Translation of Autobiography : Narrating Self, Translating the Other [1 ed.] 9789027265104, 9789027258830

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BENJAMINS ■

T R A N S L AT I O N

Translation of Autobiography Susan XU Yun

■

LIBR ARY

Translation of Autobiography

Benjamins Translation Library (BTL) issn 0929-7316

The Benjamins Translation Library (BTL) aims to stimulate research and training in Translation & Interpreting Studies – taken very broadly to encompass the many different forms and manifestations of translational phenomena, among them cultural translation, localization, adaptation, literary translation, specialized translation, audiovisual translation, audio-description, transcreation, transediting, conference interpreting, and interpreting in community settings in the spoken and signed modalities. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see www.benjamins.com/catalog/btl

General Editor

Associate Editor

Honorary Editor

Yves Gambier

Franz Pöchhacker

Gideon Toury†

Rosemary Arrojo

Zuzana Jettmarová

Sherry Simon

Michael Cronin

Alet Kruger

Şehnaz Tahir Gürçaglar

Dirk Delabastita

John Milton

Maria Tymoczko

Daniel Gile

Anthony Pym

University of Melbourne and Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Lawrence Venuti

Amparo Hurtado Albir

Rosa Rabadán

Michaela Wolf

University of Turku & Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University

University of Vienna

Tel Aviv University

Advisory Board Binghamton University Dublin City University University of Namur Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Charles University of Prague UNISA, South Africa University of São Paulo

University of León

Concordia University Bogaziçi University

University of Massachusetts Amherst Temple University University of Graz

Volume 136 Translation of Autobiography. Narrating self, translating the other by Susan XU Yun

Translation of Autobiography Narrating self, translating the other

Susan XU Yun Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/btl.136 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2017027508 (print) / 2017043308 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 5883 0 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6510 4 (e-book)

© 2017 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

ix

List of tables

xi

List of figures List of abbreviations

xiii xv

Introduction1 1. Aims and scope of the book  2 2. Data selection criteria  5 3. Bilingualism in Singapore  7 4. Pseudo-original and assumed translation  9 5. Translator’s dilemma in Singapore  14 6. Organization of the book  16 Chapter 1 Distinctiveness of autobiography: Binary oppositions and theoretical dimensions 1.1 Introduction 19 1.2 Distinctive features of autobiography  20 1.2.1 Autobiography and memoirs: Self or others  21 1.2.2 Autobiography and biography: Subjectivity or objectivity  23 1.2.3 Autobiography and fictive autobiography: Truth or myth  25 1.2.4 Autobiography and canonical literature: Comprehensibility or exceptionality  27 1.2.5 Autobiography and historiography: Private or public  28 1.3 Review of studies on autobiography  30 1.3.1 Shifts of critical focus  30 1.3.2 Self-making and world-making functions  31 1.3.3 Enactment and didactic role  33 1.3.4 Referential and rhetorical value of language and style  34 1.3.5 Competing voices and identity crisis in translation  37 1.4 Conclusion 39

19

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Chapter 2 Language of autobiography: Style and foregrounding 2.1 Introduction 41 2.2 Literariness in autobiography  42 2.2.1 Criteria of literariness  42 2.2.2 Subjective and objective language  44 2.3 Stylistic analytical framework  45 2.3.1 Foregrounding and familiarization  45 2.3.2 Checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories  47 2.3.3 Functional grammar and transitivity  49 2.3.4 Linguistic criticism  50 2.3.5 Integrated model of stylistic analysis  51 2.4 Foregrounding analysis of Challenge  53 2.4.1 Lexical categories: Underlexicalization  53 2.4.2 Syntactic categories: Contrast  57 2.4.3 Figures of speech: Subtlety  59 2.4.4 Context and cohesion: Enhancement of coherence  61 2.5 Conclusion 64

41

Chapter 3 Point of view in autobiography: Character, narrator and implied author 67 3.1 Introduction 67 3.2 Narrative-communicative situation  67 3.2.1 Levels of analysis  68 3.2.2 Narrative-communicative situation  71 3.3 Implied author, narrator and character relationship in autobiography  74 3.3.1 Implied author ≠ real author  74 3.3.2 I-narrator ≠ implied author  76 3.3.3 I-character ≠ I-narrator  79 3.3.4 Hypothetical narrative structure in autobiography  82 3.4 Point of view theories  84 3.4.1 Psychological aspects: Internal and external perspectives  84 3.4.2 Visual aspects: Focalization  85 3.4.3 Ideological aspects: Slant and filter  88 3.4.4 Linguistic aspects: Mind style  90 3.5 Conclusion 96



Table of contents vii

Chapter 4 Narrating and experiencing self: Mimesis within diegesis 4.1 Introduction 99 4.2 Constituting consciousness  100 4.3 Deixis, modality and speech/thought presentation  101 4.3.1 Deixis and reader’s consciousness  102 4.3.2 Modality and the speaker’s consciousness  105 4.3.3 Speech and thought presentation: The narrator’s/character’s consciousness  108 4.4 Character’s consciousness: The mimesis  111 4.4.1 DS  111 4.4.2 FIS  114 4.4.3 DT and FIT  117 4.5 Narrator’s consciousness: The diegesis  119 4.5.1 NRSA and NRTA  119 4.5.2 IS and IT  122 4.5.3 Paradoxical FDT  123 4.6 Interplay between character and narrator  126 4.6.1 Empathy  126 4.6.2 Irony  129 4.7 Conclusion 132 Chapter 5 Implied translator: The “other” voice in translation and rewriting 5.1 Introduction 135 5.2 The implied translator and the “other” voice  136 5.3 Rewriting 139 5.3.1 Narratorial differences  139 5.3.2 Poetics and patronage in rewriting  143 5.4 Foregrounding and transitivity in Type I texts  147 5.4.1 Overlexicalization 147 5.4.2 Syntactic foreignness  150 5.4.3 Circumlocution and overevaluation  152 5.4.4 Incoherence  155 5.5 The “other” voice in Type III texts  157 5.5.1 Faithful translator with “passive” voice  157 5.5.2 Skilful translator with “active” voice  160 5.6 Conclusion 165

99

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Chapter 6 Translating the “other”: Unreliable narrator and discordant voice 6.1 Introduction 167 6.2 The “other” consciousness in translated narrative  167 6.3 Fallible filter, unreliable narrator and discordant narration  170 6.4 Fallible filters and translator-conscious irony  172 6.4.1 Irony and empathy retained  173 6.4.2 Irony and empathy created  178 6.4.3 Irony and empathy erased  181 6.5 Unreliable narrator and translator-unconscious irony  185 6.5.1 Factual discrepancy  185 6.5.2 Attitudinal inconsistence  189 6.5.3 Ideological discordance  193 6.6 Conclusion  201

167

Conclusion205 1. Seeing the point and hearing the voices  205 2. Towards a multidisciplinary and transnational framework  209 3. Final remarks  210 References213 Index221 Index (Chinese)

231

For my beloved family who are always there for me

Acknowledgements

This book is an outgrowth of my PhD thesis, which was completed at National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2014. Many at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences have given me invaluable comment or advice on earlier versions of this book. I would like to particularly thank Ismail Talib, my thesis supervisor, for giving me the freedom to pursue my research interests. His respect and trust have inspired an inter-disciplinary approach adopted in the study. I am also immensely grateful to Bao Zhiming for his intellectual stimulation, Ho Chee Lick for his sincere encouragement, and Peter Tan for his meticulous comments. Acknowledgements are also due for the help from John Richardson and the friendly administrative staff at NUS. I wish to express my deep gratitude to Eddie Kuo, who was generous in giving advice, sometimes unpalatable, but often with penetrating insights. I am also indebted to Tan Zaixi, who gave me very constructive criticism of certain sections of the manuscript. The apt, meticulous and illuminating comments from Yves Gambier and the anonymous reviewers motivated me to forge ahead in pursuit of greater academic rigour. I also appreciate the highly efficient editorial and administrative support throughout from Isja Conen and Patricia Leplae at John Benjamins. The book has significantly affected my life and that of people around me. Many colleagues and friends at Singapore University of Social Sciences (formerly known as SIM University) have given me their unflagging support and encouragement in various ways. I owe more than I can say to my family for the sacrifice they have made for me and the stress they have endured over the past six years. They are my pillars of strength!

List of tables

Table 1. Table 2.1 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 3.5 Table 3.6 Table 3.7 Table 3.8 Table 3.9 Table 4.1 Table 5.1

Comparison of chapter division and titles in Challenge and Tiaozhan  Inter-sentential logical links in Example (2) One-level and two-part narrative structure Two-level and three-part narrative structure Levels of analysis in narrative structure in novels Chapter titles of Part 1 of Challenge Three-level analysis in Challenge Discourse structure of a prototypical fictional prose Forms of focalization Comparison of typologies of point of view Distinct linguistic features in Fowler’s (1996) typology of psychological point of view Continuum of commitment and confidence in modality Comparison of headings and sub-headings in Chapter 1 of Challenge and Tiaozhan

13 63 68 68 69 70 71 72 87 93 93 106 140

List of figures

Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3 Figure 1.4 Figure 1.5 Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4 Figure 2.5 Figure 2.6 Figure 2.7 Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 5.1 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4 Figure 6.5

Front cover and copyright page of Challenge 10 Front cover and copyright page of Tiaozhan 11 Cohn’s (1999: 19) taxonomy of four familiar genres 21 Matrix of life-writing 21 Three modes of autobiography (Renza 1977, 1980) 23 Binary oppositions in autobiography 29 Chain of relationship in autobiography (Howarth 1980) 35 A cline of “literariness” 42 The concept of foregrounding (Short 1996: 11) 45 Chain effect of style, foregrounding and defamiliarization 46 A checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories 48 Metafunction of language (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) 49 The integrated model of stylistic analysis 52 Syntactic contrast in Example (1) 58 Narrative-communicative situation (Chatman 1978: 151) 71 Level of analysis in the narrative-communicative situation 72 Hypothetical narrative situations in autobiography 83 Narrative device and linguistic indicators of point of view 95 Three constituting consciousnesses and story-telling schemata 101 Deictic shifts in the narrative-communicative situation 103 Cline of speech and thought presentation 109 Narrative-communicative situation in Challenge 133 Narrative-communicative situation in a translated narrative (Schiavi 1996: 14) 136 Constituting consciousness and the “other” consciousness in a translated narrative 168 Hypothetical narrative situations I and II in a translated autobiography 169 Secret “ironic” message on an unreliable narrator (Chatman 1990: 151) 170 Secret “ironic” message on a fallible filter (Chatman 1990: 151) 171 Narrative-communicative situation in Tiaozhan 203

List of abbreviations

ds dst dt dts fds fdt fis fit is it np nra nrsa nrt nrta st sva svo tt

Direct Speech Deictic Shift Theory Direct Thought Descriptive Translation Studies Free Direct Speech Free Direct Thought Free Indirect Speech Free Indirect Thought Indirect Speech Indirect Thought Noun Phrase Narrative Report of Actions Narrative Report of Speech Acts Narrative Report of Thought Narrative Report of Thought Acts Source Text Subject-Verb-Adverbial Subject-Verb-Object Target Text

Introduction

The passing of Lee Kuan Yew (Lee, hereafter) in March 2015 has caught the attention of many people around the world. Lee, hailed as the founding father of Singapore, has left behind extraordinary legacies in transforming a small backward Southeast Asian town into one of the most prosperous countries. His memoirs allow us to witness his backbreaking work in the earlier years of nation-building and offer a glimpse of his great mind. Lee’s memoirs are probably the few in the world that have been written in different languages and published at the same time. His last memoirs were published in English and Chinese three years before his passing: Lee Kuan Yew, My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore Bilingual Journey (Challenge hereafter) (Lee 2012) and 《李光 耀，我一生的挑战：新加坡双语之路》(Li Guang Yao, Wo Yisheng de Tiaozhan: Xinjiapo Shuangyu zi Lu, Tiaozhan hereafter) (Li 2012). In his memoirs, Lee tells us the story of his personal struggle in acquiring the bilingual competence, especially the Chinese language, and his first-hand experience in implementing bilingualism in Singapore. Besides recounting his feeling of inadequacy in learning Chinese, he relates his trials and errors in implementing bilingualism in Singapore. Lee deliberates on his controversial decision to close Nanyang University (Nantah), the only Chinese-medium university in Southeast Asia. He also frankly shares his view on the differences between the English-educated and Chinese-educated. The following paragraphs appear at the end of the first chapters of the English and Chinese versions: a. I recounted my own experiences, and said, “There is a sense – I would not say of humiliation – but definitely of inadequacy, that I have not the same facility and control over my own language (Chinese)… When I read Nehru – and I read a lot of Nehru – I understood him when he said, ‘I cry when I think that I cannot speak my own mother tongue as well as I can speak the English language.’ I am a less emotional man …but that does not mean that I feel any less strongly about it.”  (Lee 2012: 47–48) b. 在辩论中，我引述印度尼赫鲁说过的一句话。他说，他为母语说得不像 英语那样好而哭泣。我并不是一个容易动感情的人，我不常哭，不会拉 扯自己的头发，不会乱撕纸张，也不扯掉自己的衬衫，但这不表示我在 这方面的感受不那么深。  (Li 2012: 37)

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Translation of Autobiography

‘During the debate, I quoted a sentence spoken by the Indian Nehru. He said, he cried for not being able to speak his mother tongue as well as he spoke English. I am not an emotional person, I do not often cry, will not pull my hair, will not tear paper, and do not tear my shirt either, but this does not mean my feeling in this aspect was not as deep as that.’ The two paragraphs may depict the same sentiment but give a very different “feel.” They pose several questions. Why does it seem that the statement When I read Nehru – and I read a lot of Nehru in the English version attract attention, whereas the consecutive negations 不是 (bu shi) ‘am not’, 不常 (bu chang) ‘not often’, 不会 (bu hui) ‘will not’ and 不扯掉 (bu che diao) ‘not tear’ in the Chinese version leave an impact? Why does the English narrator sound a bit more truthful than the Chinese narrator? Is one the translation of the other or are both the original? The search for the answers motivates my research. In this chapter, I will describe the aims and scope of the research project before establishing an understanding of its background. 1. Aims and scope of the book This book presents an interdisciplinary study that straddles four academic fields, namely autobiography, stylistics, narratology and translation studies. It aims to show that autobiography exhibits a distinctive style found prevalent in prototypical literary genres. More than a stylistic account of autobiography, the book aims to track down the corresponding consciousnesses belonging to an autobiographer and others involved in the production of autobiography. In the case of translated autobiography, subtle variations of style may give rise to significant shifts in point of view that constructs a different persona of the autobiographer. My study will work towards calibrating the stylistic variations and capturing the instances of point of view shifts through a contrastive analysis of Lee’s English and Chinese autobiographies. The ultimate objective of this study is to investigate how the point of view effect derived from foregrounding in autobiography differs from its translation and whether the voice of the translators contributes to the differences. Using Challenge and Tiaozhan as the case in point, I will address the following interrelated research questions: a. What deviant linguistic patterns that constitute foregrounding can be observed in autobiography and what is their functional significance?

Introduction 3

b. What point of view effects are presented through foregrounding in autobiography and how do they contribute to the construction of the autobiographer’s image among readers? c. How are the deviant linguistic features that a translated autobiography exhibits different from those in its source text, and can they be attributable to the translator? d. How do the point of view effects differ between autobiography and its translation and what can the differences tell us about the translator’s consciousness and its impact on the image of the autobiographer? The questions draw attention to four concepts, namely autobiography, foregrounding, point of view and translation, across different fields of studies. Autobiography, one of the main forms of life-writing, has been marginally considered as a literary genre. Russ (1976), Lejeune (1982) and Olney (1980; 1986) are among those who pioneered in formulating theories on autobiography. The aesthetic concept foregrounding, originated from Greek Antiquity, was first applied to language by the Prague School poetic theorists. It signifies the bringing of a particular textual feature that departs from the linguistic norm (the background) to the foreground and assigning prominence to it (Verdonk 2002: 118). The deviant linguistic features contribute to the “feel” of a text, which, according to Simpson (1993: 46), is the point of view the text entails. Point of view is a narratological phenomenon that has many names including “perspective, angle of vision, filter and slant, focus of narration, and focalization” (Prince 2001: 44). It is defined as the “position taken up by the speaker or author, that of the consciousness depicted in the text, and that implied for the reader or addressee” (Fowler 1986: 9). Both foregrounding and point of view have become central concepts in stylistics, a sub-discipline of linguistics. The voice of a translator, known as the “other” voice or a “second” voice (Hermans 1996/2010) in translation studies, refers to the visible traces in linguistic forms and textual effects that indicate translators’ discursive presence in translated texts. The translator’s voice may contradict with the authorial attitude and influence the reader’s perception. Stylistics and translation studies have thrived in the recent decades, amid the ongoing calls for interdisciplinary research. Stylistics evolves from a study of language in literature to embrace eclecticism by drawing on new theories from other sub-disciplines of linguistics and literary studies. It has expanded its scope to other stylistically typical genres such as films, advertisements, political speeches and news reports. Translation studies have also undergone radical transformations, shifting from its earlier objective to understand the process of translation in a prescriptive, linguistic-oriented approach to the current rethinking of the nature of translation governed by cultural criteria. Social orientation takes central stage in recent

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research by advocating the act of translation as activism and translators as agents in regions and countries undergoing political unrest (see Venuti 1995, 1998; Baker 2006; Harding 2009; Asimakoulas 2011). This research project places itself in the fields of stylistics and translation studies with dual focuses and four objectives. From the perspective of stylistics, it resituates a stylistic framework, which mainly deals with the literary language, in autobiography, seeking to identify formal and functional distinctiveness of the language of autobiography. The study also aims to derive point of view from the deviant linguistic features in autobiography and its translation in order to comprehend the images of the author each version has portrayed. From the perspective of translation studies, the research attempts to apply a stylistic methodology to a systematic comparison of the foregrounded features between the two versions in order to pinpoint the linguistic indicators of the translator’s voice. The study also tries to identify the differences in point of view between the two versions, an understanding of which may shed light on the translator’s conscious and unconscious mind. Therefore, the study is essentially interdisciplinary across different academic fields. The interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach provides this study with theoretical and methodological significance. There is no lack of research that employs the stylistic approach to investigate foregrounding in poetry, prose and play (see Leech and Short 2007; Widdowson 2008; van Peer et al. 2007; Jeffries and McIntyre 2010). There has also been a profusion of literature on point of view effects in the conventional literary works by literary theorists (see Booth 1961; Lanser 1981; Uspensky 1972; Chatman 1978, 1990; van Peer and Chatman 2001) and linguists (see Banfield 1982; Erlich 1980; Simpson 1993; Toolan 1988; Semino 2002; McIntyre 2006). Relatively less effort has been made to explore how foregrounding gives rise to a particular point of view. Leech and Short (2007), Fowler (1986) and Short (1996) are among the few stylisticians who have outlined deviant linguistic features as the indicators of point of view. A handful of stylistics scholars (e.g. Warner 2009, Morini 2011) have examined the point of view in first-person novels, but hardly any stylistician has enquired into the foregrounding and/or point of view in autobiography. Stylistic enquiry is generally limited to monolingual texts, paying scant attention to the differences between the original works and their translations. This is probably due to the unresolved debate among stylisticians regarding (in)translatability (see Leech and Short 2007: 21–22). Translation scholars have, on the contrary, seized on the recent development in stylistics and expanded its monolingual scope of work to multilingual and multicultural contexts. As a result, stylistic approaches abound in Translation Studies (see Baker 2001; Boase-Beier 2003, 2004, 2006, 2011; Millán-Varela 2004; Bosseaux 2007; Munday 2008, 2012, Huang 2015). BoaseBeier (2011: 100) and Munday (2008: 34), for example, have enquired into recreating poetic effects in the translated literary works. A few, including Hermans

Introduction 5

(1996/2010), Schiavi (1996) and Millán-Varela (2004), drew on stylistic and narratological frameworks to pinpoint the voice of the translator that interferes the authorial attitude. Nevertheless, little effort has so far been made to investigate the translation of autobiography, let alone the foregrounding or point of view in translated autobiography. Bosseaux (2007) researched into linguistic constructions of point of view in Virginia Woolf ’s two novels and their French translations with a research objective similar to that of this study but a different methodology. Placing her study in the fields of translation studies and narratology, Bosseaux (2007: 11) converts the linguistic categories of deixis, modality, transitivity and Free Indirect Discourse (FID) into measurable items to be processed by the corpus software. Her study has confirmed the transformation in point of view resulting from the translating act. While the corpus processing tools enabled her to process large amounts of data and generalize the overall statistical properties of texts, her computer-guided analysis could have been plagued by the common pitfalls of corpus stylistics in its failure to capture subtle variations of style (Leech and Short 2007: 57), thus missing the critical interpretation of the nuances. Her definition of point of view has also left much to be explored. The stylistic framework proposed by this study leverages on descriptive foregrounding analysis while drawing on the theoretical and critical insights from autobiographical studies. The study will also incorporate narratological and translatological perspective to strengthen its theoretical foundation. Contextualized in the social, cultural and political environment of Singapore and grounded in detailed data analysis of Lee’s English and Chinese autobiography, the study is essentially empirical, adding to the existing literature a rare insight from the Singapore perspective. 2. Data selection criteria Both Challenge and Tiaozhan consist of two parts. Part 1 My Biggest Challenge (Lee 2012: 24–231; Li 2012: 18–260), comprising eight chapters authored by Lee, is considered Lee’s autobiography or memoirs. Part 2 Personal Experience (Lee 2012: 234–352; Li 2012: 263–352) is a collection of articles authored by others, including politicians, academics, teachers, writers, journalists, businessmen and civil servants, who share their experience in bilingualism, and will thus not be included in this study. Prior to Challenge and Tiaozhan, Lee published a two-volume autobiography through the same publisher, Singapore Press Holdings (the Press hereafter). The English and Chinese versions of the first volume, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of

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Lee Kuan Yew (Memoirs I hereafter) and《李光耀回忆录 1923–1965》(Liguangyao Huiyilu 1923–1965, Huiyilu I hereafter), were published in 1998. The bilingual versions of the second, From Third World to First, The Singapore Story: 1965–2000 (Memoirs II hereafter) and《李光耀回忆录 1965–2000》(Liguangyao Huiyilu 1965-2000, Huiyilu II hereafter), were released in 2000. Challenge and Tiaozhan are chosen over Memoirs and Huiyilu on two rationales. First, as compared to Memoirs and Huiyilu, which cover many aspects of Lee’s life interwoven with the development of Singapore as a nation, Challenge and Tiaozhan focus on one aspect, that is, Lee’s personal struggle with bilingualism and his involvement in implementing the bilingual education policy in Singapore. Such a focus provides a point of entry into Lee’s attitude towards language, epitomizing his point of view. The smaller scope also leads to a more concentrated stylistic analysis of the data. Secondly, unlike the inevitable translation relationship between Memoirs and Huiyilu and their asynchronous publication, the varying degree of similarities between Challenge and Tiaozhan and their synchronization in writing, translation and publication present challenging but interesting scenarios. The variation and synchronization can serve as a point of departure for exploring a wide range of complex issues in translation, such as implied translator (Schiavi 1996), the “other” voice (Hermans 1996, Alvstad 2013, Alvstad and Rosa 2015) and rewriting (Lefevere 1992, Gentzler 2016), which operate in a larger social, cultural and historical system. In order to demonstrate fully how foregrounding is constituted and point of view effect is derived from it, the examples selected are prototypically partial or full paragraphs with a few exceptions that comprise two to three paragraphs. A good number of extracts from Challenge have been identified as displaying deviant linguistic features, but only the most representative ones that aptly illustrate the theories and arguments are chosen. The Chinese extracts with deviant linguistic features abound in Tiaozhan too. They are classified into three types according to the extent of syntactic and semantic similarities in relation to Challenge, ranging from zero to low (Type I) to moderate (Type II) and high (Type III) degrees of similarities. Due to space constraints, only one or two examples illustrating each argument are presented and the selected Chinese samples mostly cover the similar topics of the English examples. In order to closely represent the syntactic structure and semantic meaning of the Chinese texts and reveal the inherent similarities and differences between the two versions, each Chinese text is accompanied by a gloss, which favours the strategy of direct translation (Vinay and Darbelnet 1995: 31) wherever possible. At some points of the research, reference is made to Memoirs and Huiyilu to verify facts concerning the historical events discussed in the examples.

Introduction 7

3. Bilingualism in Singapore To contextualize the study, let me survey the background of Challenge and Tiaozhan in relation to their theme, bilingualism, in Singapore. Apart from the first chapter that recounts Lee’s earlier experience with languages, the rest of the autobiography (i.e. Chapters 2 to 6) correspond to the five phases of bilingualism in Singapore: the start of the bilingual education, the closure of the Nantah, the introduction of Special Assistance Plan (SAP), the launch of Speak Mandarin Campaign and, finally, the recent adjustment of the bilingual education policy. The last two chapters, Chapters 7 and 8, elaborate on the achievements of bilingual education in the light of China’s economic development and summarize the principles underpinning bilingual education. The autobiographies encompass the interplay between Lee’s present evaluation and past experience, offering an insight into the evolving Singapore society. Bilingualism, the cornerstone of the Singapore education system, was implemented since 1966 and has since played an important part in boosting the economic growth of the city-state while enhancing social cohesion. The government adopted bilingualism for socio-political as well as pragmatic reasons. The policy underpins the state’s attempt to maintain equal status among different ethnic groups, promote multiracialism and hence prevent inter-ethnic conflict (Wee 2006: 345). English is used as the lingua franca to connect citizens of different ethnic-cultural backgrounds, so no ethnic group is forced to learn the language of another ethnic group. The designation of English as one of the official languages has also expedited Singapore’s integration into the world economy. In recognition of linguistic and cultural pluralism in the country, an important objective of the bilingual policy is to encourage Singaporean students to be proficient in their ethnic mother tongues. This is to ensure that they can identify with their ethnic roots and preserve their cultural traits and Asian values. Within the Chinese population, Mandarin is promoted as the common spoken language in place of other Chinese dialects to better integrate the community. A unique situation, however, arises from the designation of mother tongues, which diverges from how the concept is employed elsewhere (see Kuo and Chan 2016: 16–17). According to Oxford English Dictionaries, mother tongue is the language which a person has learnt and spoken at home since his early childhood. As in the case of Lee Kuan Yew, he grew up speaking English and Peranakan Malay, which should rightfully and naturally be his mother tongues. In many other ethnic Chinese families in Singapore, Southern Chinese dialects, such as Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and Hainanese, were once the dominant languages spoken at home. And yet, the bilingual policy in Singapore does not recognize these dialects as mother tongues but instead assigns Mandarin Chinese the status of mother

8

Translation of Autobiography

tongues for the ethnic Chinese. Under these circumstances, as Wee (2006: 345) points out, Chinese becomes “an officially assigned ethnic mother tongue.” Despite the perceived benefits of the bilingual education, in particular, its emphasis on learning mother tongues, the bilingual policy has been a site of major political debate. Problems with bilingual education, such as lower literacy in both English and mother tongues, were noticed as soon as the policy was reviewed at the end of the 1970s (see Gopinathan 1998). Since then, the bilingual policy has undergone a major structural change in primary and secondary schools to manage the social and political controversies. A streaming system was implemented to separate pupils according to their bilingual ability. This unfortunately advocated elitism and weakened the foundation of bilingual education, which was supposed to promote equality and unity in society. The SAP programme was launched to preserve “the best of Chinese education” (Lee 2012: 114) but benefitted only a small group of elites who were able to cope with the two languages and achieve a high competence in both. The programme was again perceived to be subscribed to elitism, giving privileged access to social resources for the elite group. The Speak Mandarin Campaigns aimed to discourage the use of Chinese dialects and promote the Standard Chinese spoken in China as the lingua franca within the Chinese community (Kuo and Brenda 2016: 47). The campaigns were, however, interpreted as a type of social judgement about language use, grounded in elitist purism, the “negative, proscriptive attitude to substandard and regional usage” (Ager 2003: 51). Besides, the campaigns were deemed to be rooted in linguistic instrumentalism, which considers language as “a resource for economic advancement” (Wee 2006: 352). English continues to dominate in schools and workplaces in spite of the effort to promote the use of mother tongues. The dominance of English has given rise to the concomitant decline in the use of mother tongues and the deficient competence in mother tongues. In fact, bilingualism was considered as the culprit of the deteriorating standard not only in mother tongues but also in English, given the rise of Singlish, an English-based creole language marked by its informal vocabularies, broken syntax and casual enunciation. Some also attributed the displacement of one’s linguistic and cultural identity to bilingualism: children under the bilingual education system often fail to identify with their heritage languages and, as a result, lose their cultural and social affiliations. Those with such concerns may become the potential readers of Challenge in order to gain a better understanding of bilingualism. The most negative impact of bilingualism in Singapore is perhaps the marginalization of monolingual citizens, especially those who speak only Mandarin, dialects, Tamil or Malay. This undermines the social cohesion and departs from the key objectives of the bilingual education policy. In particular, the social stereotype of Mandarin or dialect speakers, who have been perceived to be pro-communist

Introduction 9

and less educated, placed the Chinese-educated group at a disadvantage in the mainstream society. The poor career prospects of Chinese-speaking citizens and lack of government recognition of the Nantah degrees also led to their discontentment over the bilingual education policy. Many have harboured resentment against the government’s decision to dissolve Nantah, a move that was widely regarded as a means to eliminate communist infiltration (Shepherd 2005: 48–49). Ironically, these monolingual Mandarin and dialect speakers could constitute the major readership of Tiaozhan. Lee, the mastermind of bilingualism in Singapore, has been widely praised for his successful mandate of creating an economic wonder in this resource-scarce Southeast Asian nation-state and his foresight in implementing bilingual education. At the same time, he faces intense criticism for his political pragmatism, authoritarian leadership, uncompromising attitude towards his opposition and advocacy of linguistic instrumentalism as well as elitist purism. Challenge and Tiaozhan were probably written with an objective to clarify his decision-making process, elucidate on his attitude and inculcate in his readers his ideological belief grounded in bilingualism. The memoirs offer readers a seemingly unmediated access to what Lee thinks and believes with regard to the bilingual education. The insight into how Lee addressed the challenges, tackled the resistance and defended his decision in achieving bilingualism as a person and a politician will shed light on his political persona and ideological affiliation that have played a key role in shaping the national identity of Singapore. While Challenge serves the mainstream English-speaking community in Singapore as well as the international Anglophone population, Tiaozhan is the platform for Lee to reach out to the local Chinese-speaking community and the international readers from the Greater China region. The synchronized publication of the Chinese and English memoirs can be seen as a strategy to create an illusion that the Chinese readers have the same privilege as the English readers in gaining direct access to Lee’s inner consciousness. To a certain extent, this may narrow the gap between Lee and his Chinese readers and help reconcile their conflicting views. 4. Pseudo-original and assumed translation The relationship between Challenge and Tiaozhan, however, is not as simple as it appears. It is necessary, at this juncture, to establish a basic understanding of their relationship. As can be seen from the earlier discussion, the attempt to present both Challenge and Tiaozhan as the original is inevitable in a complete silence on the translation effort or translator’s involvement. The silence forms a stark contrast to Lee’s earlier

10

Translation of Autobiography

autobiography, Memoirs and Huiyilu. A brief account of the translation process and an acknowledgement of translators at the end of Huiyilu make plain its translation relationship with Memoirs (see Li 1998: 739; Li 2000: 793). In contrast, the paratexts in Tiaozhan point to an effort to publish the autobiography as an original work rather than a translation. This is in line with Alvstad’s (2014: 271 & 273) Translational Pact, which stipulates that all translated books are intended for their readers to accept them as originals. The front cover of Challenge (as visualized in Figure 1) and that of Tiaozhan (as shown in Figure 2, the English gloss is mine) emphasize Lee Kuan Yew and 李光耀 (Li Guang Yao, 1 Li hereafter) as the authors through the enlarged font. In addition, the copyright pages, also shown in Figures 1 and 2, designate Lee Kuan Yew and 李光耀 (Li Guang Yao) as the authors by assigning them the copyrights. While Challenge was published by Straits Times Press, Tiaozhan was published by Lianhe Zaobao, both are subsidiaries of the Press. Their same publication date (2012) seems to affirm the assumption that both are original works.

