestet, accommodating a shift into reflection, commentary, irony, aphorism, or a different voice or perspective. In other words, ottava rima is something like a template for the polyvocality that Mikhail Bakhtin associated with the novel. According to Addison, the Italian Renaissance poets Ariosto and Tasso used ottava rima to produce “not epics but novels” (134)—Ariosto gleefully, Tasso somewhat reluctantly. Ariosto exploited the couplet to shift from narrative to commentary, especially ironic commentary, juxtaposing

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incongruent viewpoints. Tasso, more invested in unity and epic decorum, resisted this kind of irony, but the ottava rima form sometimes betrayed him into it anyway. Lord Byron, of course, took full advantage of the ottava rima stanza’s capacity for polyvocalism in Don Juan. Typical of what Addison calls his “shock tactics” (139) is Byron’s use of the couplet to produce an abrupt shift in tone from serious to facetious, or vice-versa, or a shift from story to discourse or from discourse to story, or from one focalizer to another. Instead of illustrating these Byronic shock tactics with an example from Don Juan itself, however, let me use one from a later practitioner of the ottava rima in Lord Byron’s mode: Kenneth Koch in The Duplications (1977), the second installment of a long narrative poem eventually published under the title Seasons on Earth (1987; the first installment, in 1960, was Ko, or A Season on Earth). Addison (140) singles out one particular stanza of The Duplications to illustrate Koch’s Byronic use of the affordances of the ottava rima form; this is the third of the stanzas reproduced in Appendix Two. The inhabitants of the island of Samos have been swept into the sea by a catastrophic tsunami, and the sestet of this stanza voices their collective reflections on their situation, using free indirect style: To stay afloat and find their island home Just one more time, and then, they vowed, forever They’d be obedient to the speechless dome And parchless eye of heaven; they would never Do any bad or selfish thing, nor roam From Samos off to any place whatever.

The couplet shifts abruptly into a different voice, reframing the Samians’ plight in an ironic perspective: These vows were heard by no one but the fishes Whom usually they fried and served on dishes. (Koch 39)

Addison is quite right, of course, to single this stanza out as an example of concord between poetic segmentation—the shift from sestet to couplet— and narrative segmentation—the shift between the Samians’ voice and perspective and those of the ironizing narrator. But in isolating this stanza from its immediate context, she obscures the ways that Koch overrides formal segmentation at one level of organization even as he avails himself of its affordances at another. For the two narrative segments that make up this stanza—let’s say, roughly, a story-level segment (events, including verbal events) in the sestet, and a discourse-level segment (commentary) in the couplet—are both

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in fact continuous with the adjacent stanzas, before and after; they are both enjambed segments. The preceding stanza is comprised, except for its last line, of aphorisms attributable to the narrator, reflecting in gnomic present tense on life in general: Life’s simple in such crisis situations and so on. Only in the last line of that stanza do we return to the storyworld of the Samians, and to the “epic preterite” of narration—As these folks did at sea while struggling in it—a sentence whose continuation is found on the other side of the white space in the next stanza: To stay afl oat and find their island home. Similarly, the ironic reframing that occurs in the couplet of this stanza actually spills over into the following one (as the absence of punctuation at the end of stanza’s last line signals): Whom usually they fried and served on dishes // With lemon on the side, and sometimes rice. Thus, in this passage Koch exploits the narrative affordances of ottava rima form in some respects—in his use of the couplet to introduce polyvocality—but ignores them in his overriding of the stanza breaks. This willingness to exploit dissonance between stanzaic form and narrative segmentation is as typical of Koch’s poetics as consonance is of Spenser’s. We could begin to historicize Koch’s practice by saying that, if Koch learned the “shock tactics” of his couplet from Lord Byron, he could not have learned his overriding of the stanza break from him, because Byron almost never enjambs stanzas in Don Juan. Instead, the likeliest model for Koch’s enjambment of stanzas is Pushkin’s Onegin, because Pushkin conspicuously overrides stanza breaks, as he does other units of poetic segmentation.

The Onegin stanza (AbAbCCddEffEgg) If Addison’s attribution of novelistic qualities to Renaissance verse romances seems audacious, it nevertheless rests on solid precedent. Her authority is no less than Mikhail Bakhtin, who reads Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem Eugene Onegin as a typical novel, perhaps the typical novel. The stylistic structure of Onegin, says Bakhtin, is “typical of all authentic novels” (49). He means that the poet here rarely speaks in his “own voice,” but almost always ventriloquizes the styles of others, exhibiting “images” of the registers and social dialects current in the poem’s era. These ventriloquized styles are always distanced or disavowed to some degree, subtly ironized or parodied. Bakhtin’s examples (revisited more than once; see 43–51, 322–23, 328–29) include a passage about Onegin’s friend Lensky, in which Lensky’s own sentimental poetic style is imitated–

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Of love he sang, love’s service choosing, And timid was his simple tune As ever artless maiden’s musing, As babe’s aslumber, as the moon…

—and another that subtly ironizes Onegin’s pose of world-weariness— He who has lived and thought can never Look on mankind without disdain; He who has felt is haunted ever By days that will not come again; No more for him enchantment’s semblance, On him the serpent of remembrance Feed, and remorse corrodes the heart.3

As finely attuned as he is to Onegin’s “typically novelistic” polyvocality, Bakhtin nowhere acknowledges that Onegin is a novel in verse. Evidently, as far as Bakhtin is concerned, it might as well have been prose. He nowhere mentions its segmentation into lines, rhyming units and stanzas, and so of course he has nothing to say about its measurement or potential for countermeasurement. If Bakhtin had been curious enough to investigate, he might have observed in his exemplary passages effects of both consonance and dissonance between stylistic structure and the poem’s segmentation. The passage that ventriloquizes Lensky’s style (Two, stanza 10) fills a quatrain (lines 1–4) and continues into the rhyming couplet that follows (ll. 5–6), but in the next couplet (ll. 7–8) the distance from Lensky increases, and the poem turns overtly ironic. Here the shift in voice coincides with rhyme units; stylistic structure and verse segmentation are consonant. By contrast, the passage that adopts Onegin’s style (One, st. 46), in which Nabokov detects “a touch of the reported-speech style” (Onegin II 72), spills over the quatrain and following couplet (ll. 1–6) and ends after line 7, in the middle of the next couplet. Here segmentation according to style or voice

3

The passages are from Chapter Two, stanza 10, lines 1–4, and One, st. 46, ll. 1–7, quoted by Bakhtin’s translators, Emerson and Holquist, in Walter Arndt’s English version of 1963, slightly altered. This is the place to acknowledge that I will not be referring to Onegin in its original Russian, which I am incompetent to discuss, but in its English translations, especially those of Vladimir Nabokov and the computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter. My deficiencies as a Slavist, in every other way lamentable, at least give me the opportunity to work with two translations that are in fact meta-translations, reflections on translation, and moreover in dialogue with each other, in the sense that Hofstadter consciously aspires to counter Nabokov’s theory and practice of translation.

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and segmentation according to versification are at odds with one another; they are countermeasured and dissonant.4 Clearly, then, we can proceed no further in this inquiry without considering the general affordances of form in the Onegin stanza. As with my other two case-studies, here too I am fortunate in being able to take advantage of previous scholarship, in this case Barry Scherr’s invaluable analysis.5 Scherr synthesizes the findings of earlier studies of Onegin and uses statistical evidence gleaned from them, supplemented by fresh evidence of his own, to describe how, in effect, syntactic-semantic units are countermeasured against verse units (though “countermeasure” is not his term). Let’s begin with the basics, or what Scherr calls the “inviolable rules” of the Onegin stanza. Fourteen lines long (and thus substantially longer than either the Spenserian stanza or ottava rima), the Onegin stanza amounts to a variant of the sonnet form, rhyming AbAbCCddEffEgg, where upper-case indicates feminine rhymes (e.g., model/coddle, in Hofstadter’s translation of the poem’s first stanza), while lower-case indicates masculine rhymes (e.g., make/cake in Hofstadter). The lines are iambic tetrameter throughout, though of course the number of syllables alternates between eight and nine, depending upon whether the end-rhyme is masculine (one-syllable) or feminine (two-syllable). Commentators have remarked on the stanza’s relationship to both types of sonnet, the Petrarchan or Italian type (rhyming abbaabbacdecde) and the Shakespearean or English type (ababcdcdefefgg). Like the Shakespearean sonnet, the Onegin stanza affords opportunities to articulate content into three quatrains plus a summative or aphoristic couplet; like the Petrarchan sonnet, it affords the possibility of a rhetorical “turn” after line eight (Scherr 268–71).6 However, affiliating the Onegin stanza with sonnet forms is potentially somewhat misleading. Narratively speaking, the events of Onegin are not articulated into the discrete lyrical moments we expect of a typical sonnet cycle; moreover, the Onegin stanza itself often behaves quite differently from either sonnet type with respect to syntactic-semantic segmentation. Its difference emerges clearly when we shift our attention from the stanza’s “inviolable” rules to what Scherr calls its “violable” ones, in other

4 5 6

In lines 8–9 that follow—another mismatched unit, straddling a couplet and the beginning of the next quatrain—Nabokov finds “retrospective irony” directed against the pose of the preceding lines (Onegin II 72). Bakhtin concurs (44–45). I owe a debt of gratitude to Eyal Segal for directing me to this essay. The Onegin stanza systematically exhausts all the ways a quatrain with two end-rhymes can be organized: alternating (abab), enclosed (abba), two back-to-back couplets (aabb) (Hofstadter, Onegin xvii).

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words, to the affordances specific to the Onegin stanza (again, not Scherr’s term). Scherr identifies five of these. First, the closing couplet (gg) affords (but does not mandate) strong closure. Secondly, the opening quatrain (AbAb) has the capacity (again, not mandatory) to form a self-contained syntactic-semantic unit. These two affordances make it likely that stanzas will themselves be self-contained, not enjambed; together, strong closure and a self-contained opening resist overruns from stanza to stanza. Scherr’s third rule seems less a built-in affordance of the form than an empirical observation of Pushkin’s actual practice: syntactical-semantic units longer than five lines or shorter than two are unlikely to occur.7 Rules four and five, however, do reflect genuine affordances of the form, and are interestingly in tension with each other: on the one hand, syntactic-semantic units tend to coincide with end-rhyme patterns; conversely, they resist the promptings of the end-rhyme patterns, overrunning quatrain and couplet units. In other words, the Onegin stanza affords opportunities for both consonance between content segmentation and formal segmentation, and dissonance between them. As it happens, each of Bakhtin’s examples, cited above, illustrates one of these possibilities: consonance in the passage parodying Lensky’s poetry (Two, st. 10), dissonance in the free-indirect report of Onegin’s discourse (One, st. 46). A clarification is in order here: in common with the other analysts whom he cites and summarizes, Scherr seeks to describe the relations between versification and syntactic-semantic units (sentences and their components), not necessarily those between verse units and narrative segmentation. Narrative segmentation sometimes coincides with syntactic-semantic segmentation, of course, but not necessarily; one level of organization does not inevitably map onto the other. Consider, for example, Tatyana’s dream in Chapter Five, an inset narrative involving a change of ontological level, and constituting a discrete narrative unit. This unit spans something like twenty sentences, many of them syntactically complex and multi-part. Moreover, the dream’s beginning coincides with the beginning of stanza 11, and continues over ten stanza-breaks, ending in stanza 21. Throughout this block of stanzas, syntactic units regularly coincide with the ends of stanzas, but the narrative unit obviously does not; i.e., these stanzas, though never syntactically enjambed, are narratively

7

This observation tends to corroborate Nabokov’s insight that the lines falling between the end of the first quatrain and the closing couplet, i.e., lines 5–12, rhyming CCddEffE, are relatively free to articulate their content in various patterns or indeed no pattern at all (Onegin I 13).

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enjambed. Finally, Tatyana’s dream ends awkwardly in mid-stanza, after line 5, in the middle of the rhyming couplet of lines 5–6.8 Resistance to the promptings of the Onegin stanza’s affordances— “violations” of its “rules,” in Scherr’s terms—produces conspicuously foregrounded effects. Here the evidence of Nabokov’s translation and commentary proves invaluable. Invaluable, but not to be used without extreme caution, in light of Nabokov’s theory and practice of translating Pushkin, which are (to say the least) highly idiosyncratic and controversial. To begin with, the extreme disproportion between Nabokov’s translation (about 245 pages) and his commentary (about 110 pages in volume one, plus over 380 pages in volume two), as well as the polemical violence and willfulness of that commentary, arouse suspicion, recalling nothing so much as Nabokov’s own novel Pale Fire (1962), published two years before the first edition of Onegin, though the Onegin translation had actually been completed earlier, in 1957. Pale Fire, in a sense, is bracketed by Onegin, and one cannot help but wonder whether Nabokov might be parodying himself in Pale Fire, or vice-versa, whether the Onegin translation might be infused by the same spirit of learnéd wit and scholarly (self-)parody as the novel (see Tammi 198n, 339). Such speculation is relevant insofar as it bears on how we view Nabokov’s ungenerous attitude toward his fellow-translators. It would be nice to think that Nabokov was merely parodying academic in-fighting when, in the commentary and elsewhere (see Nabokov, Opinions 231–67), he attacks other translators for trying to replicate Pushkin’s meter and rhyme-scheme. Unfortunately, he seems to be serious. In his view, preserving the meter and rhyme of the Onegin stanza entails unacceptable compromises, approximations and semantic drift at the level of lexical choices. His own translation method aims for the closest possible approximation of the original’s lexical denotation and connotation, sacrificing everything else—not only meter and rhyme, but even the slightest gesture toward euphony. Semantic fidelity, rather narrowly conceived, trumps aesthetic effect, and rather than compromise on the level of lexical meaning Nabokov claims to aspire actively to ugliness. His Onegin translation, he writes at one point,

8

Compare Tatyana’s speech to Eugene in Chapter Eight, stanzas 42–47, another inset narrative unit, but countermeasured differently than the dream. Her speech, like her dream, spans multiple sentences, but contrary to the dream, which begins consonantly and ends dissonantly, Tatyana’s speech begins dissonantly, in the middle of stanza 42, after line 7, interrupting a couplet, while it ends consonantly, coinciding exactly with the end of stanza 47, where syntax, narrative unit and verse segmentation all converge.

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falls short of the ideal crib. It is still not close enough and not ugly enough. In future editions…I think I shall turn it entirely into utilitarian prose, with a still bumpier brand of English…it order to eliminate the last vestiges of bourgeois poesy and concession to rhythm. (Opinions 243) 9

Nabokov’s surprisingly unenlightened and cranky obsession with wordlevel semantic equivalence may not be the whole story, however. He also seems anxious to preserve Pushkin’s segmentation and enjambment (or countermeasurement), even though he jettisons the very features (endrhyme, meter) that articulate and in a sense justify that segmentation in the first place. One of his aims, his writes, is “to achieve a closer line-by-line fit (entailing a rigorous coincidence of enjambments and the elimination of verse transposals)” (Onegin I xiii). In this respect, Nabokov remains perversely faithful to the affordances of Pushkin’s form after all.10 Nabokov’s scrupulousness about segmentation makes him especially attentive to stanza-to-stanza (“interstrophic”) enjambment (Onegin I 7, 13), about which he invariably comments whenever it occurs. Recall that, according to Scherr, the affordances of the Onegin stanza—in particular its strong couplet closure and self-contained initial quatrain—militate against stanza-to-stanza enjambment. Overcoming the resistance built into the form is effortful, and therefore especially conspicuous when it does happen. Unlike Spenser, the affordances of whose stanza also resists stanza-to-stanza enjambment, Pushkin nevertheless overruns stanza breaks syntactically at least ten times in the course of a poem of 389 stanzas (Scherr 275)—a rare occurrence, in other words, but not an unthinkable one (as it evidently was for Spenser), and all the more conspicuous for its rarity. Not all of these stanza-to-stanza enjambments involve counterpoint (countermeasurement) with narrative units, but some of them do. A strik9 10

Hofstadter undertakes to rebut Nabokov’s principles of translation, and to question their results, in the introduction to his own translation of Onegin and elsewhere (Marot 233–78). Nabokov is certainly right that the exigencies of meter and (especially) rhyme sometimes compel translators to segment differently from the original (and from each other). The point is readily confirmed by comparing three versions of Five, stanza 1, by Babette Deutsch, Arndt, and Nabokov (juxtaposed by Hofstadter, Marot 265–66). In Nabokov’s unmetered and unrhymed version, Snow only fell in January,/on the night of the second, in lines 4 and 5, straddling the end of the first quatrain and the first line of the following couplet, and Tatyana awakes to the snow at the end of line 5 and into line 6; in Deutsch, the snow arrives in lines 3 and 4 of the quatrain, and Tatyana awakes at the beginning of line 5; in Arndt, the snow arrives mid-way through line 4 and into 5, and Tatyana awakes at the beginning of line 6. Hofstadter’s own translation, by the way, though metered and rhymed, reflects the same segmentation as Nabokov’s literal, line-by-line translation (Hofstadter, Onegin 69).

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ing example occurs in Chapter Three, stanzas 38–39 (see Appendix Three for two translations, Nabokov’s and Hofstadter’s). “A rare case of one stanza overflowing into another,” writes Nabokov in his commentary. “The device admirably renders Tatiana’s [sic] excitement” (Onegin II 45). Yes, indeed it does; but there is more to be said about this enjambment in narratological terms. The “excitement” that is mimed by this overrun is only one manifestation of Tatyana’s subjectivity, which carries over from one stanza to the next and indeed is foregrounded by the enjambment. In other words, the passage that straddles the stanza-break is focalized through Tatyana, and her focalization is made conspicuous by the enjambment. Tatyana’s focalization dominates from midway in stanza 37 to midway in stanza 41, with several authorial interruptions. Stanza 37 begins externally focalized (tea at the Larins’), but shifts to Tatyana at line 9 (mid-stanza, but coinciding with beginning of the final EffEgg sestet): Tatiana stood before the window (Nabokov). Her focalization is maintained across the stanza-break to stanza 38, though no syntactical enjambment occurs here. We are immersed in Tatyana’s subjectivity as she responds with panic to Onegin’s arrival and flees into the garden; the enjambment, syntactical as well as narrative, between this stanza and the next reflects and preserves the continuity of her consciousness under duress. Her focalization is not interrupted until stanza 39, line 9, by authorial intrusion: while it is still Tatyana who registers the berry-pickers’ singing, it must be the “Pushkin” persona who comments cynically and debunkingly on the reasons for their song. The song itself (omitted in Appendix Three) might best be seen as filtered through Tatyana’s somewhat distracted perception, as indicated (retrospectively) at the beginning of stanza 40: They sing; and with neglection / harking their ringing voice, / Tatiana waited (Nabokov); Tatyana pays but scant attention / To what their bell-like voices sing (Hofstadter). The authorial persona interrupts again, with similes unlikely to be attributed to Tatyana, in mid-stanza but after the middle couplets (i.e., at line 9, the same point in the stanza that Tatyana’s focalization began in stanza 37). Her focalization resumes at the beginning of stanza 41, but is decisively interrupted by the author at the same point, line 9, when he unceremoniously breaks off her encounter with Onegin and ends the chapter, returning to this scene in the garden only much later, at the end of stanza 11 of Chapter Four, after a flashback and shift of focalization to Onegin himself. Nabokov’s special attentiveness to segmentation and countermeasurement (though not in so many words) leads him to connect this instance of “interstrophic” enjambment at the end of Chapter Three with another one, in Chapter Eight, stanzas 39–40. Here Onegin rushes to Tatyana’s

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house in St. Petersburg, where she lives with her husband, Prince N., and enters to find her rereading one of his letters to her. “There is a beautiful logic,” writes Nabokov, in the fact that a similar run-on occurs in Chapter Three…where Tatiana flees into the park, only to be discovered there and sermonized by Onegin. Now the roles are reversed, and it is Onegin who is breathlessly heading for the place where he will be lectured on love. (Onegin II 233–34)

The Chapter Eight run-on occurs at almost exactly same point in the chapter as the one in Three, but this time the focalization is reversed: here it is Onegin who is focalizer instead of Tatyana. Indeed, so many and so symmetrical are the reversals that the two scenes appear to mirror each other.11 However, one detail shatters the symmetry between the two runon passages. In the Chapter Three passage, as we have seen, Tatyana’s focalization is maintained right across the stanza-break, and indeed is foregrounded by straddling that break. In Chapter Eight, though both the preceding stanza (st. 39) and the following one (st. 40) are focalized through Onegin, just at the moment of transition the authorial persona briefly intrudes, addressing the reader metaleptically and commandeering the narrative from the last line of 39 until the end of the first quatrain of 40, when he surrenders it back to Onegin: 39 […] whither, upon [the snow], his fast course 40 directs Onegin? You beforehand have guessed already. Yes, exactly: arrives apace to her, to this Tatiana, my unreformed odd chap. (Nabokov, Onegin I 303)12

11

12

For example: normally in the early chapters, Tatyana is associated with windows (e.g., Tatyana stood before the window, Three, st. 37, l. 9), Onegin with doors—a transparently gendered opposition. In this context, Tatyana’s flight outdoors in Three, st. 37–39, is actually anomalous. In Chapters Seven and Eight, however, it is Tatyana who crosses thresholds, makes entrances, etc., and only here in Eight, st. 39–40, does Onegin once again cross a threshold with the freedom he exhibited so often in the early chapters. Hofstadter: But whither, thereupon, does rush // Onegin? In anticipation, / You’ve guessed it right (an easy trick): / Tatyana’s was the destination / Of my persistent maverick (Onegin 133).

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In Chapter Three, enjambment—dissonance between verse segmentation and narrative segmentation—served to foreground Tatyana’s focalization; here in Chapter Eight, it foregrounds ironic distancing from Eugene, at exactly the point where, earlier, our immersion in Tatyana’s subjectivity had been total. These instances of stanza-to-stanza overrun, to which Nabokov calls our attention, illustrate Pushkin’s strategic deployment of consonance and dissonance to achieve particular narrative effects. When Pushkin resists the affordances of the Onegin stanza’s form—whether by overrunning stanza breaks, or by interrupting or enjambing other rhyme units13—the effect is to foreground continuities and shifts at the level of narrative segmentation. Among the narrative continuities and shifts foregrounded in this way are those involving focalization, as in the cases I have been examining here.

Appendix One Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590) III.1.14–19 http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/queene3.html#Canto%20I

13

14

Long they thus trauelled in friendly wise, Through countries waste, and eke well edifyde, Seeking aduentures hard, to exercise Their puissance, whylome full dernely tryde: At length they came into a forrest wyde, Whose hideous horror and sad trembling sound Full griesly seem’d: therein they long did ryde, Yet tract of liuing creatures none they found, Saue Beares, Lions, & Buls, which romed them around.

15

All suddenly out of the thickest brush, Vpon a milk-white Palfrey all alone, A goodly Ladie did foreby them rush, Whose face did seeme as cleare as Christall stone, And eke through feare as white as whales bone: Her garments all were wrought of beaten gold, And all her steed with tinsell trappings shone, Which fled so fast, that nothing mote him hold, And scarse them leasure gaue, her passing to behold.

For instance, the authorial intrusion at the end of Eight, st. 39 (above) not only overruns the stanza break but also splits the final couplet (gg) of 39: while Onegin’s focalization continues in line 13, the “author” abruptly displaces him in line 14.

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Still as she fled, her eye she backward threw, As fearing euill, that pursewd her fast; And her faire yellow locks behind her flew, Loosely disperst with puffe of euery blast: All as a blazing starre doth farre outcast His hearie beames, and flaming lockes dispred, At sight whereof the people stand aghast: But the sage wisard telles, as he has red, That it importunes death and dolefull drerihed.

17

So as they gazed after her a while, Lo where a griesly Foster forth did rush, Breathing out beastly lust her to defile: His tyreling iade he fiercely forth did push, Through thicke and thin, both ouer banke and bush In hope her to attaine by hooke or crooke, That from his gorie sides the bloud did gush: Large were his limbes, and terrible his looke, And in his clownish hand a sharp bore speare he shooke.

18

Which outrage when those gentle knights did see, Full of great enuie and fell gealosy, They stayd not to auise, who first should bee, But all spurd after fast, as they mote fly, To reskew her from shamefull villany. The Prince and Guyon equally byliue Her selfe pursewd, in hope to win thereby Most goodly meede, the fairest Dame aliue: But after the foule foster Timias did striue.

19

The whiles faire Britomart, whose constant mind, Would not so lightly follow beauties chace, Ne reckt of Ladies Loue, did stay behind, And them awayted there a certaine space, To weet if they would turne backe to that place: But when she saw them gone, she forward went, As lay her iourney, through that perlous Pace, With stedfast courage and stout hardiment; Ne euill thing she fear’d, ne euill thing she ment.

Appendix Two Kenneth Koch, The Duplications (Koch 38–39) Yes, there was nothing on this island now: No eagles, no bazoukis, no percussion, No moussaka, no blossoms on the bough Of the delightful peartree where the buzzing

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Of bees made glad the lad who led the cow; And all the persons who had been discussing The ways to solve their personal problems are Gasping at sea and cling to any spar. Life’s simple in such crisis situations, Provided they don’t last for very long: Such fortitude, such sympathy, such patience, Such pleasure in a patriotic song! Too bad that just by decimating nations One usually has such things. It’s wrong. One ought to live as nobly every minute As these folks did at sea while struggling in it To stay afloat and find their island home Just one more time, and then, they vowed, forever They’d be obedient to the speechless dome And parchless eye of heaven; they would never Do any bad or selfish thing, nor roam From Samos off to any place whatever. These vows were heard by no one but the fishes Whom usually they fried and served on dishes With lemon on the side, and sometimes rice. These edibles, though, found incomprehensible Their human language, which did not suffice To make the fish do anything more sensible Than swimming out of earshot. Fish are nice In being, though we eat them, not revengeful. I think that we would probably be meaner To those who washed us down with their retsina! However, back to Huddel….