Lee Kuan Yew My Lifelong Challenges: Singapore’s Bilingual Journey

LEE KUAN YEW Copyright © 2012 Lee Kuan Yew

My Lifelong Challenge

Singapore’s Bilingual Journey

Lee, Kuan Yew, 1923Lee Kuan Yew, my lifelong challenge: Singapore’s bilingual journey/[edited by Chua Lee Hoong].-Singapore: Straits Times Press, c2012

Figure 1.  Front cover and copyright page of Challenge

1. Li Guang Yao is the hanyu pinyin for Lee Kuan Yew. Li 2012 is adopted to differentiate the Chinese version from the English version.

Introduction 11

李光耀

李光耀 Li Guang Yao

新加坡双语之路

我一生的挑战

我一生的挑战—新加坡双语之路 (My Lifelong Challenge – Singapore bilingual Journey) Copyright © 2012 Lee Kuan Yew 李光耀，1923李光耀，我一生的挑战—新加坡双语之路 [作者，李光耀；编辑，严孟达等]-新加坡：联合 早报，2011 ‘Li Guang Yao Li Guang Yao, my lifelong challenge: Singapore’s bilingual journey/[Author, Li Guang Yao; Editor, Yan Meng Da, et al].-Singapore: Lianhe Zaobao, 2011’

Figure 2.  Front cover and copyright page of Tiaozhan

Further evidence in support of presenting Tiaozhan as the original work by the autobiographer can be found in the Acknowledgements page (《致谢》). Absent in Challenge, the acknowledgements express appreciation to the members of the editorial team: 没有新加坡报业控股的编辑团队为这本书投入大量研究、提供写作材料， 书是不可能写出的。 ‘Without the large amount of research carried out by and the writing materials provided by the editorial team of Singapore Press Holding, the book would never be completed.’

The prelude of Tiaozhan named as 自序 ‘Self Prelude’ additionally affirms Tiaozhan’s status as the self-authored autobiography. The rationale behind presenting Tiaozhan as an original work and the absolute silence with regard to translation or translators could be the originality associated with the prevailing concept of authorship and the marginality associated with translation. As Venuti (1998: 31) elaborates, (p)erhaps the most important factor in the current marginality of translation is its offense against the prevailing concept of authorship. Whereas authorship is generally defined as originality, self-expression in a unique text, translation is derivative, neither self-expression nor unique: it imitates another text. Given the reigning concept of authorship, translation provokes the fear of inauthenticity, distortion, contamination.

Indeed, given Tiaozhan’s theme on bilingualism, the presentation of Tiaozhan as the original work rather than the translation has three advantages. First, the fact that the autobiographer is able to write his autobiography in Chinese sets a good

12

Translation of Autobiography

example for his readers, attesting to the success of bilingualism. Secondly, the emphasis of the autobiographer as the author enhances the originality and eliminates inauthenticity. Thirdly, the assured authenticity convinces its readers that they are in direct dialogue with the autobiographer without any third-party mediation. In view of the large chunk of texts in Tiaozhan, whose originals can be traced to Challenge, Tiaozhan can only be a case of “pseudo-original,” defined as “translated texts falsely presented and received as originals” by Pym (1998: 60). The word “pseudo-original” is coined in correspondence to Toury’s (1995: 40) pseudotranslation, which is “presented as translation with no corresponding source texts in other languages.” According to Pym (1998: 60), a pseudo-original is assigned a translational status as long as its original can be located. In this book, I posit Tiaozhan as the assumed translation of Challenge on the basis of three postulates put forth by Toury (1995) to differentiate a pseudotranslation from an assumed translation, “all utterances which are presented or regarded as such within the target culture, on no matter what grounds” (1995: 32). For a text to be accounted for as a translation, it needs to satisfy the source-text postulate, transfer postulate and relationship postulate (Toury 1995: 33–35). A source text (ST hereafter) must be assumed to exist in another culture and language prior to the text taken to be its translation. An assumed translation, also known as a target text (TT hereafter), came into being through the process of transferring certain features of the ST to the TT. Finally, there are accountable (intertextual) relationships which tie the assumed translation to its assumed ST on the basis of certain features such as the sharing of the same function across cultural-semiotic border. Despite sharing the large socio-cultural and political environment, Challenge and Tiaozhan were written for different sub-cultures, satisfying part of the sourcetext postulate. Their same publishing date (2012) nevertheless creates an illusion of both being the original, which seemingly violates the condition of temporal pre-existence in the source-text postulate. English as the lingua franca in Singapore and the dominant language of the autobiographer has assigned the “logical priority” to Challenge, making the transfer from English to Chinese inevitable. The video CD that accompanies the book entails Lee’s oral narration mainly in English and sparsely in Mandarin and Malay further attests to a possible transfer process from English to Chinese and the ST-TT relationship between Challenge and Tiaozhan. Meanwhile, some contents covering Nanyang University (Nantah) and the Chineseeducated students’ protests were probably drawn from the Chinese-medium archive, involving the translation from Chinese to English. It could then invert the ST-TT relationship between the English and Chinese versions. Such inverted ST-TT relationship, however, is unlikely to avert the public perception of the assumed STTT relationship between Challenge and Tiaozhan.

Introduction 13

The similarities in chapter division and titles between the two versions, as shown in Table 1, produce evidence in support of the intertextual relationship between Challenge and Tiaozhan. Table 1.  Comparison of chapter division and titles in Challenge and Tiaozhan 2 Part I: My Biggest Challenges

第一部分：一波一波的挑战 ‘Challenges one wave after another’

1. Language and my early years 1923–1959

历史洪流塑造我的语文观 (1923–1959) ‘The flow of history shapes my language perspective’ 双语政策终于起步 (1959–1979 2) ‘Bilingual policy finally takes the first step’ 南洋大学兴与败的启示 (1956–1980) ‘Reflecting on the Nanyang University’s rise and fall’ 时势造就了特选学校 ‘The time and tide favour the Special Assistance Plan schools’ 华语运动 32 年细说从头 ‘Tracing the beginning of the 32 years of the Speak Mandarin Campaign’ 调整又调整 改革又改革 ‘Adaptation after adaptation, reform after reform’ 中国崛起带来的大气候 ‘The climate brought about by the rise of China’ 我的经验总结 ‘Summary of my experience’

2. Birthpangs of bilingualism 1959–1987 3. Nanyang University 1956–1980

4. S pecial Assistance Plan schools: Preserving the best of Chinese education 5. The Speak Mandarin Campaign

6. A dynamic balance 7. Bilingualism and the rise of China 8. Eight principles of Singapore’s bilingualism policy

The thematic and sequential similarities between the Chinese and English chapters warrant the parallel in content and structure of the two books. Even the decision to include or exclude the periods in the chapter titles seems to be aligned between the two versions. As Fludernik (2009: 24) asserts, the similar chapter division indicates the same approach to inculcating readers with the similar experience. More importantly, the parallels in the chapter division point to a concerted effort of the editorial team to synchronize the two editions. Their sharing of the same functions in the respective languages and cultures underscores an (intertextuality) relationship between Challenge and Tiaozhan. Chesterman’s (1997: 62) elaboration on the minimum requirement of an assumed translation, however, further complicates the situation: 2. While Chapter 2 in Tiaozhan has covered events similar to that of Challenge in the period of 1959 to 1987, the chapter title indicates only the period from 1959 to 1979.

14

Translation of Autobiography

The minimum requirement (of an assumed translation) is simply that a text is claimed to be a translation, and that it is accepted (by the client and/or the readers) as a translation in the target culture: it is accepted as conforming to the prevalent translation norms. On this view, then, the boundaries of the concept “translation” are ultimately not set by something intrinsic to the concept itself, but by the ways in which members of a culture use the concept.

Given that Tiaozhan has never been claimed by its publisher as a translation or a product of translational activities, it fails to meet the first requirement on one hand. On the other hand, Tiaozhan has been widely accepted by the readers in Singapore as the translation of Challenge, based on their perception of Lee’s constraints in Chinese, hence satisfying the second requirement. The fact that Lee’s (1998, 2000) earlier memoirs published by the same publisher were translated into Chinese may reinforce the readers’ assumption of Tiaozhan as the translation of Challenge and the involvement of translators. As a result, it is plausible to assign assumed translation status to Tiaozhan, given the transfer and intertextual postulates it satisfies, the “pseudo-original” it turns out to be and the prevalent readers’ assumption. Admittedly, the significant differences between Challenge and Tiaozhan weaken the assumption that Tiaozhan is translated from Challenge. The differences endorse the claim (see Pan 2011) that the Chinese version is a collection of original writings authored by Lee, who was assisted by an editorial team working for the Chinese media. I shall delay addressing this issue until later in Chapter 5. Instead, I shall deliberate on a unique situation concerning translation in Singapore to shed additional light on the background of this study. 5. Translator’s dilemma in Singapore The silence on translation involving Challenge and Tiaozhan can neither conceal the translating act in the production nor eliminate the imprints the translators have left behind and the voices they have injected, given that translators are humans with emotions and attitudes. In point of fact, the silence on translation constitutes erasure, a sociolinguistic phenomenon in which some persons or activities are rendered invisible by certain ideology (Irvine and Gal 2000: 38). The erasure reflects a common mindset and a unique situation in Singapore concerning translation as a result of bilingualism. The situation mirrors translator’s dilemma in Singapore. The issue of translation is unique in two ways in Singapore’s context. First, many in Singapore have had practical experience in translation, given its multiracial and multilingual environment. Notwithstanding the prevalent assumption that bilingualism in Singapore is conducive to translation practice and

Introduction 15

translator’s education, there has been a deeply rooted prejudice against translation in this economically developed city-state. Translation has never been thought of as a respectable pursuit in Singapore and thus not within the purview of professional bodies or intellectual investigation. Such a prejudice can be traced back to several ideologies embraced by the Singapore society. Given the pragmatic approach adopted by the government agencies that advocates efficiency and productivity, multi-tasking is a norm in the society. This translates into a very small number of full-time translators and interpreters employed in the public sectors such as courts and police force. Even fewer salaried translators work in the private sectors including the Press, driven by the tenacious quest for cost-efficiency. In the absence or scarcity of full-time translators, translation jobs are mostly done by bilinguals who have neither received training in translation nor been given sufficient resources to do a proper job. Translators involved in Tiaozhan could be subjected to the same conditions – they are mostly journalists who double up as translators when such a need arises. Under the influence of linguistic instrumentalism in association with bilingualism, translation is often viewed as a tool rather than a sophisticated art, similar to the pervasive view of languages as tools for economic development and the preservation of cultural heritage. Such a view gives rise to a low social and economic status of translators, who fall into the category of low-skilled workers in a meritocratic society like Singapore. In the earlier years, entry requirements for translators were a secondary school certificate, giving little chance for career advancement. The requirement has been raised in the recent years but public images of translators remain unfavourable. The lack of career prospects and financial rewards deter bright students from considering translator as a career option. The other uniqueness of translation in Singapore rests in the fact that the host culture (i.e. the target culture) of a translation is situated largely in the same cultural environment and socio-political system as the source culture. The recipients of translation mostly share the same national and ethnic identity as that of the authors and translators of the original text. Effectively bilingual and with a sound understanding of the source and target cultures, these translation recipients are usually much more critical towards a translation than their counterparts in a monolingual and homogeneous society. Probably as a strategy to avoid public attention to and, thus, latent criticism on their translations, translators may opt to be evasive about the true status of their works. Such might be the case of Tiaozhan. The various constraints in relation to translation and translator could compromise the quality of translation. This is reflected in the intermittent but persistent mistakes found in translated official documents and websites, newspaper articles, TV programmes and public signage, to name a few. Fortunately, the constant

16

Translation of Autobiography

dissatisfaction from the public over substandard translations has raised awareness among government officials. As a result, new measures and initiatives have been rolled out to improve the recognition of translators and quality of translation. Still, a lot more is desirable in order to raise the standards of translation and status of translators. As we can see, the problems surrounding translation and translator’s behaviour in the specific context of Singapore differ from those in other contexts involving two divergent socio-political systems. A probe into issues pertaining to translation and translator in this unique socio-political context would be a fairly enriching experience. 6. Organization of the book The main body of this book is organized into six chapters. In Chapter 1, I demonstrate that autobiography is a distinctive genre with multi-dimensional features by comparing it with other life-writing genres. Relevant theories pertaining to autobiography are introduced, followed by a survey of research on autobiography from different academic fields. I propose in Chapter 2 a stylistic analytical framework that incorporates foregrounding, transitivity and linguistic criticism theories. A preliminary foregrounding analysis of Challenge is carried out to illustrate the formal and functional distinctiveness of autobiographical language as well as to assess the feasibility of the model. This forms the basis for the foregrounding analysis in the rest of the book. In Chapter 3, I interrogate the misconception surrounding the conflation of the author, implied author, narrator and character in autobiography. It advances two hypotheses concerning the narrative-communicative situation in autobiography. The review of major point of view theories lays the theoretical foundation for the subsequent analysis. Based on the analytical and theoretical framework established in Chapters 2 and 3, I examine in Chapter 4 the point of view effects in relation to consciousness in Challenge, bringing in readers’ role in constructing the image of the author. The foregrounding analysis will focus on the key linguistic indicators of point of view in order to understand how the interplay between the consciousnesses of the characters, narrator and readers produces a specific point of view effect that shapes the persona of the implied author in Challenge. My study then shifts its focus to the translation of autobiography based on the same framework established in the earlier chapters. In Chapter 5, I make a case for the translator’s discursive presence by identifying linguistic indicators of the “other” voice unique to Tiaozhan through foregrounding analysis. Prior to the analysis, I

Introduction 17

will address the differences between Challenge and Tiaozhan, drawing upon relevant translation theories. Finally, in Chapter 6, I will show how a specific point of view is unfolded in Tiaozhan in order to pinpoint significant shifts in point of view with reference to that in Challenge. I will pay attention to the linguistic manifestations of incongruities that call into question the reliability in narration and the translator’s interference. In the concluding chapter, I summarize the analytical findings and reflect on their practical relevance before suggesting a multi-dimensional and transnational research model to advance the frontier of interdisciplinary studies in translation.

Chapter 1

Distinctiveness of autobiography Binary oppositions and theoretical dimensions

1.1 Introduction In autobiography, people tell stories of their own lives. As a main form of life-writing, autobiography has become “a staple of mainstream publishing for which the appetite of the reading public seems insatiable” (Benton 2009: 1). It has received interest from psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and theologians since the mid-1950s, but has been treated by literary critics “always as an ancillary matter, a kind of service literature” (Olney 1988: xiv). There is, however, a general consensus that autobiography is a literary genre in its own right. Olney (1988: xiv), one of the pioneers in the literary criticism of autobiography, postulates that autobiography should be considered as “a mode of writing with an interest of its own” and demands “the sort of philosophical, rhetorical and linguistic scrutiny that would be given to any other variety of literature.” To date, literary critics have worked on autobiography from different angles – women’s autobiography (see Smith 1987, Smith and Watson 1998, Wang 2004), ethnic or minority autobiography (see Taylor 1983), national autobiography (see Holden 2008), period autobiography (see Barros 1997), etc. As Smith (1987: 3) observes: Suddenly everyone in the university of literary critics and theorists seems to be talking about autobiography, a genre critics described until recently as a kind of flawed biography at worst, and at best a historiographical document capable of capturing the essence of a nation or the spirit of an age. Ironically, or inevitably, as more and more critics talk about autobiography, the sense of its generic conventions, even its very definition, has begun to blur, until some now question whether autobiography exists at all.

Smith’s (1987) insight has highlighted the indistinct generic boundaries between autobiography and other types of life-writing. The marginal status of autobiography between literary and non-literary genre, fiction and nonfiction, history and non-history could possibly cause scholars to shun from research on autobiography. In its apparently plain language, simple structure and self-evident stories, autobiography is generally perceived to lack literary sophistication. Countering such perceptions,

20 Translation of Autobiography

Olney (1980: 13) asserts that autobiography tells “the story of a distinctive culture written in individual characters and from within” and “offers a privileged access to an experience that no other variety of writing can offer.” This chapter shows that autobiography is a distinctive genre with multi-dimensional features and deserves research effort. It seeks to outline the distinctive features of autobiography in relation to other closely relevant types of life-writing, namely memoirs, biography, fictive autobiography, canonical literature and historiography. Through a survey of the relevant research that has sought to theorize autobiography from the perspective of narrative psychology, literary criticism, stylistics and translation studies, the chapter makes a case for a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary theoretical framework in order to carry out a comprehensive and systematic enquiry into autobiography. 1.2 Distinctive features of autobiography French literary theorist Philippe Lejeune (1982: 193) defines four elements of autobiography: (1) the linguistic form of narrative and prose; (2) the subject matter of individual life or personal history; (3) the author’s identity with the narrator; and (4) the narrator’s identity with the protagonist and retrospective orientation. For a particular work to be classified as autobiography, it has to satisfy these four conditions. The third and fourth conditions constitute what Lejeune (1982: 193) calls autobiographical contract. To Lejeune, memoirs fail to meet condition (2) and thus cannot be considered as autobiography. American literary theorist Cohn (1999: 19), in an effort to outline the distinctive features of fiction, frames four familiar genres, namely biography, autobiography, third-person novel, and first-person novel, in a four-partite divisional diagram as shown in Figure 1.1. She postulates a two-dimensional schema crossing the oppositions between history and fiction, third person and first person (Cohn 1999: 19). Autobiography depicts history in first person and has shared features with history writing and first-person novels, but it is in stark contrast with third-person novels. Lejeune’s (1982) pioneering effort in defining the boundaries for autobiography is laudable, but the validity of each of the four conditions is called into question, as I will show, in the light of the evolving nature of autobiography in new socio-cultural contexts. Cohn’s (1999) model largely follows the convention of fiction/non-fiction, first-person/third-person distinctions. To demonstrate the distinctive features of autobiography, I postulate a five-partite life-writing matrix, which places autobiography at the centre, as shown in Figure 1.2. Drawing on in various ways the elements

Chapter 1.  Distinctiveness of autobiography 21



biography

Regime: Third Person

Domain: History autobiography

Strachey Queen Victoria

Rousseau The Confessions

third-person novel heterodiegesis fictional biography Tolstoy, Ivan Ilyich

first-person novel homodiegesis fictional autobiography Brontë, Jane Eyre

Regime: First Person

Domain: Fiction

Figure 1.1  Cohn’s (1999: 19) taxonomy of four familiar genres

Biography

Historiography Autobiography

Canonical Literature

Fictive Autobiography

Figure 1.2  Matrix of life-writing

of all four other familiar types of life-writing, I will expound the relationship between autobiography and other life-writing genres 1 in the following discussion to illustrate the distinctive features of autobiography. 1.2.1 Autobiography and memoirs: Self or others Let me first clarify the terminological confusion surrounding life-writing, autobiography and memoirs. Life-writing, according to Smith and Watson (2010: 4), is a general term for diverse kinds of writing that takes a person’s life as its subject, be it biographical, novelistic, historical or autobiographical. Autobiography, as defined by Hamilton 1. Although canonical literature may encompass fictive autobiography, third-person novels, poem and drama, it prototypically refers to novels. Since fictive autobiography will be discussed separately, canonical literature in the matrix shown in Figure 1.2 excludes fictive autobiography.

22

Translation of Autobiography

(2008: 270), is a generic term encompassing “everything written by an individual: from a book of memoirs to diaries, blogs, letters and journals” about the producer’s life. Indeed, the increasing trend of publishing autobiography in new media and multi-media undermines Lejeune’s first condition that autobiography must be a linguistic form of narrative and prose. More terminological confusion centres around the term memoirs. To Bruss (1976: 7), the term memoirs, which pre-dates the term autobiography, has “the connotation of informality, a casually constructed affair and not a serious literary effort.” In other words, memoirs lack the quality of literariness as compared to autobiography, which has undergone a change in status and literary reputability since the Renaissance (1976: 7). Hamilton (2008: 270) holds a similar view on the aesthetic inferiority of memoirs in comparison with autobiography. While autobiography is a form of self-exploration in which the writer challenges himself and the world to “be honest about their own life and those around them” (2008: 291), memoirs are merely “straightforward accounts by individuals, describing their life-experiences during particular eras of history” (2008: 270). In Hamilton’ (2008: 273) opinion, memoirs are “personal reminiscences” about others filtered through the eyes of the memoirists, with an underlying motivation of self-advertising or self-satisfying. Given the straightforward narrative style of memoirs, it is possible to “employ the services of a ghostwriter as coauthor – a practice which readers will find perfectly understandable” (2008: 280). Contrastingly, Smith and Watson (2010: 3) accord a higher aesthetic value to memoirs and emphasize memoirs’ function of “self-understanding.” Adopting a historical view of memoirs as “recollections by the publicly prominent who chronicled their social accomplishments,” Smith and Watson (2010: 4) distinguish between autobiography and memoirs primarily in terms of temporality: auto­biography brackets an entire life span, whereas the memoirs focus on a period of experience. In defining memoir as a popular form of autographical works “characterized by density of language and self-reflexivity about the writing process,” Smith and Watson (2010: 4) may have captured the nature of memoirs as self-representation but could have overstated memoirs’ status as an aesthetic object. In point of fact, the term memoirs is mainly used by the publishing houses to capitalize on the prominence of the publicly renowned autobiographers, as in the case of Challenge and Tiaozhan. While memoirs and autobiography may differ in their extent of subjectivity and intentionality, both reveal the author’s self, even if the author makes an effort to suppress it. Memoirs do not just focus on others and events. Rather, they concentrate on the positioning of the self in relation to others. Such a relationship is revealing of the memoirist’s self. Challenge, for example, consists of considerable details of the protagonist’s interaction with his family

Chapter 1.  Distinctiveness of autobiography 23



members, political alliance and opponents, colleagues and foreign leaders. This nevertheless does not prevent us from gaining access to the memoirist’s thought, attitude and emotion in the process. In this regard, Lejeune’s (1982: 193) exclusion of memoirs from the genre of autobiography because of its failure to focus on individual’s life or personal history is unfounded. Memoirs such as Challenge and Tiaozhan belong to the genre of autobiography. Renza’s (1980) taxonomy of autobiography lends its support to categorizing memoirs as autobiography. In classifying three modes of autobiography that co-exist within a particular autobiography into memoir-prone, confessional and narcissism-prone as shown in Figure 1.3, Renza (1977: 10, 1980: 279) projects a co-existent rather than exclusive relationship among the three modes. He asserts that autobiographies, in all three modes, are analogically about the “self,” not the “others,” notwithstanding the varying intensity. Autobiography

Memoirs

Confession

Narcissism

Figure 1.3  Three modes of autobiography (Renza 1977, 1980)

1.2.2 Autobiography and biography: Subjectivity or objectivity Having clarified the relationship between memoirs and autobiography and interrogated Lejeuene’s (1982) exclusion of memoirs from the genre of autobiography, I will now explore the relationship between biography and autobiography in an attempt to refute another major point of criticism that regards autobiography as “a kind of flawed biography” (Smith 1987: 3). Biographies are similar to autobiographies in their historicity, given that both tell stories about the life of the protagonist, who is a recognizable individual in

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existence at some points of time in history. Both offer a window through which readers glimpse into the life of others, especially those who have achieved recognizable success such as politicians, writers, footballers and pop idols, so as to draw inspiration and search for meaning in life (Benton 2009: 2). Both biography and autobiography can be further divided into different sub-genres on the basis of the profession of their subjects such as literary (auto)biography, which deals with literary writers, and political (auto)biography, which centres on politicians. Literary (auto) biography and selected political (auto)biographies, on account of their literary status and historical significance, respectively (e.g. politician Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and theologian St Augustine’s Confession), are most likely subject to literary critical enquiries. A fundamental generic boundary between biography and autobiography arises from authorship and choice of grammatical person. A biography is invariably written in third person by an author who is not the protagonist, whereas an autobiography is usually written in first person by the autobiographer, who shares the same name as that of the protagonist. While some biographers might be associated with the protagonist in a pre-existing relationship, such as a relative, friend or former aide, the majorities of biographers tend to be independent professional writers, such as scholars, critics, journalists and historians. They hence have an occupational need to prove their capability as professional writers. One implication of such a tendency is that the language of a biography, even if it is a non-literary biography, is more artistically and stylistically sophisticated than that of an autobiography written by an amateur writer except for a literary autobiography. Another generic difference between biography and autobiography arises from their time of composition. Autobiography is always written during the subject’s life span, but biography can be written during the life or after the death of the subject (Smith and Watson 2001: 5). At different points of time in history, sometimes centuries apart, different biographies written by different biographers may offer different interpretations of a particular historical figure according to the needs and trends in the specific context. A significant distinction between autobiography and biography revolves around the mode of narration. To be sure, the writing of both biography and autobiography necessitates remembering and recalling. Through interviews with those who knew the protagonist and evidence gathered by recourse to historical documents and family archives, biography is narrated from a point of view external to the protagonist (Smith and Watson 2001: 4). It is generally perceived to be “objective” under the regulation of “the requirements of the genre of history,” as it shows the protagonist’s visible actions seen from outside (Gusdorf 1980: 45). However, scepticism is often cast on the writing of biography, which could resort to the imagination, invention or interpretation of the biographers in their attempt to incorporate intimate details



Chapter 1.  Distinctiveness of autobiography 25

of a person’s life (Benton 2009: 4). While the intimate details of a person’s life enhance the readability, the oversupply of such unverifiable details could undermine the credibility of a biography. It is perhaps due to the awareness of reading a story told by an outsider rather than an insider that readers of a biography tend to be alert and sceptical. Autobiography, by contrast, is generally perceived to be more credible yet subjective, given that it is presumably retrieved from the personal memory of the author who has the insider’s knowledge of what happened and can provide an internal point of view. Readers of autobiography tend to assume its inherent credibility, backed by the autobiographer’s “insider” privilege and endorsed by the sharing of the name between the protagonist and the author. Indeed, autobiography assumes documentary authority of the autobiographer’s life because of the identity in name between the author, narrator, and protagonist, as Lejeune’s (1982: 193) Autobiographical Contract specifies. The coincidence of writer, narrator and protagonist in autobiography, as Boldrini (2012: 2) asserts, entails the ethical consequences and thus requires the author and narrator to tell the truth to readers. Lejeune’s (1982) and Boldrini’s (2012) view on autobiography is somewhat idealistic, as will be shown in Chapter 3. They have ignored the fact that autobiography is also a work of art, in which the autobiographer attempts to show us a public persona he or she believes or wishes to be (Gusdorf 1980: 45). The intertwining subjectivity of the autobiographer as the observing subject and object of investigation (Smith and Watson 2010: 1) causes it to be generally perceived less reliable than biography, which is believed to offer an omniscient and objective view of the protagonist. Such an insight has, however, ignored the obligation of the autobiographer to tell the truth, to report or recall historical facts and events. Autobiography thus exhibits a certain degree of objectivity. The blending of objectivity and subjectivity further accentuates the instability and hybridity of autobiography as a genre (Marcus 1995: 14). 1.2.3 Autobiography and fictive autobiography: Truth or myth The value of autobiography, as emphasized by Bruss (1980: 299–300), is derived from its veracity of the evidence consistent with other documents that describe the same event in the autobiographer’s life and the sincerity of the author who is consistent in what he has said or written on other occasions. No matter how subjective the “inside” point of view is, autobiographers are expected to tell the truth, at least what they believe to be true. It is its extra-textual commitment to veracity that draws a line between autobiography and a fictive or fictional autobiography or what others call autobiographical novel.

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Confusion arises from the definition of a fictive autobiography and terms used to refer to it. Cohn (1999: 19), for example, differentiates a first-person novel from a third-person novel. Boldrini (2012: 1) adopts the term heterobiography to refer to novels “that are presented as if they were the autobiographies of historical personages.” Novels such as Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, narrated in an intimate first-person voice confiding their personal history and life story, may fit into Cohn’s (1999) category of first-person novels but cannot be considered heterobiographies by Boldrini’s (2012) definition, given their fictional protagonists. To overcome the restrictions of these two terms, I adopt the notion fictive autobiography to cover both scenarios in which the narrator is a fictive character or a historical personage. The latter type of fictive autobiography resembles an autobiography more closely than the former and is more prone to what Boldrini (2012: 2) calls “identity theft,” as a result of the merging of historical, fictional, and authorial subjectivities in the characters. The fictionality of fictive autobiography exempts it from the duty of fidelity to fact and the ethical obligation to tell the truth, empowering it with the freedom to embrace literariness and creativity. At the same time, by adopting an autobiographical strategy, fictive autobiography is geared towards historical factuality that disguises the fictionality and creates a myth of “truth.” An autobiography, by contrast, has to exclude fictionality and encompasses only historical facticity and authorial subjectivities, given that the author’s intention at every moment of any true autobiography is to convey the sense that “this happened to me” (Mandel 1980: 53). However, in the event that a ghost author is engaged or techniques of fiction are deployed, the facticity and truth in autobiography could be mystified. Autobiography, indeed, entails the duality of truth and myth, concomitant with objectivity and subjectivity. An autobiographer has to employ techniques of fiction to keep the readers entertained and informed. As a result, autobiography is likely to mingle facts with fiction and exhibit fictionality, notwithstanding its general intentions to tell the truth. Given that the notion of truth is subjective, elusive and illusionary, Smith and Watson (2001: 10) posits that it is “subjective truth” rather than “fact” that characterizes autobiography. Johnson (2008: 18) affirms that truth is attained through subjectivity, “the enduring, timeless wisdom that enables us to have and keep faith in ourselves and in each other.”



Chapter 1.  Distinctiveness of autobiography 27

1.2.4 Autobiography and canonical literature: Comprehensibility or exceptionality The emphasis of facticity and objectivity in autobiography should not be read as an affirmation of the prejudice against autobiography on its lack of rhetorical power and aesthetic pleasure inherent in canonical literature (see Kermode 2004: 28). Literary theorists and critics generally take a high view of literary works, in particular canonical literature. For Attridge (2004: 80–87), literary works require creative reading and are worthy of re-reading so as to suspend readers’ predispositions and enable them to apprehend the work’s re-inventive power. To him, the re-reading of non-literary works, autobiography being one of them, simply confirms readers’ expectations unless they fail to grasp the work’s argument (2004: 89). Contesting the aforesaid prejudgment, I would like to draw on American psychologist Jerome Bruner’s insights on the comprehensibility and exceptionality of autobiographical narrative. As Bruner (1991: 71–72) states, autobiographical narrative serves the dual function of telling something comprehensible and telling something interesting. To tell something comprehensible, the narrator’s intentional states and action must be structured in a way that aligns with “folk psychology,” which “embodies and entrenches the canonical ways of people responding to the world” (Bruner 1991: 72). To tell something interesting, the story must violate folk-psychologically canonical expectancy or breach the convention so as to present something exceptional. The contrast between the typical and atypical qualities of autobiography can thus be represented by comprehensibility and exceptionality, constituting the fourth set of binary opposition inherent in autobiography. The exceptionality of autobiography bears some resemblance to the singularity of a literary work (Attridge 2004: 58–63), which manifests linguistic innovation and contains new subject matter (i.e. ideas, emotional complexes and realities) that makes it distinguishable from other examples of the same genre. With regard to comprehensibility, Bruner (1991) and Attridge (2004) also share the views that the inventiveness of a work is dependent on cultural convention in order to stay relevant to the culture and evoke response from the readers. The parallel between autobiographical exceptionality and literary singularity, both of which build on comprehensibility, refutes the prejudice of many literary theorists against autobiography. As Bruner (1991: 76) asserts, autobiography is a commitment to “a set of presuppositions about oneself, one’s relation to others, one’s view of the world and one’s place in it.” It certainly deserves creative reading and re-reading as will be demonstrated in the subsequent chapters. The opposition between comprehensibility and exceptionality gives rise to ordinariness and literariness in language, which will be discussed in relation to foregrounding in Chapter 2.

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1.2.5 Autobiography and historiography: Private or public Finally, let me explore the relationship between autobiography and historiography, given that the facticity and historicity are the inherent elements of both genres. Hampl and May (2008: 3) offer an intriguing insight: Though both forms are narrative and require the storytelling arts, they reverse each other – memoir 2 being personal history, while history offers a kind of public memoir.