Appendix Three A. S. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, Chapter Three, stanzas 37–41. Trans. Vladimir Nabokov 37 ‘Twas growing dark; upon the table, shining, there hissed the evening samovar, warming the Chinese teapot; light vapor undulated under it. Poured out by Olga’s hand, into the cups, in a dark stream, the fragrant tea already ran, and a footboy served the cream; Tatiana stood before the window;

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breathing on the cold panes, lost in thought, the dear soul wrote with her charming finger on the bemisted glass the cherished monogram: and O and E. 38 And meantime her soul pined, and full of tears was her dolorous gaze. Suddenly, hoof thuds! Her blood froze. Now nearer! Coming fast…and in the yard is Eugene! “Ach!”—and lighter than a shade Tatiana skips into another hallway, from porch outdoors, and straight into the garden; She flies; flies—glance back dares not; has traversed in a trice platbands, footbridges, lawn, the avenue to the lake, the bosquet; has broken bushes[,] lilac, flying across the flower plots to the brook, and, panting, on a bench 39 has dropped. “He’s here! Eugene is here! Good God, what did he think!” Her heart, full of torments, retains an obscure dream of hope; she trembles, and glows hotly, and waits; does he not come? But hears not. Girl servants, in the garden, on the beds, were picking berries in the bushes and singing by decree in chorus (a decree based on that in secret the seigniorial berry sly mouths would not eat and would be busy singing; device of rural wit!): THE SONG OF THE GIRLS

[…] 40 They sing; and with neglection harking their ringing voice, Tatiana waited with impatience for the heart’s tremor to subside in her, for her cheeks to cease flaming; but in her breasts there’s the same quivering, nor ceases the glow of her cheeks: yet brighter, brighter do they burn.

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Thus a poor butterfly both flashes and beats an iridescent wing, captured by a mischievous schoolboy; thus in the winter corn a small hare quivers upon suddenly seeing from afar the shotman in the bushes crouch. 41 But finally she sighed and from her bench arose; started to go; but hardly had she turned into the avenue when straight before her, eyes blazing, Eugene stood, similar to some dread shade, and as one seared by fire she stopped. But the effects of the unlooked-for meeting today, dear friends, I have not the strength to detail; after this long discourse I need a little jaunt, a little rest; some other time I’ll tell the rest. A. S. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, Chapter Three, stanzas 37–40. Trans. Douglas Hofstadter 37 […] Tatyana, though, prefers to linger Beside the window, pensive lass, Breathing against the chilly glass. She traces, with a graceful finger On fogged-up panes, a filigree Of cherished letters: ‘O’ and ‘E’. 38 And all the while, her soul was aching; Her languid eyes were filled with tears. But now, her blood runs cold: the shaking And rumbling noise of hoofbeats nears. Eugene has come! “Ach!” Helter-skelter, Tatyana seeks some safer shelter; From porch to courtyard, through the plants, She darts, she flies, no backward glance Allowing now; she scampers madly By bridges, blooming plots and leas, Skirts the lake trail, shoots between trees, And tramples lilac bushes badly; Through gardens skitters toward the creek, And tumbles panting, dazed and weak,

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39 Upon a bench… “He’s come! He’s driven From far! Oh, God! His judgment’s grim!” And yet her heart, by torment riven, Retains its dream of hope, though dim. She’s trembling, sweating, growing dizzy; She cannot hear, and thinks, “Where is he?” But meanwhile, peasant girls in lines Are plucking berries off their vines While singing, chorus-like, under order. (And why the songs? Because fruit tempts A girl’s sly mouth to make attempts… But if she sings, her song will thwart her; Such are the ruses and the tricks Dreamt up by famers in the sticks!) […] 40 Tatyana pays but scant attention To what their bell-like voices sing; Instead, she hopes for swift suspension Of that which makes her soft heart sting. Of that which makes her cheeks so torrid. And yet her breast feels no less horrid, And in her cheeks the sting’s the same, As brighter, brighter burns the flame… […]

Works Cited Addison, Catherine. “Ottava rima and Novelistic Discourse.” Journal of Narrative Theory 34.2 (2004): 133–45. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. 1975. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2006. —. “Manifests.” Diacritics 26.3–4 (1996): 31–53. Gibson, J. J. “A Theory of Affordances.” An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1979. 127–43. Hofstadter, Douglas, trans. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. New York: Basic Books, 1999. —. Le ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Kinney, Claire Regan. Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Koch, Kenneth. The Duplications. New York: Random House, 1977. McHale, Brian. “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry.” Narrative 17.1 (2009): 11–30.

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Nabokov, Vladimir, trans. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin. Vols. I–II. Revised Edition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975. —. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973. Scherr, Barry. “Structural Dynamics in the Onegin Stanza.” Formal Approaches to Poetry: Recent Developments in Metrics. Ed. B. E. Dresher and N. Friedberg. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. 267–86. Shoptaw, John. “The Music of Construction: Measure and Polyphony in Ashbery and Bernstein.” The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. S. Schultz. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 1995. 211–57. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Book III. 1590. http://www.luminarium.org/ renascence-editions/queene3.html#Canto%20I. Tammi, Pekka. Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1985. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

Gennady Barabtarlo (University of Missouri)

A Shadow on the Marble In his article on Nabokov’s “Terra Incognita” Professor Tammi observes that the story lacks “the stable frame of the external narration” and that because it has no “embedding level” there is “constant, distracting oscillation and flux between the potential frames.” The story so destabilized, he continues, “purports to show us what it is like to be dead, while simultaneously telling about it” (“Exploring” 170). At the end of his analysis, he invites his readers to find, in all of fiction, another instance of a “full-fledged autodiegetic narrator” who, like the one in the story, is “dying to tell about it” (171). Five years later he might have withdrawn the challenge since such an instance has now become available, no matter how arguably, in the hazy terra incognita of Nabokov’s last novel, uncharted, uncompleted, and undestroyed. Nabokov did not publish what he wrote until he buffed it to his singularly high-set standard of finish. By December of 1975 he had apparently done composing this new book in his head, as was his wont, and then proceeded to write its various parts down on his pocketable index cards, most out of the sequential order of the storyline. The process followed the pattern adopted six novels earlier, but this time it was spastic: he had to interrupt it every now and then because of an illness that required frequent hospitalizations and from which he never recovered fully enough to finish setting down the conceived figment. One of the early working titles was Dying Is Fun. In Invitation to a Beheading, one of the acting impersonae, a joker, drops, as if by accident, a musical resolution to the plot that the death-row hero does not grasp, and which, when properly decoded, states that the secret is that death is sweet (Barabtarlo, Aerial 193–97). Four years after Nabokov’s death his widow told me of his last novel, begun and left unfinished. “I was under the orders to burn it” [мнѣ было велѣно сжечь его], she said with a detached smile, looking at me steadily with that slightly quizzical glance of hers; it dwelled a trice longer than usual. One could suppose that she was restaging mentally that

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conversation with her dying husband, and that the matter troubled her. The invariable loving formula gracing almost all of his English dedication pages—“To Véra”—in this case expanded into the urgency of a dying wish note: “…burn it.” This conversation took place during one of our Russian Pnin editing sessions in Nabokov’s small study in the Montreux Palace hotel, with a tall oval window giving out on the lake. “But I have not done it yet.” She did not offer, and I did not seek, any follow-up, perhaps out of the silently shared sense that this angular secret should remain undisturbed by curiosity. In his preface to the original edition, the late Dmitri Nabokov writes that his mother was prevented from destroying the manuscript by procrastination—“procrastination due to age, weakness, and immeasurable love.” The storyline surfaced eight years after that initial conversation, when Brian Boyd sent me the manuscript of his Nabokov biography for evaluation. That pre-publication version relayed the contents of The Original of Laura in detail that I thought was too ample for something that was meant to vanish without much trace. My opinion alone would scarcely have mattered, but in the event Véra Nabokov demanded that the description be whittled down to a bare bone account, and that was what Boyd published. At the time (the late 1980s) nobody but the widow, the son, and Boyd had read the cards, indeed few had known of their very existence. Here is a strong proof: in 1991, Nabokov’s sister Elena Sikorski, who knew his art deeper than many specialists, wrote to me: “You…have read The Original of Laura in Boyd’s paraphrase. Do you suppose that it would be indiscreet of you to give me the content of that book in a nutshell? I shall of course keep it in strictest confidence.” In his preface Dmitri Nabokov points to the recurrent theme of fire, and his tortuous choice reminds one of the dilemmatic episode from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), where the narrator is sitting before the fireplace with a batch of intimate letters which his dead half-brother willed to be destroyed unread. Ethically speaking, there must, however, be a treadable difference between private letters and a presumed masterpiece, even if unfinished. It must be doubly hard to annihilate the last composition of a supreme genius, a work that, by the logic of artistic evolution unmarred by impotence or senility, was likely to outdo in certain important ways (formal control, for instance) all the previous. Indeed, the chief argument of those who advised Dmitri Nabokov to publish, over the advice of those who thought he should not, was that the stylistic brilliance preserved in some of the fragments outweighed the clear lack of integrity and critical mass. There is, of

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course, a vast no-man’s ground between burning a manuscript and publishing it, a non-burning and non-publishing murky grey area, a death row of sorts, where Laura had languished for many years, first in the Palace’s storeroom and then in a Swiss bank’s strongbox. And now an unfinished masterwork, condemned to die by the master, was being released—on appeal.

Ending as a Departure Point In his Philosophy of Composition (1846) Poe explains how he began composing “The Raven” from the end, “where all works of art should begin.” Had Nabokov been building his last novel in sequence from the foundation up, the finished third might have been enough for a plausible contouring of the whole edifice. If, on the other hand, he had been a run-of-the-mill award-winning writer, whose chief method consisted in connecting the immense halls of down-to-earth dialogue by narrow descriptive passages, then certain recognizable traits and combinations found in those descriptions would have enabled an expert to plot the rest with believable approximation. But Nabokov’s prose tends to avoid dialogue and is emphatically neither friable nor porous, and, of special weight here, he composed and kept in his mind not only the design but the entire book in much detail, and when he started setting it down on paper he would not follow a sequential story but rather a plan for general ordonnance, teasing out, affi xing, and adjusting this or that episode with lesser or greater care, now from the middle of the plot, now close to the entrance or the exit. These latter two could have been worked out first. He repeatedly likened his habit of writing to the processing of a photographic film: it preserves in darkness the entire series of exposed pictures waiting to be chemically treated, then printed in random order, and finally sorted out—composed—in the strictest, preordained sequence. It is possible therefore to say with confidence that the extant fragments of The Original of Laura make up more or less joined, or rather more or less disparate, descriptions and scenes rendered from the sign language of imagination onto one hundred and thirty-eight 9 x 12 cm cards, and that as such they do not allow a trustworthy conjecture of the book’s plot. These cards are numbered presumably in the order they were found, and since the incremental numeration is not by Nabokov’s hand, that order in many instances does not establish position of this or that episode in the novel. In his preface Dmitri Nabokov writes that his father “lovingly arranged and shuffled the cards of his new novel.” The original edition

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comes with cards notched all round,1 with no through numeration, allowing, even bidding the reader to extract them and play out his own pensive solitaire. One can imagine second-hand copies surfacing years later with a neat rectangular cavity inside—perfect for stashing away from a burglar’s eye the crown jewels of a king deposed by mutinous rabble, or a will, or a stack of notes for an unfinished novel.

Shuffling the Deck In May 1974, even before Nabokov’s last published novel, Look at the Harlequins!, came out, he had mapped his next book mentally. Other tasks interfered: translations, new editions of the old books, collections of short stories flogged on by a lucrative but pressing contract with McGraw-Hill. A May 15 entry in his diary reads: “Inspiration. Radiant insomnia. The flavour and snows of beloved alpine slopes. A novel without an I, without a he, but with the narrator, the gliding eye, being implied throughout” (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov 644). Boyd thought that this was meant for a project following The Original of Laura, but I think that this plan fits well the narrative mode of the novel about Laura nested within another, about Flora. Throughout 1974 and the first months of 1975 Nabokov expends much time and effort on editing the French Ada. Yet from December of that year and for two months following he writes down three cards of The Original of Laura a day—not every day, however, and often rewriting his drafts. Tradition has it that Virgil wrote three verses of The Aeneid a day, and seeing that he could not finish it before he died, he asked that the manuscript be burnt, but Augustus, his imperial friend, did not heed his request. In February 1976, Nabokov writes in his diary: “New novel more or less completed and copied 54 cards. In 4 batches from different parts of the novel. Plus notes and drafts. 50 days since Dec. 10, 1975. Not too much” (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov 653). Yet at about the same time he writes to his publisher that he has put together an equivalent of about “a hundred pages of print, or about half of the novel.” Either he miscalculated badly, or else he counted his drafts, which he might have destroyed after all, for the 138 surviving cards make up hardly forty pages of regular

1

“Now I’ll ask them [Fyodor’s publishers] to make little holes around them [his poems] with a perforator—you know, like coupons, so that you can tear them out more easily” (The Gift, 193).

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print (even thirty-four, by Dieter Zimmer’s careful estimation).2 Early in April he writes “five or six cards per day, but a lot of rewriting,” then notes in his diary that he “transcribed in final form 50 cards = 5000 words” (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov 654).3 But the existing 138 cards have 10,209 words total, thus his count of a hundred words per card is clean off mark, in part because many cards are only half-filled. Towards the end of Petrarch’s life “his illnesses gathered: fevers, fainting spells, foot trouble, the itch. He was so thin he was afraid of vanishing” (Bishop 166).4 By contrast, Philip Wild, Flora’s unfortunate husband, is so fat that he has no fears of vanishing; indeed he welcomes it. Nabokov, who almost certainly read this (Morris Bishop was a good friend of his), could scarcely miss the f-alliteration. Dying is no fun. In his preface to The Original of Laura, Dmitri Nabokov recalls that the year 1975—almost exactly 600 years after the distant admirer of Laura de Noves and the first poet-laureate died—“seemed to set off a period of illness which never quite receded…a harrowing search for the noisome germ began [the supposed cause of the recurrent fever. G. B.] …his steps became short and insecure…[among his sufferings] were incessant inflammations under and around his toenails….” His life-long insomnia grew worse, the trial-and-error sleeping pills rotation provided but short relief, and after his fall on a Swiss slope and an unrelated surgery in July of 1975 he was noticeably infirm. Even the physical routine of writing became toilsome. Boccaccio advised the old and ailing Petrarch to abandon his writing labours; the poet replied that nothing weighed less than a pen and nothing gave more pleasure. Yet even a pen may become too cumbrous to lift. In 1977 Nabokov could engage in writing The Original of Laura only fitfully and only until mid-March, when he came down with a viral cold and spent many weeks in a Lausanne hospital. Even in his sickbed he tried to keep processing the script that was stored in the safe of his imagination, but on July 2 he passed on.

2 3 4

About a year ago, Brian Boyd came upon ten more Laura cards among the papers in Dmitri Nabokov’s Montreux apartment, so perhaps there was indeed more text written down than has been published. Card 7 has a note in the upper corner: “rewrite once more,” which seems to allow that some (perhaps many) cards are a second or even a third draft. Petrarch visited Montreux at least twice, in 1347 and 1353, one of those gratuitous yet fetching concinnities.

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Loose Ends It should not then be unreasonable to propose that the text set on the 138 cards is for the large part a once or twice revised draft of various places of a novel that was designed to grow three- or fourfold. There is a sharp division among scholars on this point. Whilst Dieter Zimmer (who translated The Original of Laura into German) has independently arrived at the same conclusion as given here, Brian Boyd, along with the Japanese translator (joined later by Martin Amis), thinks that the text might be 60 to 70% of the whole, a thin novelette. Three points run against this theory: (1) Nabokov’s own calculations given above; (2) absence of any 70-page novel among his English fiction5 ; and (3) most significantly, the large number of inchoate lines and loose ends requiring considerable space to be sorted, linked up and tied up, something Nabokov invariably did with utmost care. The first five chapters take up 58 (or 63) cards; they propel a dynamic description of Flora’s person in a natural sequence, with almost no digression, with detail noticeably dwindling from chapter to chapter: Ch. 1: Exposition: Flora’s Russian Lover (20 cards). Ch. 2: Flora’s Lineage and Childhood (18). Ch. 3: Flora’s Youth and Defloration (11, with large gaps). Ch. 4: Flora’s Mother Exit; Enter Philip Wild (4, just the beginning). Ch. 5: Flora Lind Marries Philip Wild (5). It is possible that the five adjacent cards, 59–63, were assigned to chapter 5 as well, but since they engage the internal novel My Laura, they may in fact belong to an entirely different part of the book. If so, Flora’s line runs the length of 58 cards. It is followed by an intermittent series containing Wild’s diary entries in which he describes, pizzicato, stages of his autohypnotic self-destructive experiments: 64–77, 79–87, 91–92, 96–97, 105–07, 122–27, and 133–36, forty cards total. Wild’s private life and reminiscences, recorded in his diary and related by a third (fourth?) person narrator, are set on sixteen more cards (98–104, 115–18, and 128–32). Nine cards account for a-novel-within-a-novel theme (59–63, 93–94, and 110–11). What I take

5

Of his Russian books, The Eye (Соглядатай, 1930) stands out as the shortest by far, yet even that short novel, as Nabokov called it, was fatter (100 pages), while “The Enchanter” (“Волшебникъ,” 1939), of 80 pages, he called a short story—although these terms ought not, of course, to be based on bulk.

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to be the novel’s intended finale is written on three cards: 112, 113, and 114 (more on this later). Working notes and quotations are found on seven cards (78, 90, 108, 109, 119, 137, 138). There are besides five cards on which three key episodes are barely sketched: “Medical Intermezzo” (88–89); first scene revisited (95, which could be a variant of the beginning); and a very important and very enigmatic setting on cards 120–21, which is either a starting point of a completely new line or a sharp turn of the main one. Thus 114 cards out of 131 (discounting the reference notes etc.), or almost nine-tenths of the whole batch, are divided about evenly between the still mostly preliminary line of Flora and the dotted one of Philip Wild’s diary. The other 17 are sketches of other themelines, of which the most important by far—important for the understanding of the book’s plot (taken as general design)—is the theme of the inside novel My Laura. It seems therefore improbable that the material in hand comprises anything more than a third of the whole book. In other words, it would take three to four hundred cards more to give this material the shape and inner works of a complete Nabokov novel. Here is a partial list of leads that are begun and left dangling, or else only mentioned. Eric (118; could be someone from Flora’s seraglio; could be Wild’s alias); Nigel Delling (68; could be a new personage, to appear elsewhere; could be another Wild’s alias. Nigel fits anagrammatically into Delling—as does Flora’s maiden name6); A.N.D. (88–89, Medical Intermezzo; A. Nigel Delling? yet another alias of PW?); Ivan Vaughan (59; the author of My Laura?); Philip Nikitin (133; the author of My Laura, Flora’s Russian paramour from the first chapter? Wild’s penname, chosen not only for its Russianness but also for the fact that both name-surname combinations have only i’s for the vowels—a singular emblem of Wild’s self-annihilating experiment? Or could it be the silent marginal character in Anna Karenin, imported here for an unknown associative reason?). All guesses are bound to be more or less wild, for the reader finds himself on a wonderland hopscotch grid, at a nonplus which square to hop to next: their numbering is misleading. Yet since it is doubtful that Philip was to have so many pseudonyms, we are moved to conclude that these cards mark several new lines in want of development, branching out, grafting, characterization, coordination with others etc. One of the most mysterious personages is not even named, because he is the first 6

Dr Stanislav Shvabrin has suggested (in a private communication) that Nabokov meant Dalling here, a young British football star whose fame peaked in 1975; but it is unlikely that Wild, in his New Jersey abode, would care to know the name of a British soccer player.

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person narrator on only two cards, 120 and 121. This three-sentence wistful passage is among the most lucid of the lot, one of those special stretches of Nabokovian prose of fine yet strong lyric pull—here cut off before it could take off—that make one understand better why Nabokov’s widow and son found it so difficult to annihilate the manuscript. “We met in a splendid park that she praised with exaggerated warmth…and in a secluded part of it…we simply had to stop for a rest and a bite…and as she spoke I suddenly began to realise that the ‘pavilion’ was the celebrated Green Chapel…and that she was brimming with religious fervour and yet miserably, desperately fearful, despite bright smiles and un air enjoué, of my insulting her by some mocking remark.” Whose voice-over do we hear in this super-long, paratactic sentence, Nabokov’s favourite? The author’s of the book about Laura, Flora’s Russian lover? If so, what distant—yet contemporary—war is he talking about? And who is the she? Could it really be Flora (she is said to be “still married to that hog”—a link to Wild’s seeing in his closet glass…“an obese bulk with formless features and a sad porcine stare [68]”), the same Flora for whom taking new lovers is a natural consequence of taking her husband’s surname, an obligatory component of any marriage?7 If so, how can it be plausibly combined with a religious sense so deep-seated and so vulnerable that she is afraid to provoke, by her incautious mention of the “Green Chapel of St Esmeralda,” an irreverent quip on the part of her lover and storyteller whom she apparently knows to be an agnostic? This facet alone would have capitally changed her character that the reader of the first five chapters has adopted. Can Laura be so radically unlike her original? And if, on the other hand, this is not Flora, then who is the woman of cards 120–21? And who is her hog of a husband? After all, there are no other standalone female parts in the existing draft, while to bring on the stage an entirely new heroine with more than a walk-on role would require more chapters, set with interconnecting wiring. In this curiously detached place one feels potential energy that usually flows through Nabokov’s completed and enclosed work through all sorts of contacts; but in the fractured manuscript of Laura the current is interrupted every now and then, causing the magnetic field, generated in the novel’s core, to collapse.

7

The Wilds, like almost all Nabokov’s couples, reliably were to remain childless. Giving birth in his fiction is a lethal enterprise, and so his married women either avoid it, or produce a child (usually just one) in the pre-narrative past: there are no toddlers in Nabokov’s novels.

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The Puzzle One principal difficulty in bringing out these fragments has inevitably to do with the fact that Nabokov’s highest artistic achievement is not in the rich intricacy of style and sheer power of expression, in which he has few equals, but precisely and especially in the art of composition, where he has none. Not so much the fretwork of words as the plexure of periods, passages, parts, planes of narration, thematic backroads and skyways. Nabokov understood astonishingly early what many even first-rate writers never do: that art, in a high metonymic sense, is an elaborate intercourse of liberty and deliberation, a stream freely running over a bumpy ground after a torrential rain, and at the same time, but viewed from a different standing place, a complex of connecting, by-passing, and drain canals. Not everything is subordinated and fixed within the well-furnished space of a Nabokov novel. There is enough room for a free and unthematic unfolding of an image or a description as well as for a tightly woven thematic fabric, and the art of reading Nabokov consists, among other demands, in the ability of telling one from the other: not forcing a connection where none is meant yet finding and tracing all such connections where their latticework is part of the design.8 But in the absence of a finished structure the latter operation is hardly possible. The weave and interaction of parts and particulars cannot be traced and tried, transitions, reciprocities and other familiar Nabokovian landmarks are all but absent, and you cannot see again, from a high elevation halt on the twisty road, the spot that you passed a score of pages earlier. With The Original of Laura one cannot say that an unfinished book breaks off at the most interesting place, a cliff-hanger, because here cliffs are everywhere, many places are all ruptures. It is full of “instabilities,” in James Phelan’s elastic sense of narrative progression (only Wild– Flora relationship is established), whilst “tensions,” understood as internal narrative conflicts, abound, but we cannot tell whether these were to be immanent features of the complete novel or are due to its disassembled state: sharp objects may lose their angularities when fitted together (see

8

In conclusion of his 1966 letter to Carl Proffer, about the latter’s Keys to Lolita, Nabokov makes a remarkably clear, if playful, statement which all those who study his fictions should make into a floating screen-saver: “A considerable part of what Mr Nabokov thinks has been thought up by his critics and commentators…for whose thinking he is not responsible. Many of the delightful combinations and clues, though quite acceptable, never entered my head or are the result of an author’s intuition and inspiration, not calculation and craft. Otherwise, why bother at all—in your case as well as mine” (Selected Letters 391).

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Phelan 211ff). Above all, our text lacks textility and at the same time topography, a system of linkages required for the understanding of the correlation between the inner narration (My Laura) and the embracing one (Dying Is Fun), and also between these two on the one hand and the all-encompassing, roving-eye narration of The Original of Laura, on the other.9 Needless to say, without such understanding no sound judgement of the book’s plotted content is possible; in this state it is much more like the archaic torso of the Miletus Apollo, whose legendary head, Rilke says, we cannot know (nor can we see three-fourths of his limbs), than the Milos Venus, her arms missing rather fetchingly. We therefore can by no means be certain that the placement of the cards as they were found after the author’s death follows the assigned sequence in the book that he had already composed mentally.10 Nor can we, as the original edition tempts us to do, rearrange them ourselves with enough justification, try as we may to find in the ghostly contour of an imagined book the assigned place for a single card or a series. Luzhin-Jr., putting together a jigsaw puzzle, “would try to determine by scarcely perceptible signs the essence of the [whole] picture in advance” (The Defense 38). We have a puzzle for which not only two-thirds of the pieces are missing but, more important, missing is the box with the model picture: we don’t quite know whether we are assembling a man or a mansion. Many scalloped pieces can be interlocked to form isles of bright and clear sense, and some of those can be indisputably joined, or placed side by side, to hint at an outline of a larger archipelago. But there also are many single tesserae that fit nothing. And yet it is all too easy to forget that what is published as The Original of Laura is not a collocation of shards, nor excerpts of an unfinished novel, but rather fragments from a novel—one already structurally composed in the architect’s mind but only partly written down. What that structure was to be is anybody’s guess and nobody’s surety. In my Russian edition I followed the numbered order of the original, with two important exceptions. First, all seven working notes obviously extraneous to the novel’s body were removed to an appendix. Secondly, the fragments have been fitted with a putative conclusion. Whereas the initial series of fifty-eight cards presents an incontestable beginning (they are so marked by the author: Chapter One, Two etc.), it is scarcely less clear that the last text-bearing cards in the stack, nos. 135 9 10

On concentric narrative circles in Nabokov’s fiction see chapter “Narrative Embedding” in Tammi (Problems 183ff),—a foundational, detailed treatise of his architectural strategies. On the other hand, Nabokov’s numeration within a given series of cards containing an episode or a thematic string usually sets the correct order for that group.

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and 136, which describe one of the earlier stages of Wild’s experiments, not only could not possibly mark the end of the book but logically are out of the lot’s sequence. Of course, one cannot expect a manuscript in this state of incompleteness to have anything resembling a finale. However, I think that by luck we happen to have a closing, at least a provisional one.