While autobiography can be read as historical document and function as a source of evidence for the analysis of historical movements or events or persons, as Smith and Watson (2010: 13) caution, it cannot be merely reduced to a historical record. Autobiographers perform a rhetorical act of justifying their individual significance in history, whereas history writers carry out a concise account of historical events in the society. Hence, the generic differences between autobiography and historical writing can be encapsulated in terms of the contrast between individuals and society. Parallel to Cohn’s (1999: 18) distinction between history and fiction, autobiography could be seen to describe events and changes that affect the lives of individual beings, whereas historiography unfolds those affecting entire societies. Autobiography privileges a personal experience based on an individual author’s lifespan, whereas history writing engages the shared experience in the collective time of a society. Autobiographers stay at the centre of the historical pictures they assemble and are interested in their own accounts of the events. Historians, by contrast, try to position themselves outside or at the margin of the historical picture and seek out multiple sources of evidence in order to achieve scrupulous objectivity. The contrasts between autobiography and historiography reveal a paradoxical property of autobiography with regard to its position in the private or public sphere, given its motive “to carve public monuments out of their private lives” (Howarth 1980: 92). Gusdof (1980: 36) posits that autobiography has either public or private sector of existence and that autobiography written in defence or glorification of a national hero or a political cause is “limited almost entirely to the public sphere of existence.” This public sector of autobiography is manifested in the elementary motives of most political autobiographies, as Gusdof (1980: 36) asserts. The private sphere of existence is embedded in the act of recalling that satisfies one’s desire to heal certain anguish and ease his or her own mind (Gusdof 1980: 37). Sharing a similar view, Renza (1980: 285) also emphasizes an “unresolved discrepancy between the 2. The term memoir is used by Hampl and May (2008) as the synonym for the term autobiography.

Chapter 1.  Distinctiveness of autobiography 29



way writing ‘public-izes’ the autobiographer to others and the way it signifies himself to himself.” Interpreting the “public” and “private” aspects in terms of a “split intentionality,” he posits that the writer’s awareness of his life remains private even as he brings it into the public domain through his act of writing (Renza 1980: 279). On the surface, I argue, the public aspects and historical events may dominate a political autobiography such as Challenge and Tiaozhan, gearing it towards the public sphere of existence. Hidden behind the public sphere could be the deepest intention, which underlines the attitude and consciousness of the individual being, regardless of whether he is an autobiographer, ghost author or translator. Hence, the public and private sphere of an autobiography cannot be readily fitted into an equally dividable sphere as Gusdof (1980) suggests or located at two uncompromising poles as Renza (1980) posits. Instead, they constitute a scale, each competing for dominancy. The foregoing discussion of autobiography in relation to four closely related genres has confirmed that autobiography is not a simple, unitary genre for easy reading. Rather, these “historically situated practices of self-representation” (Smith and Watson 2010: 18) manifest distinctive features that can be summarized into four pairs of binary oppositions as visualized in Figure 1.4.

Objectivity

Comprehensibility

Public

Biography

Historiography

Truth

Autobiography Subjectivity

Canonical Literature

Fictive Autobiography

Exceptionality

Private

Myth

Figure 1.4  Binary oppositions in autobiography

An autobiography may exhibit all eight distinctive features, albeit in varying degrees. Placing emphasis on truth and located at the public sphere of existence, autobiography is endowed with facticity and objectivity that are affiliated with history writing and biography. With a subjective and internal view, autobiography entails myth and inhabits the private sphere of existence, as fictions do. Additionally, autobiography embraces the duality of comprehensibility and exceptionality in order to justify its existence. Straddling between the opposites, autobiography deserves a central position in life-writing as shown in the diagram. Its fluidity, plurality and intricacy have made an academic enquiry into autobiography a rewarding pursuit.

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By way of illustration, Challenge and Tiaozhan have displayed all the binary features as identified in the preceding discussion. The autobiographer strives to give an objective account of implementing bilingualism in Singapore by presenting facts and figures with frequent recourse to the third-person narration. This nod to objectivity enhances historicity. Meanwhile, the autobiographer constantly relates his feelings and thoughts in the process, revealing his subjectivity. While Challenge and Tiaozhan entail substantial empirically verifiable facts of history in the service of the truth, there is no lack of artistically crafted embeddings reminiscent of techniques, commonly found in fiction, that fictionalize the facticity and create some myths. As the autobiographies of a “public man” in Singapore, Challenge and Tiaozhan may fit most closely into the “public” sphere of existence. But the autobiographer has inevitably gone beyond the facts and history to reveal his private sphere of life by confessing to the mistakes he made and the misconceptions he once held. To enjoy wider readership, Challenge and Tiaozhan must be written comprehensibly to fit into their cultural contexts. They also need to strive for exceptionality so as to withstand the test of time. Next, I will undertake a brief review of literature on autobiography that is relevant to this study. An understanding of the strengths and limitations of the existing approaches to autobiography will provide a grounding for this study’s interdisciplinary and multi-faceted theoretical framework. 1.3 Review of studies on autobiography I will start with a brief account of the critical shifts in autobiographical studies, followed by a review of literature on autobiography in narrative psychology, literary criticism, stylistics, and translation studies that are relevant to this study’s research questions. 1.3.1 Shifts of critical focus According to Smith and Watson (2010: 1), autos, in Greek, signifies “self,” bios “life” and graphe “writing.” Taken together, they constitute the three essential components of autobiography, each interestingly corresponding to the critical focus given to autobiography by three generations of critics (2010: 4–7). The first generation of critics focused their attention largely on bios, considering the “truthfulness” in autobiography as a matter of biographical facticity that can be confirmed or refuted by recourse to the historical record (Smith 1987: 4). The second generation of critics (e.g. Lejeune 1982, Bruss 1980, Starobinski 1980) shifted their focuses to autos,



Chapter 1.  Distinctiveness of autobiography 31

attuned to the questions of truthfulness in self-representation (i.e. identity). Instead of assessing the truth of an autobiography in its factual and moral dimensions, they approach it from psychological perspectives by positing that any utterance in autobiographical texts materializes the autobiographer’s truthful identities (or authentic self). The third-generation critics, mainly structuralists and poststructuralists, have focused their attention on graphe/graphia, the act of producing a text. They question the referentiality of language and the authenticity of the self, based on their observation of the increasing number of “not merely of deceits, but of mystifications, bewilderment and confusion critics have found in autobiographies” (Loesberg 2008: 173). A most recent movement within the third-generation critics has turned its attention to the “reader” of autobiography. Autobiography is either seen as a manifestation of a prior act of reading on the part of the author who re-reads literary and cultural conventions and his life, or the site of manipulation by the autobiographer who creates the implied reader to help bring the rhetorical construct of self into existence. The third-generation critics’ focus on the act of writing and reading aligns most closely to the emphasis of this study, which enquires into the deeper consciousness that goes on in the mind of the narrator and reader through analysing language of autobiography. The shift of critical focus to graphe, however, should not mislead the research effort to ignore the components of bios and autos, all three contributing to a holistic view of autobiography. It is always useful to draw insights from different fields to deepen the understanding of autobiography. 1.3.2 Self-making and world-making functions Psychologists (e.g. Rubin 1996, Conway 2001, Kasabova 2009, Smorti 2011) have focused their attention on the narrative quality of autobiographical memory (i.e. memories of significant happenings in one’s life) in their effort to inquire into cognitive state of human beings. According to Rubin (1996: 2–4), autobiographical memory entails narrative, through which the present consciousness of a prior conscious experience is realized. Some sensory process of memories formed by auditory information such as sounds, setting and words, and cognitive and affective processes signalling emotions experienced during the events give rise to the narrative quality of autobiographical memory. The binary nature in the narrative quality of autobiographical memory has been highlighted by several psychologists. As Schrauf and Rubin (2003: 135–137) elaborate, the rememberer’s present consciousness of a prior conscious experience contains two extremes: a strong sense of re-experiencing the past versus a lack of such a sense. Bruner (1991: 69) emphasizes the distinction between narrator and

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protagonist in autobiographical narrative: a narrator takes upon himself the task of describing the growth of a protagonist, who shares the same name; he brings the protagonist from the there and then into the here and present in such a way that the protagonist becomes the present narrator and both share the consciousness. In his examination of several literary autobiographies, Bruner (1991: 70–71) has observed a significant percentage of present-tense verbs, most of which have to do with evaluation, telling readers why this is worth telling. It is this “why tell” function that assigns the significance to narrative and endows it with exceptionality. A breakthrough made by Bruner (1991) is his discovery of self-making and world-making functions of autobiography. As Bruner (1991: 76) states: “what makes the telling justifiable” is also a commitment to a certain set of presuppositions about oneself, one’s relation to others, one’s view of the world and one’s place in it. So, given that autobiography is also a form of “taking a stand,” it is perforce rhetorical. And when one combines the rhetoric of self-justification with the requirements of a genre-like narrative, one begins to come very close to what Goodman describes as “worldmaking” in which the constructed self and its agentive powers become, as it were, the gravitational center of the world.

Bruner (1991) views autobiography not as a record of what happened but as a continuing interpretation and reinterpretation of one’s experience (Bruner 1991: 76). As he later elaborates, an autobiography is a set of procedures for self-conception and a commitment for the autobiographer to maintain a sense of alliance and opposition with the rest of the world (Bruner 2004: 691–692). Bruner (2004: 693), nevertheless, cautions that, while the overlapping between the narrator and the central figure makes the self-report of one’s life reflexive in the shared consciousness, this reflexivity creates a paradox if an external criterion of rightness is imposed. This is because a person’s memory is “notoriously fallible” and the stories constructed about his life based on his own memory are therefore subject to narrative invention, which may contain irresistible errors (Bruner 1991: 70). To further expound the paradox of truth or myth, Smorti (2011: 303–304) re-articulates the distinction between the narrator and the protagonist as the difference between a Self who tells stories and a Self that is formed by the story it tells others, both of which constitute the autobiographical Self. Vividly encapsulating the relationship between autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative as two mirrors through which people reflect their lives, Smorti (2011: 304) highlights the principles of adaptive self-coherence and adaptive coherence with others that guide the interplay between memory and narration in autobiography. In her opinion, the autobiographical memory must maintain a balance between the need to correspond to reality in order to maximize its chance for survival and the need to be truthful with the self, achieving “partial coherence with the Self ” (Smorti 2011: 306). The



Chapter 1.  Distinctiveness of autobiography 33

autobiographical narration must also reach “a state of partial balance between the need to be listened to and the need to be believed.” In other words, the narrator needs to recount his own life to others in a way that makes his recounting interesting and believable, achieving “partial coherence with the others” (2011: 306/309). The self-making and world-making function highlighted by psychologists sheds light on the social mission of autobiography. Their emphasis on the distinction between narrator and protagonist is close to the narratologists’ notions of real author, implied author, narrator and character, which will be discussed in Chapter 3. Despite their acknowledgement of the importance of language in constructing what it narrates and thus realizing the autobiographer’s commitment to himself and the world (Bruner 2004: 696), hardly any effort has been made to elucidate on how certain linguistic choices can give rise to a change of a reader’s view of the world and his place in it. After all, it is not the psychologists’ but the linguists’ job to draw connections between linguistic choices and the change of worldview. The stylistic framework proposed in Chapter 2 serves such a purpose. 1.3.3 Enactment and didactic role The social mission of autobiography, in particular, the issue of human agency and enactment, has also aroused interests from literary critics (such as Smith and Watson 2010, Danielewicz 2012). To Smith and Watson (2010: 54), autobiography is an act and proof of human agency. People exercise “agency” in the act of narrating their lives, through understanding their addressees, changing the stories they tell, gaining access to other cultural scripts and coming to understand themselves differently (Smith and Watson 2010: 59). More often than not, agency is politically charged in that people employ autobiography to assert their cultural difference and serve their political inspiration such as resisting colonial repression (2010: 59). Such is the case identified by Danielewicz (2012: 269–278) in what he calls double-voiced autobiographies, where a second first-person voice that is not identified as the authors is observed to promote a different agenda. Holden’s (2008, 2009) postulation of a nationalist’s enactment in political autobiography is highly relevant to this study. Earlier on, Olney (1991: 376–377) states that, despite different approaches and sub-generic differences, the act of autobiography is peculiar to a nation, be it historically, politically, psychologically and/or literarily. Along these lines, Holden (2008) examined autobiographies written by nationalist leaders, which he names national autobiography, to understand their role in decolonization and modernization. Theses autobiographies include those written by Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew. Holden (2008: 5) writes:

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The growth of an individual implicitly identified as a national father explicitly parallels the growth of national consciousness and frequently proleptically, the achievement of an independent nation-state. These texts had – and continue to have – two functions. They demonstrate to an international audience, through the life of a representative individual who is paradoxically also an exceptional leader, the nation’s entry into modernity. At the same time, they function within the nation as documents of – and indeed, by being read, incitement to – the production of citizens of the new nation-state. They thus become conduct books of exemplary, although not unflawed, lives.

In examining Lee’s (1998, 2000) autobiography, Memoirs I and II (See Introduction), Holden (2008: 8) explores the way gender, in particular, masculinity, is written into modernities after colonialism. He gives credit to the individualizing impulses in Lee’s autobiography that successfully mould the citizen-subject to accept neoliberalism, and the effect of legitimizing the nation as the community that demands loyalty on its citizen-readers (2008: 186). Holden (2008: 187) is, nevertheless, disappointed at the autobiography’s overemphasis on Lee’s importance in its paratexts. Undoubtedly, the nationalist element has its presence in Challenge and Tiaozhan, so does the glorifying attempt, setting an important context for this study. Adding that “auto/biography mimes the narrative of the new nation, aligning the nation’s life with that of an individual in order to interpellate new citizen-readers,” Holden (2009: 288) emphasizes the enactment and didactic role of autobiography. National autobiography, masked by the prominence of the autobiographer’s social status, economic power or political influence, is endowed with the socio-political mission to shape ideology and thus assumes the didactic and enactment role in a relevant society and at an appropriate time. Having expounded the relevant narrative psychological and socio-critical approaches to autobiography, I will now focus on the relevant literature that has the language and style of autobiography as its focus, the central issue of this book. 1.3.4 Referential and rhetorical value of language and style Some literary critics have attempted to clarify the relation between language and other components of autobiography. Based on Aristotle’s three elements, mythos, ethos and dianoia (in other words, action, character and theme), that guide a writer’s progress in a sequence of contexts and relationships, Howarth (1980: 86) proposes technique, character and theme as the three elements in an autobiographer’s writing strategy. His understanding of character, referring to the image or self-portrait his book presents (Howarth 1980: 87), corresponds to implied author rather than character in the narratological sense (see Chapter 3, Sections 2.1 and 2.2). Theme refers

Chapter 1.  Distinctiveness of autobiography 35



to the ideas and beliefs that give an autobiography its meaning. Technique embraces formal devices such as style, imagery and structure, which “build a self-portrait from its inside out” (1980: 87). Each of the three elements in an autobiographer’s writing strategy relates to an isolated aspect of the composition: the writer (character), the work (technique) and the reader (theme), forming “a single chain of relationships progressing from motive, to method, to meaning” (Howarth 1980: 88), as shown in Figure 1.5. Writer/Character/Motive

Work/Technique/Method

Reader/Theme/Meaning

Figure 1.5  Chain of relationship in autobiography (Howarth 1980)

Starting with the understanding of the writer’s motive, followed by the analysis of the style, and ending with the interpretation of the meaning from the reader’s perspective, Howarth’s (1980) literary-critical model irresistibly places greater emphasis on the interpretative attempt than on linguistic phenomena, notwithstanding his earlier acknowledgement of insufficient attention having been given to the technique element. Sharing Howarth’s (1980) insight on the important role of style in bridging the gap between the writer and the reader, Starobinski (1980: 73) postulates that a great variety of particular styles may occur in autobiography. He emphasizes the self-referential value of style in autobiography (1981: 74). As he asserts, style in autobiography assumes the dual function of establishing the relation between the “author” and his own past and of revealing the author to his future readers. Joining the seemingly unending debate over form and content among critics and stylisticians, Starobinski (1980: 74–76) refutes the view of style as a “form” added to a “content” resulting in a discontinuity between form and content in that what one sees on the surface does not represent the author’s inner spirit. He believes that style is a deviation giving rise to the originality in the autobiographical style and thus forms a system of indices that reveal the authorial traits and present an “authentic” image of the author (1980: 77–83). Language in autobiography yields rhetorical perspectives, as Barros (1992) posits. Barros (1992: 4–6) stipulates that language, image and structure of the text should be the “starting places” to explore autobiography as they offer three rhetorical perspectives that enable us to describe “‘what’ and ‘how’ it ‘says’ and come to some conclusions as to what it ‘means’” (Barros 1992: 6). She is quick to caution that, while the perspectives allow us to look inside autobiography, they are heuristic and exploratory (1992: 7). Barros’s view on language and perspective in autobiography, in particular, her proposition that meanings are derived from the perspective

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seen inside the text, highlights the relation between style and point of view, the central concepts of this study. As in the case with Howarth 1980, both Starobinski’s (1980) and Barro’s (1992) approaches to the issue of language in autobiography are immensely interpretative based on their randomly selected linguistic phenomena rather than being guided by a systematic, rigorous framework of stylistic analysis. Rather puzzlingly, the acknowledgement by literary critics of the importance of style in autobiography falls on deaf ears among stylisticians. Little effort has been made to examine the stylistic patterns and point of view derived from these patterns in autobiography. The most relevant work done by the stylisticians is on fictive autobiography. Warner (2009), for instance, examines Verena Stefan’s first-person novel, which she calls confession, Shedding, as linguistic practice and explains its narrative authenticity (i.e. the unmediated effect) based on the cognitive poetic concepts of schema and deixis. Through the analysis of the stylistic features related to different aspects of deixis (e.g. direct speech and indirect thought), Warner (2009) illustrates how each deictic shift activates a particular story-telling schema such as remembering as recounting and remembering as immersive reliving. The latter evokes the textual effect of an unmediated voice and encourages the reader to experience authentic immediacy. In a study also based on the deictic shift theory in a stylistic-oriented approach, Morini (2011) examines Dickens’s David Copperfield as an example of autodiegetic fiction. He refutes the prevalent assumption that the conflation of I-character and I-narrator in first-person autobiographical novels gives rise to a single voice. Through meticulous linguistic analysis of the deictic shifts between I-narrator and I-reflector in David Copperfield, Morini (2011: 608) outlines Dickens’s strategic use of perceptual disengagement between the I-narrator and I-reflector in some cases and their “automatic” blending in others, both of which create subtle comic effects. While literary critics offer important insights on the referential and rhetorical value of language in autobiography, the research done by Warner (2009) and Morini (2011) demonstrates that literary critical interpretation, coupled with linguistic analysis, gives literary criticism the unique advantages of objectivity and neutrality. Though their interests on fictive autobiography are still very much aligned to the dominant trend in stylistics that focuses on fiction, play, and poetry, the analytical strength in these models makes a case for a stylistic enquiry into the “real” autobiography.



Chapter 1.  Distinctiveness of autobiography 37

1.3.5 Competing voices and identity crisis in translation There is nevertheless a surprising dearth of published research on the translation of autobiography. Ironically, it is the American writer Eva Hoffman’s Lost In Translation that prompts the literary critics (e.g. Besemeres 1998; Mousley 2012) to investigate translation of autobiography. Their research has mostly focused on competing voices in translation that shape the author’s identity and symbolize the translator’s. Besemeres (1998: 327–344) discusses translation not as the activity of performing the linguistic transfer from Polish to English but as an analogue of Eva Hoffman’s transition from her Polish cultural identity to the new English cultural identity, based on the underlying assumption that any language implies a cultural universe. According to Besemeres (1998: 330), two voices are manifested in Hoffman’s autobiography to signify the relationship between language and the self: the Polish voice claims a greater authenticity than the English one because the former is Hoffman’s native language (1998: 331). Besemeres’s study highlights the tension between two voices associated with two languages and two cultures inherent in autobiography. These are important issues that need to be addressed in the translation of autobiography, as in the case of Challenge and Tiaozhan. Literary critic and translation scholar Tymoczko (2000) suggests that the translation of someone’s autobiography can become the autobiography of the translator, symbolizing the translator’s struggle for identity rather than the autobiographer’s. This conclusion is drawn after she evaluates the English translation of an anonymous Middle Irish narrative, which she regarded as the autobiography of Suibhne, a king of northern Ireland who became a poet. The translation was carried out by Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, translator and playwright. Tymoczko (2000: 310) sees the translation as Heaney’s strategy to compete for public recognition as a committed Irish writers and nationalist. Having expected to see “the decolonized cultural confidence,” she was disappointed at a “diffidence that suggests the remnants of a lingering colonized mentality” (2000: 314) in the translation. She notes that Heaney’s translation fails to deliver the kind of cultural sensitivity the source text entails (2000: 312) and favours the system of target culture over that of source culture (2000: 315). Departing from the literary critical approach adopted by Besemeres (1998) and Tymoczko (2000), Jawad (2007) carries out a “pure” stylistic analysis of the translation of autobiography. He examines the translator’s strategies in translating paraphrase, parallelism and chiasmus in literary autobiography al-Ayyam (The Days) written by Egyptian writer Taha Hussein. In an effort to investigate the norms, strategies and procedures in translation, Jawad (2007: 197–214) identifies a variety of strategies which underline a general tendency to comply with the target language

38

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norms. He notes that the adherence to the norm of acceptability (Toury’s 1995) compromises on the textual and rhetorical functions of the original work. Jawad’s (2007) stylistic analysis would have attained more critical significance if it extends its boundaries beyond the linguistic description by incorporating literary criticism. In this regard, Rosengrant (1995) has an edge over Jawad’s (2007) research in his investigation of the bilingual style of the Russian novelist Vladimir Nobokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory in English and Russian. Rosengrant (1995) deals with the linguistic, textual and aesthetic aspects within the text as well as the autobiographer’s identity and personality shaped by these devices. Focusing on the linguistic analysis of alliteration, Rosengrant (1995: 109) differentiates between those serving as rhetorical devices that reinforce the meaning and those as manifestations of the authorial persona. He acknowledges the double sense of story-telling and pleasure-making in the text and the complex identity of the narrator as an experiencing child and observing adult (1995: 116–7), a claim similar to that of Bruner (1991) (see 1.3.2) and Morini (2011) (see 1.3.4). In offering “stylistic inflection” as one of the possible reasons for the translator’s tendency of abandoning the precise meaning of the English expressions, Rosengrant (1995: 121) concludes that the stylistic inflection most directly affects the conjunction of form and meaning that ultimately determines the textual and authorial identity (1995: 123). There is, nevertheless, a lack of concrete evidence from which he derives such a conclusion. Rosengrant (1995) also fails to address a unique but intricate relation between the ST and TT arising from Nobokov’s autobiography, given that Nobokov himself is the author and translator of the multiple language editions. As he points out, the English version consists of fifteen chapters composed in English and one chapter translated from French (1995: 108). Yet, intentionally or unintentionally, he neglects this special situation in his analysis of the English and Russian versions, in his failure to examine issues such as translation postulates (Toury 1995) and self-translation (see Lau 1995). As the literature review in this section has shown, the research into autobiography by literary critics, narrative psychologists, stylisticians and translation scholars has generated interesting insights on the function, role, language and style, and translation of autobiography. Their effort, however, has been largely uncoordinated and restricted to literary autobiography. This indicates a need to extend the study of autobiography to non-literary autobiography.



Chapter 1.  Distinctiveness of autobiography 39

1.4 Conclusion This chapter has examined the genre of autobiography in relation to other life-writing genres. The study characterizes autobiography as a genre of distinctiveness, displaying the binary oppositions between subjectivity and objectivity, truth and myth, comprehensibility and exceptionality, and public sphere and private sphere of existence. Memoirs are subsumed under the genre of autobiography rather than being considered as a different genre or a sub-genre. The multi-dimensional properties inherent in autobiography make the genre a fertile soil for academic enquiry, placing it at the central, rather than peripheral, position where other life-writing genres intersect. Recent development in autobiographical studies, particularly, the theories proposed by the narrative psychologist and literary critics, contextualizes this study. Autobiographical critics have shifted their attention away from the sole emphasis of truth value or identity to the writing of autobiography. The narrative psychological approaches to autobiography have highlighted the narrative quality of autobiographical memory (Rubin 1996, Schrauf and Rubin 2003, Bruner 1986). Far from objectively recording what happened in one’s life, autobiography performs the functions of self-making and world-making (Bruner 1991). In emphasizing human agency and nationalist element in autobiography, literary critics (Holden 2008) shed light on the didactic and agentive role of autobiography in society. Even as the referential and rhetorical value of style has been highlighted by literary critics, the stylistic-oriented approach to autobiography has been scarce, except for a few inquiries into fictive autobiography (Warner 2009; Morini 2011). A dearth of literature on translation of autobiography notwithstanding, the work done by several literary critics (Besemeres 1998; Tymoczko 2000) casts light on the tension between the competing voices in a translated autobiography, which represent different identities, including that of the translator(s). The understanding of the strengths and limitations of each theoretical strand lays a solid foundation for this study. Many gaps identified through the review of the relevant literature necessitate a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary framework for a systematic, rigorous study of autobiography and its translation. The next chapter will focus on the language of autobiography, which forms an integral part of the stylistic approach, with an objective to set up the methodological framework.

Chapter 2

Language of autobiography Style and foregrounding

2.1 Introduction In the previous chapter, I have summarized the characteristics of autobiography as a genre into four binary oppositions. Autobiography is endowed with self-making and work-making functions and enacts social changes. First and foremost, autobiography is realized through language. Placing language and style at the starting point, I will embark on a stylistic approach to autobiography starting from this chapter. In a broad sense, style is a choice, based on Traugott and Pratt’s (2008: 39) definition. More specifically, style is “the way in which language is used in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose, and so on” (Leech and Short 2007: 9). The most widespread definition of style, according to Carter and Nash (1990: 3), is a deviance from standard or normal language. Stylistics has two aspects. It undertakes a linguistic analysis and facilitates an interpretative synthesis (Leech 2008: 3). The linguistic analysis investigates the formal aspect of a text, whereas the literary synthesis explores the functional aspect. For decades, stylisticians have primarily focused their attention on the language of literature, which is believed to be heavily invested in literariness realized through foregrounding. In this chapter, I will show that the language of autobiography exhibits a specific level of foregrounding that has unique functional significance. I will first examine the notion of literariness in order to characterize the language of autobiography. The overriding objective of this chapter is to set up a stylistic analytical framework to pinpoint deviant linguistic features in autobiography, in which point of view comes about. The framework incorporates the Prague School’s foregrounding, Leech and Short’s (2007) checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories (Checklist hereafter), Hallidayan transitivity system and Fowler’s (1996) linguistic criticism. By way of illustration, Lee’s English autobiography Challenge will be analysed with a focus on foregrounding to assess the feasibility of the framework and demonstrate its analytical methodology.

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2.2 Literariness in autobiography In the traditional dichotomy between literary and non-literary language, the former is assumed to be endowed with “literariness,” whereas the latter is labelled as “ordinary” or “standard” language. Many scholars (e.g. Herman 1983: 99; Leech 2008: 56; Fowler 1996: 94) found it unhelpful to define literary language by literariness as opposed to “ordinary” or “standard” language, as special uses of language can be found in literature as well as “in other domains such as joke-telling, advertising, and ordinary conversation” (Leech 2008: 56). Others like Chapman (1982), Carter and Nash (1983), and van Peer (2008), however, continue with their effort to define the criteria of “literariness.” 2.2.1 Criteria of literariness The most influential scholars engaged in the discussion of literariness are Carter and Nash (1983, 1990). To refute the “harmful” division between literary and non-literary language, which polarizes languages leading to “one kind being more positively valued than another kind,” Carter and Nash (1983: 124–126) propose a “cline” of literariness. The cline, visualized in Figure 2.1, runs from technical manual and legal agreement, which are believed to possess very low literary potential, to novels, assumed to deploy a complex of literary devices. Technical Manual

First-person Novel

Advertisement

Legal Agreement

Autobiography ?

Third-person Novel

Figure 2.1  A cline of “literariness”

According to Carter and Nash (1993: 130–139), non-literary language is only effective in conjunction with another medium (e.g. equipment as in the case of technical manual) in its directive functions. It facilitates direct interaction between a sender and a receiver by making readers to enact, implement or take cognizance. For this purpose, language in a non-literary text is prototypically “restrictively and necessarily monosemic” (Carter and Nash 1990: 41). It entails the “use of precise technical terms which are valid only in special application by a special type of audience” (Carter and Nash 1983: 127). Literary language can be specified by several defining criteria of literariness, including textual sovereignty, displaced interaction, semantic density and polysemy (Carter and Nash 1983: 130–139; 1990: 37–42). The former two criteria seem to



Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 43

emphasize a functional quality, whereas the latter two deal with a formal quality. Literary language, with its descriptive and inferential function, makes no direct practical claim on the readers in its deferred or displaced interaction between author and reader but has sovereign power that stimulates readers’ ability to interpret, co-create and judge. Semantic density is materialized by means of interactive patterns in syntax, lexis, phonology and discourse (Carter and Nash 1990: 39). It is manifested in the contrasts between complex and simple syntax, formal and informal lexical items, and mono- and polysyllabic words, to name a few. Unlike monosemic non-literary language, literary language is “obscure” by nature and polysemic in its networks of multiple and expanding meaning (Carter and Nash 1983: 139). Along the “cline” of literariness, Carter and Nash (1983: 136) places third-person novels to the right of first-person novels in their assumption that the former lacks autobiographical realism and the absence of the speaker-within-the text causes the reader to respond more critically to the finer details of the language. Based on the same rationale, autobiography would have been located between first-person novels and advertisements. It certainly projects a higher degree of autobiographical realism, which may cause readers to respond less critically than to that of first-personal novels. Autobiography, however, does not make the practical claim on the readers to the same extent as advertisements do. It is therefore strategically located at the meeting point between literary language and non-literary language. Such a strategic position will inevitably contribute to a mixture of “literariness” and “ordinariness” in autobiographical language. Carter and Nash’s (1983; 1990) emphasis on the formal and functional quality of literary language finds some parallels in van Peer’s (2008) functional dimensions, namely “the reflective, socially cohesive, and delight inducing qualities” (2008: 121– 123), which distinguish “homiletical texts” from “institutional texts.” Institutional texts, such as official documents, school textbooks, newspapers and magazines and religious texts, “shaped by the needs and aims of social institutions” (van Peer 2008: 121), have clear functionality and take care of practical needs. By contrast, homiletical texts, including poetry, fiction and drama, are distant from practical needs in daily life and induce reflection on the general nature of things. Such reflective processes may create a utopian vision, resulting in experience of delight (2008: 123). These functional qualities of homiletical texts are usually fulfilled by formal qualities such as parallelism and juxtaposition, metaphor and ambiguity, and paradox and irony, to name a few (2008: 124). The insight generated from the discussion of the formal and functional significance of “literariness” by Carter and Nash (1983, 1990) and van Peer (2008) allows us to explore the plurality of autobiographical language with reference to a set of parameters. I will now discuss the formal and functional qualities of autobiographical language with reference to the criteria of “literariness.”