Missing the Train Poe’s paradox underscores that in a top-level work of durational art the ending is the point d’appui of the whole thing, and sometimes also its departure point. Ivan Luzhin, a flabby writer (The Defense), discovers Poe’s principle at the end of his life but dies before he can begin writing his new book (about his son’s genius). Nabokov’s endings often nudge the reader to go back to the book’s opening in order to view it in a different light and from a higher vantage point—and then yield to the salutary desire to reread the entire novel. Soon after his migration to America Nabokov published his ending to Pushkin’s unfinished Rusalka (River Nymph), not merely as a sporting homage to his favourite poet but also, I think, because of his desire to see the whole, even if in a fantastic frame of his own fabrication. Of course, there is a difference in integral worth between a mermaid without the tail and a tail without the mermaid. Even upon the first, superficial reading of the text I thought that cards 112–14 were quite possibly designed to end the novel. For one thing, one cannot ignore that they are inscribed “Last §” (Nabokov’s customary mark for chapters, e.g. in the manuscript of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight) and “Z, Z2, Z3” respectively on each of the three cards. At the bottom of #114 a fat line is drawn. True, a few other cards bear this sort of bottom line; moreover, card #93 is also marked “Last chapter.” However, there is a significant, if oblique, evidence in favour of the proposition that the text on cards 112–14 was designed as the tail of the book—perhaps, a working tail. Just above that bold line appears what might have been the novel’s final sentence: “You’ ll miss your train.” Nabokov fielded this double-entendre (as in “to miss the boat,” to miss the train of thought or events) in a number of books and in several variations. In his first English novel, Nina Rechnoy, a sirène fatale of exceptional seductive power, who had already enthralled and brought down Sebastian Knight and was now busy spellbinding his half-brother, the supposed narrator, whom she has lured to her estate, tells her husband while getting rid of him for the day so as to clear the stage for the final act of her mesmeric séance: “Mon ami, you’ll miss that train.” Of course, it is the narrator who misses the train in more senses than one at the novel’s end; this is forestalled, as are

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many other events in V.’s unreal life, by a mysterious voice resembling Knight’s that mumbled that he regretted having missed trains, allusions and opportunities.11 The semantic string here is precisely what that short sentence in The Original of Laura was, I think, charged to imply. We see something similar in Pnin, which opens on a story of the hero getting on the wrong train, and this mishap becomes a metaphoric emblem of much of what is to unfold. When Pnin does not understand an American idiom (in the second chapter) he replies malapropos, thus “missing one bus but boarding the next.” Could Flora’s words to her girlfriend, who is dying to show her the place in My Laura where Laura’s “wonderful death” is described, be designed to alert the reader that he had missed something significant? Perhaps he would do well to catch the next train to the beginning and start the book over, now well-conned by the intelligence collected on the first run. We shall very likely never know whether this was to be the book’s finis; it is certain, however, that the islets and keys that form The Original of Laura contain no ending that would be more Nabokovian.

Harlequins in a Receding Cavalcade Two curious traits stand out at once, even at first reading. One is euphonic: besides the thematic rhyming and telescoping of the names Laura and Flora (her original)—with the sidekick Cora, Flora’s maid—Nabokov all too often resorts to the weak alliteration of the initial consonant in words that come in pairs, threesomes, sometimes even larger clumps. The cards are mottled with these; phrases such as beaming bum, banal bevy, firm form, high heather, rubber and rot, sketchy skeleton, pain and poison, Carlton Courts in Cannes are so inordinately frequent (I counted nearly forty instances, i.e. about one per regulation page) as to annoy by their persistent buzz, much as shimmering and sparkling harries the eye of a seafarer.

11

In Sebastian Knight’s last novel The Doubtful Asphodel, in which the first person narrator is reported to have died in the book, taking with him a simple solution to the ultimate riddle of life and death just as he was about to whisper it in the eager ear of the other, reporting narrator, his half-brother V.—a design that Nabokov tried again the following year in his last Russian novel, unfinished and reduced to two published chapters with Latin titles. For more on this see Barabtarlo (“Taina Naita”). See Tammi (Problems) on the problem of the narrator’s presence in his text, esp. sections on “Grammatical Person” (37) and “Naming of N-Agents” (46); also, Stanzel (229–32), in general, and Tammi (“Exploring”), in particular for Nabokov, for the specific instance of the autodiegetic narrator’s death within his narrative.

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The other feature is more interesting and almost as persistent: The Original of Laura is striated as densely as the much larger space of Look at the Harlequins!, Nabokov’s last finished novel, with references to “other works by the author.” Any reasonably well-read lover of Nabokov’s fiction will at once recognize various names and situations from all but one of his previous English novels, here elastically deformed or canted. Where in Lolita Humbert Humbert’s wife is killed by a car, instantly making him Dolly’s only earthly guardian, Laura’s Hubert Hubert’s presumed daughter Daisy is killed by a backing lorry (the nameless nympherast in “The Enchanter” also dies under the wheels of a huge truck). Aurora Lee immediately brings up her near namesake Annabel Leigh, Humbert’s child love, and their common Poe-tic 1849 source, Annabel Lee. In Pnin’s second chapter methodical Freudians Eric and Liza Wind gather various wives and husbands “in two parallel psycho-asinine discussion groups where the former with absolute frankness compare notes on the plusses and minuses of the latter: Well, girls, when George last night…”; The Original of Laura’s third chapter stages a similar, if more ribald, scene in a different setting: there, on the grass in Fontainebleau, “the girls would compare dimensions of their companions. Exchanges would be enjoyed with giggles and cries of surprise” (#42). The manuscript of the last chapter of Wild’s opus is filched by a person unknown (to us, in any event) whilst the author is dying of a heart attack (#94)—the manuscript of Shade’s long poem “Pale Fire” is snatched by Kinbote (a masked personage, to us) and inlaid within his own grandiose story disguised as commentary to the poem but related to it only by fanciful contacts attached by a brilliant madman. Continuing chronologically, Ada’s agonist Van (Ivan) Veen has here a phonetic counterpart: Ivan Vaughan appears in an intriguing place unattached to anything elsewhere. Flora’s matter-of-fact adultery and her husband’s desperate resignation are perhaps closer psychologically to the situation we see in Transparent Things than in Invitation to a Beheading. One can find in The Original of Laura a number of Russian reminiscences as well, although upon crossing the language toll bridge they may appear more tenuous. In one of his first short stories “Revenge” (1924), Nabokov presents a tightly compressed plot of jealousy in its last, irrevocable stage (madness leading to murder). Here, as in The Original of Laura, a savant invents a professional and original method of dispatching his wife. In “Revenge” a biology professor places a skeleton in the conjugal bed, and his supersensitive wife dies of fright; in The Original of Laura, a neurology professor (or perhaps the author of My Laura) seems to proceed from experiments in gradual self-erasure to a methodical telepathic annihilation of his lecherous wife who dies “a wonderful death” (##61, 113–14). The great difference between the two is that in the early story

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the wife is innocent; she has mystical rather than philistine proclivities, and her husband, not unlike Othello, is a victim rather of self-mystification than of blind jealousy alone. In the titles of Flora’s grandfather’s paintings, “April in Yalta” and “The Old Bridge,” Nabokov’s reader will recognize, respectively, “Spring in Fialta” and Nabokov’s favourite poem of the same period, “The Swallow” (from The Gift): “One night between sunset and river / On the old bridge we stood, you and I.” Hubert Hubert dies in a hotel lift that was “going up, one would like to surmise” (#38), and one may recall one especially magnetic place in The Defense, where a hydraulic house elevator, having delivered Sasha Luzhin’s corpulent French governess upstairs, would come down empty: “Goodness knows what had happened to her—perhaps she had travelled up to heaven and remained there…”). The Original of Laura’s provisional title (Dying Is Fun) is a colloquial remake of an encoded key phrase in Invitation to a Beheading (mentioned at the beginning of this essay). The gliding eye of the narrator resembles a similar device in The Eye and the beginning of “Spring in Fialta.” And a shadow of the idea of self-induced dissolution of one’s body makes a fleeting appearance in a strange poem of 1938, the year The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was composed: here, too, the grand mystery of man’s existence is solved in a dream: Рѣшенье чистое, простое. О чемъ я думалъ столько лѣтъ? Пожалуй и вставать не стоитъ: Ни тѣла, ни постели нѣтъ. (A clean and simple resolution. What was I thinking of so long? Why even bother getting up— My body and my bed are gone.)12

All of which reminds one of Nabokov’s stratagem in his last published novel: it opens on the list of “other works by the narrator” which differs from that of his author by the exquisite rephrasing of the titles and slightly displaced chronology. One should resist the temptation to look in these cards for the tracks of all Nabokov’s books listed in Look at the 12

Stikhi 259 (my translation). This poem was written in Mentone, the locale of “The Visit to the Museum,” a short story (1939) about recurvated space, which curiously reminds one of Gumilev’s famous “The Wayward Tram” (1918–21): both the story and the poem, after a mind-boggling “return trip” through warped space, end up in the same spot in St Petersburg. A curious reader will also recognise the “udder-like face” of the poem’s redshirted executioner in the “large soft pinkish face [which was] remarkably like a cow’s udder” of Mr Goodman, the odious biographer of Sebastian Knight (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight 60).

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Harlequins!, a temptation that grows stronger as one imagines that The Original of Laura might be meant as the last review of his harlequins, the figments of his rich imagination, as he calls them in his last poem, parading in cavalcade before they recede from his sight: “Ахъ, угонятъ ихъ въ степь, арлекиновъ моихъ, Въ буераки, къ чужимъ атаманамъ...” (All my harlequins! they will be driven away to the gullies and plains, to strange chieftains…)

This is exactly the sort of final inspection to which Sebastian Knight, in his farewell novel, briskly marshals most of his books and themes and images.

Laura and Her Original “The portrait’s fine—th’ original is dreadful.” Lermontov, The Masquerade

Since the text at our disposal was in nowise meant to be at our disposal, we face enigmas wherever we turn our attention: doors leading to pitfalls, corridors ending in pit-faces, windows giving out onto naught. A highly classified, suddenly abandoned construction site has been turned into an archaeological dig open to the public, and a visitor must tread here with utmost circumspection. We cannot even be certain about the important question of what exactly the title means.13 Does the original refer to the small-headed, small-minded Flora Wild, a model for the doubly fictional Laura? Is it the outer structure that wraps round the internal novel My Laura, a dream within a dream? Or could it be something else, an unsupposed third possibility of which no one can know anything with firmity? The name Laura, in its Franco–English pronunciation, is phonetically contained within her prototype (which makes its translation into most languages a conundrum). “Everything about [Flora] is bound to remain blurry, even her name which seems to have been made expressly to have another one modelled upon it by a fantastically lucky artist” (#43). If everything does not deceive, this Laura cannot be attached without a

13

But note that it recycles, perhaps with hidden significance, a formula found in Nabokov’s preceding novel: there, Esmeralda and Her Parandrus is the title of one of the books by the narrator, V. V. N.

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deforming stretch to either Petrarch’s beloved, “radiant in her virtues,” or to Pushkin’s frothy girl from The Guest of Stone, who, inconstant as she is, “cannot love two men at once.”14 On the other hand, not having the entire book one cannot assert even that. As in Petrarch, an idealized poetic subject is slipcased into a (perhaps) starkly differing protagonist; a thematic thread of metamorphosis basting its course through what remnant length of the text we have; Petrarch’s favourite punning on Laura: L’aura (breeze), L’auro (gold)15 which somehow correlates with the Flora—Laura—L’Aurora [Lee] series. The fifth sonnet in the Rime sparse is an elaborate game on her name in Latinized French, Laurette: Lau-reta, one syllable hidden in the third, fifth, and seventh lines of the octave, then repeated in a different pattern in the sestet (ineluctably bringing to mind the syllabic intoning of Lo-li-ta in the opening paragraph of that other novel). It may be worth noting that an excellent Harvard edition of Petrarch’s lyric poems by Robert Durling came out in 1976, when The Original of Laura was in the works; that Cornell University, Nabokov’s academic stead for ten years, is home to a great Petrarca Collection (fully catalogued in 1974); and that Nabokov’s closest friend at Cornell, Professor Morris Bishop, was a renowned Petrarch expert and the author of the famous 1963 book Petrarch and His World (“highly readable but unreliable,” Durling shrugs). There may, however, be a more natural precedent for the heroine’s name and the book’s title. Even though what we have is only a remnant piece of fabric, it bears discernible traces of what can be taken for a weave of a floral motif, from Flora’s linden maiden name and the banal bevy of birds-of-paradise flowers in the entrance hall (#18–19, 21) to the wild brambles in a ditch at the bottom of the batch (#136). In the episodes we have left this motif serves only as a pastel background or shimmering backlighting, but who knows how it would have blossomed and whither led, had the other two or three acts been written. This thematic floral design—anthemion, as Nabokov once intended to title the book of his memoirs—inevitably takes one to the prototype of all Floras, the Roman goddess of flowers, and to her peerless image on Botticelli’s Primavera. There she stands bedecked with wild flowers and bestrewn with wreaths and anthemia, and her facial features and expression overlap with the

14

15

Had Flora’s lover, the author of a romance about her, known Pushkin, he might have addressed his verse to a lucky rival: “Forsooth, your mistress is no moron. / I bear no grudge, though see it all. / She is a most enchanting Laura, / But I am not her Petrarch, pal.” Pushkin’s Don Juan, in his Guest of Stone, calls her “my Laura” twice, and her guests are decidedly not of stone. There were no apostrophes in his time, and thus the visual effect matched the aural.