44 Translation of Autobiography

2.2.2 Subjective and objective language The binary properties of autobiography as genre, expounded in Chapter 1, impose constraints on its language, which entails objectivity and subjectivity. The language of autobiography serves to project objective reality, achieve comprehensibility and fulfil the mission of telling the truth. It also has to express subjectivity, create the feeling of reliving the past, and thus invent exceptional experience for its readers. Ordinary language is key to the objectivity and comprehensibility in autobiography. Characterized by the restrictive monosemy, ordinary language often embodies syntactic iconicity: “the syntactic relations between words characteristically imitating relations between the objects and events which those words signify” (Leech and Short 2007: 188). Two common instances of syntactic iconicity are chronological sequence that imitates the real-time temporal sequence of events and psychological sequence that represents the thought processes (2007: 190). Literary language ensues if autobiography is to achieve exceptionality by means of authentic expressions of the autobiographer’s personal and emotional experience that evokes a sense of unobtrusiveness. The subjectivity in language is usually “characterized by lavish descriptions relating to subjective experience and thought” (Warner 2009: 11), providing readers the access to the state of mind of the author. Such descriptive extravagance is characterized by literary polysemy or semantic density. The link between the objective reality and subjective view is legitimized by the social morals posited by the identity between the author and the voice in the text. Otherwise, language would have created an illusion that reveals the lies told by the author, as observed by Warner (2009: 8) in some debunked autobiographies. This is because language is rooted in human being and culture, so are the lies; “cross examination” of words against words makes it possible to discover the truth and reveal lies, as Mandel (1980: 63) suggests. Looking at autobiographical language from this perspective, we are entering the area of the functional significance of autobiographical language and emphasizing the correlation between language and social meanings. Autobiography, presumably written by a historical figure about his unique experience of a particular section of society in the peculiar circumstances, certainly depends on its mode of language to crystallize and stabilize ideas. Language is therefore of paramount importance in serving the social mission of autobiography. Deviant language, in particular, accentuates an authorial tone or an attitude or stance taken by the autobiographer (Leech and Short 2007: 225). Autobiographical language therefore embraces the duality of ordinariness and literariness, realized through objective and subjective language. Striking a balance between them requires fine writing capacity. An overdose of the special application of language in autobiography and a lavish description of subjective experience in

Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 45



an effort to evoke reading pleasure could undermine its authenticity and credibility. Conversely, the dominance of ordinary language and excessive elaboration of the objective reality could reduce reading pleasure and weaken the aesthetic appeal. This study hypothesizes that, given a higher commitment to truth in a political autobiography like Challenge and Tiaozhan, ordinary language is unmarked in autobiography, but there is a certain degree of marked use of language in the form of foregrounding that reveals the authorial tone and fulfils certain communicative goals. A stylistic approach lends itself to analysing the literary quality of autobiography by applying techniques to underline the foregrounded linguistic features that characterize literary texts and underscore their aesthetic value. 2.3 Stylistic analytical framework Having discussed the formal and functional distinctiveness of the language in autobiography, I am now proposing a stylistic-oriented method of analysis to bring out such distinctiveness. My stylistic analytical framework builds its theoretical foundation on foregrounding theory and formulates its analytical method based on the Checklist proposed by Leech and Short (2007) and the functional grammar established by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004). In addition, the framework incorporates Fowler’s (1996) linguistic criticism to extract the aesthetic value and social meaning from the stylistic analysis. 2.3.1 Foregrounding and familiarization Central to the stylistic analysis is the aesthetic concept of “foregrounding,” which originated from Greek Antiquity and received its status as theory in visual arts with the Russian Formalist School in 1916–17 (van Peer 2007: 99). Foregrounding in language was first identified by the Prague School scholar Jan Mukařovský. The diagram drawn by Short (1996: 11) provides a visual representation of the concept, as shown in Figure 2.2.

Background Foreground

Figure 2.2  The concept of foregrounding (Short 1996: 11)

46 Translation of Autobiography

Similar to the foreground of a painting distinguished from its background, foregrounding in language is the bringing of a particular textual feature that departs from the linguistic norm to prominence (Verdonk 2002: 118). The distinct linguistic pattern is the foreground of a text, whereas the normal language use is the background of the text. Foregrounded language focuses on the act of expression for its own sake and suspends the communication, in contrast to the norm of automated language (scientific language being its purest form) that is primarily communicative (Herman 1983: 101–102). Typical methods of foregrounding include deviation from linguistic norms, repetition of words and parallelism of structures. Foregrounding creates a “surprise” effect in their readers, and acquires a particular meaning through a distinct linguistic patterning or parallelism that deviates from what is normally an expected way of communication (Leech and Short 2007: 23). The term foregrounding is very often used interchangeably with “deviance,” “deautomatization” and “defamiliarization.” In particular, the terminological interchange between foregrounding and defamiliarization is most prevalent but causes confusion. It is therefore useful to draw distinctions between them in order to lay foundation for the subsequent discussion. The relationship between foregrounding and defamiliarization can be configured in a chain effect, as shown in Figure 2.3: foregrounding defamiliarizes the readers; defamiliarization conveys significance and reveals an authorial tone.

Foregrounding (Linguistic)

Defamiliarization (Aesthetic)

Authorial Tone (Socio-Cultural)

Figure 2.3  Chain effect of style, foregrounding and defamiliarization

Foregrounding, in the special use of language or the application of linguistic techniques that create “poetic” effect in a text, results in defamiliarization. Defamiliarization, meaning make strange, signifies the psychological or “surprise” effect on readers. The concept of defamiliarization is also derived from the thinking of Russian Formalists, especially expressed by Viktor Shklovsky (See Fowler 1996: 12). The term signifies the restoration of freshness to “perception which has become habitual and automated” (Cook 1994: 131). It was first applied to arts but later extended to language in the sense that a certain use of language can change readers’ mental representation of the world, causing them to gain a new insight into a familiar problem (Cook 1994: 9–10). Different stylisticians interpret the two terms differently. For example, Jeffries and McIntyre (2010: 64) attribute foregrounding to formal distinctiveness of

.



Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 47

literature and defamiliarization to representational distinctiveness. To Leech (2008: 3), foregrounding incorporates formal and functional points of view, in which a deviation or departure from the normal linguistic code conveys a special effect or significance. Fowler (1996) interprets the concepts of defamiliarization in contrast to habitualization and legitimation. Readers become habitualized when reading a plain and mundane language and tend to be passive in the face of a legitimized language slanted towards the needs of officialdom and politicians. Defamiliarization, arising from any deviation from the linguistic convention as well as expected context of culture (1996: 115), disrupts habitualization and legitimation, restoring freshness and critical alertness (1996: 12). Consolidating the views from Jeffries and McIntyre (2010), Leech (2008) and Fowler (1996), I posit that a linguistic description of foregrounding at different coding levels is to account for the formal distinctiveness. The understanding of the communicative goal of foregrounding will shed light on defamiliarization that underpins the functional distinctiveness. Integrating the two aspects enables us to detect the authorial tone, which is close to point of view, the central concept of this study, in a specific socio-cultural context. 2.3.2 Checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories To identify the salient features of foregrounding, my study draws upon the Checklist formulated by Leech and Short (2007). The Checklist consists of a list of questions 1 concerning lexical categories, grammatical categories, figure of speech, and context and cohesion (Leech and Short 2007: 61–66), as configured in Figure 2.4. The questions under each sub-category facilitate a systematic linguistic survey of texts in search for deviant linguistic features. The answers to the questions will yield stylistically relevant information that pinpoints instances of foregrounding. Questions pertaining to the lexical category would draw attention to any excess or scarcity of a specific word class. Questions in the grammatical category will place any unusual syntactic pattern under scrutiny. With regard to figure of speech, effort will be made to identify any rhetorical device that leaves a psychological impact on the readers. Moving beyond the elements of language, I will shift my attention from the linguistic aspects to the social relationships within and outside the texts by examining intra- and inter-sentential links. In addition, by considering stylistic variants (i.e. unwritten alternatives or might-have-beens) of the original text (Leech

1. Instead of listing the questions here, I will illustrate them in the foregrounding analysis in the next section.

48 Translation of Autobiography

A. Lexical categories

B. Grammatical categories

C. Figures of speech

D. Context and cohesion

General

Sentence types

Grammatical and lexical

Cohesion

Nouns

Sentence complexity

Phonological schemes

Context

Adjectives

Clause types

Tropes

Verbs

Clause structure

Adverbs

Phrases (nouns, verbs, others) Word classes

General

Figure 2.4  A checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories

and Short 2007: 106), I will zero in onto the functional significance of a specific use of language in the specific socio-cultural context. While Leech and Short’s (2007) Checklist provides a rather comprehensive framework that can capture most of the deviant features, it can be supplemented by Jeffries and McIntyre’s (2010: 34–61) stylistic model, which examines foregrounding at five linguistic levels. Among the five levels, namely, phonology, graphology, morphology, syntax and semantics, the last two categories are particularly relevant to this study, given that foregrounding in autobiography most likely takes place at the syntactic and semantic levels. The semantic foregrounding illustrated by Jeffries and McIntyre (2010: 58) is by and large subsumed under the lexical categories and figures of speech in Leech and Short’s (2007) Checklist. Some of the grammatical techniques as examples of foregrounding suggested by Jeffries and McIntyre (2010: 50–58) offer additional insight into how syntactic structures can be exploited to create foregrounding. For instance, minor sentences without main verbal element

Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 49



could result in a kind of timelessness that can be exploited in a range of ways. Iconic structures with extended noun phrases as given information may cause readers to experience some forms of discomfort. Ambiguous constructions such as noun phrase, appositive noun phrase and minimized punctuation have the potential to build more meaning than an unambiguous structure. Vagueness resulting from the cohesive deficiency forces readers to make extra processing effort in interpreting the text. The use of deliberate ungrammaticality makes the reader think hard but without making it impossible to understand the text. The two models presented by Leech and Short (2007) and Jeffries and McIntyre (2010) can complement each other in identifying deviant linguistic patterns systematically and comprehensively. They will be used to guide the foregrounding analysis in this study in search for formal distinctiveness. 2.3.3 Functional grammar and transitivity Hallidayan meaning-oriented functional grammar provides an additional tool to analyse the deviant linguistic patterns that fulfil the communicative goal of language. Functional grammar is grounded on the belief that the basic functions of language are to make sense of our experience and to act out our social relationship (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 29). The former is the ideational function and the latter, the interpersonal function. These two modes of meaning are enabled by the third mode, the textual function. In its ideational function, language as reflection construes human experience into categories. In its interpersonal function, language as action enacts our personal and social relationships with other people around us and is both interactive and personal. In the textual function, language is structured in the sequences of discourse with cohesion and continuity to serve the decoding needs of the readers (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 29–30). The three functions, as shown in Figure 2.5, represent “three coexisting ways in which language has to be adapted to its users’ communicative needs” (Leech and Short 2007: 109).

Textual

Ideational

Interpersonal

Figure 2.5  Metafunction of language (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004)

The textual function will be accounted for in the linguistic description of cohesion and context based on Leech and Short’s (2007) Checklist. The interpersonal function will be embedded in the analysis of point of view in the subsequent chapters. Transitivity, the concept central to the ideational function of language, lends itself

50

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well to exploring the functional significance of foregrounded features especially in terms of their ideological significance. The system of transitivity facilitates a systematic analysis of the choices of lexical verbs with regard to how they model the experience of change and configure a process that consists of a flow of events. Transitivity construes the world of experience into six sets of process (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 170). The three principal types of processes are material process constructing the process of doing-and-happening, mental process signifying the process of sensing and relational process constituting the process of being (i.e. classifying or identifying). The three subordinate process types include behavioural process that represents physiological and psychological behaviour, existential processes representing that something exists or happens and verbal process of saying, each located at the boundaries between principle processes. As Fowler (1991: 71) posits, a choice is made through suppressing some possibilities, and such a choice indicates a point of view with ideological significance. As will be shown, transitivity analysis can characterize some aspects of the style that other models of stylistic analysis fail to capture. It is particularly effective in ascribing the functional significance to the formal distinctiveness. Hence, transitivity forms an integral part of the stylistic analysis throughout the book. My study, however, will not stop at deriving the formal and functional distinctiveness from the foregrounding and transitivity analysis. I will leverage on linguistic criticism to assign social meaning to the foregrounded linguistic features. 2.3.4 Linguistic criticism Linguistic criticism proposed by Fowler (1996: 4) is instrumental in integrating the critical aspects into the interpretation of language structures. The theory applies an analytic method drawn from linguistics to criticism and verifies some literary-critical hypotheses based on the linguistic evidence (1996: 7, 9). Linguistic criticism prioritizes two areas of linguistic usage as its object of enquiry. One is the public, official language as in the newspaper, governments’ statements and company reports. The other is the personal discourse, which easily becomes unconscious and habitualized. In the former, the objective of linguistic criticism is to demystify the partial and slanted linguistic practices presented as if they are neutral and innocent. In the latter, the linguistic criticism aims to create an awareness that an individual’s discourse conveys social values, some of which he or she does not mean to convey or even agree to (Fowler 1996: 51). Autobiography, as a public and personal discourse, fits well into both areas of enquiry proposed by linguistic criticism.



Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 51

A major contribution made by Fowler is his introduction of the concept of point of view into linguistics based on his belief that consistent stylistic choices could signify particular outlook on the world (1996: 13). Fowler (1996: 170) develops Russian semiotician Boris Uspensky’s (1972) typology of point of view into a linguistic-oriented model of point of view. The model provides a stylistic tool for analysing point of view systematically by focusing on transitivity, modality, speech and thought presentation, and vocabulary. The typology of point of view will be elaborated in Chapter 3. Point of view is essentially a narratological concept that denotes a relationship “in a complex network of interactions between author, narrator(s), characters, and audiences both real and implied” (Lanser 1981: 13). Each participant comes from different positions with different consciousnesses and thus may have a different point of view, attributable to the character, narrator or author. Hence, the concept point of view needs to be examined with reference to the narrative-communicative situation, where three participants interact. Chapters 3 and 4 will be dedicated to such a discussion. In the preliminary analysis of point of view in the current chapter, no distinction is made between the author, narrator and protagonist, all of whom will be referred to as the author or autobiographer. 2.3.5 Integrated model of stylistic analysis The foregoing discussion of the three models of stylistic analysis proposed by Leech and Short (2007), Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) and Fowler (1996) outlines the strengths of each stylistic model. Each unavoidably has its limitations. Leech and Short’s (2007) Checklist provides a useful tool for deriving stylistically relevant information that could pinpoint instances of foregrounding, but its orientation towards literary texts or literariness may somewhat hinder my analysis of foregrounding in autobiography. Hallidayan transitivity enables me to zoom in on the functional distinctiveness beyond the literary convention, but its insistence of categorizing every element of language sometimes appears rigid and requires tremendous effort to classify minute details including each word, from which ambiguity and indeterminability ensue. Fowler’s (1996) critical linguistic approach to point to view gears the linguistic analysis towards a more meaningful search of deeper meaning hidden in the linguistic evidence. His exploration of point of view is, however, rather restricted, as will be shown in Chapter 3, leaving much to be discovered. Integrating the three models, I opt for a stylistic analytical framework that rides on the strengths and overcomes the limitations of the three models, as shown in Figure 2.6.

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Language of Autobiography

Formal distinctiveness

Functional distinctiveness

Foregrounding

Foregrounding analysis (Checklist)

Linguistic Criticism

Transitivity analysis (Functional Grammar)

Point of View

Figure 2.6  The integrated model of stylistic analysis

The objective of the integrated model is to show that the language of autobiography exhibits formal and functional distinctiveness that is realized through foregrounding and gives rise to point of view. First, a foregrounding analysis mainly based on Leech and Short’s (2007) Checklist will be carried out to identify deviant linguistic features. A transitivity analysis according to Hallidayan Functional Grammar will shed additional light on the specific linguistic patterns and the functional principles that govern the choice of language. Linguistic criticism provides a method to infer the artistic effect and social meanings based on these linguistic features. The findings will lay the groundwork for the in-depth analysis of point of view to be conducted in Chapters 3 and 4. In the rest of this chapter, I will characterize, on a limited scale and by way of illustration, the formal and functional distinctiveness of the language of Challenge based on the integrated model. The preliminary analysis also serves to affirm the validity of this model.

Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 53



2.4 Foregrounding analysis of Challenge I focus my foregrounding analysis on four categories, namely lexical, grammatical, cohesion and context, and figures of speech. Under each category, I will make general observation prior to the analysis of specific examples extracted from Challenge. Throughout, linguistic criticism will be applied to interpret the functional significance of the deviant features. For the purpose of testing and demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed model, the preliminary analysis of each example is exhaustive and descriptive. 2.4.1 Lexical categories: Underlexicalization In the lexical categories, I concentrate on deviant choices of words, taking into consideration of other stylistic choices in order to comprehend their functional significance underpinning such choices. The vocabulary of Challenge, as the autobiography of Singapore’s national father, is largely plain, precise and monosemic, adhering to the ordinary language conventions. Overall, content words consisting mainly of nouns and verbs are dominant lexical features typical of the objective language, in contrast to the relative scarcity of adjectives and adverbs. There is generally a lack of the “dramatized” vocabulary typically found in novels and poems. Example (1) is a case in point. The extract in Example (1) relates the autobiographer’s experience as a student in London. It is manifested with the dominance of nouns and verbs and scarcity of adjectives and adverbs. Against the background of ordinary and objective language, instances of foregrounding in the lexical categories emerge from the analysis. For easy reference, each sentence in Example (1) and all subsequent examples in this chapter as well as the rest is indexed and the underlining is mine: (1) (a) Though I did not spend much time in London, I frequented a place in the city’s Gordon Square called the China Institute. (b) 1What I saw there stayed with me for the rest of my life and 2fuelled my determination to learn Chinese and push bilingual education in Singapore. (c) The China Institute was built by the British and financed from the indemnity China had to pay for the damage to British lives and property in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. (d) The club was open to ethnic Chinese students from all over the world. (e) Every afternoon from 5pm to 7pm, they provided high tea; for poor students, it served as dinner. (f) I often went there and would see Chinese students from all corners of the world. (g) From their accents you could tell where they were from – China, Hong Kong, Malaysia or Mauritius, for example. (h) The most pitiful were

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those from the West Indies. (i) They spoke in singsong West Indian ‘English’ and absolutely no Chinese. (j) I felt very sad for them. (k) I vowed that I would not be like them. (l) That was when I began to feel a sense of loss about not knowing Chinese, and decided not to repeat this state of affairs with my own children.  (Lee 2012: 32)

In a consistently simple, plain and high-frequency vocabulary such as verbs see, tell, feel, push, speak, know, begin, decide, pronouns I, you, they, conjunctions when, though, and, and adverbs there, Example (1) entails a factual description of the author’s experience in London. The plain and monosemic vocabulary could unveil the autobiographer’s motivation to keep the narrative account as objective as possible while making it accessible to ordinary readers. Adverbs are not frequently used in Example (1), except for adverb of place there in (b2) and adverb of degree absolutely in (j), probably in the same attempt to maintain objectivity and neutrality. Highly distinctive in Example (1) are the proper nouns and noun phrases specifying the names of places (such as Gordon Square, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Mauritius), entities (such as the China Institute) and events (such as the Boxer Rebellion). The referentiality of these phrases enhances the historicity and factuality. A formal style is construed in lengthy, complex noun phrases containing proper nouns such as the city’s Gordon Square called the China Institute in (a) and the indemnity China had to pay for the damage to British lives and property in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 in (c). Adjectives, which hardly occur in other parts of Example (1), appear intensively in (h) to (j). They are instances of foregrounding against the background of adjective scarcity. The adjectives are evaluative (pitiful), auditory (singsong) and emotive (sad). They serve as the linguistic indicators of the sensory process in the autobiographical memories. Their colloquial quality deviates from the overall formal style and surprises the readers in its simplicity and subjectivity, alerting them to the satirical tone deeply hidden in the foregrounding. The expression ‘English,’ with its quotation marks, strengthens the ironic tone. The same idea could have been expressed in more neutral adjectives rather than the evaluative or emotive adjectives. For example, distinctive and in a rising and falling tone are more neutral than pitiful and singsong, respectively; sympathetic and a type of English variety are more precise than sad and ‘English.’  The choice of simple and colloquial expressions could underline a strategy of underlexicalization: underlexicalization is marked by two alternative linguistic devices: either the noticeable suppression of a term, or the substitution of a noticeably complex expression for what in other registers would be a simple term. (Fowler 1996: 216)



Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 55

The abrupt switch from a formal, objective vocabulary to a colloquial, emotive vocabulary certainly creates a psychological impact on the readers. Through foregrounding, readers are alerted to the author’s satirical tone and mild sense of superiority. Foregrounded features by means of underlexicalization are also found in Example (2). The extract tells readers how the autobiographer made the decision to study law and how his English improved: (2) ① (a) By the time I went to Raffles Institution for my secondary education, I had already made up my mind to be a lawyer. (b) My mother often re­ minded me that I should master a profession so that I would not encounter my father’s plight. (c) My father was a rich man’s son who stopped schooling after secondary school. (d) Alas, his father fell upon hard times when his business was hit during the Great Depression in the 1930s. (e) He lost his fortune. (f) Without higher education, my father could only get a job as a storekeeper with the Shell Oil Company. (g) He was later responsible for managing the company’s depots at Batu Pahat and Stulang in Johor, as well as Pasir Panjang in Singapore. ② (h) With my father’s experience in mind, I decided I had three choices: medicine, law and engineering… (i) To study law, I had to master the English language. (j) Judges were all Englishmen then. (k) My English had to be as good as theirs if I wanted to stand up to them. ③ (l) In my Junior Cambridge year, my class master was an Englishman named A. T. Grieve, a young Oxford University graduate. (m) He was friendly and approachable. (n) My English improved enormously under him. (o) 1I came in first in the Junior Cambridge examinations, 2my first major examination with papers set and marked in Cambridge. (p) I also won two awards that year, the Raffles Institution and the Tan Jiak Kim scholarships, which together gave me the handsome sum then of 350 Straits dollars. (q) I bought myself a beautiful bicycle for 70 dollars. (r) But even better was to come.  (Lee 2012: 26–27)

In a plain and neutral vocabulary, Paragraph (1) describes the author’s family dilemma and gives the contextual clues leading to his decision to pursue law. Proper nouns and noun phrases are deployed to identify people and entities (my mother, my father, the Shell Oil Company), places (Raffles Institution, Batu Pahat and Stulang in Johor, Pasir Panjang in Singapore) and events (the Great Depression). What strikes me as deviant in this paragraph is the use of the exclamation alas in (d), which forms a sharp contrast with otherwise largely formal and non-evaluative vocabulary. The deviant feature certainly calls itself into readers’ attention and constitutes foregrounding. Similar to the foregrounding instances in Example (1),

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the exclamation alas could have been replaced by the adverb unfortunately or adversative conjunctions but, nevertheless or however, which are less satirical and more formal than alas. On the surface, the choice of the exclamation reflects a sympathetic tone, but it conveys an underlying satirical emotion, prompting readers to search for its significance. Elsewhere, the exclamation alas is inserted into the text which is written predominantly in formal language, resulting in the same ironic effect (see Lee 2012: 82). The choice of alas exemplifies the strategy of underlexicalization and leaves some impact among the readers, alerting them to an implicitly ironic tone. The strategy of underlexicalization is reflected in a noticeable suppression of kinship terms in paragraph (1). For instance, the choice of his father instead of my grandfather in (d) evokes naïve consciousness as if the author did not know his relationship with the two characters. The phrase he was a rich man’s son could have been replaced by a complex sentence that gives sufficient contextual clue (he was born into a family with a good fortune). Both cases conjure up a distant relationship between the author and the character his father, revealing a sense of alienation and disrespect to the character his father. In a stark contrast to the vocabulary with negative connotations in paragraph (1) the positive value-laden expressions are manifested in paragraph (3), including adjectives (friendly, approachable, first, handsome, beautiful, better), verbs (improved, won) and adverbs (enormously). Against the backdrop of objective vocabularies in the preceding texts, the value-laden subjective expressions constitute foregrounding, alerting the readers to the deeper meaning in the message. In particular, the choice of adjectives handsome and beautiful that, respectively, pre-modify the nouns sum and bicycle is worthy of attention. The choice of these adjectives seems to be guided by an underlying intention to instil excitement into the otherwise rather mundane language. It signals a proud tone. To a certain extent, it unveils the author’s affiliation with linguistic instrumentalism, as explained in Introduction. Additionally, the author’s affiliation with elitism is reflected in the repetition of the proper noun Cambridge 2 in (l), (o1) and (o2). His inclination as a linguistic purist is also evident in the deliberation that his teacher was an Englishman and an Oxford graduate. As can be seen in Examples (1) and (2), even though ordinary and objective vocabulary is manifested in Challenge, there is no lack of deviant lexical choices that result in an aesthetic literary effect commonly found in fiction. The author tactfully adopts the strategy of underlexicalization to create a satirical effect, alerting 2. Junior Cambridge year and Junior Cambridge examinations in (l) and (o1) refer to the protagonist’s secondary school period, during which he took the examinations set by the Cambridge Examination Board, which was then known as the “Senior Cambridge examinations.” Cambridge in (o2) refers to “Cambridge University” in the United Kingdom.



Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 57

the readers to the hidden irony. The choice of overly simplified lexicon gives an impression that the author uses everyday language an ordinary reader is accustomed to and thus shortens his distance from his readers. The similar strategy of underlexicalization can be detected elsewhere in Challenge (see Lee 2012: 36, 52, 62, 82, 144, 188, 209). 2.4.2 Syntactic categories: Contrast Typically in a political autobiography like Challenge, declarative, rather than interrogative and exclamatory, sentences are the dominant syntactic features, which contribute to historical factuality and authorial assertiveness. In a written and formal style with information density, declarative sentences in Challenge, on the whole, entail syntactic complexity in the form of complex or compound sentences, or combinations of both. Meanwhile, sentences generally of moderate length and syntactic complexity are organized in a temporal order by logic or congruity that achieves semantic clarity. The syntactic linearity can be illustrated by Example (1). Except the topic sentence (b), the rest of the paragraph are organized in a sequence that imitates the way “impressions occur in the mind” (Leech and Short 2007: 190): from general (a–d) to specific (f–j) and back to general (k–l), exemplifying syntactic iconicity. The syntactic iconicity in a congruent psychological sequence in Example (1) symbolizes a logical mind. The last sentence of the paragraph, (l) (That is when….), is lopsided with a long embedded nominal clause functioning as the subject complement. The unbalanced structure, a foregrounded feature, unveils the author’s unwavering determination to learn Chinese and resonates with sentence (b) in accentuating the theme. Sentence complexity in Challenge, however, is not always consistent. A sudden switch between brevity and complexity exemplifies the interactive pattern that constitutes semantic density, the important criterion of literariness proposed by Carter and Nash (1990) (see 2.2.1). In Example (1), complex sentences are interwoven with simple sentences. The complex and long sentences (a) to (c) make plain the theme, assume a formal tone and set the scene for the rest of the paragraph by elaborating the historical background. Moving beyond sentences (a) to (c), simpler and shorter sentences (d) to (i) with moderate complexity and length take the dominance. They continue to set the context, with a focus on a smaller domain (i.e. the China Institute). The switch of grammatical subject from I in (f) to you in (g) mimics a dialogic pattern which could shorten the distance between the author and the reader. Against the backdrop of moderate to high syntactic complexity in (a) to (i), the simplicity and brevity are foregrounded in the SVA structure (j), I felt very sad

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for them, which could hardly be ignored by readers. Sentence (j) could have been merged with (k) into I felt very sad for them and vowed that I would not be like them, which avoids the repetition of the grammatical subject I. The foregrounded (j) naturally draws our attention to the sad feeling depicted in the sentence. Mirroring the progressive simplifying syntax from (a–c) to (d–i) and to (j) is the gradual increase in syntactic complexity from (j) to (k) and to (l) as visualized in Figure 2.7: (a) To (c) (d) To (i)

(j)

(k) (l)

Figure 2.7  Syntactic contrast in Example (1)

As can be seen from the graph, the strategic location of (j) at the intersection between the decreasing and increasing syntactic complexity affirms its status as syntactic foregrounding. Its brevity in contrast with the complexity in the rest of the paragraph leaves an impact on readers. The similar syntactic contrast, as shown in Figure  2.7, is also found in Example (2), which exemplifies syntactic iconicity. For instance, paragraph (1) follows a psychological sequence, which is based on the principle of memory (i.e. “first is most important”) (Leech and Short 2007: 190): my mother’s advice precedes my father’s dilemma because the former is more important than the latter. Paragraph (3) adopts a chronological order in a cause-effect relation. The adherence to psychological or chronological sequences enables the author to recount the past without depending on conjunctions and the readers to comprehend the flow of events without difficulty. The sudden brevity in sentence (e) He lost his fortune forms a contrast to the complex sentences preceding it (a–d) and following it (f–g). Sentence (e) could have been combined with (d) into a compound sentence Alas, his father fell upon hard times when his business was hit during the Great Depression in 1930s and lost his fortune. The simple, independent sentence (e) gains in prominence. Its objective vocabulary denotes a serious tone, contrasting the satirical tone denoted by alas in (d). The semantic and syntactic contrasts constitute foregrounding that defamiliarizes readers.

Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 59



Semantic density as exemplified by the syntactic contrast can be found elsewhere in Challenge (see Lee 2012: 79, 122, 155, 176, 199). Occasionally, the syntactic brevity is realized through timeless minor sentences such as yes, a small handful can (Lee 2012: 146), mimicking dialogues. As illustrated by the two examples, the contrast between syntactic brevity and complexity adds jaunty “freshness” to the otherwise formal and formulaic syntactic structures. It exemplifies the semantic density that characterizes literariness, constituting foregrounding that creates a sense of “newness” among readers. 2.4.3 Figures of speech: Subtlety There is a scarcity of figure of speech, which can be seen as an effort to beef up the objectivity but may lead to habitualization and legitimation. The small number of rhetorical devices found in Challenge constitutes foregrounding, inviting special interpretation. The most common rhetorical device found in Challenge is metaphors. Some metaphors such as No policy is cast in stone (Lee 2012: 200) and it is the zero-sum game (2012: 14) function to concretize what is abstract. Others are deployed to create imaginative quality and emphatic effect as in we were a multiracial country in a sea of Malays (2012: 42), The united front was a ticking time bomb (2012: 43) and a sea change (2012: 213). Figures of speech also take the form of neologisms such as Singaporeanised (2012: 220) and borrowings such as tingxie, moxie and Jiangjundu (2012: 69) from Mandarin Chinese. More often than not, figure of speech is embedded in lexical and syntactic foregrounding with a very subtle rhetorical effect, as shown in Example (3). In this passage, the author recounts how he made the decision to learn Chinese during the Japanese Occupation: (3) (a) Japanese forces occupied Singapore on 15 February 1942. (b) In the months that followed, all public notices were in Japanese, with many kanji characters, the same characters of the Chinese language. (c) I could not understand them. (d) The fact that I did not know the language of new rulers of Singapore hit me hard. (e)… This grisly scene made me even more determined to learn Chinese so that I could understand such notices. (f) Learning Chinese would be better than learning Japanese; at least, it was my own language, not that of a hated conqueror.  (Lee 2012: 28)

Sentence (d), by Jeffries and McIntyre’s (2010) definition (see 2.3.2), is an iconic structure. In a seemingly simple SVO structure, the head noun phrase functioning as the subject (the fact) is extended by the post-modifier that I did not know the

60 Translation of Autobiography

language of new rulers of Singapore. The extended subject causes discomfort in the readers before finally arriving at the verb element hit. The lexical collocation between the inanimate agent in the form of abstract noun (the fact…) and action verb (hit) adds a trace of “strangeness.” The choice of value-laden adverb hard deviates from the largely neutral lexical choices in the preceding text. The verb hit is polysemic with different interpretations. All these features add up to suspense, stimulating readers’ curiosity to find out what happened. The subsequent paragraph, which depicts the gruesome scene of the dismembered head of a Chinese man hanging in front of the Cathy as a main trigger of the author’s regret of not knowing Chinese, contains deviant collocations. The negative value-laden adjectives such as grisly and hated express a sense of hatred towards the cruelty of the Japanese militants. Contrary to the negative value-laden adjectives that describe the gory scene, the neutral noun phrases are used to represent the Japanese militants such as new rulers of Singapore and conqueror. There could have been better choices such as invader or aggressor with derogatory connotation to match the negative emotion associated with the cruelty of the Japanese forces. This strange choice of word prompts us to search for the underlying intention governing such a choice. While the words with negative connotations reveal the author’s resistance to the Japanese occupation, the choice of the neutral nouns reflects a neutral attitude towards the Japanese. The attitude signifies a subtle attitudinal shift from resistance to neutrality, congruent with the author’s pragmatic approach to the Japanese occupation. As Holden (2008: 182) observes in his study of Lee’s (1998) autobiography: Lee does not, for instance, attempt to show instances of anti-Japanese resistance on his part during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore; rather, he devotes most of his account to a description of how he survived financially by making a “decent profit” from the sale of gum he and a friend manufactured…

Different from the deviant collocation that creates subtle rhetorical effect, figure of speech is realized through structural parallelism and lexical repetition, as illustrated by Example (4): (4) (a) My resistance to the Japanese language lessened over the months. (b) With the Japanese Occupation, my father had no work, I had no college, my three brothers and sisters had no school. (c) I decided I had to get a job and this meant learning the Japanese language. (d) So I learned Japanese at the Japanese Gakuen in Queen Street, a school run by the Japanese Military Administration and taught by a civilian Japanese teacher. (e) The Chinese script that I had self-studied helped me.  (Lee 2012: 29)



Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 61

The topic sentence (a) sets a mixed tone of resentment and neutrality, similar to that in the earlier example. The statement is tactfully substantiated by a series of parallel subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences in (b): my father had no work, I had no college, my three brothers and sisters had no school. The structural parallelism and lexical repetition of no produce rhythmical patterns as instances of foregrounding. The foregrounding emphasizes the plight of the author’s family so as to justify his decision to learn Japanese as stated in (c). The four repetitions of Japanese in sentence (d) also constitute foregrounding, which underlines a linguistic purist approach the author is observed to subscribe to (see Introduction). In the same clause, the foreign word Gakuen creates a sense of “strangeness” which may impede the reader’s comprehension. Similar to the borrowing in Example (3b), where the foreign word Kanji is explained by means of the apposition the same characters of the Chinese language, the meaning of Gakuen in Example (4d) is made plain through the apposition a school run by the Japanese Military Administration and taught by a civilian Japanese teacher. In both cases, the technique of suspense is exploited: the foreign words first cause the readers to experience apprehension, followed by the explanations in the appositions that mitigate such apprehension. The purpose of the suspense could be two-fold: the author shows off his command of Japanese by means of borrowing; he tries to delay acknowledging the fact that he attended a school run by the Japanese military. Through the semantic contrast between military and civilian, the author tactfully emphasizes the fact that the teacher was civilian. As can be seen from Example (4), parallelism, repetition and suspense arising from borrowings function together to create a subtle rhetorical effect, justifying the author’s lessened resistance to the Japanese language stated in the beginning. Syntactic and lexical patterning is therefore not a random choice in Challenge, as demonstrated by Examples (3) and (4), but is strategically integrated to create subtle rhetorical effect. The figures of speech vitalize the otherwise quotidian narration. They reveal the authorial stance and manipulate the readers’ attention. The instances of figures of speech identified in the examples are indicative of the author’s matter-of-fact approach to recounting the past and subtlety in expressing his opinions. 2.4.4 Context and cohesion: Enhancement of coherence Finally, let us take a preliminary look at context and cohesion in Challenge, which play a key role in fulfilling its textual metafunction (see Section 2.3.3). Under context, the external relations of a text or a part of text are explored in terms of the social relations between the participants such as the author, characters and readers;

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under cohesion, the internal relations within a text are examined with regard to how one part of text is linked to another (Leech and Short 2007: 64). As the discussion of syntactic iconicity in 2.4.2 shows, Challenge depends on chronological and psychological sequences for its inter-sentential links. The adherence to syntactic iconicity makes it possible to organize the sentences based on meanings rather than conjunctions, as will be shown in Example (5). In the passage, the author reveals his inner consciousness of being lost in culture and his decision to send all his children to the Chinese-medium schools: (5) (a) My wife Kwa Geok Choo and I were both educated in English-medium schools. (b) While studying in England, we became conscious of how deculturalised we were whenever we met student from China. (c) We were like hundreds of Raffles College graduates, not well-tutored in their own Asian cultures, yet not part of British culture either. (d) We were lost between two cultures. (e) I felt separated from the mass of ordinary Chinese who spoke dialects and Mandarin. (f) Choo and I decided we should not let our children end up the same way, Chinese by ethnicity yet alienated from their Chinese heritage. (g) So we vowed very early on to send them to Chinese-medium schools. (h) We wanted them to have the self-confidence and self-respect knowing their Chinese roots.  (Lee 2012: 34)

A notable feature in cohesion is the lack of conjunctions except for the conjunction so in (g) functioning as the inter-sentential link and two conjunctions, while in (b) and when in (j), that connect the subordinate clauses to the main clauses. The scarcity of conjunction makes room for other textual devices to achieve cohesion. Lexical cohesion dominates the passage in the form of lexical reiteration, elegant variation and collocation. For instance, sentences (a) and (b) are linked through cross-reference by the first-person pronoun we in (b) referring to my wife Kwa Geok Choo and I in (a). The same cross-reference by the pronoun we is seen in (c), (d), (g) and (h). In addition, (c) is linked to (b) through the semantic relevance between the words deculturalised and culture. Sentences (c) and (d) are connected through the lexical repetition of the noun culture(s). Sentence (e) elaborates (d), establishing the connection between culture and language. Sentence (f) is joined to the preceding sentence through elegant variation, in which the word heritage is referred to as culture. The word roots in (h) reflects the same strategy of elegant variation to replace heritage or culture, linking the sentence to its antecedents. The three words, culture, root and heritage, constitute collocation, “a sets of words tend to turn up together in texts because they relate to the same idea” (Fowler 1996: 87). Similarly, the word schools occurring in (g), (i) and (j) reinforces the link with the earlier part of the text, which contains the word schools in (a) and Raffles College in (c). The repetition and collocation, maintaining the cohesion, strategically



Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 63

accentuate the theme that emphasizes the role of bilingual education in retaining one’s cultural heritage. Their recurrence constitutes foregrounding and focuses the readers’ attention on the connectedness between culture and language. The text structured in this way is highly coherent due to systematic or logical connections and consistency, facilitating readers’ comprehension of the message. The enhancement of coherence also contributes to the harmonious social relationships between the author and character, and between author and reader. The choice of My wife Kwa Geok Choo and I in the opening statement contextualizes the passage but signals a sense of distance between the author and the character my wife. In the rest of the paragraph, the repetitions of first-person pronoun we as anaphoric references denote a close relationship between the author and the character my wife. In particular, the choice of Choo conveys a sense of intimacy towards the character my wife. The harmony between the author and other characters evokes readers’ trust on the author, conducive for a close author-reader relationship. Similar to Example (5), Example (2) relies on co-­referential links and lexical repetition for its inter-sentential connection. In particular, cross-references such as the third-person pronoun he or determiner his referring to my father play a key role in linking the sentences in paragraph (1). In paragraph (2), the lexical repetition of law in (h) and (i) and English in (i) and (k) warrants the cohesion. The cohesion in paragraph (3) is achieved through collocation, formed by the group of words associated with English learning and rewards such as examination, awards, scholarship, sum and dollar in (o) to (p). The collocation ensures that the text stays on the same topic despite the length of the paragraph. The scarcity of conjunction in Example (2) conforms to its inherent syntactic iconicity, as identified in Section 2.4.2. As a result, the passage relies on the logical links for connectedness, as shown in Table 2.1 (the inter-sentential relations are made explicit by the inserted conjunctions in the brackets): Table 2.1  Inter-sentential logical links in Example (2) (i) To study law, I had to master the English language. (because) (j) Judges were all Englishmen then. (therefore) (k) My English had to be as good as theirs. (l) My class master was an Englishman named A. T. Grieve, a young Oxford University graduate. (and) (m) He was friendly and approachable. (therefore) (n) My English improved enormously under him.

The strong logical links in Example (2) give rise to coherence, signifying a logical thinking pattern. The coherence makes it easier for an ordinary reader to follow the thread. In addition, the first-person pronoun I gives an impression that the author

64 Translation of Autobiography

is addressing his readers directly. With such an impression, readers tend to assume that they are reading the author’s first-hand account of his past consciousness. The assumption, supported by sophisticated coherence, evokes the readers’ trust in what the author said. In summary, the foregoing analysis of selected passages from Challenge has identified a number of deviant features in the lexical and grammatical categories, figure of speech and context and cohesion. The findings have attested to my hypothesis that the autobiographical language entails a certain degree of literariness realized through foregrounding. The deviant linguistic features in the form of underlexicalization, syntactic brevity, rhetorical subtlety and enhanced coherence produce an emphatic effect, impelling the readers to inquire into the deeper meanings beyond the surface structure. The search for the social meaning in a linguistic critical approach illuminates an authorial attitude, which is oriented towards elitism, linguistic instrumentalism and purism, and pragmatism. A close author-reader relationship is construed through the strategic combination of literariness and ordinariness in the language. 2.5 Conclusion In this chapter, I have revisited the issue of literariness to characterize the language of autobiography in the traditional dichotomy of literary and ordinary language. I then set up an integrated stylistic framework to identify the formal and functional distinctiveness in the language of autobiography. The framework establishes its theoretical foundation on the Prague School’s foregrounding theory. Its analytical methodology builds in Leech and Short’s (2007) Checklist and Hallidayan functional grammar. I further draw on Fowler’s linguistic criticism to strengthen the model’s interpretative capability in relation to a specific socio-cultural context. The preliminary foregrounding analysis of Lee’s autobiography Challenge has identified a certain degree and importance of deviant use of language that contributes to its literariness in autobiography. Deviating from the largely ordinary and formulaic language, the special use of language is manifested with instances of underlexicalization, syntactic contrast, rhetorical subtlety and enhanced coherence. The foregrounding enables a jaunty unfolding of the past events and creates a vivid sense of reliving the past, through which the autobiographer achieves “partial coherence with the self ” (Smorti 2011, see 1.3.2). The delight-inducing quality of foregrounding intensifies reading pleasure, contributing to the autobiographer’s “partial coherence with the readers.” The search for the functional significance of the foregrounding unveils the author’s affiliation with pragmatism, elitism, linguistic instrumentalism and purism.



Chapter 2.  Language of autobiography 65

As illustrated by the preliminary analysis based on the proposed stylistic framework, a foregrounding analysis effectively focuses our attention on the formal and functional distinctiveness of autobiographical language that defamiliarizes readers and endows the autobiography with its exceptionality. Such distinctiveness of language gives rise to point of view, the key concept that occupies Chapters 3 and 4. There is, nevertheless, an unresolved limitation in the stylistic framework that assumes the conflation of the author, narrator and protagonist in autobiography. For the discussion on point of view, it is important to explicate the relationship among the three participants based on relevant narratological theories.

Chapter 3

Point of view in autobiography Character, narrator and implied author

3.1 Introduction In the earlier chapter, I have established a stylistic analytical framework, based on which the foregrounding analysis of Challenge has identified deviant linguistic features and their functional significance. I will now dwell on point of view in autobiography. Point of view, as Lanser (1981: 13) summarizes, is essentially a relationship and a synthesis of the various voices and perspectives. Examining the concept from this angle, we are confronting a complex network of ever-changing, multi-levelled relationship between the author, narrator(s), characters and readers with a formidable scope (Lanser 1981: 13–14). In this chapter, I will explore the interaction between the author, narrator and character in a narrative-communicative situation specific to autobiography. I undertake to interrogate the prevalent assumption that the conflation of the author, narrator and character in autobiography results in a single point of view shared by all three participants, before proposing two hypothetical narrative-communicative situations in autobiography, each of which produces point of view as intricate as that in a novel. A review of the major point of view theories in the second half of the chapter focuses my attention on the psychological, visual, ideological and linguistic aspects of point of view. It enables me to zero in on key linguistic indicators of point of view attributable to the narrator or character. 3.2 Narrative-communicative situation To explore the relationship between the author, narrator and character, I will first define the narrative structure in terms of levels of analysis as well as the narrative-communicative situation, where the three participants interact. I will then make general observation pertaining to novels, given that most of the existing literature concentrated on fictions. By way of illustration, the situation in autobiography will be discussed, using Challenge as an example.

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3.2.1 Levels of analysis The interpretation of narrative structure varies from one to three levels of analysis. The one-level structure harks back to the Russian formalists’ distinction between fabula and syuzhet. According to Todorov (2000: 123), narrative structure can be represented in two aspects: fable (story) tells “what has happened in life” and “corresponds to the reality evoked”; subject (plot) explains “how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it” and corresponds to “the literary devices the author employs.” In Chatman’s (1978: 146) words, narrative is “a structure with a content plane (called ‘story’) and an expression plane (called ‘discourse’).” The one-level and two-part narrative structure is shown in Table 3.1: Table 3.1  One-level and two-part narrative structure (Todorov 2000 and Chatman 1978) Narrative = fable (story, fabula) + subject (plot, discourse, syuzhet)

French structuralist Genette (1980: 27–31 & 1988: 13) posits a two-level narrative structure. The level of connection between story (the narrative content, histoire) and narrative (the discourse or narrative text, récit) deals with the question of who is the character whose point of view orientates the narrative perspective or who sees; the level of connection between narrative and narrating (the act that produces the discourse) deals with the issue of who is the narrator or who speaks (Genette 1980: 186). Table 3.2 shows Genette’s concept of two-level narrative structure. Table 3.2  Two-level and three-part narrative structure (Genette 1980) Narrative

= story (histoire) + narrative (récit, discourse, text) character’s point of view = narrative (discourse, text, récit) + narrating narrator’s voice

Acknowledging the parallel between his story/narrative (histoire/récit) distinction and the Russian formalist’s story/plot (fable/sujet), Genette (1988: 13) claims that his triad story/narrative/narrating is “more meaningful and more transparent than the Russian pair,” as it gives a better account of the narrative fact by distinguishing between the character and the narrator. Indeed, Genette’s (1980) distinction between the character and the narrator has gained much ground in the study of narrative texts. A three-level narrative structure, taking into consideration of readers’ role at the surface text level, has been backed by Austrian literary scholar Monika Fludernik and Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal. As Fludernik (2009: 7) states: From the text the reader constructs the underlying world and story or action structure (also called the plot), which is a manifestation of the fable or network of motifs of the story.

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Bal (1985: 6) draws a three-layer distinction between text, story and fabula to “account for particular effects which the text has upon its reader.” She stresses that the three-layer distinction is a theoretical supposition necessary for text analysis, though the three layers are in effect inseparable and only the text layer is directly accessible to readers (Bal 1985: 6). If the different interpretations of the narrative structures by Todorov (2000), Chatman (1978), Genette (1980, 1988), Bal (1985) and Fludernik (2009) are placed together as shown in Table 3.3, a three-level narrative structure becomes inevitable. Table 3.3  Levels of analysis in narrative structure in novels Fludernik (2009)

Bal (1985)

Genette (1980)

Todorov (1978)/ Chatman (1978)

Discourse

Narrator’s report/ text (Reader)

Text (Reader)

Narrative

Text

Plot level / fictional world

Plot (Story)

Discourse

Narrating

Story

Fable

Fable

Story

Story (histoire)

Fabula

In general, fable/fabula/story/histoire is the basic or deep level, plot/narrating the intermediate level, and discourse (text) the surface level. Different genres of narrative, be it a detective, news or thriller, entail what Fludernik calls fable-plot-text structure, albeit with a slight difference in the order of presentation. As Genette (1988: 14–15) posits, in historiography, story (the completed events) precedes the act of narrating, which produces narrative in the form of a written text, whereas in fiction, the narrating act invents both the story and its narrative, so the former happens before the latter. In this regard, autobiography bears resemblance to historiography in its order of presentation. The proliferation of terms translated into English from Russian, German and French, however, causes confusion. For consistence and clarity, I will adopt Fludernik’s (2009) fable-plot-text structure but replace the term fable 1 with fabula to avoid the ambiguity arising from the former. Fabula represents the deepest level of narrative and plot represents the intermediate level of the narrative structure, both of which are immanent parts of a narrative text. I shall now briefly discuss the narrative structure of Challenge to illustrate the level of analysis in the narrative structure of autobiography.

1. The word fable in English has another widespread meaning of short traditional story.

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The overall presentation of Challenge follows a natural, chronological order of the major events. The eight chapters are largely arranged chronologically from 1923 to the present as tabulated in Table 3.4. Table 3.4  Chapter titles of Part 1 of Challenge (Lee 2012) Chapter number and title 1. 2. 3. 4.

Language and my early years 1923–1959 Birthpangs of bilingualism 1959–1987 Nanyang University 1956–1980 Special Assistance Plan schools: Preserving the best of Chinese education

5. 6. 7. 8.

The Speak Mandarin Campaign A dynamic balance Bilingualism and the rise of China Eight principles of Singapore’s bilingualism policy

Deep in the narrative structure is the fabula, which tells us about the author’s personal struggle with acquiring bilingual competence and his role in institutionalizing bilingualism in Singapore. The fabula is presented in a plot that favours a chronological sequence, producing the narrative text on the surface level. An interesting phenomenon arises from the chapter titles, highlighting a strategy to orientate readers. The titles of the first two chapters indicate the periods of 1923–1959 and 1959–1987, respectively, covering a span of 64 years. Chapter 3, as its title suggests, is dedicated to a much shorter period from 1956 to 1980, which is embedded in that of Chapter 2. Conversely, the titles of Chapters 4 to 8 do not contain any specific period. Chapter divisions, as Fludernik (2009: 24) stipulates, are “sometimes reader- rather than content-related” and “their purpose is not necessarily to reflect important stages in the plot but to chunk the text into bite-sized pieces for the reader.” The indication of periods in the titles of the first three chapters is of decisive importance for readers to assume historicity and objectivity inherent in the autobiography. The absence of periods in the titles of Chapters 4 to 8 in contrast to the inclusion of periods in the titles of Chapters 1 to 3 has its significance too. The Special Assistant Plan schools scheme mentioned in the title of Chapter 4 and the Speak Mandarin Campaign in that of Chapter 5 are still valid up to date, differing from the events mentioned in the titles of Chapters 1 to 3, which ended at specific moments of the past. In addition, the abstract concepts as the titles of Chapters 6 to 8, such as a dynamic balance and bilingualism and the rise of China, denote the author’s present evaluation. The dominance of the present and present perfect tense in these chapters attests to Bruner’s (1991: 70) proposition that autobiography is responsible for bringing the past to the present to fulfil its why-tell function (refer to 1.3.2). Hence, the overall narrative structure of Challenge can be represented in a three-level analysis as shown in Table 3.5.

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Table 3.5  Three-level analysis in Challenge Levels of analysis

Challenge

Narrative Text (Surface Structure) Plot (Intermediate Structure)

Part 1 of Challenge 1923–1956 (Chapter 1) → 1959–1987 (Chapter 2)    → 1956–1980 (Chapter 3)    → 1979–2012 (Chapter 4–8) 1923 → 1956 → 1959 → 1979 → 1980 → 2012

Fabula (Deep Structure)

The foregoing discussion on the levels of analysis in the narrative structure of Challenge illustrates that autobiography entails three levels similar to that of novels. My next objective is to locate the author, narrator and character at a specific level in the narrative structure and explore their interaction in the narrative-communicative situation. 3.2.2 Narrative-communicative situation The narrative-communicative situation proposed by Chatman (1978: 76) has been widely accepted as the communicative model of narration, as shown in Figure 3.1. Narrative Text Real author --→ Implied author →(Narrator) → (Narratee)→Implied reader ---→Real reader.

Figure 3.1  Narrative-communicative situation (Chatman 1978: 151)

According to Chatman (1978: 151), a narrative transmission embraces three sets of communicative relations between real author and real reader, implied author and implied reader, and narrator and narratee. The implied author and implied reader (within the box in Figure 3.1) are immanent to a narrative situation, whereas the narrator and narratee are optional (indicated by the parentheses in Figure 3.1). The real author retires from the text as soon as the book is completed and the implied author becomes the agency within the narrative text and the source of its meaning structure including its denotation, connotation and ideological nexus (Chatman 1990: 74–75). The act of reading a text therefore “entails two immediate constructs: one in the text, which invents it upon each reading (the implied author), and the one outside the text, which construes it upon each reading (the implied reader)” (Chatman 1990: 76). An implied reader, similar to implied author, is not the flesh-and-bones reader (Chatman 1978: 149). “(J)ust as the narrator may or may not ally himself with the implied author, the implied reader furnished by the real reader may or may not ally

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himself with a narratee” (Chatman 1978: 150). Leech and Short (2007: 208) further defines the implied reader as “a hypothetical personage who shares with the author not just background knowledge but also a set of presuppositions, sympathies and standards of what is pleasant and unpleasant, good and bad, right and wrong.” Based on Chatman’s (1978) model, Leech and Short (2007: 211) drew up a four-level discourse structure for a prototypical fiction or novel, where the narrator interacts with the implied author and characters. They nevertheless postulate the potential conflation of the levels of author-reader and implied author-implied reader as a general principle in most literary texts (2007: 210). To them, the four-level discourse structure is de facto a three-level structure, as shown in Table 3.6. Table 3.6  Discourse structure of a prototypical fictional prose (Leech and Short 2007: 212) Addresser 1 (Author) Addresser 2 (Implied Author) Addresser 3 (Narrator) Addresser 4 (Character A)

→ Message → Addressee 1 (Reader) → Message → Addressee 1 (Implied Reader) → Message → Addressee 2 (Narratee) → Message → Addressee 3 (Character B)

Despite their simplistic assumption that “author means implied author and reader means implied reader” (2007: 210), Leech and Short’s (2007) three-level discourse structure in third-person narrative fiction duly corresponds to the three levels of analysis established in the earlier section. The fabula is the character’s discourse, the plot the discourse of the narrator and narratee, and the narrative text that of the implied author and implied reader, as shown in Figure 3.2. Narrative Text (Implied Author)

Narrative Text (Implied Reader)

Plot (narrator)

Plot (narratee)

Fabula (Characters)

Figure 3.2  Level of analysis in the narrative-communicative situation

Short (1996: 169) posits that the three-level discourse structure with at least six participants only applies to third-person novels. Other genres such as non-fictional writing, poetry and drama entail a simpler discourse structure that has fewer participants. Leech and Short (2007: 213–214) also claim that a third-person narration



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is believed to be more intricate than a first-person narration on account of fewer collapsing discourse levels: the third-person narrator is usually not the character even though he is often assumed to be the author. If based on Leech and Short’s (2007) rationales, autobiography, often classified as a first-person non-fictional narrative, is believed to have collapsed all three levels, a view in line with Lejeune’s (1982) autobiographical contract. As Short (1996: 260) asserts, “the narrator is the author who is also a ‘character’ in the story he or she tells, thus explaining the rather straightforward viewpoint relations in standard autobiographies (‘I’ = narrator = main character).” The conflation on the “addressee” side of the diagram is likely to happen, too, in first-person narrative (Leech and Short 2007: 212). Indeed, the perceived conflation of the author, narrator and character is exploited in the blurb of Challenge to claim credibility and exclusivity for the autobiography. As can be seen in Example (6), which contains some extracts of the blurb, there is an inevitable attempt to present Lee as the real author, narrator and protagonist: (6) ① (a) (Challenge) is the story of Lee Kuan Yew’s 50-year struggle to transform a polyglot former British colony into a united nation where everyone, while knowing English, knows also at least one other language, his mother tongue. (b) The founding prime minister of Singapore tells of why he did away with vernacular schools in spite of violent political resistance, why he closed Nanyang University, why he later started Special Assistance Plan schools, and why he continues to urge all ethnic Chinese Singaporeans today to learn the Chinese language… ② (c) My Lifelong Challenge is also the story of Mr Lee’s own personal struggle to learn Chinese, which began when he was six years old and his Hakka maternal grandmother enrolled him in a Chinese class with fishermen’s children. (d) In an evocative detail, the man born to English-speaking parents recounts his own feelings of rebellion and humiliation at different points in his life, when faced with the Chinese language and his own inadequacy in it. (e) This book describes in a matter-of-fact yet vivid fashion his steely determination to improve his Chinese and reclaim his Chinese heritage, right up to the present when he is well into his 80s… (f) Finally, Mr Lee distils his experiences of 50 years into eight precepts that he spells out at the end of his narrative. ③ (g) The book is essential reading for anyone wanting to know more about Singapore’s bilingualism policy and its chief architect. (h) It breaks new ground by putting into the public domain information about education matters that has never been publicised. (i) It is also an invaluable resource for all who are interested in the primeval interplay between language and politics. (front and back flap of the cover of Challenge)

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Lee’s status as the real author is made plain through the material clause (see 2.3.3) Mr. Lee distils into eight precepts in (f). The traits of the implied reader has also been spelt out in Paragraph (3), such as anyone wanting to know more about Singapore’s bilingualism policy and its chief architect in (g) and all who are interested in the primeval interplay between language and politics in (i). Lee’s role as the narrator is signified through the two verbal processes (see 2.3.3), The founding prime minister of Singapore tells of why … in (b) and he spells out at the end of his narrative in (f). Lee as the protagonist is also made explicit through the noun phrase in (a) the story of Lee Kuan Yew’s 50-year struggle and the adjective own in (c) My Lifelong Challenge is also the story of Mr Lee’s own personal struggle. The textual evidence gathered so far emphasizes that Lee is the real author, narrator and protagonist in Challenge and readers have direct access to Lee’s mind. In the next section, I am going to interrogate the assumed collapsing of author, implied author, narrator and character by demonstrating that the three-level narrative-communicative situation applies to autobiography, in which none of the four is identical to another. 3.3 Implied author, narrator and character relationship in autobiography Relevant narratological theories lend themselves well to expounding the relationship between the real author, implied author, narrator and character in autobiography. Drawing examples from Challenge, I shall advance my argument that, in autobiography, the real author is not identical to the implied author, neither is the first-person narrator (I-narrator) the same as the implied author or the protagonist (I-character). 3.3.1 Implied author ≠ real author The misconceptions surrounding the narrative situation in autobiography can be traced back to the fundamental issue of person, “the relationship of narrators to the figures they tell about” (Fludernik 2009: 30). On this issue, Booth (1961: 150) offers the following insight: Perhaps the most overworked distinction is that of person. To say that a story is told in the first or third person will tell us nothing of importance unless we become more precise and describe how the particular qualities of the narrators relate to specific effect.



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The above statement, considered by Cohn (1981: 163) the “most notorious statements,” however, plausibly dismisses the simplistic first- and third-person opposition. The notion of implied author was first introduced by Booth (1961: 151) to highlight the differences in narrative effect, which depend “on whether the narrator is dramatized in his own right and on whether his beliefs and characteristics are shared by the author.” As Booth (1961: 151) postulates, regardless of whether the narrator is dramatized or undramatized, there is always “an implicit picture of author who stands behind the scenes” like a stage manager or puppeteer. This implied author differs from the real author “who creates a superior version of himself, a ‘second self ’ as he creates his work” (1961: 151). Booth’s differentiation between the implied author and the real author received support from some literary scholars. Chatman (1990), as can be seen from his communicative model of narration shown in Figure 3.1, is one of the strong proponents. To him, the difference between the implied author and the real author is useful to debunk the prevalent myth that “the reader has direct access through the fictional text to the real author’s intention and ideology” (Chatman 1990: 76). Along the same line, Abbott (2008: 84) posits that the real author, who has a much rich and complex life with multi-faceted personality that is ever changing, may hold views different from or even repudiated in the narrative. Some scholars attempt to enhance the notion of implied author. For instance, Currie (2010: 69–71) divides implied author into two types: one he calls the implied author and the other the second author. In an implied author scenario, the personality readers attribute to the author differs from that of the real author as in the case of a more attractive persona emerging from work than the actual persona of the author. In a second author case, which usually happens in an embedded story, “the author is speaking ironically or in some other pretend mode and in doing so manages to create a consistent impression of narrating from some stable, imagined perspective.” Given that both scenarios require readers to imagine a new author or authorial persona, the distinction between the implied author and the second author may not seem necessary. Currie’s (2010) notion of second author, however, highlights the possibility of pretence that attests to the separation of the real author and the implied author. In my view, the separation between the author and the implied author well applies to autobiography, as will be illustrated by Challenge. Even though Lee has been presented consistently and explicitly as the real author of Challenge, as in the blurb (see Example (6)) and front covers (see Figure 1), readers remain dubious about whether Lee is the real author of Challenge, given that the production of the autobiography certainly involved a team of editors, journalists and archivists – the so-called ghost authors. Uncertainty about the authorship aside, I will refer to Lee

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as the real author in the subsequent discussion, as such a reference does not conflict with the objective of this study, which is to explore the point of view in autobiography rather than the authenticity of the authorship. The blurb, as shown in Example (6), exemplifies an effort to project a positive image of Lee in the profusion of noun phrases with positive connotations, such as the founding prime minister in (b), Mr Lee in (c) and its chief architect in (g). Other linguistic devices, such as the semantic contrast between a polyglot former British colony and a united nation in (a), dynamic verb transform in (a), and verb of speech acts urge in (b), all exemplify the effort to glorify Lee. The implied author constructed by the reading of the blurb is nevertheless not identical to the real author Lee: the former is endowed with a glorified persona, a common phenomenon in political autobiographies as Abbott (2008: 138) observes. The attitude and ideology of the implied author represented in Challenge may be far more restricted than those of the real author. The issue gets more complicated in the case of its assumed translation, Tiaozhan, with the involvement of translators. Autobiography, therefore, does not have a direct appearance of the real author. What it portrays is the persona of the implied author, who hypothetically represents part of the real author. In some extreme cases, the implied author may even misrepresent the author, resulting in a distorted image of the author. Readers are in direct communication with the implied author, whose intention and ideology could be different from the real author’s belief and attitude. The non-identification between the real author and the implied author is parallel to the distinction between the historical I and autobiographical I stipulated by Smith and Watson (2010, see 1.3.2). It is noteworthy that several influential narratologists, including Genette, Cohn and Fludernik, have not acknowledged the notion of implied author. Some may assume a conflation between the author and the implied author, as in the case of Genette, which has already been proven problematic in the foregoing discussion. The rest seem to implicate the existence of an implied author, as will be seen in the discussion of Cohn’s and Fludernik’s views on narrator in a little while. 3.3.2 I-narrator ≠ implied author The author-narrator distinction is considered by Fludernik (2009: 56) as “one of the most significant achievements of narratology.” It highlights the direct role of a narrator in narrative transmission (Toolan 1988: 78). As Chatman (1990: 76) puts it emphatically, “the immediate source of the text’s transmission,” does not come from the implied author but belongs uniquely to the narrator. The caution against the presumption of narrator as the direct or indirect representative of the implied author (e.g. Abbott 2008: 85), however, has been largely restricted to third-person novels.



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Cohn (1999) is one of the few narratologists who has applied the author-narrator distinction to first-person novels. Warning against “the inveterate tendency of critics to take a narrative told in the first person at its face value and to confuse the narrator’s consciousness with the author’s,” she attributes incongruities, gaps, over- and under-emphases to the narrator’s self-delusion (Cohn 1999: 33–34). As she elaborates, “the distance separating author and narrator in any given first-person novel is not a given and fixed quantity but a variable, subject to the reader’s evaluation” (1999: 34). In verifying the accuracy of the narrator’s report, readers exercise their interpretive freedom that determines the distance between authors and narrators (Cohn 1999: 34). The reader’s role in the implied author-narrator distinction is also emphasized by Fludernik (2009). As she asserts, readers usually draw the different identities of author and narrator from an extremely strange style that evokes a peculiar narrator figure and through the discrepancy between the views of the author and the view of the story world (2009: 56). The emphasis on reader’s role in the author-narrator relationship by both Cohn and Fludernik indicates that their sense of author is that of the implied author who is constructed by the reader. The gaps and discrepancies they identify in the first-person narrative call attention to the important issue of “unreliable narrator.” Unreliable narration arises from the disparity between narrator’s account of the event and what the text implies to be the fact (Chatman 1990: 149). To Short (1996: 257), a first-person narrator is always “unreliable” in the sense that he tricks the readers by withholding information or telling untruths and is thus “limited” in his “absolute knowledge” of the narrated experience as if he does not know all the facts. The immanent unreliable first-person narrator makes a strong case for separating the narrator from the implied author in first-person novels, where the narrator’s role is fictive. This, however, has not yet solved the paradox inherent in autobiography. At this juncture, I would like to draw on Stanzel’s (1984) typology of narrative situations to elucidate the relationship between the narrator and the implied author in autobiography. Seeing narrator as the mediator, Stanzel (1984: 4–5) distinguishes three narrative situations, namely first-person narrative, authorial narrative and figural narrative, each with a different element (person, perspective and mode), respectively. The first-person narrator is a character in the first-person narrative situation. An authorial narrator does not belong to the world of the characters in the authorial narrative situation. A reflector mode dominates the figural narrative situation, in which the event is reflected to the reader like a camera eye through a reflector, “a character in the novel who thinks, feels and perceives, but does not speak to the reader like a narrator” (Stanzel 1984: 5). An overt narrator, that is, a teller, is usually embodied in the first-person narrative and authorial narrative, whereas a covert narrator, namely a reflector, inheres in the figural narrative. The distinction

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between the teller and the reflector mirrors the differences between mediated and im-mediate narrative, telling and showing, reporting and scenic presentation. Doubts have been cast on Stanzel’s (1984) authorial narrative, which runs the risk of confusing the authorial narrator with the author himself. Fludernik (2009: 93), however, defends the term authorial by seeing it as a metaphorical expression that denotes the kind of authoritative narrator whom readers align with the image of the author. Fludernik (2009: 89) also posits that the narrator in the first-person narrative is not necessarily always a teller and can take up the reflector’s role as well as an omniscient narrator’s role. There is plenty of evidence in Challenge in support of the transposition of all three types of narrator stipulated by Stanzel (1984). While first-person narrator dominates Challenge, some parts of Challenge are mostly the articulation of implementing the bilingual policies with quantitative figures, statistics, date, acronyms and proper names (see Lee 2012: 54, 57, 123, 135, 158, 179, 198), featuring an authorial narrator. Some other parts express the sentiments and attitudes of the protagonist and other characters (see Lee 2012: 32, 35, 170, 193), underscoring a reflector. Example (7), in the absence of the first-person pronoun I, illustrates the juxtaposition of an authorial narrator and a reflector but not a first-person narrator: (7) (a) The attrition rate was very high. (b) In November 1974, then-Education Minister Dr Lee Chiaw Meng said out of 1000 primary one students, on average 206 dropped out before obtaining any kind of school certificate or qualification. (c) Many left school feeling inadequate and bitter, feelings which later led to juvenile delinquency. (d) Of those remaining, about 440 would make it to secondary four 10 years later. (e) Among them only 106 would obtain an O-level pass in three or more subjects. (f) This meant that of the original 1,000 students, only 10.6 per cent could successfully make it through their primary and secondary education.  (Lee 2012: 66)

In a detailed exposition loaded with quantitative figures, the text begins with an authorial narrator’s mode. The authorial narrator speaks like a chronicler or a historian who does not belong to the story world, telling his readers the facts and figures. In sentence (b), he reports the character Dr Lee Chiaw Meng’s speech in a rather impersonal tone in a teller’s mode. He then transposes to a reflector mode in sentence (c) by describing psychological states of others (in this case, the feeling of the withdrawing students), reflecting the characters’ consciousness like a camera eye to the readers. Sentences (d), (e) and (f) nevertheless resist such a transposition, embodying an authorial narrator in a resumed impersonal tone. A subtle discrepancy in modality could trigger a dissociation between the narrator and the implied author. While the dominant past tense signifies a retrospective



Chapter 3.  Point of view in autobiography 79

vantage point, the modal verbs would and could in (c) to (e) imply a prospective view of a future status. The contrasting vantage points raise some doubt on the degree of mediacy, which underlines the inconsistency in narration. Given that the temporal deixis 10 years later referring to a time in the future was actually a point of time in the past, when the statistic figures became a fact, it is perplexing for the retrospective narrator to choose the modal verb constructions would make and would obtain, which denote possibility. The modality reveals a lack of precision and assertiveness in the narrator’s approach. It impels the reader to dissociate the narrator from the real author who is generally perceived to be precise and assertive, as discussed in Chapter 2. While the unavailability of the statistics could be the reason for such tentativeness, another possible explanation is that the modality results from adapting public speeches or statements into indirect or free indirect speech. To a certain extent, the modality reveals a minute trace of “unreliability”: the implied author tricks the readers by withholding information, which would have been available through reference and research. This example reminds us to refrain from equating the narrator to either the implied author or the real author in autobiography, just as in the case of first- and third-person fictions. As Stanzel (1984: 11) asserts, it is time to stop assimilating the personality of a narrator to the personality of the implied author. The narrator, be it in a novel or autobiography, is simply the “mouthpiece of the author” and “a tool of invention” (Chatman 1990: 84) or “a textual strategy devised by an implied author” (Schiavi 1996: 8). The separation of implied author and narrator in autobiography finds support from Heidt’s (1991: 7) distinction between a mimetic voice and a diegetic voice in autobiographical writings that include fictional and non-fictional autobiography. According to Heidt (1991: 7), the author’s voice is mimetic “when it reports directly the words spoken and his thoughts and feelings at the time” and diegetic “when it comments upon or evaluates these later.” The diegetic voice belonging to the narrator and the mimetic voice originated from the character unite with, replace or explain each other to represent something unique and significant of the author. 3.3.3 I-character ≠ I-narrator Understanding the relationship between the narrator and the character in autobiography is vital to investigating point of view. There has been a general consensus among narratologists (e.g. Chatman 1990: 144–145; Bal 1985: 112) over the distinction between narrator and character in first-person narratives including autobiography. The narratologists’ consensus is largely in line with the opinions of narrative psychologists (such as Bruner 1991; Smorti 2011; Smith and Watson 2010).

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Genette (1980) has been instrumental in the discussion through his much-quoted questions of “who speaks?” and “who sees?,” which distinguish between voice and point of view. In his words, the narrating I (I-narrator) and the narrated I (I-character) are separated “by a difference in age and experience that authorizes the former to treat the latter with a sort of condescending or ironic superiority” (Genette 1980: 252–253). As he asserts, the narrator’s discourse and character’s discourse in real or fictive autobiographies, juxtaposed and interwoven, will never merge (1980: 253). Seen from this angle, the fundamental differences between I-narrator and I-character can be traced to the different levels of narrative structure each inhabits: the narrator belongs to the plot, whereas the character inheres in the fabula. In a similar vein, Stanzel (1984) distinguishes between the narrating self and the experiencing self in fictive autobiography such as David Copperfield. Drawing on German literary scholar Wolfgang Kayser’s notion narrating self, Stanzel (1984: 82) recognizes “the tension between the older, matured and more sensible ‘I’ as narrator and the ‘I’ as hero, still completely engrossed in his existential situation.” He names the former the narrating self and the latter the experiencing self. As he elaborates: …a first-person narrator not only remembers his earlier life, but can also re-create phases of it in his imagination. His narrating is, therefore, not strictly confined to the horizon of experience of the experiencing self. (Stanzel 1984: 82)

In many first-person novels, as Stanzel (1984: 99) explains, the narrating self resists its total identification with the experiencing self because the personalized I-narrator wants to dissociate with the past mistakes made by the I-character and show that he is intellectually and affectively more mature than the character. Given the historicity inherent in autobiography, the I-narrator in autobiography has more reasons to dissociate with the I-character, especially in dealing with the mistakes made by the I-character, than in first-person novels. It is therefore not a surprise that the distinction between the narrating self and the experiencing self finds parallel with Bruner’s (1991) contrast between a Self who tells stories and a Self that is formed by the story it tells others and Smith and Watson’s (2010) “I”-now/“I”-then binary in autobiography (see 1.3.2). Fludernik (2009) deepens the understanding of the difference between narrating self and experiencing self by attributing them to two narrating instances rather than simply the narrator/character distinction. She writes: …when events and actions are reported from the perspective of a now older and wiser narrator, this narrating self often indulges in retrospection, evaluation and the drawing of moral conclusions. Conversely, the text may eschew retrospection and concentrate on the action as it takes place, at any one particular moment in time. In such cases, the focus is on the narrator as protagonist, the experiencing self. There is a kind of dynamic at work here: ideally, experience and evaluation should be in equilibrium. (Fludernik 2009: 90)



Chapter 3.  Point of view in autobiography 81

Fludernik’s interpretation of the narrating self and the experiencing self as two narrating instances is reminiscent of the differences between the teller-character mode and reflector-character mode proposed by Stanzel (1984), which are renamed as I-narrator and I-reflector modes by Morini (2011: 600). The distinction between narrating self and experiencing self is also similar to Heidt’s (1991) contrast between the diegetic voice and the mimetic voice in autobiographical writing. For clarity and consistence, I will adopt Fludernik’s stipulation of the narrating self and the experiencing self as the two narrating modes, the teller mode and reflector mode, respectively. By way of illustration, I will zero in on the narrating mode in Example (8), to ascertain the hypothetical difference between the I-narrator and the I-character in autobiography: (8) (a) My Hakka maternal grandmother paid a lot of attention to my education. (b) In 1929, before I was six, she insisted I join the fishermen’s children attending a Chinese school near my house, in a little wood and attap hut, the home of a middle-aged Chinese-language teacher. (c) I rebelled against him. (d) He spoke more Hokkien than Mandarin, and made us recite words after him without explaining their meaning. (e) He also made us write Chinese characters with a calligraphy brush, which I found difficult. (f) I pleaded with my mother to leave the school. (g) My grandmother allowed a change of school but was adamant that I continue with my Chinese education. (h) I was sent to Choon Guan School in Joo Chiat Terrace, a Chinese-medium school a mile away from home. (i) I still found it tough going. (j) I could not understand the teachers. (k) My fellow students spoke poor English with strong dialect accents. (l) After a few months, I again pleaded with my mother to transfer me to an English-language school. (m) In January 1930, I joined Telok Kurau English school. (n) Here, students were encouraged to speak English. (o) Many Malay students from the Telok Kurau Malay School in the next compound would join the English school but at two standards below in their Malay school. (p) At Telok Kurau, I finally understood what the teachers were saying with little effort. (q) I eventually graduated top of the school.  (Lee 2012: 25)

Example (8) gives a chronological account of the I-character’s childhood experience, with an emphasis of the roles of his grandmother and mother in his earlier education. The chrono-logic coupled with causality presents readers with a clear picture, which enables them to follow the thread. The sequential temporality contributes to the clarity, objectivity and historicity of the text. While the dominant first-person singular pronoun I and sequential temporality may lead to the belief that the I-narrator is the I-character, the past tense reminds us of the temporal difference between the I-narrator and I-character. The narrator, older and wiser, positioned in the present time, is reporting in retrospect the

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experience of the character who was a school-going child. A series of the material clauses such as (c) I rebelled against him, (h) I was sent to Choon Guan School and (m) I joined Telok Kurau English school signify dynamic actions in the past. The dynamism could narrow the gap between the realms of existence of the I-character and that of the I-narrator, who recreates some parts of the past event in his recollection. The I-character slowly gains in prominence as his consciousness is reflected to the reader by the I-reflector through mental clauses (i) I still found it tough going, (j) I could not understand the teachers and (p) I finally understood what the teachers were saying with little effort. Towards the end of the passage, the I-narrator resumes his control by indulging in retrospect in (p) and (q) marked by the adverbs finally and eventually, both of which denote consequential temporality. As can be seen, the transposition between the I-narrator and the I-reflector entails the interwoven experiencing self and narrating self. The narrating self dominates in the beginning and at the end with an external view of the I-narrator. The experiencing self emerges in the middle, reflecting the internal view of the I-character to readers. To summarize, Example (8) attests to the proposition that the I-narrator and I-character, juxtaposed or interwoven, do not collapse in autobiography. Located at the present, the I-narrator perceived or participated in the past events and adds his present evaluation, which is not part of the I-character’s cognition and emotion. Idealistically, the I-narrator inhabits a larger realm of existence than the I-character. However, in some special scenarios such as second-author (Currie 2010) and unreliable narrator (Chatman 1990), the realm of existence between the I-narrator and I-character may be disconnected. 3.3.4 Hypothetical narrative structure in autobiography The foregoing discussion has exposed the fallacy of the collapsing author, implied author, narrator and character in autobiography. The non-identification of the four reaffirms the three-level analysis of the communicative situation in autobiography, which is no different from first- or third-person fictions. The characters inhabit the level of fabula; the narrator mediates at the level of plot; the implied author interacts with implied readers through the narrative text. The realm of I-narrator is larger than that of the I-character because the former adds his present evaluation, which is not part of the emotion and cognition of the latter. Similarly, the implied author inhabits a bigger realm than the I-narrator does because he can choose to withhold certain information or tell “untruth.” Under normal circumstances, implied author can only partially represent the real author, dwelling a smaller realm of existence than that of the real author.

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Based on the possible gaps and incongruities arising from an intricate author-narrator-character relationship suggested by various scholars (e.g. Bruner 1991, see 1.3.2; Currie 2010, see 3.3.1), I formulate two hypothetical narrative situations in autobiography, as visualized in Figure 3.3. Real Author

Real Author Implied Author

Implied Author

Narrator

Narrator

Character

Character

Scenario I

Scenario II

Figure 3.3  Hypothetical narrative situations in autobiography

Hypothesis I is an ideal narrative situation in autobiography: the I-character is embedded in the I-narrator, and together, they constitute the implied author, who represents the real author partially but reliably without any distortion. Hypothesis II represents a less desirable situation: the partial conflation between the I-character and the I-narrator and between the I-narrator and the implied author entails distortion at all three narrative levels – the add-up effect of such distortion could result in a significant deviation from the real author’s attitude and belief. The narrative situation may vary from autobiography to autobiography, from chapters to chapters within autobiography, or even, from paragraphs to paragraphs in a chapter, resulting in different extents of dynamism between the characters, narrator and implied author. By no means can the interaction among the three participants in any narrative-communicative situation of autobiography yield a single point of view as generally perceived. In the case of translated autobiography, the translator is likely to intervene at all three narrative levels where the I-character, I-narrator and implied author inhabit. It is highly possible that the translator’s intervention could culminate in an altered persona of the implied author and a misrepresented ideology of the real author. Such a situation remains hypothetical until further evidence is established.

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3.4 Point of view theories Given the stylistic-oriented methodology adopted in this study, my next focus is to survey the major theories of point of view in an effort to underpin linguistically relevant information on point of view in autobiography. An in-depth understanding of the theories will lay the foundation for the stylistic analysis of the point of view in Challenge and Tiaozhan in the subsequent chapters. Point of view in literary works has received lots of attentions from scholars of different fields. Their respective theoretical positions have widened the scope of the investigation and deepened the theoretical insights. Simpson (1993: 30–39) classifies the point of view theories into three strands, namely structuralist, generative and interpersonal (functional), represented by Genette (1980), Banfield (1982) and Uspensky (1972)/Fowler (1986), respectively. The classification, based on their theoretical origins, poses challenges to those without any knowledge of the linguistic theories. I would rather review the theories according to their foci on different aspects of point of view: psychological, visual, ideological and linguistic, most significantly represented by Stanzel, Genette, Chatman and Fowler, respectively. Interestingly, most of the theories revolve around the typology of point of view. 3.4.1 Psychological aspects: Internal and external perspectives Stanzel (1984: 111–112) distinguishes internal perspective from external perspective according to the position from which the narrated world is perceived or represented. Internal perspective prevails if the perceiving position is located in the main character or in the centre of events, whereas external perspective dominates when the position is located outside the main character or at the periphery of events. The distinction between the internal and external perspective can be shown by examining the spatio-temporal deixis – words (mainly pronouns and adverbs) that orient the reader in the time and space of the story world (Stanzel 1984: 91). As Stanzel (1984: 112) elaborates, “(i)nternal perspective exhibits a certain affinity with the perceptual category of space, and external perspective a certain affinity with that of time” (1984: 112). In other words, readers’ attention is drawn to the spatial relations between the characters and things and their perceptual limitation when internal perspective prevails, and to the temporal dimension of the story when external perspective dominates (1984: 113). The distinction of experiencing self (reflector or “knower”) and narrating self (teller or “sayer”) discussed in the earlier section, is rooted in the internal/external perspective opposition. Linking point of view to foregrounding, Stanzel (1984: 114) writes:

Chapter 3.  Point of view in autobiography 85



The focusing of a part of the represented reality directs the reader’s attention to the thematically most important element of the narrative or of a part of the narrative. Therefore focusing can be defined as the foregrounding of a certain thematic aspect by means of narrative perspective.

Indeed, the distinction between the internal and external perspective based on the significance of spatial and temporal relations provides a useful tool to explain how readers are oriented towards the narrator’s or character’s point of view through temporal and spatial deixis. In Example (12), when the spatial deixis ((a) near my house, (h) in Joo Chiat Terrace, a Chinese-medium school in a mile away from home, (n) here, and (o) in their Malay school) assumes the prominence, readers tend to be aligned with the internal perspective of the I-character and develop a sense of closeness to him. Conversely, when the temporal deixis ((b) in 1929, before I was six, (l) after a few months and (m) In January 1930) is highly visible, readers become aware of the difference between the “then” and “now,” which gives clue to the mediacy of the narrator. In an effort to improve Stanzel’s (1984) binary internal and external perspective, Cohn (1981: 180) introduces the first- and third-person distinction into the dichotomy. She names the first-person narratives focalized through the authorial narrator with an external perspective the dissonant types of first-person narration and those through the reflector with an internal perspective the consonant types. For instance, an ironic thought report or free indirect speech is dissonant but an empathetic one is consonant. To a certain extent, the polarity of internal perspective and external perspective is restricted in its failure to account for more specific types of perspective that do not fall into either category. This limitation, however, can be addressed by the visual approaches to point of view. 3.4.2 Visual aspects: Focalization Genette (1988: 11) strongly advocates the separation of narrator’s voice from the character’s point of view in the same way as he advocates the separation of the narrator’s discourse from the character’s discourse. He makes a distinction between mood and voice in examining the narrator and character’s relationship in narrative: mood deals with the question who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective? (i.e. who sees?), whereas voice is a very different question of who is the narrator (i.e. who speaks?) (1980: 186). Genette (1980: 162) divides mood into distance and perspective, using the analogy that our view of a picture depends on the distance separating us from the picture for precision and on our position with regard to what obstruction is blocking the picture for breadth. For this reason,

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Genette’s (1980) approach to point of view is considered visual rather than psychological. Contradictory as it may sound, he proposes the term focalization, meaning “focus of narration,” with an objective to avoid the visual connotations of the term point of view (Genette 1980: 189). Focalization is divided into three types, on account of mood and voice (Genette 1980: 189–190). They are zero focalization, where the omniscient narrator says more than the character knows (Narrator>Character), internal focalization, where “the narrator says what a given character knows” (Narrator=Character), and external focalization, “where the narrator says less than the character knows” and gives no access to the consciousness of the character (Narrator” means the narrator says more than the character knows; “ character) External focalization (narrator < character) External focalization (narrator < character)

(1996: 174). FID in Type B, unlike its counterpart in Type A as the indicator of the character’s consciousness, embodies double voice “interwoven with and framed by the author’s account of the character’s inner state” (1996: 174). Given the impersonal third-person narration in Type C and the highly restricted narrator in Type D, the scarcity of evaluative modality and verba sentiendi can still function as the psychological indicators of the narrator (1996: 177). Words of estrangement (e.g. apparently, evidently, perhaps, as if, it seemed), metaphors and comparisons continue to emphasize an act of interpretation by the narrator to reconstruct the consciousness of the character (1996: 178). Table 3.9 summarizes the distinct linguistic features that indicate the psychological point of view ascribed to either the character or the narrator in each sub-type within Fowler’s (1996) typology: Table 3.9  Distinct linguistic features in Fowler’s (1996) typology of psychological point of view Type

Narration mode

Character’s point of view

Narrator’s point of view

Internal Type A

The character’s consciousness by first-person narrator or third-person narrator The character’s consciousness by an omniscient narrator The most impersonal form of narration A highly restricted authorial narrator with no access to the character’s ideologies

FID/ internal monologues/ transitivity verba sentiendi/ transitivity/FID direct speech

deixis / verba sentiendi / modality / choices of diction deixis/ modality/ transitivity/FID modality and verba sentiendi modality/words of estrangement

Internal Type B External Type C External Type D

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Fowler’s linguistic-oriented model of point of view prepares the ground for systematically analysing point of view attributable to the narrator or character. However, its analytical model is limited by its insistence on labelling every narrative according to the typology, thus ignoring the fluidity and hybridity of point of view. The model is also very much aligned to the conventional first- and second-person division. Additionally, some linguistic features listed in Table 3.9 can be ambiguously categorized into either ideological or psychological point of view. Overall, the classification of point of view into the spatial, psychological and ideological planes is not as clear-cut as imagined, given their overlaps in one way or another. Other stylisticians have attempted to refine and redefine the point of view theories. Simpson (1993: 55), for example, examines point of view based on a modal grammar. He proposes another dichotomy of point of view, Category A and Category B narratives. Each category is subdivided into three broad patterns of modality, namely positive, negative and neutral. Toolan (1988: 68) suggests orientation in replacement of the terms point of view or focalization. He believes that the term orientation is “a usefully wider, less visual, term than ‘focalization’” and reminds us of “cognitive, emotive, and ideological perspectives, in addition to the simply spatiotemporal one.” Leech and Short (2007: 142) distinguishes fictional point of view (“the slanting of the fictional world towards ‘reality’ as apprehended by a particular participant, or a set of participants, in the fiction”) from discoursal point of view (“the telling of the story through the words or thoughts of a particular person”). Acknowledging that Fowler’s (1996) typology of point of view is more comprehensive than their binary concepts, Leech and Short (2007) propose to add social viewpoint to the four sub-types (2007: 299). While these developments offer additional insight into point of view, they do not make a significant breakthrough. In this study, I shall make no specific effort to differentiate the different planes or aspects of point of view. Rather, I will consider all different aspects an integral part of point of view, to mark “the richness encompassed by point of view” (Currie 2010: 90). To summarize, the foregoing review of point of view theories has surveyed different approaches in accordance to their foci on the psychological, visual, ideological and linguistic aspects of point of view. There has been a general consensus among the scholars on the need to separate the narrator’s point of view from the character’s. As confirmed by most of the scholars whose work has been reviewed in this section, the different aspects of point of view co-exist in a narrative, where the narrator can switch between narrating from his point of view and narrating according to the character’s point of view. The fact that each scholar proposed a typology of narration attests to the richness embedded in point of view, but the typologies tend to overlap in one way or another. While most of them attempted to assign different terms (perspective,

Chapter 3.  Point of view in autobiography 95



focalization, voice, filter, slant, etc.) to better represent point of view, none of the terms is without defects. For example, the terms perspective and voice are too broad, thus lacking precision, whereas focalization stresses too much the visual aspect. While filter and slant are metaphorical and evasive, mind style is restrictive in covering only ideological aspect of point of view. My study will thus continue to adopt the term point of view, which embraces the richness in multi-dimensions. In the subsequent analysis of Challenge and Tiaozhan, point of view is attributable to both the character and the narrator. The term voice will only be used in the context of translated autobiography in connection with the discursive presence of a translator (see Chapter 5). The review of the theoretical approaches to point of view has identified important narrative devices or linguistic features that function to ascribe the point of view to the character or the narrator as shown in Figure 3.4. They can be applied to autobiography. Underpinning the I-narrator’s point of view are the temporal deixis (Stanzel 1984), access to the mind of others (Fludernik 2009), modality, deixis, verba sentiendi and words of estrangement (Fowler 1996). Indicating the I-character’s point of view are spatial deixis (Stanzel 1984), access to the mind of self (Fludernik 2009) and direct speech (Fowler 1996). Transitivity and FID can signify both the narrator’s and character’s point of view. I-narrator’s point of view

I-character’s point of view

Temporal deixis

Spatial deixis

Mind of others FID

Mind of self FID

Modality, verba sentiendi, words of estrangement

Interior monologues, direct speeches

Transitivity, FID

Transitivity, FID

Implied Author

Figure 3.4  Narrative device and linguistic indicators of point of view

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Among the listed features in Figure 3.4, minds of others and self are realized through thought presentation. Interior monologues, direct speeches and FID are the main forms of speech presentation. Verba sentiendi and words of estrangements can be categorized as the modal expressions endowed with modality. The key linguistic indicators of point of view can thus be summarized into deixis, modality, and speech and thought presentation, in addition to transitivity. 3.5 Conclusion In the first half of this chapter, I suggest that, more often than not, the character, narrator and implied author in autobiography do not converge, by the virtue of the fact that each of them belongs to a different realm of existence at a different level of narrative structure. The I-character inhabits the deepest level (fabula). The I-narrator, occupying the intermediate level (plot) and situated at the present, presumably perceived or participated in the past events but knows more than the I-character. The interplay between the I-narrator’s and I-character’s points of view gives rise to the implied author’s persona. The implied author interacts with readers at the surface level (narrative text), projecting an image that may or may not represent the real author’s attitude and belief. Based on the discussion of the narrative-communicative structure in autobiography, I stipulate two hypothetical narrative situations to capture the intricate relationship among the character, narrator, implied author and real author in autobiography: a harmonious relationship between the I-narrator and the I-character could contribute to an implied author, who partially but reliably represents the real author; the disharmony between the I-narrator and the I-character is likely to construct an altered persona of implied author, who misrepresents the real author. In the second part of this chapter, I delineate the differences between the narrator-centred and character-centred narrating modes in autobiography through the binary of narrating self and experiencing self. My review of the major point of view theories (Genette 1980, Stanzel 1984, Chatman 1978, 1990, UspenskyFowler 1972/1996) has reaffirmed the differences in point of view between the narrator and the character. I put forward a list of narrative devices and distinctive linguistic features highlighted by various theorists as the key linguistic indicators that serve to separate the narrator’s point of view from the character’s. The insight generated from such separation could determine the extent of the narratorial mediation. Any trace of discrepancy, if detected, may call into question reliability in narration.



Chapter 3.  Point of view in autobiography 97

Built on the theoretical foundation, my tasks in the next chapter are to integrate the narrative theories on point of view into the stylistic analytical framework established in Chapter 2 and verify the hypotheses put forth in 3.3.4. By way of illustration, I will analyse point of view in relation to consciousness in Challenge, focusing on the three linguistic indicators of point of view, namely modality, deixis, and speech and thought presentation (transitivity has already been discussed in Chapter 2).

Chapter 4

Narrating and experiencing self Mimesis within diegesis

4.1 Introduction In the previous chapter, I discussed the intricate relationship between character, narrator and implied author in autobiography and their different point of views. I have identified deixis, modality and speech presentation as among the key linguistic indicators of point of view. In this chapter, I set out to examine the textual evocation of point of view attributable to the narrator and character, whose interplay construes the image of the implied author. Given that readers play an important role in constructing the implied author, as discussed in Chapter 3, I will first make an effort to understand how the reader’s consciousness is aligned to the character’s consciousness or the narrator’s. In the discussion, I will draw on Fludernik’s (1996) cognitive model of narrativization, which complements the foregrounding and defamiliarization theory discussed in Chapter 2. I will then deliberate on each of the three concepts, namely deixis, modality and speech presentation, in relation to the consciousnesses of the narrator, character or readers, using examples from Challenge. In particular, speech and thought presentation provides the most fertile ground, where the three participants interact and their consciousnesses intermingle. I will thus illustrate the major types of speech and thought presentation through examples from Challenge to pinpoint the point of view effects derived from the texts. Towards the end of the chapter, I will zero in on the specific point of view effects to determine the extent of narratorial mediation in Challenge. The findings will shed light on the persona of the implied author and whether it is in line with the image, attitude and belief of the real author of Challenge. They should also attest to the feasibility of integrating foregrounding analysis into point of view theories to determine how images of an autobiographer are constructed among the readers.

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4.2 Constituting consciousness Fludernik’s (1996: 43–50) reader-oriented cognitive model of “natural” narratology explains how readers understand and interpret a story through their cognitive reliance on the appropriate schemata. Lying at the heart of this model are three inter-linked concepts, narrativity, experientiality and narrativization. Narrativity is formed by experientiality, “the quasi-mimetic evocation of real-life experience” (1996: 12), and established by readers through narrativization (also known as naturalization), “a reading strategy that naturalizes texts by recourse to narrative schemata” (1996: 34). As Fludernik (1996: 30) elaborates, narrativity can emerge from the experiential, emotive and evaluative description of dynamic event sequence as well as human consciousness. In the process, the narrator’s mediation occurs through consciousness parameters in various forms such as observational, reflective or self-reflective (1996: 30), whereas the protagonist’s emotional and physical reaction to the activities and circumstances is the most important factor that yields experientiality (1996: 30). Experientiality facilitates the readers’ activation of “a cognitive schema of embodiedness” that relates to their existence and concerns, enabling them to be emotionally involved in the narrative-communicative situation (1996: 12–13). Based on the above, Fludernik (1996: 43) proposes “four basic viewpoints which are available as explanatory schemas of access to the story.” These story-telling schemata comprise telling, viewing, experiencing and cultural knowing (1996: 44). The last schema, elusive and intricate, is excluded from her model and will neither be considered in my study. Hence, the three forms of human consciousness in story-telling are viewing (the real-world schema of perception representing the reader’s consciousness), telling or reflecting (the real-world “scripts” of telling or recollection representing the narrator’s consciousness), and experiencing (the access to one’s own narrativizable experience representing protagonist’s consciousness) (1996: 43–44). The correlation between constituting consciousness and story-telling schema is visualized in Figure 4.1, adapted to be in line with the three-level narrative structure (see 3.2.2), where the character inhabits the deepest level of fabula, narrator the plot and implied author and reader the surface text. As Fludernik (1996: 45–46) explains, readers deploy different strategies to make sense of texts, especially when they are confronted with unreadable narration. In a “teller” mode narrative, the reader’s consciousness is likely to be aligned with the ruling consciousness of the narrator by resorting to the schema of the act of telling. In a “reflector” mode narrative, readers rely on their experiencing schemata to overrule the oddity or unfamiliarity that impedes their comprehension. They tend to be aligned to the character’s consciousness. In a neutral narrative, with a

Chapter 4.  Narrating and experiencing self 101



Constituting Consciousness

Story-telling Schema

Reader’s consciousness

Viewing

Teller’s consciousness

Telling/Reflecting

Protagonist’s consciousness

Experiencing

Figure 4.1  Three constituting consciousnesses and story-telling schemata

missing observer and thus an empty deictic centre (Banfield 1987), readers who “view” become the ruling consciousness. Interestingly, Fludernik’s (1996) emphasis on narrativization or naturalization (making the strange familiar) in the reading process is in stark contrast to Cook’s (1994) focus on defamiliarization (making the familiar strange) as a means of readers’ schema refreshment. Like Fludernik, Cook (1994) views readers as the sum of their schemata, which are brought to bear upon the interpretation of discourse (1994: 196–197). He posits that defamiliarization restores freshness to readers’ perception, which has become habitual and automated, causing them to see anew (1994: 131, 206). The two seemingly contradictory approaches, however, complement each other in understanding the reader’s consciousness, as will be shown in the subsequent analysis of Challenge. Fludernik’s (1996: 52) narrativization lends itself well to explaining how readers make sense of texts, especially where oddity persists, and align themselves to the ruling consciousness belonging to either the character or the narrator in the reading process. Cook’s (1994: 4) interpretation of defamiliarization unveils a special effect on the mind that refreshes and changes readers’ mental representations of the world. Both could thus contribute to expounding the interplay between the reader’s consciousness and the narrator’s or character’s consciousness in autobiography to produce a specific point of view effect. 4.3 Deixis, modality and speech/thought presentation Having established the theoretical understanding of how the reader’s consciousness interacts with the narrator’s or character’s, I will now explore the three key linguistic indicators of point of view in relation to the constituting consciousness. Deixis is found to be closely related to a reader’s consciousness, modality, that of the speaker’s, and speech and thought presentation, that of the narrator’s as well as the character’s.