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description of Flora Wild, that scentless wild flower of Nabokov’s last novel. Botticelli made her almost microcephalic, more so than the other figures in the painting, because it was supposed to hang above eye level (over a lettuccio, an exceedingly elaborate settee on a pedestal, in a chamber in the Medici town palace)—and Nabokov gives his Flora a markedly little head (#9) for her “strange little mind” (#117). The painted Flora’s eyes are not close-set, and although they were painted blue, they grew drab olive-green over the past five centuries.16 But the ruthless sensuality of her slightly open mouth (#43) is strikingly there, and so is the pulling force of her imperturbable but parlous attraction and the strangely modern general air about her entire appearance. She is depicted as a married woman wearing, as was the custom in the 1400s, a ghirlanda on her head and a floral girdle high round her waist. With her left hand she is holding up a fold of her dress making a pouch for the roses that she is about to strew out with her right hand, and that gesture seems somehow a graceful foil to one rum place in The Original of Laura: “Statically—if one can put it that way—the portrait [of Flora] is a faithful one. Such fixed details as her trick of opening her mouth when towelling her inguen or of closing her eyes when smelling an inodorous rose are absolutely true to the original” (#61). Nabokov must have known this painting thoroughly. In April of 1966 he spent a fortnight in Florence hunting for butterflies on the canvasses of the old masters for his book on the subject. That he had taken time to study Primavera can be seen from the following passage in his last published novel, thus immediately preceding The Original of Laura: “I want you to celebrate your resemblance to the fifth girl from left to right, the flower-decked blonde with the straight nose and serious gray eyes, in Botticelli’s Primavera, an allegory of Spring, my love, my allegory” (Look at the Harlequins! 107). Anna Blagovo, an unclever virgin to whom these words from Vadim Vadimych N.’s letter are addressed, is Flora Wild’s opposite in everything, excepting this strange outward affinity. In this fantastic masterpiece, great in both senses of the word (it is a 7 ½ foot by 10 megalorama), Botticelli adjoins two temporal planes: Flora is standing next to her own younger self as she was when, a nymph called Chloris, she was deflowered by the oddly ghoulish, ashen-greenish Zephyr, who then, according to Ovid, made her his wife and thereby promoted her to the goddess of flowers.17 This prologue takes place in a

16 17

In the eye of one expertly beholder these eyes are still blue: see Lightbown 138. Fasti 5:193–212. Ovid has Flora explain that her name is a Latin corruption of her original Greek name Chloris.

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laurel thicket, rather than in a citrus grove where the rest of the picture is set, which serves as a visual cue to the deliberate anachronism of the scene. In an adjacent myth, nymphet Daphne, pursued by Apollo, metamorphs into a laurel tree (daphne means laurel in Greek); hence the bay wreath on Apollo’s brow; hence, by extension, the custom of laureating poets; hence, also by extension, a laurel tree is never struck by lightning. Did Laura, Daphne’s Latin namesake, know that?

Terminating the Phrase Once again, without a map of the unrealized novel we cannot inspect its grounds; not knowing the system of its inlet and outlet canals we cannot even admire, let alone navigate it.18 Yet if some road signs can be taken for pointers, they may suggest a possible solution: a hazy convergence of the only two arterial themes we can detect here, that of Flora’s fiction-writing lover and that of her husband’s vanishing act. By comparing the detailed descriptions of Wild’s self-annulling experiments with the mention of some unparalleled, wonderful death of Laura, a fiction character modelled on his wayward wife, one can cautiously propose that Nabokov might have had in mind the Pygmalion story turned the wrong way round: an artist telepathically reducing a live Galatea to nil, while making of her an immortal marble statue.19 The book’s very first sentence is Flora’s reply to a courtesy question about her husband’s occupation, put to her presumably by a Russian writer, who is to become her lover that very night. “He was, she answered, a writer, too—at least after a fashion” (my emphasis). Next we learn that what he is secretly writing is not fiction but rather “a mad neurologist’s testament, a kind of Poisonous Opus as in that film.” She no doubt knows of that “absolute secret” because she, contrary to her pointed denial, did go through his notes. But what is this opus, in what film? Among many more or less plausible candidates20 there is a 1972 screen version by Rogelio González of “The Oval Portrait,” a story within a short story by Poe, which in its first publication in 1842 was entitled “Life in Death.” In it, an artist is painting a portrait of his wife who dies while sitting for “Геометрію ихъ, Венецію ихъ / назовутъ шутовствомъ и обманомъ...” [Their geometry, their Venice / they will call buffoonery and deception]: Nabokov on his books, in his last poem (Stikhi 299; my translation). 19 One can find a curious application of the (traditional) Pygmalion sujet in The Gift in Blackwell 139–40. 20 Including Albert Zugsmith’s 1962 screen version of De Quincey’s opiatic opus. 18

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him, but the portrait turns out to be horrifically life-like. The plot had of course been trotted out in, and before, Gogol’s “The Portrait” and was not avoided even after Wilde’s definitive The Picture of Dorian Gray, but the following enigmatic phrase found on card #61 gives support to my conjecture of The Original of Laura’s possible storyline direction: “The I of the book is a neurotic and hesitant man of letters who destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her.” The word obliterate is the very last one on the last card of Nabokov’s last novel (in the sequence as it has been now reproduced). It was an accessory card, of a different, graph paper stock, on which he jotted down a long column of synonyms to “efface.” Most of them he put to use. The theme of obliteration enters of course the main line: Professor Philip Wild, a man of letters, is an oblittérateur, as it were—a singular notion that lends itself to the weird concept of obliterature: the art of erasing what has been written. And this is precisely what Wild does: wipes, by sheer willpower, the lower parts of his whitish “I” off his mental blackboard. The key conclusion to a carefully written record of this experiment has been stolen (perhaps by another writer) and thus, in a sense, also effaced. We cannot know exactly why Nabokov wished that the cards with the unfinished The Original of Laura be destroyed: out of resentment to appear in public in a dressing-gown, thus out of decency mated to authorial dignity or vanity; or perhaps because, when death is in sight, long-held views on matters such as the fate of The Aeneid (had it been burnt as willed), or of Dead Souls (had the second volume not been burnt by Gogol before he died), or of one’s own drafts—especially one’s own drafts—may undergo a rapid and radical change. In almost every novel since his third, The Defense, Nabokov inserts as a secret signature mark one theme that he varies in shape and application but never really develops: the theme of imperceptible but effective intercourse of the souls of personae who died within the book’s limns with the doings and destinies of the characters still quick. Having held one Nabokov book up to the light and seen the pattern of this theme, the reader keeps looking for it in others, acknowledging its recurrent signs.21 This is a strange, one-way spiritism whose influence is completely inaccessible to the characters fallen under its spell and can be discerned only by a keen observer outside the book, and then only after he has acquired 21

Nabokov pointed to this theme’s presence in a do-it-yourself interview; his widow described it in an important preface to his posthumous collection of Russian verse (Stikhi 3–4); Brian Boyd did the earliest study of it in his 1978 doctoral dissertation on Ada (partially published in Boyd, Nabokov’s Ada).

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the knack. The death that released a gently guiding or watchfully guarding ghost is usually mentioned in passing, within a long period, often in the pluperfect, but the reader should learn how to collect such things, for the understanding of higher planes of the story. Dying in a Nabokov novel may not be fun, but it is no fin either. On the other hand, Nabokov, unlike Tolstoy, for example, never shows death itself at close range, in a physically realistic description. Philip Wild dies of a heart attack, apparently at home, far away from the reader’s eye, while Laura’s “wonderful death,” within the confines of an intramural novel, remains in the end an enigma even for her original. In 1951 Nabokov confided to Katharine White, editor of The New Yorker and a good friend of his, after his spectrally shimmering story “The Vane Sisters” had been misunderstood and rejected, that his fiction followed “a system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one” (Selected Letters 117). A more or less universal law of any artistic act is that it is essentially driven by l’amore che muove the artist’s pen or brush. The fuel is a greatly variable mixture of love and vanity: the last soaring lines of Paradiso disentangling themselves from the vicious circles of Inferno. “Both Homer and la mer are driven by l’amore,” in Mandelstam’s precise formula, from his famous insomnia poem. Earthlier love being terminal is the drivetrain of a classical tragedy, and Nabokov so beautifully ponders this antinomy, insoluble on earth, in a long, wistful, keenly lyric passage in his memoir, recollecting one morning in May of 1934 when his son was born. It can be said that all Nabokov’s novels are tragedies in at least one narrow sense: love and death, as their subject and predicate, span the tenses from the past perfect to the indefinite future. As early as 1923, when he was about to begin his amazingly swift transformation from a gifted young poet of dependent sonorities and frangible strength into a strangely mature, masterful artist, he wrote to his love, the future singular second person of his Conclusive Evidence: “When you and I were last at the cemetery,22 I realized with such incisive clarity that you knew everything, you knew what would come after death…and that is why I am so happy with you.”23 From the very beginning to the very end of his lifelong exploration of the mystery of life, death, and afterdeath in the laboratory of fiction, Nabokov tried and tweaked the formula “death is…X.” Since his brilliant 1924 Tragedy of Mr Morn, where a curiously well-informed personage

22 Tegel, in Berlin, where his father, murdered a year earlier, was buried. 23 Letter of July 13, 1923, sent from Prague to Berlin (to be published in the forthcoming collection by Knopf).

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says that “death is curious,” he let characters of varying intelligence and trustworthiness rephrase it—into the strangely encrypted “death is sweet” (Invitation to a Beheading), or the deceptively banal “death is inevitable” (The Gift, epigraph), or the oddly doubled, as in incantation, “death is divestment, death is communion” (Pnin), or the desperately grumbling “death is silly, death is degrading” (Look at the Harlequins!). His famous maxim that death [in a novel] is a question of style is at once shallow and deep, depending on the angle of view. Looking straight down, how far can one penetrate Nabokov’s aerial design, having just these ten thousand words to work, or to play, with? Was the death of Philip Wild to give his ghost a special role further on in the tale, a corrective assignment in the lives of Flora or her literary lover? A minimally educated guess depends in part on the place reserved for card 94, where Philip Wild’s death of a fatal heart attack is reported in the subordinate clause, while the main clause momentarily produces an anonym who deftly plucked from Wild’s typist the manuscript of the last chapter of his opus. It is entirely possible that in that chapter Wild recorded his attempt to touch his heart with a mental eraser. Philip Wild proposes that dying by divesting oneself of one’s flaccid body, whether head or feet first, is far from silly, is fun, even ecstatic. Death in fiction may be a matter of style, but in fiction, too, Nabokov kept otherworldly concerns above the worldly ones. Pushkin, at a low ebb before his marriage, in the last lines of his hastily finished, or rather finished off, Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse seven and a half years in the making, quite unexpectedly calls life a feast that one would do well to leave early, his glass of wine half-full; to stop reading life’s novel before reaching the end. Pushkin was Nabokov’s weakness, he admired him almost uncritically, but this notion that an early departure may be a blessing was wholly alien to him. Unlike the other poet, he knew no ennui, “life’s noise” (in Pushkin’s famous 1828 lyric poem) did not “torment him with anguish,” and the “gift of life” was not only not “in vain” but on the contrary promised new marvels, joyous and unaccidental to the point of tears. He fell almost literally with “a heavenly butterfly in his net, on the top of a wild mountain,” to quote from a clairvoyant poem about the possible setting of his deathscene, written three years before the incident.24 The net leapt out of his hand and got caught up in 24 He also had a remarkable foreglimpse of this fall in a simultaneous prose: “Imagine me, an old gentleman, a distinguished author, gliding rapidly on my back, in the wake of my outstretched dead feet, first through that gap in the granite, then over a pinewood, then along misty water meadows, and then simply between marges of mist, on and on, imagine that sight!” (Look at the Harlequins! 240)

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a tree branch, “like Ovid’s lyre” (why Ovid, by the way, and not Orpheus, the original enchanter?), and could not be retrieved. But he died two years later, on a hospital bed, pace Gumilev (whose poem was the model for his “heavenly butterfly” parody), and shortly before the end his eyes welled with tears, perhaps at the realisation, according to his son, that he would never see again a certain earthly butterfly which was on the wing, an “uncaptured specimen of an insufficiently described subspecies,”—but not that his book was left unfinished; at the thought that his life’s book was about to end and that he would soon have to part with it, at which point the notion of parting with “my Laura”25 might have receded into tomorrow’s haze.