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4.3.1 Deixis and reader’s consciousness The concept of deixis refers to the speaker-related pointing expressions in terms of space, time and social relation. It anchors meaning to a context (Stockwell 2002: 42). Functioning as “linguistic signals of subjectivity,” deixis gives readers the access to the hearts and minds of characters and narrators (Fludernik 2009: 78). Deixis can be classified into different categories. There has been a general consensus over the categories of place, time and person deixis, but taxonomies vary in other categories. McIntyre (2006: 94–99), for example, taking into account Levinson’s and Lyons’s taxonomy, distinguishes between social and empathetic deixis. Stockwell (2002: 45–46) outlines three additional categories of deixis, namely perceptional, textual and compositional, appropriate to the literary context. Drawing on the existing taxonomies, I recognize three core deictic categories, namely person deixis (e.g. I and you), temporal deixis (e.g. adverbs of time now and then), and spatial deixis (e.g. adverbs here/there, verbs come/go and bring/take, and the demonstratives this and that). My study also accepts three peripheral categories: social deixis, textual deixis and compositional deixis. Social deixis refers to the relation between people in social terms including the naming system (Short 1996: 272) and the position of the speaker in a social hierarchy (McIntyre 2006: 92). Textual deixis relates to “the textuality of the text, including explicit ‘signposting’ such as chapter titles and paragraphing, co-reference to other stretches of text, reference to the text itself or the act of production, claims to plausibility, verisimilitude or authenticity” (Stockwell 2002: 46). Compositional deixis such as In Chapter 1 and I wrote about captures the aspect of the text that is manifested with the deictic relationship between author and reader (Stockwell 2002: 46). An author or a reader, by default, stands at the deictic centre of his world, from which they interpret deictic terms (McIntyre 2006: 92). A deictic centre originated from the speaker I, place here and time of utterance now is called zero-point by Stockwell (2002: 43). As in the case of Challenge, the deictic centre encompasses the first-person narrator I, here in Singapore, now at the time of writing (2010–2012) and the prominent social status of the autobiographer, who is the founding father of Singapore. In inventing characters and narrator to tell a story, an author must take the perspective of the narrator in order to make the text linguistically and deictically correct (Segal 1995: 69). In other words, the author needs to make a deictic shift into the fictional world and the mind of the character who observed the events in that world “to imitate what the character would write” (69–70). The deictic shifts arising from the change of the deictic centre, as Stockwell (2002: 43) asserts, will result in a change in the consciousness the readers are exposed to, affecting the way they interpret the world from their point of view.

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The insights from Segal (1995) and Stockwell (2002) are rooted in Deictic Shift Theory (DST), a useful and usable model for investigating how a particular point of view is realized in texts. The theory argues for the cognitive validity of the metaphor of readers getting inside a story. It attempts to explain how readers feel so deeply involved in a narrative that they interpret the events as if they were experiencing the events themselves (McIntyre 2006: 92). The DST also expounds “how the deictic centre is created by authors in texts, how it is identified through a cognitive understanding of textual patterning and how it is shifted and used dynamically as part of the reading process” (Stockwell 2002: 47). The metaphor of PUSHes and POPs is introduced to explain how readers become cognitively involved in a narrative, as visualized in Figure 4.2, which replicates the three-level narrative-communicative situation (see Figure 3.2). A PUSH occurs when the I-now-here deictic centre of the narrator moves down the diagram to a point earlier or a place farther, pushing into the deictic centre of a character (Stockwell 2002: 47). A POP takes place when the deictic centre of the character moves up the diagram (Stockwell 2002: 47). It resembles “the action of emerging from a deictic field” such as awakening from a dream or closing a book (McIntyre 2006: 100). POPs and PUSHes are expected to be balanced as in flashbacks returning the readers eventually to the current time. Any violation of this norm is noticeable and constitutes a foregrounding (Stockwell 2002: 48). PUSH Narrative Text (Implied Author)

Narrative Text (Implied Reader)

Plot (narrator)

Plot (narratee)

Fabula (Characters) POP

Figure 4.2  Deictic shifts in the narrative-communicative situation

McIntyre (2006), however, has identified problems with POPs and PUSHes. For example, the concepts are hard to “be applied analytically” due to a lack of a “clear indication of the types of cues that might instantiate a PUSH or a POP into a different deictic field” (2006: 108). The notions also fail to explain adequately how

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readers become aware of the shift between different deictic fields (2006: 111). As I shall illustrate with Example (9), the constraints of DST can be addressed by incorporating theories of narrativization and defamiliarization: (9) (a) Lee Hsien Loong was able to converse with Hu Jintao in Mandarin because he spent 12 years in Chinese schools. (b) Will Singapore be able to find another Prime Minister equally comfortable in Mandarin? (c) At a meeting in 2004, then Chinese Vice-Premier Wu Yi wished Hsien Loong, who was then Deputy Prime Minister, success in his career, using the phrase bu bu gaosheng, 1which means “to attain eminence step by step”. (d) Hsien Loong’s spontaneous rejoinder – “gao chu bu sheng han” – came as a pleasant surprise to Wu Yi. (e) The phrase, 1which means “it’s lonely at the top”, was from a poem by Song poet Su Dongbo and demonstrated a degree of literary knowledge atypical among Singaporeans.  (Lee 2012: 212)

Despite the absence of the first-person pronoun I or we, the narrator’s presence is felt through a variety of deictic features. The temporal deixis dominates the first half of the passage (12 years, in 2004, then). By comparison, the spatial deixis (in Chinese schools in (a) and Singapore in (b)) is less prominent, clustering at the beginning. The dominance of temporal deixis gives prominence to the narrator, according to Stanzel (1984, see 3.4.1). The evaluative expressions, such as a pleasant surprisein (d) and atypical in (e), thus point to an affectionate narrator who displays a sense of pride towards the character. While the past tense in (a) introduces a retrospective view, the present tense in (b) inaugurates a prospective outlook. The sudden POP-up from the past tense in (a) to the present tense in (b) and the immediate PUSH back to the past tense in (c) instigate a temporal deictic shift and strike us as deviant. Additionally, the rhetorical question (b) deviates from the declarative sentences in the rest of the paragraph, constituting foregrounding that defamiliarizes the readers. It is reminiscent of a dramatic performance where the narrator suddenly emerges from his recollection of the past on the stage and turns to his audience by posing a question to them. The rhetorical question sets up a dialogic relation between the narrator and his readers. Based on Fludernik’s (1996: 12–13) narrativization, the dialogic relation facilitates the readers’ activation of story-telling schemata, which makes them feel deeply involved in the narrative as if they come face-to-face with the narrator. Within (c) and (e), the deictic shift from the past tense in the main clause to the present tense in the subordinate clause (i.e. c1 and e1) is equally defamiliarizing, constantly reminding readers of the narrator’s mediation. The social deixis largely denotes a distant relationship between the narrator and the characters, such as Lee Hsien Loongin (a), Chinese Vice-Premier Wu Yi, and Hsien Loong, who was then Deputy Prime Minister in (c). Although the choice of



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Hsien Loong and Wu Yiin (d) indicates the shortened social distance between the narrator and characters, the narrator’s mediation is pervasive through various textual deixis. The two relative clauses, (c1) and (e1), that explain the abridged, foreign and italicized words bu bu gaosheng in (c) and “gao chu bu sheng han” in (d) can be considered as the compositional deictic expressions that signal an authorial effort to facilitate the reader’s comprehension. The foreign words are, at the same time, the foregrounded features that defamiliarize the readers, causing them to ponder. The analysis of Example (9) demonstrates that the deictic features, mainly the temporal, social and textual deixis, give prominence to the consciousness of the narrator. The scrutiny of foregrounding and defamiliarization can explain how readers’ attention is manipulated, whereas the understanding of narrativization elucidates how the reader’s consciousness is aligned with the narrator’s consciousness, as in the case of Example (9), and to the character’s, as will be shown in other examples. 4.3.2 Modality and the speaker’s consciousness Having shown that deixis is an important linguistic device that functions to manipulate the reader’s consciousness, I now move a level deeper along the diagram in Figure 4.2 to delve into the narrator’s consciousness. As Fowler (1996: 78–79) asserts, modality in narrative generally characterizes the speaker’s point of view towards a subject matter or a state of world. In a written narrative like Challenge, where the speaker is usually the narrator, modality indicates the narrator’s consciousness unless it occurs in direct speech. Modality is a major component of the interpersonal function of language in Hallidayan functional grammar. By Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004: 147) definition, it “construes the region of uncertainty that lies between ‘yes’ and ‘no’” and is realized by Finite Operator (modal auxiliary verb) and Modal Adjuncts (modal adverbs such as certainly, probably, possibly). Modality entails two important kinds of modal logic: possibility (the judgement as to truth or desirability) and necessity (the obligation). Possibility is marked by modal auxiliary verbs such as will, would, can, could, may and might, whereas necessity is signified by must, need and should. Possibility and necessity each can be further divided into epistemic and deontic modality, parallel to Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004: 618) modalization and modulation. Epistemic modality is “concerned with its truth status in the light of what the speaker knows” (Huddleston 1984: 167–168) and deals with knowledge and belief. Deontic modality is concerned with “whether something is going to be done” (1984: 168) and, thus, entails obligation and permission. Epistemic modality, signifying the speaker’s subjectivity, is speaker-oriented, whereas deontic modality is agent-oriented, geared towards the obligation to perform certain actions.

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It is also noteworthy that modal auxiliary verbs such as will and shall can be used as tense-markers, which “fall in the boundary area between modality and time” (Huddleston 1984: 166). They relate the proposition to its context by reference to the time of speaking and, at the same time, reveal the judgement of the speaker (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 114–116). Simpson (1993: 47) defines two additional modal systems, boulomatic system in expressing a desire closely related to the deontic system, and perception modality as a subsystem of epistemic modality. These modal systems are referred to as metaphorical expansion of modality by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004: 613) and can be subsumed under desiderative and perception mental clauses, respectively (see 2.3.3). Table 4.1 tabulates the scale of modality based on Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004: 116) Table of Finite Verbal Operators and Simpson’s (1993: 47) continuum of commitment in the deontic domain and continuum of confidence in the epistemic domain. Table 4.1  Continuum of commitment and confidence in modality

Deontic (Continuum of Commitment) Epistemic (Continuum of Confidence)

Low (can, may, could, might)

Median (will, would, should, is/was to)

High (must, ought to, need, has/had to)

Permission

Obligation

Requirement

Low confidence

Confidence

Strong confidence

Apart from modal auxiliary verbs, modality can be expressed by syntactically diverse items, including catenative verbs such as need and dare, have to and be to, the adverbs perhaps and surely, and the adjectives able and possible (Huddleston 1984: 166). Other types of modal words include evaluative adjectives and adverbs, verbs of knowledge, prediction, evaluation (e.g. seem, believe, guess, foresee, approve, dislike), and generic sentences that “claim universal truth and are usually cast in a syntax reminiscent of proverbs or scientific laws” (Fowler 1996: 167). Example (10), followed by a table of words used in the passage denoting modality, illustrates how a variety of modal auxiliary verbs are exploited to reflect the narrator’s subjectivity: (10) (a) A hundred years later, we will still be part of Southeast Asia. (b) That reality we can never change. (c) Some quarters among the Chinese Singaporeans then might have wanted Singapore to be an outpost of the People’s Republic of China, which would be a source of unending strife within our society and friction with our neighbours. (d) We would have failed.

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(e) Similarly for the economic realities. (f) How would Singapore make a living? (g) With barely 700 sq km of land, agriculture was out of question. (h) Trade and industry were our only hope. (i) But to attract investors here to set up their manufacturing plants, our people had to speak a language they could understand. (j) That language had to be English….  (Lee 2012: 59)

Deontic Epistemic

Low

Medium

High

might (b)

will (a), would (c, d, f)

had to (i, j) can never (b),

As shown in the above table, the modal verbs in Example (10) are largely epistemic and indicate a varying degree of confidence. Will in (a) represents the moderate confidence in projecting the future state. Can in (b) is arguably epistemic and, together with the negative adverb never, signifies high confidence. Might and wouldmay function as tense-markers indicative of a past moment of history when an event took place, but, at the same time, they construe uncertainty over the validity of what is being projected. Similarly, the past-tense phrase had to signifies the deontic modality of requirement, which forms a contrast with the prevalent epistemic modality. It is thus foregrounded and alerts the readers to the assertive tone at the end of the passage. Without any explicit indicator of the character’s words or thoughts, the modality is attributable to the narrator, indicative of his consciousness. Dominantly epistemic, the modality constitutes a declining gradation in confidence and increasing tentativeness. As the text draws to the end, the narrator becomes assertive in the repetition of the deontic modalizer had to. The prominence of modality in Example (10) thus performs an interpersonal function in congruence with its genre of autobiography, contributing to the dual landscape of consciousness and action. While the epistemic modality makes explicit the narrator’s attitude and belief, the deontic modality characterizes the narrator’s desire to call on his readers to align with his cognisance and act according to his wish. When situated in speech and thought presentation, modality becomes a useful mimetic device indicative of a character’s attitude. In point of fact, speech and thought presentations make frequent use of modality markers expressing judgements about the probability or necessity of the denoted action. While such subjectivity is attributable to the character rather than the narrator in direct speech or thought, it is not so straightforward to determine whether the modality emanates from a character or a narrator in other types of speech and thought presentation. It is therefore necessary to identify the boundary between the narrator and character in speech and thought presentation in order to underpin the character’s consciousness and differentiate it from the narrator’s.

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4.3.3 Speech and thought presentation: The narrator’s/character’s consciousness Speech and thought presentation lies at the heart of the everlasting heated debate over the binary division of mimesis and diegesisor showing and telling. For Genette (1988: 46), the diegesis/mimesis distinction is reflected in the contrast between narrative (dialogue in indirect style) and dialogue (dialogue in direct style). Fludernik (1993: 29), considering speech and thought presentation the medium of mimesis within diegesis, emphasizes that all narratives are diegetic to a varying extent. Certain forms of speech and thought presentation reduce the diegetic quality, whereas other forms enhance the diegetic quality. While mimesis augments human experientiality, diegesis gives prominence to the mediation. The difference between diegesis and mimesis is parallel to the difference between “single-voiced” narrative and “double-voiced” narrative, reminiscent of Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of novelistic “polyphony” (Fludernik 1993: 30). Central to this argument is the concept of dual voice, first defined by Roy Pascal (1977) (see Fludernik 1993: 322) as a linguistic concept referring to “the retention of the narrator’s temporal and pronominal deixis and the integration of expressive features relating to the character’s deictic centre.” Fludernik (1993: 340) re-defines it as “a stylistic effect fostered by the difference between the narrator’s and a character’s styles or languages” and “a result or effect of the reader’s pragmatic interpretation of the textual elements within their specific literary context” (1993: 349). Speech and thought presentation is an effective device through which the author manipulates the relationship between the narrator and the character. Different forms of speech and thought presentation signify the mimetic quality at varying degrees and the narratorial mediation at different levels. Leech and Short (2007: 260) propose a cline of speech presentation, which runs parallel to a cline of “interference” in report, the former representing a movement from the more bound (indirect) to the more free (direct), and the latter concerning the level of narrator’s control of report from the total control to the non-control situation. To take into consideration thought presentation, I adapt Leech and Short’s (2007: 260) cline into a cline of speech and thought presentation visualized in Figure 4.3. At the most bound and indirect extreme are the diegetic Narrative Report of Actions (NRA) and Narrative Report of Thought (NRT), where the narrator’s mediation prevails. At the other extreme are the mimetic Free Direct Speech (FDS) and Free Direct Thought (FDT) without any evidence of the narrator’s presence, projecting an unmediated presence of characters (rather than just the words). Direct Speech (DS) and Direct Thought (DT), more bound than FDS and FDT, entail a limited mediating role of the narrator who quotes the character’s speech and verbalizes the thought verbatim. Here, the character’s point of view and the narrator’s

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NRA/NRT (singlevoiced)

NRSA /NRTA (singlevoiced)

IS/IT

FIS/FIT

DS/DT

FDS/FDT

(doublevoiced)

(doublevoiced)

(doublevoiced)

(singlevoiced)

Bound/Indirect

Narrating self

Direct/Free

Experiencing self

Figure 4.3  Cline of speech and thought presentation

intertwine, but the prominence is given to the former thanks to the intense mimetic effect. In the middle ground stand Indirect Speech (IS), Indirect Thought (IT), Free Indirect Speech (FIS) and Free Indirect Thought (FIT), where the narrator and character share or compete for prominence, giving rise to dual voices. The Narrative Report of Speech Acts (NRSA) and Narrative Report of Thought Acts (NRTA), less bound than NRA/NRT, give a minimal account of the speech/thought by summarizing stretches of conversation/streams of consciousness (Leech and Short 2007: 260). Figure 4.3 features an elliptical effect of voices – single voice at the two extremes in contrast with the growing dual voice in the centre, where the character’s subjectivity fuses with the narrator’s. Presumably, the speech and thought presentations at the freer end (FDS/FDT and DS/DT) push the character’s consciousness to the foreground, whereas those at the bound end (NRA/NRT, NRSA/NRTA) give prominence to the narrator’s consciousness. In the middle ground (FIS/FIT and IS/IT), the interaction between the narrator and the character is two-fold. The congruity in the dual voice strengthens the unity between the character and the narrator, accentuating the narrator’s empathy for the character. Conversely, the incongruity, stirring up the division between the character and the narrator, reveals an ironic tone towards the character (Cohn 1981). The second scenario also reminds us of fallible filtration proposed by Chatman (1990) arising from the conflict between the narrator’s account and the character’s perception. Under such circumstances, the character is referred to as a fallible filter. Usually, a consistent authorial tone

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reveals the reliability of the narrator who serves as the “mouthpiece” of the implied author. Any irregularity in the tone may nevertheless suggest the narrator’s untrustworthiness(unreliability), prompting readers to search for the hidden motivation of the implied author. Scholars interpret differently the value of the various types of speech and thought presentation. Leech and Short (2007: 276), for example, stipulate that DS is the norm for the speech presentation while IT is the baseline for the thought presentation, though FIT is arguably more common than IT in the twentieth-­century novels. The difference in the norms of speech and thought presentation gives rise to the different values of FIS and FIT. FIS, located to the left of the norm DS in Figure 4.3, is interpreted as a movement towards narratorial intervention. FIT, positioned at the right of the norm IT in the diagram, is seen as moving away from narrator’s control into the mind of the character. Bray (2007: 40), however, insists that Free Indirect Discourse (FID) fuses the two voices of the character and the narrator in its duality of style. Currie (2010: 144) posits that FIS and FIT encourage “empathy between the audience and the character,” whereas IS and IT are often exploited to cast irony on the characters. As will be shown in the subsequent analysis, each view is valid to a certain extent. Fludernik (2009: 82) recognizes only three forms of thought representation, namely FDT (also known as interior monologue), FIT and psycho-narration (equivalent to Leech and Short’s NRTA). She acknowledges the difficulty in differentiating FIT from FDT, especially “when we are dealing with a first-person narrative in the present tense” (Fludernik 2009: 83). Indeed, the distinction between FDT and FIT is considered by Cohn (1978: 12–13) unhelpful. Palmer (2004: 55) shares the same view by stating that the FDT/FIT distinction “obscures the two key factors they have in common: the reference to the thinking self in the first person and the reference to the narrated moment in the present tense.” Paradoxically, an entire autobiography could be considered as an FDT that concretizes abstract mind and emotion of the I-narrator who embodies the I-character. Towards the end of this chapter, I will deliberate on a unique feature in Challenge, which I call “the paradoxical FDT” indicative of the narrator’s consciousness rather than the character’s. The cline of speech and thought presentation in Figure 4.3 is somewhat idealistic, given that the speech and thought presentations are hardly standalone expressions. Authors do not just choose one mode but combine or juxtapose different modes, which could result in a more complicated polyphonic narrative situation than a single- or dual-voiced situation. Generally, NRA is not considered as a form of speech presentation (Leech and Short 2007: 260). Neither should NRT be regarded as a type of thought presentation. FDS, hardly present in Challenge, causes confusion because of the omission of the introductory or reporting clauses. Readers may feel lost over who is speaking after reading a long stretch of FDS. Hence, I

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would rather concentrate on major types of speech and thought presentation that aptly underscore the underlying consciousness of the speakers. I will first zero in onto each type of speech and thought presentation before investigating how point of view effects are derived from the juxtaposition of the various types. 4.4 Character’s consciousness: The mimesis In this section, DS, FIS, DT and FIT will be explored individually as the key indicators of the character’s consciousness, illustrated by examples selected from Challenge. 4.4.1 DS DS “purports to be a faithful verbatim report of a person’s actual words” (Toolan 1988: 120). It is “characterized by the presence of an introductory reporting clause and a reported clause enclosed in quotation marks” (Simpson 1993: 22). Although DS is not the word-for-word reproduction of an utterance, having removed certain features such as pauses, reformulations, repairs and dialect (Toolan 1988: 120), it retains the flavour of the utterance, the kind of words uttered and the overall topic (Fludernik 2009: 66). DS thus creates an illusion of mimesis. To illustrate the mimetic effect of DS that underpins the character’s consciousness, I will examine three extracts from Challenge. Example (11) conjures up a vivid picture of the protagonist’s encounter in Switzerland through his short but interesting exchanges with a front desk staff at a hotel. The series of DS resemble the type of DS typically found in prose fiction: (11) (a) Arriving at a hotel in Lucerne, the desk clerk asked me, “Chinese?” (b) I said, “No, Malayan.” (c) His response was, “What’s that?” (d) I said, “Well, I come from Singapore, it’s part of Malaya.” (e) He said, “Never mind, I’ll put you down as Chinese.” (f) I decided I must be Chinese from such experiences.  (Lee 2012: 33)

The speech filler well, colloquial expressions never mind, and contracted forms what’s, it’s, and I’ll indicate an effort to reproduce verbatim to simulate a real-life conversation. The first-person pronouns I and me in the reporting clauses of (a), (b) and (d) clearly refer to the I-narrator, the older self looking retrospectively at his younger self, who is represented by the first-person pronoun I in the reported clauses of (d) and the second-person pronoun you in the reported clause of (e). The verbatim rendering of what was said in the series of DS enhances experientiality

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and foregrounds the consciousness of I-character. Even though the spatial deixis at a hotel in Lucerne and the dynamic verb arriving locate in the reporting clause of (a), they present information about the I-character rather than the I-narrator, contributing to an illusion of mimesis. The concluding comment in (f) I decided I must be Chinese from such experiences entails two paradoxes. The first paradox surrounds its status as an arguable NRTA or FIT, depending on whether the first-person pronoun I refers to the narrator or the I-character. The second paradox concerns the modality of must, which can be epistemic or deontic with regard to the I-character’s Chinese identity. The fact that the tense of must has not been back-shifted to had to intensifies the paradox: the present tense could point towards the I-narrator with an I-now-here deictic centre or the I-character whose thought was reflected to the readers by an I-reflector. The paradoxes in (f) could be a result of underlexicalization (see 2.2.4), which is deliberately implemented to inject a mixed sense of naivety and humour. They strengthen the mimetic quality accumulated through the preceding DSs. The mimesis facilitates the activation of readers’ experiencing schema, giving readers the unmediated access to I-character’s consciousness embedded in the conversations. The irony and poignancy cause them to view the protagonist with empathy and the character the desk clerk with irony. In the same vein, by means of the DS, Example (12) presents a lively conversation between the I-character and character President Jiang, two former prominent political leaders in Singapore and China, respectively: (12) (a) During the period when China did not understand the West adequately, at dinners, President Jiang would often seek my views on America and the West. (b) Once, he (President Jiang) held my hand and asked me, “Tell me, what does the West really think of us?” (c) I said to him, “Really, they’re fearful of you once you get your act going.” (d) On another occasion, I told him, “If I were you, when they visit, I would not show them all the successful places. I would show them the unsuccessful, backward places. They will then say you’ve got a major job to do.” (e) President Jiang went on to do just that.  (Lee 2012: 211)

Understandably, DSs in (a), (b) and (c) may not be the actual words uttered by the character President Jiang who presumably spoke Chinese. They nevertheless retain the casual, simple and colloquial lexical forms such as tell me and really, signifying the strategy of underlexicalization, which injects a sense of intimacy as well as naivety. Within the DS in (c), the parallel and contrast between I would not show them and I would show them, between successful and unsuccessful, create a rhetorical effect that constitutes foregrounding and attracts readers’ attention. Throughout the text, the third-person pronoun they, referring to the West, denotes



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a sense of distance towards the I-character, in contrast to his close relationship with the characters President Jiang. The constant shifts from the narrator’s zero-point deictic centre in the reporting clause of the DS into the deictic centre of the characters in the reported speech characterize the dynamic and vividness of the past scene, strengthening the mimetic effect. Although the reporting clauses entail the re-instantiation of the narrator’s deictic centre, reminding readers of the narrator’s presence, the mimesis arising from the DSs activates the readers’ experiencing schema, orienting them to what the characters see. The I-character’s consciousness is therefore reflected to the readers through DS by the I-narrator, who plays a role of reflector or “camera eye,” withholding his judgement or emotion. Readers, assuming an unmediated access to the characters’ consciousness, trust what is presented to them in the narration. As a result, the wisdom of the protagonist is convincingly accentuated in a subtle contrast with the naivety of the character President Jiang through the DSs. Differing from the series of DSs in the foregoing examples, Example (13) exemplifies the mimetic effect of just one DS that manipulates the readers into viewing the characters, his Chinese counterparts in Suzhou, unfavourably: (13) (a) Lee Yi Shyan, whom the Economic Development Board sent to Suzhou, once related to me an encounter he had with his Chinese counterparts in Suzhou. (b) They said to him, “How old is your country? Forty years? Mine is 5,000 years old. You want to teach me?” (c) 1 The Suzhou officials believed they were superior, 2 and they were not far wrong. (d) For every person we sent out there, they had two smarter than he, to mark him like in a basketball match. (e) And they learned very fast. (f) 1 In their minds, Singapore was not superior to them; 2 Singapore had merely had a head start over them. (g) I decided that the only way to get the Suzhou Industrial Park really going was to give the majority share to the Chinese.  (Lee 2012: 215)

The presence of the retrospective I-narrator is indicated by the first-person pronoun as the object me and the temporal deixis once in (a), with the I-here-now deictic centre. The spatial deixis sent to Suzhouand the DS in (b) mark a deictic shift to a distant place and a past moment. The deictic centre, however, neither belongs to the I-character nor to the character Lee Yi Shyan but the anonymous characters, they (i.e. his Chinese counterparts). The DS in (b) contains a series of truncated locutionary interrogatives with arrogant and aggressive connotations. The juxtaposition of second-person deixis (you and your) and first-person deixis (me and mine) enhances dialogic and mimetic quality. The choice of the DS is rather strategic as it reflects the characters’ arrogance to the reader through “camera eyes,” casting negative light on the characters. The arrogance, in stark contrast to the modesty in the narrator’s

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acknowledgement that they were not far wrong in (c), is likely to trigger disapproval from the readers upon activating their experiencing schemata. The evaluative comment in the adjacent clauses such as (c2) and the simile to match him like in a basketball match in (d) are attributable to the narrator too. A subtle irony emerges from the adverb merely, originated from the narrator and targeted at the character the Suzhou officials. Overall, the sensible and modest tone in the narrator’s report forms a stark contrast to the characters’ insolence reflected through the mimetic DS (b) and diegetic IT (c1 and f1). As a result, readers are cognitively and emotionally aligned to the I-narrator, forming a disapproving view of the fallible filter. As illustrated in the three examples, DS constrains the narrator’s presence to the reporting clause and gives prominence to the character’s consciousness. The choice of DS creates an illusion of mimesis, which enhances experientiality. The experientiality activates readers’ schemata, aligning them to the point of view of the character. Meanwhile, DS constitutes foregrounding and defamiliarizes the readers, impelling them to probe into the deeper meaning behind the surface structure. As a result of the strategic use of DS as the mimetic device, readers are manipulated into empathizing with the I-character and other characters who share the same views. They tend to view with irony the fallible filters. 4.4.2 FIS FIS receives a great deal of attention from various scholars due to its position between IS and DS and the convergence of the direct and indirect speech. As Toolan (1988: 122) succinctly states, FIS is “the most fascinating styles” that “lie between orthodox direct and indirect speeches” and “mixings or mergings of narratorial indirectness with characterological directness.” In essence, FIS claims no truth as it is not the reproduction of the original speech but emphasizes faithfulness in the rendering of the original (Leech and Short’s 2007: 261). In other words, FIS presents readers with some indications of an intervening narrator and flavours of the original speech (Leech and Short 2007: 262). It is noteworthy that the absence of the reporting clause in FIS does not translate into the diminishing mediation of the narrator, whose presence is reflected in the tense, pronoun selection and referential and temporal features that resemble IS (Leech and Short 2007: 260–261). Formal characteristics of FIS akin to DS include proximal deictics (here, now, this, today), syntactic inversion in questions and prominent use of modality expressing the judgements from the character-speaker. FIS is manifested in the expressive features that are more often associated with the character’s utterance than with the narrator’s. Expressions such as “use of the vocatives, evaluative words (poor, dear), fillers (well, of course), expletives, interjections, and dialectal or idiolectal distinctiveness, and emotive language in general, that we associate with



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the character rather than the narrator” (Toolan 1988: 123–124) are regarded as a flavour, “fruitiness” or eccentricities added to the narrative (1988: 126) or as signs of “freeness” (Leech and Short 2007: 261). Let me explore segregating the character’s subjectivity from the narrator’s in the FIS by way of illustration. Example (14) is marked by a series of FIS, most of which contain modal auxiliaries in reporting the I-character’s utterance addressed to his political counterparts, the Chinese Chamber members: (14) (a) The Chamber’s treasurer, Kheng Chin Hock, a champion of the Chinese language, argued that Chinese was used by more than 80 per cent of the population and should be the first among the four languages. (b) I gave him a dressing-down. (c) Did he want Singapore to be like Sri Lanka, with unending racial strife between the Sinhalese and the Tamils because the Sinhalese imposed their language upon the whole country? (d) Did he want Malays and Indians to feel discriminated against? (e) How would Singaporeans as a whole make a living – would China give us jobs? (f) Who would we trade with, apart from Taiwan? (g) Why should multinational corporations invest in Singapore when they could go to Taiwan, where it was cheaper?  (Lee 2012: 60–61)

Beginning with an IS in (a) and NRSA in (b), the interrogatives (c) to (g) are a series of FIS in their omission of the reporting clause, the backward tense-shift resembling an IS, and the retention of question marks as a flavour of a DS. The first two are the yes-no questions without any modality marker, whereas the rest three are wh-questions with modal auxiliaries. The epistemic modality denoted by the repetition of would in the FIS indicates a moderate confidence, seasoned by the obligation denoted by should. The epistemic modality, together with the low to medium deontic modality signified by could and should, cushions the harshness of the verb phrase dressing-down in (b). Situated in the FIS, the modality signifies the subjectivity of the I-character, who is the speaker, rather than the narrator’s, but the past tense reminds the readers of the intervention of the I-narrator. This is largely in line with Toolan’s (1988: 123) assertion that the modality belongs to the character rather than the narrator in FID. Some of the linguistic features in the FIS strike us as deviant. For instance, the first-person pronouns us in (e) and we in (f) function as social deixis rather than person deixis. Referring to Singaporeans or Singapore, they foster a sense of inclusivity among the readers, the majority of whom are Singaporeans. The “closeness” naturally aligns the reader’s consciousness with the speaker’s point of view. Additionally, the sudden syntactic brevity in (b), in contrast to the interrogatives in the FISs, constitutes foregrounding, leaving an impact on the readers. The FISs create a mimetic effect that imitates the words of the protagonist, turning on a sense of involvement among the readers as if they were witnessing the reported event.