Works Cited Barabtarlo, Gennady. Aerial View: Essays on Nabokov’s Arts and Metaphysics. New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1993. —. “Taina Naita: Narrative Stance in Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.” Partial Answers 6.1 (2008): 57–80. Bishop, Morris. “Petrarch.” 1961. The Italian Renaissance. Ed. John Plumb. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987. 160–75. Blackwell, Stephen. Zina’s Paradox. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Boyd, Brian. Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985. —. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Lightbown, Ronald. Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1989. Mandel’shtam, Osip. “Bezsonnitsa. Gomer. Tugie parusa.” The Penguin Book of Russian Verse. Ed. Dimitri Obolensky. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962. 352–53. Nabokov, Vladimir. Conclusive Evidence (later editions: Speak, Memory). New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1951. —. The Defense. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964. —. Diary (excerpts quoted in Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov). —. The Gift. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963. —. Look at the Harlequins! New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. —. Pnin. Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1957. —. Stikhi [Poems]. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979. —. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Norfolk: New Directions, 1941. —. Selected Letters 1940–1977. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich–Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1989. —. The Original of Laura. New York: Knopf, 2009. Ovid. Fasti. Trans. James Frazer. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP–William Heinemann, Ltd., 1931.

25

“…as I with my Onegin”—the last words of Pushkin’s novel in Nabokov’s translation.

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Phelan, James. “Narrative Progression.” Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Ed. Brian Richardson. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2002. 211–16. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” 1846. The Oxford Book of American Essays. Ed. Brander Matthews. New York: Oxford UP, 1914. Pushkin, Alexander. “Brozhu–li ia vdol’ ulits shumnykh…” (1828); Eugene Onegin (1823–1830); The Guest of Stone (1830). Stanzel, F. K. A Theory of Narrative. 1979. Trans. Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Tammi, Pekka. “Exploring terra incognita.” FREE language INDIRECT translation DISCOURSE narratology: Linguistic, Translatological and Literary-Theoretical Encounters of FID. Ed. Pekka Tammi and Hannu Tommola. Tampere: Tampere UP, 2006. 159–73. —. Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1985.

Index

Abbott, Barbara 233 Abbott, H. Porter 24, 39 Adams, Carol J. 112 Adamson, Jane 243 Addison, Catherine 280–82 Adorno, Theodor 177 Aesop 96, 98 Agee, James 123 Akerman, Chantal: Jeanne Dielman 124 Alber, Jan X, XIII, 83, 122, 146, 148, 154, 174–75, 183 Alexander, Paul 239, 240, 251 Allen, Colin 94, 105 Amis, Martin 182, 302 Time’s Arrow 182 Anderson, Joseph D. 121 Anderson, Sam 88 Angier, Carole 234 Apanowicz, Franciszek 230 Ariosto, Ludovico 280 Aristotle X, 35, 42 Armstrong, Paul B. 216 Ascárate, Richard John 124 Ashcroft, Bill 70 Aslanov, Cyril 230 Atwood, Margaret XIII, 192–201, 206, 209 Alias Grace XIII, 192–209 The Handmaid’s Tale 198 Augustine 28 Austen, Jane: Sense and Sensibility 76 Baetens, Jan 128 Baker, Mona 271 Baker, Nicholson XIV, 42–45, 48–55 The Anthologist 43 A Box of Matches 43, 49–50, 52 The Mezzanine 42–43, 45–49, 51, 52 Room Temperature 43, 48–49, 51–52 The Size of Thoughts 51 U and I 45 Baker, Steve 102

Bakhtin, M. M. 3, 34, 69, 211, 213, 272–73, 280, 282–83, 284, 285 Bal, Mieke 141 Balzac, Honoré de 35 Barabtarlo, Gennady XV, 72, 297–98, 308 Barr, Marleen S. 206 Barthelme, Donald 76 Barthes, Roland 144, 195, 228 Bauman, Richard 188 Baumgarten, Murray 30, 32 Bazin, André 128, 131 Beauvoir, Simone de 112 Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home 103 Beckett, Samuel 42, 45, 54–55, 78, 182–83 “Lessness” 183 “Ping” 42, 45, 54 Play 182–83 Beecher Stowe, Harriet 175, 176 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 175 Behrendt, Kathy 27, 39 Bekoff, Marc 94, 105 Bell, Anthea 27 Belpoliti, Marco 235 Belting, Hans 222 Benjamin, Walter 75 Benston, Kimberly W. 101 Benveniste, Emile 35–37 Berlatsky, Eric L. 198 Bishop, Morris 301, 312 Blackwell, Stephen 314 Bleyen, Mieke 128 Boccaccio, Giovanni 301 Booker, Marvin Keith 185 Boorman, John: Deliverance 121 Booth, Wayne C. 216, 242–43 Bordwell, David 121, 122–23, 126, 133–34 Botticelli, Sandro 312–13 Botton, Alain de 44 Boyd, Brian 247, 249, 298, 300–01, 302, 315 Bradbury, Ray: “A Sound of Thunder” 185 Braidotti, Rosi 94

322

Index

Brentano, Margaret 43 Bresson, Robert 132 Bridgeman, Teresa 195 Brockmeier, Jens 29 Brooke-Rose, Christine 188, 217 Brontë, Emily: “The Prisoner” 196 Brown, Andrew 43–44 Brown, Bill 48 Brown, Lisa 95 Bruner, Jerome 38 Bruun, Sanna Katariina XIII Buber-Neumann, Margarete 232 Butte, George 121 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 241, 281, 282 Don Juan 281, 282 Caesar, Julius 155, 228 Caillois, Roger 84–85 Cameron, James: Avatar 127, 130 de Camp, L. Sprague: Lest Darkness Fall 185 Capps, Lisa 33 Cardinal, Roger 124 Carpio, Glenda R. 177 Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland 254–55 Carroll, Noël 38, 122, 124 Catford, J. C. 254 Cave, Terence 212 Cavell, Stanley 129, 131 Cawelti, John 245 Centerwall, Brandon S. 239–40 Chambers, Ross 45, 217, 218 Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice 178 Chatman, Seymour 4, 44, 126, 144, 151, 202 Chekhov, Anton X, XI, 3, 25–27, 28, 265, 266 “A Boring Story” X, 3, 25–27 The Cherry Orchard 266 “The Lady with the Dog” XI Chesterman, Andrew 255, 256 Chopin, Kate: The Awakening 51 Churchill, Caryl: Cloud Nine 182 Clark, Andy 97 Clark, Herbert 58, 60, 65–70, 72 Cohn, Dorrit 100, 141, 146, 154, 155, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 170, 201, 228–29 Cohn, Ruby 183 Coltrane, John 84 Conrad, Joseph IX, 30, 31, 34–35, 211–217 Heart of Darkness IX, 31, 211–20, 222 Lord Jim 211, 212 Coover, Robert: “The Babysitter” 183 Cortázar, Julio: “The Other Heaven” 175 Coulmas, Florian 62

Critchley, Simon 125 Culler, Jonathan 140, 142, 146, 148, 169 cummings, e. e. 277 Currie, Mark 174 Danielewski, Mark Z.: House of Leaves 71–72, 175 Dannenberg, Hilary P. 114, 195 Davies, David 127 Davis, Lennard J. 197 Davis, Lydia: The End of the Story 37 Diamond, Cora 243 Dick, Bruce 177 Dickinson, Emily 206, 277 Disney [The Walt Disney Company] 97, 98, 127, 130, 132 Bambi 98 Lady and the Tramp 98 The Lion King 102 Pocahontas 127, 130, 132 Doležel, Lubomír 184 Donnellan, Keith S. 233 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 132, 135 Ordet 135 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 276–77 Durling, Robert 312 Eakin, Paul John 228 Edwards, Leigh 127 Eikhenbaum, Boris 241 Eleftheriotis, Dimitris 123, 130 Elias, Amy 175, 195 Eliot, T. S.: The Waste Land 277 Elkin, Stanley: George Mills 175 Escher, M. C. 110 Ewert, Jeanne 97 Faris, Wendy B. 178 Fauconnier, Gilles 184 Faulkner, William 204, 206 Absalom, Absalom! 206 Flaubert, Gustave 239 Fludernik, Monika XI, 24, 25–27, 39, 42, 58, 63–65, 66, 68, 69, 81, 82–83, 96, 100, 122, 139, 142, 146, 147, 148, 162, 164, 169, 184, 188 Foley, Barbara 243 Forster, E. M. 26, 180 Fothergill, Anthony 215 Foucault, Michel 245 Fowles, John: The French Lieutenant’s Woman 175 Frazier, Ian 238 Freeman, Elizabeth 238

Index Fyodorov, Andrej 269 García Landa, José Angel 100 García Márquez, Gabriel 178 Gaut, Berys 130 Genette, Gérard X, 35–36, 42, 44, 57–63, 65, 67, 133, 155, 157, 182, 197, 211, 240 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 33 Gerrig, Richard 58, 60, 65–70, 72 Gibbons, Alison 71 Gibson, J. J. 97, 278 Gibson, Mel: Apocalypto 121 Girgus, Sam B. 135 Gogol, Nikolai 265, 315 Dead Souls 265, 315 “The Portrait” 315 Goncharov, Ivan: Oblomov 258 Gonzales, Laurence: Lucy 100 González, Rogelio 314 Goodstein, Elisabeth S. 76 Gordon, Robert 235 Graves, Robert XIII, 155, 159 I, Claudius 155, 159–67, 169–71 Grayson, Jane 254, 256, 261, 264, 268, 270, 272 Greenblatt, Stephen 76, 77, 127 Griffith, D. W. 123–24 The Birth of a Nation 123 Grishakova, Marina XII, 240 Groensteen, Thierry 102 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 130 Gumilev, Nikolai 310, 318 “The Wayward Tram” 310 Gunn, Daniel P. 163 Gunning, Tom 124 Hackman, Gene 132 Hakusho, Hakobune: Animal Academy 103 Haldeman, Joe: The Forever War 185–86 Hamilton, Ian 246, 248, 250–51 Harari, Yuval Noah 228 Hassan, Ihab 244 Hatavara, Mari XIII, 153, 159 Hawking, Stephen 178 Heidegger, Martin 28, 48, 131 Heinlein, Robert A. 185 “All You Zombies” 185 Time for the Stars 185 Heinze, Rüdiger 174 Heise, Ursula K. 174 Heller, Peggy 24 Hemingway, Ernest 78 Herman, David XIII, 3, 24, 26, 27, 37, 38,

323

39, 44, 93, 96, 97, 133, 144, 178, 179, 181, 232, 243 Herman, Luc 76–77, 243, 244 Herman, Vimala 167 Herzing, Denise L. 101 Herzog, Werner: Fitzcarraldo 124 Hiaasen, Carl: Skinny Dip 77 Higgins, George V. XII, 3–5, 7–12, 14–22 The Friends of Eddie Coyle XII, 3–5, 7–21 Hitchcock, Alfred 123, 247 Rear Window 123 Hofstadter, Douglas 283, 284, 287, 288, 289, 294 Hogan, Patrick Colm 84 Homer: The Odyssey 206 Horkheimer, Max 177 Horstkotte, Silke 129, 221 Hotchman, Will 245 Howells, Coral Ann 193, 199, 205, 208 Hrushovski, Benjamin 148 Hughes, Shirley XIII, 94, 95, 99, 103, 104, 110–16 Bye, Bye Birdie 94, 99, 103, 104, 110–15 Hulse, Michael 27 Hutcheon, Linda 193, 195, 197–98, 199, 204 Hutto, Daniel D. 38 Hyvärinen, Matti XII, 33, 39 Hägg, Samuli XII, 83, 84 Ingram, David 132 Irwin, W. R. 184 Iser, Wolfgang 235 Iversen, Stefan 154 Jahn, Manfred 140, 145, 147, 151 Jakobson, Roman 259 Joffe, Phil 181 Johnson, Mark 98, 113–14 Jones, Susan 216 Joyce, James 61, 151 “Eveline” 151 Finnegans Wake 61 Jurgenson, Luba 229 Kacandes, Irene 3 Kafalenos, Emma 100 Kafka, Franz 29, 30, 35, 51, 99 Metamorphosis 99 Kagan, Jerome 116 Kane, Sarah: Cleansed 175 Karttunen, Laura XII, 60 Kayser, Wolfgang 213

324 Keen, Suzanne 106 Kerouac, Jack 246 Kharms, Daniil: Incidents 257 Kindt, Tom 242, 243 Kinney, Claire Regan 278 Kiparsky, V. 271 Klevan, Andrew 124 Koch, Kenneth 281–82, 291 The Duplications 281–82, 291–92 Kracauer, Siegfried 123 Kristmannsson, Gauti 272 Kubica, Chris 245 Kuhn, Markus 126 Kuhn, Reinhold 76 Kundera, Milan 198, 268–73 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting 198 Kuzmanovic, Zoran 247 Labov, William 36, 62 Lakoff, George 98 Lamarque, Peter 125 Langellier, Kristin M. 33 Lanser, Susan 243 LeClair, Thomas (Tom) 82, 246 Leech, Geoffrey 70 Lehane, Dennis 7, 10 Lehtimäki, Markku XIII, XV Leise, Christopher 79 Lejeune, Philippe 228 Leonard, Elmore 7 Lermontov, Mihail 266–67, 270, 311 A Hero of Our Time 270 The Masquerade 311 Lessing, Theodor 204 Levecq, Christine 175 Levi, Primo XIV, 227, 234–35 If This Is a Man XIV, 227, 234–35 Moments of Reprieve 232 The Truce 234–35 Levine, George 80 Levinson, Jerrold 243 Lightbown, Ronald 313 Lipper, Elinor 232 Lish, Gordon 246 Lodge, David 54–55 Lothe, Jakob XIII–XIV, 126, 213, 218, 220, 221 Lovejoy, A. O. 116 Ludwig, Sämi 175 Lyotard, Jean-François 180 Macdonald, Iain 125 Mailer, Norman 246

Index de Maistre, Xavier 43–44 A Journey around My Room 43 A Nocturnal Expedition around My Room 43 Malick, Terrence XIII, 120–21, 123–35 Badlands 126, 129 Days of Heaven 129 The New World XIII, 120–21, 125–35 The Thin Red Line 125, 126, 131 The Tree of Life 132 Mandelstam, Osip 316 Mann, Thomas: Der Zauberberg 258 Map, Walter: De Nugis Curialium 186 Marks, Laura U. 130 Martin, Adrian 127 Maxwell, Richard 153 May, Rachel 255, 269 Maynard, Joyce 239, 245 McCormick, Paul 170 McHale, Brian X, XI, XIII, 3, 25, 32, 43, 52, 58, 78, 79, 87, 174, 175, 187–88, 276 McHugh, Susan 101, 106 Michael, Magali Cornier 179, 180, 193, 194, 197, 200–01, 205–06 Michaels, Lloyd 131 Mickelsen, David J. 195 Mikhailik, Elena 233 Mikkonen, Kai 29, 38 Miller, J. Hillis 217 Miller, Laura 45 Mitchell, Robert W. 101, 106 Moodie, Susanna 195–97, 205 Life in the Clearings 195–97 Moore, Thomas 78 Moraru, Christian 176 Morgan, Joanne 239–40 Morrison, James 127, 129, 130 Morrison, Toni 178 Morrissette, Bruce 141, 144 Morson, Gary Saul 38 Mottram, Ron 125, 127, 131, 134 Mullarkey, John 122–23, 128 Murdoch, Iris 28, 242 Murphy, Terence Patrick 3 Myers, Greg 64 Müller, Hans-Harald 242, 243 Müller, Klaus Peter 194, 200, 201 Mäkelä, Maria XIII, 83, 145, 165 Nabokov, Dmitri v, 246, 257, 263, 267, 270, 298, 299, 300, 301, 304, 316, 317 Nabokov, Véra 239, 297–98, 304, 315 Nabokov, Vladimir IX, XIII, XIV–XV, 7, 72,

Index 162, 203, 207, 227, 238–40, 246–51, 254–65, 267, 268, 269, 270–73, 283, 284, 285, 286–90, 292, 297–318 Ada 247, 300, 309, 315 “An Affair of Honor” 254, 257, 259, 260, 262, 264–65 Bend Sinister 247 “Colette” 238 Conclusive Evidence 316 The Defense 306, 307, 310, 315 “The Doorbell” 260 “The Enchanter” 302 The Eye 302, 310 The Gift 249, 261, 262, 272, 299–300, 310, 314, 317 Invitation to a Beheading 297, 309, 310, 317 Lectures on Russian Literature XV, 265 Lolita 7, 203, 207, 238, 239–40, 246, 251, 263, 269, 305, 309, 312 Look at the Harlequins! 247, 249, 300, 309, 310–11, 313, 317 Mary 261 Nabokov’s Dozen 259 Nikolai Gogol 258, 271 The Original of Laura XV, 297–318 Pale Fire IX, XII, 247–48, 286, 309 “The Passenger” 260 Pnin XIV–XV, 72, 297, 308, 309, 317 The Real Life of Sebastian Knight 249, 250, 298, 307–08, 310, 311 “Recruiting” 162 “Revenge” 309 “A Russian Beauty” 267 Selected Letters 305, 316 Speak, Memory 238, 249 Stikhi 310, 314, 315 Strong Opinions 239, 246, 247, 286–87 “Terra Incognita” 297 Tragedy of Mr Morn 316–17 Transparent Things 309 “The Vane Sisters” 316 Nagel, Thomas 28, 96, 99 Naiman, Eric 247 Nelles, William 161 Nielsen, Henrik Skov 153, 154, 168, 171 Nietzsche, Friedrich 75 Nolan, Steve 131 Noë, Alva 97 Nünning, Ansgar 44, 243 Ochs, Elinor 33 O’Brien, Flann: The Third Policeman 183

325

O’Hara, John: “Appearances” 10 Oppen, George 276 Ovid 313, 318 Fasti 313 Quincey, Thomas De 314 Quine, W. V. O. 66 Paavolainen, Olavi 271 Palmer, Alan 83, 164, 188 Palumbo, Alice M. 193 Park, Ed 238 Passmore, J. A. 87–88 Pasternak, Boris 271–72 Doctor Zhivago 271 Paton, Steven 183 Patt, Lise 221 Patterson, Wendy 39 Pavić, Milorad 273 Pedri, Nancy 129 Penn, Arthur: Night Moves 132 Pera, Pia: Lo’s Diary 246 Perec, Georges: La Vie mode d’emploi 71 Perry, Menakhem 140, 145 Pessoa, Fernando 230, 233 Peterson, Eric E. 33 Petrarch 284, 301, 312 Pettersson, Bo XII, 51, 52 Phelan, James XII, 4, 8, 21, 28, 34, 132, 156–57, 158, 166, 167–68, 170, 200, 202, 203, 231, 242, 243, 305–06 Pick, Anat 94 Pier, John 100 Plato 28, 57–58 Poe, Edgar Allan 196, 299, 307, 309, 314 “Annabel Lee” 309 “The Oval Portrait” 314–15 “The Raven” 299 Pomerance, Murray 124 Prince, Gerald 33, 100, 101, 202 Proffer, Carl 305 Proust, Marcel XV, 28 Pushkin, Alexander XIV, 132, 227, 239, 254–55, 259, 266, 270, 271, 282, 285–88, 290, 292, 307, 312, 317, 318 Eugene Onegin XIV, 132, 227, 254–55, 269, 282–90, 292–95, 317, 318 The Guest of Stone 312 “The Queen of Spades” 259 Rusalka 307 “The Shot” 266 Pym, Anthony 271 Pynchon, Thomas XII, 75, 77, 78–82, 84–89, 246

326

Index Against the Day 77, 78–80, 82, 85–86, 89 Gravity’s Rainbow 78–79, 80–82, 84–86 Inherent Vice 88, 89 Mason & Dixon 79, 86, 89 Slow Learner 88

Rabinowitz, Peter J. 5 Rantanen, Tytti 140 Reed, Ishmael 174, 175, 177, 185 Flight to Canada 174, 175–77, 182, 185 Mumbo Jumbo 175, 177 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down 175 Reklaw, Jesse XIII, 94, 95, 99, 103–08, 110, 114 Thirteen Cats of My Childhood 94, 99, 104–09 Richards, Keith: Life 50 Richardson, Brian 38, 83, 100, 141, 147–48, 154, 174, 178, 182, 248 Richardson, Michael 127 Ricoeur, Paul 100 Riffaterre, Michael 44, 195 Rigney, Barbara Hill 199 Rilke, Rainer Maria 306 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 38 Ristau, Carolyn A. 94, 105 Robbe-Grillet, Alain XIII, 141–42, 144–46, 148 Dans le labyrinthe 145 La Jalousie XIII, 141–48, 150–51 Ron, Moshe 157 Rosch, Eleanor 97, 278 Rosen, Gerald 245 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 241 Roussel, Raymond: “La Vue” 238–39 Roy, Arundhati: The God of Small Things 59–61, 66, 70 Rushdie, Salman 178 Rushton, Richard 127 Ryan, Marie-Laure 53, 84, 140, 145, 178, 180, 182 Sabatos, Charles 272, 273 Salinger, J. D. XIV, 238, 239, 240, 244–51 The Catcher in the Rye 244–45 “Franny” 244 “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” 238 Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters 238, 249 “Seymour: An Introduction” 244 “Zooey” 244 Salinger, Margaret A. 245

Saltzman, Arthur 44, 45 Sarraute, Nathalie 42 Sartre, Jean-Paul 273 Scherr, Barry 284–87 Schiff, Stacy 239 Schiffrin, Deborah 244 Schlobin, Roger C. 184 Schmid, Wolf 242 Schrader, Paul 131–32, 135 Schur, Thomas 129, 130 Schwenger, Peter 44 Schweninger, Lee 132 Scott, Walter XIII, 153, 155, 156, 158, 168 The Antiquary 158 The Fortunes of Nigel 156 Ivanhoe 158 Peveril of the Peak 158 Redgauntlet 153, 155–59, 161, 162, 165–71 Sebald, W. G. XII, XIV, 24, 27–39, 211, 212, 217–19 Austerlitz XIV, 24, 29, 36, 38, 211, 212, 217–22 Campo Santo 24 The Emigrants 24, 29, 30 Luftkrieg und Literatur 219, 221 The Rings of Saturn XII, 24, 27–39, 217 Vertigo 29, 30 Sebold, Alice: The Lovely Bones 175 Seeley, John 244–45 Seinfeld 67 Semino, Elena 69 Service, Robert 50, 52 Shakespeare, William 170, 247, 284 Timon of Athens 247 Shakhovskoy, Zinaida 250 Shalamov, Varlam XIV, 227–34 Kolyma Tales XIV, 227, 229, 230 Shapiro, Kenneth J. 94, 99 Shapiro, Michael J. 131 Shaw, Harry E. 156, 168–69 Shklovsky, Viktor X, 53, 121, 132–33, 174 Sholokhov, Mikhail 272 Shoptaw, John 276–77 Short, Mick 69, 70, 71 Shvabrin, Stanislav 303 Sigh, Amrjit 177 Sikorski, Elena 298 Silverman, Kaja 128 Sinnerbrink, Robert 127, 134 Smith, John 120, 125–27, 131 A Map of Virginia 120, 131 Snow, C. P. 116

Index Sontag, Susan 244 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 76, 77 Spaulding, A. Timothy 177 Speelman, Raniero M. 227 Spenser, Edmund 278–80, 282, 284, 287, 290 The Faerie Queene 278–80, 290–91 Spiegelman, Art: Maus 96–98 Squire, Corinne 39 Stableford, Brian M. 184 Staels, Hilde 193 Stanger, Allison 273 Stanzel, F. K. 308 Steiner, George 244 Stendhal 28, 29 Stern, Lesley 124 Sternberg, Meir X–XI, 3, 33, 58, 59, 62–63, 64, 65, 66, 121, 125, 133–34, 145, 161, 170 Sterne, Laurence: Tristram Shandy 132 Stevens, Wallace 192, 193, 209 “The Poems of Our Climate” 192, 209 Strawson, Galen 27–28, 34, 39, 50 Svendsen, Lars 76 Symons, Alphonse James Albert 249–50 Tammi, Pekka X–XI, XIV, XV, 3, 25, 26, 32, 43, 55, 72, 83, 96, 116, 133, 151, 153, 162, 170, 193–94, 227, 248, 254, 256, 259, 260–61, 264–65, 272–73, 286, 297, 306, 308 Tannen, Deborah 62, 64, 69 Tarkovsky, Andrei: The Mirror 124 Tasso, Torquato 280–81 Thomas, Anne-Marie 185 Thomas, Bronwen 3 Thomas, D. M. 174, 178–80 The White Hotel 174, 178–82, 185, 186 Thompson, Evan 97, 99, 106, 278 Thomson, Ian 227, 234, 235 Thurber, James 52 Todorov, Tzvetan 148, 181, 184, 219 Toker, Leona XIV, 159, 228, 232, 235–36 Tolstoy, Leo XV, 258, 316 Anna Karenin(a) 303 War and Peace 258 Tomashevsky, Boris 241–42 Tommola, Hannu XIV, 254, 262, 266 Torrance, Steve 97 Toury, Gideon 255–56 Traill, Nancy H. 184 Turner, Mark 184 Tynyanov, Jurii 241

327

Uexküll, Jakob von 99, 104 Updike, John 45 Varela, Francisco J. 97, 278 Venuti, Lawrence 260, 270, 273 Verstraten, Peter 120, 124 Vervaeck, Bart 76–77, 243, 244 Vesterman, William 7 Vine, Steve 179–80 Vinokur, Grigorii 241–42 Virgil: The Aeneid 300 von Trier, Lars: Breaking the Waves 135 Vonnegut, Kurt 51, 88 de Voogd, Peter 61 de Vries, Mark 59, 60 Wagner, Richard 127, 134 Walcott, Derek 178 Walezky, Joshua 36 Walsh, Richard 124, 132, 156, 158, 177, 199–200 Walton, Kendall L. 128 Watt, Ian 217–18 Watts, Cedric 217 Weber, Myles 244, 246 Weiss, Katherine 183 Wesseling, Elisabeth 198, 204–05, 206 White, E. B.: Charlotte’s Web 98 White, Hayden 34, 35, 36, 37 White, Katharine 316 White, Thomas I. 101 Whitley, David 130 Wiesel, Elie: Night 232 Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray 315 Williams, William Carlos 277 Wilson, Robert: Spin 186 Wilson, Sharon R. 193, 207 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 131 Wolf, Werner 44, 100–01 Wolfe, Cary 101 Wolfe, Peter 7 Woods, Michelle 272 Woolf, Virginia 28, 204 Wroe, Nicholas 112 Wynne, Martin 69 Yacobi, Tamar 167–68, 170, 175, 178, 182 Young, Sarah J. 230, 231 Zalloua, Zahi 148 Zamora, Lois Parkinson 178 Zimmer, Dieter 301, 302 Zugsmith, Albert 314 Zunshine, Lisa 83