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The interrogative FISs vividly represent the I-character’s emotion in the naturally occurring utterance, intensifying the experientiality. As can be seen in Example (14), while the I-narrator’s control is clearly observable in an FIS, the use of FIS presents the readers with a strong flavour of the I-character’s speech. The foregrounded linguistic features such as interrogatives, intensive modality and syntactic contrast accentuate the acrimony and assertiveness in the I-character’s attitude. The mimetic effect arising from the FIS activates readers’ experiencing schemata, which enable them to determine who is right or wrong. As a result, the reader’s consciousness is aligned with the I-character, viewing the fallible filters with disapproval. Different from Example (14), where the FIS presents the I-character’s speech, the FIS in Example (15) reports the speech of a character other than the protagonist. Yet, a similar mimetic effect is achieved: (15) (a) Some of my Cabinet Ministers disagreed with me about dropping dialects. (b) These included Lim Kim San and Toh Chin Chye. (c) Both spoke dialects better than Mandarin. (d) Dr Toh said to me, “Look, we are southern Chinese, we naturally speak the southern dialects. Why are we trying to force a northern Chinese form of speech down on Singaporeans?” (e) He illustrated his point with a poignant example of how links between generations would be lost. (f) His daughter was then in school where she was learning both English and Mandarin. (g) She could not speak Dr Toh’s native Hokkien dialect. (h) When she visited her grandmother in Taiping in Malaysia, she could not communicate with her.  (Lee 2012: 151)

Following the DS in (d) and NRSA marked by the verbal process illustrated in (e), sentences (f) to (h) are arguably FIS in the absence of reporting clause. The FIS displays formal characteristics mostly akin to IS such as the past tense, choice of third-person pronouns he and determiner his referring to the speaker Dr Toh. The temporal deictic then and social deixis Dr Toh, denoting a remote sense, align the readers to the deictic centre of the I-narrator rather than the character Dr Toh. The repetition of could not constitutes a foregrounding, alerting the readers to the negative impact of not being able to speak dialects. The lack of evaluative language in the FIS indicates the I-narrator’s attempt to refrain from explicitly disproving or outweighing the character’s statements in the FIS. To some extent, this attests to the FIS’s unique advantage of keeping the narrator’s intervention under control while allowing the readers to witness the character’s consciousness as it goes by and leaving it to them to judge for themselves. Indeed, the use of FIS in Example (15) serve to justify Leech and Short’s (2007: 262) observation that “this ability to give the flavour of the character’s words but also to keep the narrator in an intervening position between character and reader

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makes FIS an extremely useful vehicle for casting an ironic light on what the character says.” As will be shown in Example (26) in 4.6.2, should the narrator wish to explicate his attitude, he would have resorted to other forms of speech and thought presentation such as IS/IT or NRS/NRT. 4.4.3 DT and FIT Thought presentation narrates the intimate thought of a character (Toolan 1988: 116). It is a natural choice of narrative device to foreground the consciousness of the character. As Leech and Short (2007: 270) put it, the verbal rendering of “the flow of thought through a character’s mind” is “ultimately an artifice,” giving novelists a “unique licence” to represent the inner world of their characters and their motivations for the action. DT presents conscious thinking in the form of “imaginary conversations which characters have with themselves or others” (Short 1996: 312). FIT keeps “much of the vividness of DT without the artificiality of the ‘speaking to oneself ’ convention,” thus getting the best of both worlds (Leech and Short 2007: 277). To Palmer (2004: 48), FIT is a technique of focalization “by which a narrator uses a character’s consciousness as the perceptual viewpoint or angle from which the narration takes place.” The subjectivity, which initially appears to be the narrator’s, is given to the character. As such, FIT is a unique avenue to explore focalization by linking the internal consciousness of a character to his external social and physical context (2004: 49). Autobiographers, in their own right, have more privileges than fictionists in representing the feeling and minds of the protagonist through thought presentation. In the case of Challenge, however, there is a tendency of withholding presenting the protagonist’s thought, except for a few instances of DT and FIT. Example (16) consists of a rare instance of DT and several FITs, which work together to strengthen the experientiality, creating an illusion of readers getting inside the I-character’s mind: (16) (a) At the height of the stand-off, I drove past the university hostel on Dunearn Road, just around the corner from Chinese High. (b) The contrast could not be greater. (c) I could see the students – the English-educated students – enjoying themselves. (d) They were having a party. (e) They blew whistles, relishing the drama of the clash between Chinese students and the police. (f) I thought to myself then, “The country has been hit by such a big incident, and you think it’s all a game?” (g) I vowed then to change this state of affairs. (h) If Singapore students all turned out like those in the university hostel, Singapore would fail.  (Lee 2012: 46)

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The spatial deixis in the opening sentence (a) such as past the university hostel on Dunearn Roadand just around the corner from Chinese High assigns prominence to the protagonist’s consciousness. The verb see in (c), representing a perceptive mental process, functions as a point of entry for the readers to witness the actions described in (d) and (e) through the eyes of the I-narrator. The repetition of the temporal deixis then in (f) and (g) ensures that the deictic centre remains at the plot level where the I-narrator inheres. The insertion of DT (f) draws the readers closer to the protagonist by presenting his stream of consciousness in the reported thought. The DT is full of interactive markers. The second-person pronoun you creates the imaginary conversation between the I-character and other characters, creating mimesis that enhances experientiality. The interrogative in a declarative structure you think it’s all a game? constitutes syntactic contrast that is foregrounded, underscoring the impulsiveness of the thought in an emphatic and satirical tone. While the verb vow could be seen as a verbal process that marks sentence (g) as an NRSA, it is more plausible to classify it as a mental process and sentence (g) as an NRTA in continuation with the DT in (f). Consequently, sentence (h) is an FIT rather than an FIS. In an absence of reporting clause, (h) involves a back-shift of the tense and a spatial deixis those with a distal sense, signalling the narrator’s deictic centre. Located in the FIT, the modal auxiliary would signifies the I-character’s subjectivity. The juxtaposition of the FIT with the DT reflects the authorial intelligence: the blurred boundary between the I-character and the I-narrator gives rise to the assumed convergence of the narrator’s consciousness with the character’s active mind. As a result, the whole paragraph can be seen as the stream of consciousness, which is reflected to the readers through “camera eyes”: the narrator’s evaluation in (b) becomes the protagonist’s thought. The narrator’s cognizance in (g) could slip into the interior portrayal of the character’s thought without readers noticing what has happened. The expanded mimetic effect offers the readers glimpses into the character’s inner world, allowing the readers to activate their schema of experiencing, feeling close to the I-character. The foregoing attempt to underpin the character’s consciousness through analysing DS/FIS and DT/FIT has shown how it is possible to separate the character’s consciousness from the narrator’s. While it is relatively simple to attribute the subjectivity to the character in DS and DT, it is not so straightforward to separate the character’s point of view from the narrator’s in FIS and FIT. The complication involving FID highlights an important aspect of autobiography: the first-person pronoun I, appropriate to both the fabula (the character’s discourse) and the plot (the narrator’s discourse), creates an illusion of mimesis, in which the protagonist’s consciousness is embedded in the narrator’s. The mimetic effect produces experientiality, enabling readers to get inside the story and interpret from “an insider’s”

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point of view with trust and empathy. Deviant linguistic features, such as underlexicalization and syntactic contrast, leave a psychological impact on the readers, restoring freshness in their minds. In the next section, NRSA/NRTA, IS/IT and the paradoxical FDT will be examined in an effort to pinpoint the narrator’s consciousness, which mediates between the character’s and reader’s consciousnesses. The extent of the narrator’s mediation has an impact on the persona of the implied author emerging from the narration. 4.5 Narrator’s consciousness: The diegesis I shall start with the most indirect form, that is, NRSA/NRTA to understand how they unveil the narrator’s consciousness. 4.5.1 NRSA and NRTA Through NRSA, a narrator gives a minimum account of a speech act carried out by a character. In NRSA, the narrator is only committed to summarizing the speech act(s) without any effort to reproduce what was uttered by the speaker (Leech and Short 2007: 259–260). This gives the narrator a total control of the narrative-­ communicative situation. Understandably, the verbal process is manifested in NRSA, as shown in Example (17): (17) (a) It was a painful adjustment. (b) I spoke to Nantah students twice to sympathise with their difficulties and encourage them to persevere. (c) 1When English-stream students in the joint campus complained that their progress was slowed by the infusion of Chinese-stream students, 2I reprimanded them 3and said it was their social responsibility to help their Chinese-stream counterparts. (d) I said that if their position had been reversed, if the Singapore economy had been reliant on Chinese multinationals, Chinese-stream students, with strong mutual help habits and pride in Chinese Culture, would have gone out of their way to help the English-stream students.  (Lee 2012: 106)

The passage consists of five verbal clauses (verbs underlined), among which (b) and (c2) are NRSA. In both cases, the I-narrator must have summarized two long stretches of conversation into verbal processes spoke in (b) and reprimanded in (c2), respectively. Other verbal processes are found in (c1) (c3) and (d), which are IS. Even though the conscious being I is the sayers of most of the verbal processes, the temporal deixis twice in (b) attributes the consciousness in the NRSA or IS to the narrator.

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Semantically, a subtle confrontation is construed through the dialogic relation between the two verb processes complained and reprimanded, the sayer in the former becoming the addressees in the latter. While the dialogic relation provides sensory details, which conjures up a vivid picture of the past event, the concentration of NRSA and IS within this short paragraph reminds readers of the narrator’s mediation. Meanwhile, the syntactic contrast between the brevity in the opening statement and the increasing complexity in the rest constitutes foregrounding that alerts the readers to an assertive tone in the narration. Similar to NRSA, NRTA provides a minimal report of a character’s thought action. Generally, the reported clause in the main clause of NRTA tends to be nominalized (Leech and Short 2007: 239). By means of NRTA, an author invites readers to see things from a character’s point of view but keeps the narrator’s mediation highly visible by summarizing the character’s thought acts. NRTA is usually realized through the mental process, that “construes a quantum of change in the flow of events taking place in our own consciousness” (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 197). According to Halliday and Matthiessen (2004: 208– 210), the mental process is subdivided into perception (process of seeing), cognition (process of thinking), projections or desiderative (process of wanting) and emotion (process of feeling). In Challenge, cognitive and desiderative clauses abound, as opposed to a relatively lower frequency of perceptive clauses and scarcity of emotive clauses. This suggests a focus on the abstract content of consciousness (such as ideology) and a tendency to suppress emotion and prejudice. Prototypically, sensers of mental processes are realized by noun phrases that denote human beings. In an autobiography like Challenge, first-person pronouns as the subjects and sensers of mental processes are unmarked, as shown in Example (18) (the subtype of mental process is indicated in brackets): (18) (a) When the PAP took over the government in 1959, one of the first things we did was to provide financial aid to the Chinese schools. (b) 1I myself had attended English-medium schools, 2but I shared the desire (desiderative) of Chinese school students to preserve the best of Chinese-language education. (c) 1I understood (cognitive) the difficulties that Chinese school students had in finding jobs, 2and I wanted (desiderative) to find ways to open doors for them.  (Lee 2012: 72)

This short passage entails desiderative and cognitive types of mental processes in (b2), (C1) and (C2), all of which can be labelled as NRTA. At the first glance, the first-person pronoun I as the sensers of all the mental processes points to the I-character’s subjectivity. Nevertheless, the temporal deixis, in 1959, in (a) and the past tense throughout alert readers to the narrator’s mediation. Nominalization in (b2) and (C1) and finite clause in (C2) can be considered as textual deixis that



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points to the narrator’s effort in summarizing the thought acts of the I-character. In general, the enhanced coherence, achieved through consistent lexical references (e.g. first-person pronoun I and myself) and conjunctions, facilitates the merging consciousness between the protagonist and the narrator. As a result, readers view the narrative situation with trust and the protagonist with empathy, even as they are aware of the narrator’s mediation. Sensers of mental processes in Challenge are, nonetheless, not always first-person pronouns or human subjects. Some sensors come in the form of nouns or noun phrases representing others and abstract entities. Example (19) is a case in point: (19) (a) Neither did Tan Lark Sye understand (cognitive) the domestic politics of the Southeast Asian countries. (b) All newly independent governments were wary of (cognitive) the communist threat from China, and viewed (perceptive) their communist movements as subversive forces that would extend China’s influence into the region. (c) A university founded by a pro-China businessman would be viewed (perceptive) with suspicion from the start. … (d) The Malaysian government began marginalizing its Chinese and Indians after it obtained independence from the British in 1957. (e) The Federation government wanted (desiderative) to take over the autonomous Chinese-medium schools and convert them into national, Malay-medium schools. (f)The Malaysian Chinese Association, the main party representing the Chinese in Malaysia, opposed (cognitive) this.  (Lee 2012: 80)

The cognitive, perceptive and desiderative types of mental processes manifest themselves in the NRTA (b), (c), (e) and (f). The sensers of the mental processes are all nouns representing either an individual (Tan Lark Sye) or abstract entities (e.g. The Malaysian governments and The Malaysian Chinese Association). This underlines an authorial narrator (see 3.3.2), who resorts to personified consciousness to counteract the boredom of the “public” and “objective” autobiography. As discussed in 1.3.1, adding an element of emotion (in this case, cognitive and affective components) could enhance the narrative quality of the autobiographical memory, injecting vividness into the dullness of officialdom. And yet, the mediation of the narrator is strongly felt by readers through third-person pronouns and temporal deixis denoting the past (e.g. in 1957 and the past tense). As can be seen, with a full control over narrative-communicative situations in NRSA and NRTA by means of summarization, a narrator can still take advantage of verbal and mental processes to enhance the vividness in diegesis, aligning readers to his consciousness without feeling awkward.

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4.5.2 IS and IT As compared to NRSA, IS provides a more accurate and detailed account of what a character said in the narrator’s words (Toolan 1988: 120). IS is marked by an absence of quotation marks, an optional that subordinator, hypotactically connected two clauses, third-person pronoun, back-shift of tense, a past or distant deictic orientation and verbs with non-specific directional movement (1988: 120–121). Unlike DS, which is imitative in giving a faithful verbatim report of a speech, IS reduces the reported speech to its content and is thus interpretative and non-­expressive (Banfield 1982: 62–63). IS abounds in Challenge, as exemplified by the two ISs in Example (20): (20) (a) In his reply to me on March 18, which was also released to the media, Wee Cho Yaw said he had hoped that changing Nantah’s medium of instruction to English and the implementation of the joint campus scheme could have arrested the declining number of students. (b) He recognized now that “unless the trend is quickly corrected, Nantah will face a natural death in one to two years’ time”. (c) However, he noted that Nantah occupied a special place in the minds of many older Chinese Singaporeans. (d) This “fund of goodwill towards Nantah should not be lightly discarded”, though his own personal view was that “national interest must come before emotional attachments.” … (e) I replied on March 29. (f) I said I was agreeable to both his proposals but pointed out their limitations.  (Lee 2012: 109)

In the absence of quotation marks, the IS in (a) exhibits distinctive features such as tense shift from past to past perfect (had hoped) and hypotactically joined clauses (Wee Cho Yaw said + he had hoped that). The choice of IS can be seen as an effort to paraphrase and summarize the character Wee Cho Yaw’s reply in the I-narrator’s words. The IS in (f) reports the speech of the I-character. The choice of the first-person pronoun I in the reported clause gives the illusion of the conflated I-narrator and I-character. The summative comment in a past tense I was agreeable to both his proposals, however, pushes the I-narrator’s consciousness to the foreground. The mediating consciousness of the narrator gives rise to the diegetic quality in the narration, activating reader’s “telling” schemata, viewing the character with somewhat detachment. Sometimes, a reported speech in an IS may give a verbatim account of the I-character’s speech, as in (a) in Example (20). However, verbatim does not warrant an unmediated consciousness of the character. The back-shift of tense had hoped and the third-person pronoun he never fail to highlight the mediation of the narrator, thus underscoring a diegetic quality.



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IT is similar to IS formally but takes on a different semantic value. As the most common form of thought presentation (Short and Leech 2007: 276), IT abounds in Challenge as exemplified by the two sentences (b) and (c) in Example (20). Both instances of IT report the thought of other characters from what Stanzel (1984) calls an external perspective. They could be a case of paralepsis based on Genette’s (1980) stipulation that a narrator gives more than necessary information. Under such circumstances, reporting the minds of others foregrounds the narrator’s consciousness rather than the character’s. The words within quotation marks in (b) and (d) may appear to be DTs. However, the relative pronoun that in (b) and pronoun this in (d) that precede the quotations reveal their true status as citations commonly found in public documents. Instead of signifying the thoughts of the characters, they highlight the consciousness of what Stanzel (1984) classifies as an authorial narrator. The brief analysis of the thought presentation in Example (20) has shown that the choice of ITs enables the I-narrator to present his point of view, which outweighs the character’s. Even as character’s thoughts are reported verbatim, readers become aware of the mediation of an authorial narrator through the textual deixis such as that as well as citation-like DTs. As illustrated by the two examples, despite the narratorial control and diegetic quality of IS and IT, the narrator remains largely unobtrusive without any self-contradiction or inconsistence. 4.5.3 Paradoxical FDT Given the prevalence of present evaluation in autobiography, I shall examine it in relation to FDT due to its close resemblance to an interior monologue or FDT. In a strict sense, the present evaluation is not an FDT, because it is attributable to the narrator rather than the character. It deviates from the assumption that FDT is focalized through a character found typically in third-person past-tense narration novels. As Fludernik (2009: 84) acknowledges, it is extremely difficult to pick up on the difference between narration and thought presentation in a first-person present-tense narration, because it is “impossible to recognize whether a passage represents the narrator’s comment, a character’s interior monologue or free indirect discourse.” For a lack of a better name, this special type of thought presentation is termed paradoxical FDT, unique to autobiography. According to Bruner (1991: 70), the present tense in autobiography is usually associated with the I-narrator’s present evaluation that fulfils its self-making and world-making functions (see 1.3.2). Examples (21) and (22) illustrate how paradoxical FDT represents the thought of the I-narrator, playing a role in fulfilling the social functions of autobiography:

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(21) (a) In the midst of our messy, massive exercise to revamp the education system, I realised I had been wrong in my fundamental premise that it is possible to be equally fluent in two languages. (b) No matter how bright you are and how young you start learning, it is the rare person who can master two languages at nearly the same high levels.  (Lee 2012: 68)

Sentence (a) is an IT, denoted by the mental verb realized, the main and subordinate clauses and the backshift of tense in the subordinate clause. Sentence (a) is stylistically marked in two ways. First, it contains an embedded clause (it is possible to be equally fluent in two languages) within the subordinate clause (I have been wrong in my fundamental premise that). Secondly, the present tense in the embedded clause is in contrast to the past tense and past perfect tense in the rest of the sentence. This embedded clause is also what Fowler (1996: 167) calls the generic sentence, “generalized propositions which claim universal truth, and are usually cast in a syntax reminiscent of proverbs or scientific laws.” Given its location in the embedded clause that belongs to the I-character’s discourse, the modality entailed in the generic sentence signals the I-character’s subjectivity instead of the I-narrator’s. Sentence (b) embodies another generalized proposition marked by its present tense. Highly deviant is the repetition of the second-person pronoun you, which creates a dual effect. On the one hand, the second-person pronoun you may function as a compositional deixis, placing the proposition at the plot level belonging to the narrator’s consciousness. It constructs a dialogic relation between the narrator and readers. On the other hand, you as a person deixis could refer to a person in general appropriate to the generalized proposition. In this case, (b) could be a real FDT entailing the I-character’s consciousness, which exists at the fabula level. The evaluative expressions such as rare and nearly in (b), however, tilt the scale of subjectivity to the I-narrator, accentuating his assertiveness, which is in contrast with the I-character’s lack of confidence denoted by the epistemic possible in (a). The paradoxical FDT is endowed with the duality of mimetic and diegetic effect. The mimetic effect activates readers’ experiencing schema, aligning them with the ruling consciousness. The diegetic quality derived from the intensified modality generates rhetorical power that leaves an impact on the readers’ mind. The cognitive alignment and psychological freshness cause the readers to be receptive to the proposition that no one can be equally fluent in two languages. Apart from the juxtaposition of the past-time recollection and present-time evaluation as illustrated by Example (21), standalone present-tense narrative statements are plentiful in Challenge. More often than not, the present evaluation reveals a dominant and assertive narrator who takes a firm stand on a specific issue. Given the rhetorical effect of deontic modal expressions, the present evaluation typically contains the repetition of must and appears at the end of a section or a chapter.



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Example (22), the closing statement of Chapter 6 A dynamic balance of Challenge, is a case in point: (22) (a) The challenge is how to teach Chinese effectively as a second language to an increasingly English-speaking population. (b)1 I believe the best way is to get parents to speak Mandarin to their children at home, 2 never mind if their vocabulary is limited. (c) Once the sounds and sentence structure of Chinese are familiar to a child from young, he will have an easier time learning the language in school. (d) The bottom line is that our education system must evolve and adjust as the situation changes. (e) No policy is cast in stone. (f) If the Chinese language grows in economic value and parents and students want to learn more Chinese, our system must accommodate them. (g) The choice, however, must be exercised by parents and students, and not by the government.  (Lee 2012: 200)

The present tense throughout, the first-person pronoun I and the determiner our underline a deictic centre of I-now-here associated with the narrator. The IT or psycho-narration in (b1) reports the I-narrator’s thought. Clause (b2) never mind if… is a paradoxical FDT, given its colloquial quality reminiscent of the fragmented thought of the I-narrator and its location after the IT. The stream of consciousness continues in sentences (c) to (g), which can all be considered as paradoxical FDTs. The aggravating subjectivity from the moderate confidence expressed by the epistemic will in (c) to the obligation denoted by deontic must in (d), (f) and (g) signifies an increasing determination to enact the change. The slip from the IT in (b1) into the paradoxical FDT (b2 to g) assigns the mimetic quality to the narration. The strategy facilitates the reader’s seamless transition from an outsider’s view of the narrator’s mind to an insider’s view, as if the reader is inside the narrator’s head as he thinks. A highly deviant feature arises from the proverb (e) in its syntactic contrast to the surrounding complex structures. The proverb-type generic statement nevertheless entails strong subjectivity with an emphatic and rhetorical effect that leaves a psychological impact on the readers. The sentence could be what Banfield (1982) refers to as the empty-centred sentence with a missing observer, which makes it difficult to pinpoint the subjectivity in the statement. Its location within the paradoxical FDT, however, makes it indisputable to ascribe the consciousness to the narrator. Example (22), once again, attests to the strategic exploitation of the mimetic effect of FDT and the emphatic effect of foregrounding to align the readers with the ruling consciousness of the narrator. The psychological alignment is likely to be translated into a nod to the ideology embedded in the narration. As can be seen from the two examples, the paradoxical FDT in autobiography is focalized through the narrator, whose consciousness is reflected from an internal

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perspective. The paradoxical FDT creates the illusion of mimesis within diegesis, turning the mundane narrator’s thought into a vivid stream of consciousness. In so doing, the narrator indulges in reliving the past, achieving the self-making function of autobiography. Such a strategy creates a quasi-mimetic effect that is likely to activate readers’ real-life schemata and create a sense of being inside the narrator’s mind. Coupled with the rhetorical effect and psychological impact arising from the foregrounding, the close narrator-reader relationship causes readers to see eye to eye with the narrator and act as he desires, getting close to the world-making function. 4.6 Interplay between character and narrator Having examined the character’s and narrator’s point of view separately with a focus on each type of speech and thought presentation, I will now investigate how the narrator’s consciousness interacts with the character’s to create a specific point of view effect. Empathy and irony emerge from such interplay, as our preceding discussion has shown preliminarily. Given the earlier focus on the psychological aspect of point of view with regard to how readers are aligned to the narrator’s or character’s consciousness, I shall give more attention to the ideological aspect. As compared to the examples analysed earlier, the examples selected in this section deploy a variety of narrative and stylistic devices, thus featuring much more complex narrative-communicative situations. 4.6.1 Empathy Unlike the “mimesis within diegesis” resulting from the various forms of speech and thought presentation, Example (23) entails a complex situation of “deigesis within mimesis” with a triple deictic centre arising from the example’s paradoxical FDS status: (23) ① (a) Let me provide another example of the gumption and steadfastness that came with a Chinese school education. (b) In the 1970s, long hair was the rage in university campuses in the West. (c) When my son Hsien Loong went to Cambridge University in 1971, I waited to see what would happen. (d) I never discussed it with him. (e) I waited six months to a year. (f) Eventually he sent pictures of himself. (g) Remarkably, he still retained his crew cut. (h) Five years later, my younger son Hsien Yang went. (i) After a year, he sent pictures home. (j) He still had short hair. (k) The values they

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had imbibed from their days in Chinese schools had prevented them from succumbing to the long hair fad. (l) They had a total value system which grounded them. (m) They went to Cambridge to learn Western science and technology. (n) They did not go there to have long hair, wear dirty jeans, walk about barefoot and wear T-shirts with strange slogans printed on them2. ② (o) I am not saying that learning the Chinese language means you will also absorb the Chinese value system. (p) No. (q) But the chances are that it will help. (r) The Western value system is premised on the primacy of the individual and his rights. (s) The traditional Chinese ethical system, however, assumes that a person owes certain obligation to society. (t) If its value could be taught to Singaporeans from young, our society would be stronger. (u) SAP schools came about because of this reasoning.  (Lee 2012: 117)  

2Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s National Day Rally speech of 13 August 1978

(Lee 2012: 138)

Paragraph ① exhibits distinct deictic features. The compositional deixis let me provide another example and the prevalence of temporal deixis such as in the 1970s (b), when my son Hsien Loong went to Cambridge University in 1971(c), six months to a year(e), five years later(h) and after a year(i) indicate a strong presence of the retrospective I-narrator with the zero-point deictic centre. The I-narrator’s subjectivity is also revealed through the evaluative adverbs eventually and remarkably in (f) and (g) and the series of NRA in (k) to (n). The prevalent simple sentences (e) to (m), however, accentuate its mimetic quality of conversational style reminiscent of one’s speech. This is in line with the extract’s status of public speech revealed by the footnote at the end of sentence (n). The fact that paragraph ① was extracted from a public speech highlights its status as an FDS belonging to the I-character, whose deictic centre was located at a past moment (i.e. 1978). The zero-point I-narrator is actually the I-character whose speech is quoted. In the narration (b) to (n), the social deictic expressions denote a kinship, such as my son Hsien Loong, my younger son Hsien Yang and home, and the spatial deictic expressions send, go and there create experientiality that aligns readers’ viewing position with the I-character. This I-character, however, has a deictic centre located sometime earlier than 1978. Despite the constant deictic shifts and complicated narrative situation, sophisticated coherence is achieved through collocation (hair, value) and cross-references (they, there). The semantic contrast between (m) and (n) and the parallelism within (n) accentuate the narrator’s endorsement of the Chinese value system.

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In paragraph ②, a deictic shift from the past to the present is activated in the I-narrator’s present evaluation. The I-narrator’s consciousness is highlighted through the epistemic modality with low to medium confidence in his proposition (will, could, would). However, the truncated and verbless syntagm No. in (p) is heavily foregrounded, leaving an impact on the readers. Together with the person deixis you, the foregrounded (p) fosters a dialogic relation between the I-narrator and readers. Strong logic is inherent in the cohesion, which is realized through the semantic contrast between (r) and (s) and conjunctions (however, because of, if). At the end of the paragraph, the empty-centred past-tense statement (u) accentuates the theme, that is, the benefits of SAP schools, the implementation of which is rooted in political pragmatism and linguistic instrumentalism (see Introduction). As can be seen from the analysis of Example (23), despite the intricate narrative situation, where the I-narrator’s discourse is embedded in the I-character’s, the organization of the passage exemplifies the syntactic iconicity that imitates the way impressions occur in mind (see 2.4.2). In this way, the mundane narrator’s evaluation is interspersed with the intermittent character’s musing, producing a quasi-mimetic effect. The foregrounding arising from the deviant linguistic feature leaves a profound impact on readers, accentuating the ideological belief that the Chinese value system has a positive correlation with ethics. The harmony between the I-narrator and the I-character evokes trust and empathy from the readers. Similar to Example (23), a close relationship between the narrator and the reader has been fostered in Example (24), despite its diegetic quality inherent in the narrator-centred mode. The I-narrator relates to his reader the I-character’s confrontation with his political opponent Lam Tian, who is said to openly discredit the I-character on his lack of proficiency in Chinese: (24) (a) Facing me in Tanjong Pagar in 1955 was Lam Tian, a Chinese-educated candidate from the Democratic Party. (b) He was a Hakka like me and represented the Hakka community in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. (c) Unlike me, he spoke Chinese fluently. (d) He said I could not represent the Chinese voter since I could not read or write the language and challenged me to debate. (e) Naturally, I could not accept the challenge. (f) I was deeply embarrassed although I tried not to show it.  (Lee 2012: 40)

Marked by the temporal deixis in 1955, past tense and person deixis me, the I-narrator is looking at his younger self retrospectively. The choice of IS in (d) is an additional sign of the narrator’s control over the quantity of information in character Lam’s speech to be released. Meanwhile, the run-on sentence (d) reminds us of the stream of consciousness, constituting foregrounding against the backdrop of short and simple sentences. The three repetitions of the modal expression could notconstitute another foregrounding, which leaves a psychological impact on the readers. The repetitions strengthen the cohesion between sentence (d) and

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sentences (e) and (f), all of which embrace subjectivity denoted by mental processes accept the challenge, was deeply embarrassed and not to show it. While it is hard to attribute the subjectivity to the I-character or I-narrator, the evaluative adverb naturally underpins the I-narrator’s consciousness. Despite the dominant narrator, the inherent obscurity concerning the subjectivity in the IS facilitates the merging of narrator’s and character’s consciousnesses, creating an illusion of “mimesis within diegesis.” As a result, the mediation of the narrator is downplayed and readers’ experiencing schemata are activated. Readers’ perception is therefore aligned with what the I-character sees. Meanwhile, the foregrounding slows down the reading process and alerts the readers to the contrast between Lam’s sense of superiority and I-character’s feeling of inferiority. Such a contrast tends to evoke empathy for the disadvantaged in the confrontation. With empathy, the readers become receptive to the linguistic instrumentalism implanted in the narration, that is, not knowing Chinese has political disadvantages. While irony could have been targeted on Lam, the political opponent of the I-character, the I-narrator opts to focus on relating his own emotion without resorting to ironize Lam. The narrator remains matter-of-fact and outright without appearing hostile and defensive. The absence of irony in Example (24), however, does not mean that the narrator shuns the use of irony. The analysis of two examples in the next section has unveiled ironies cast on the fallible filters. 4.6.2 Irony A subtle irony is cast on the character Lim Kim San (Lim hereafter), one of the I-character’s political allies, in Example (25). This paragraph, immediately after Example (15), juxtaposes a variety of speech and thought presentations. The character Lim and the I-character differ in their views towards the launch of the Speak Mandarin Campaign: (25) (a) Lim Kim San felt exactly the same way. (b) He was the first to ask me, “why should my grandchildren be made to learn Mandarin? They were getting on all right in English and they could get by with dialect.” (c) But he knew from his own experience that he could not keep his dialect and Mandarin at the same time. (d) He spent hundreds of hours learning Mandarin. (e) But once back among his grassroot workers, he was back to speaking dialect. (f) He would then have to work hard again on his next speech in Mandarin. (g) Eventually, the experiences of his grandchildren persuaded him. (h) One grandchild had a maid who spoke Mandarin, another had a maid who spoke only Hokkien. (i) The former had no trouble with his schoolwork while the latter floundered. (j) Since he spent hours at home with a Hokkien-speaking maid, it was little wonder that Mandarin became a burden to him.  (Lee 2012: 151)

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The consciousness of the character, Lim Kim San, is pushed to the foreground through a series of speech and thought presentations including IT in (a), DS in (b), IT in (c) and the arguable FIT in (d) to (j). Despite the mimetic effect arising from the speech and thought presentation, the I-narrator is highly visible through the prevalent textual deixis (but, the former, the latter) and evaluative adverbs (exactly, eventually). Lim’s attitudinal switch from his disapproval of the I-character’s belief in (a) to (b) to his acceptance of the I-character’s proposition in (c) to (j) undermines the cogency in Lim’s argument. The emphatic clause he was the first to ask me in (b) and the conjunction but in (c) disclose a narrator-intended sarcasm towards Lim. The sarcastic tone is reinforced by the clause it was little wonder in (j). Although the narrator does not articulate his attitude, the irony on the fallible filter reveals the narrator’s stance, grounded in his affiliation with linguistic purism: dialects had to give way to Mandarin. Interestingly, while the character Lim shares a view similar to that of character Dr Toh depicted in Example (15), the I-narrator’s attempt to ironize Lim in this example differs from his earlier effort in withholding his judgement on Toh’s perception. The contrast between Examples (15) and (25) attests to the fact that the character’s point of view, even if it is revealed through the mimetic DS, IT and FIT, is very much subject to the mediation of the narrator. Through a careful choice of stylistic devices and narrative strategies in Example (25), the narrator’s point of view outweighs that of the character Lim. As a result, a subtle irony is cast on the fallible filter Lim, who can neither articulate nor resist. In the last example of this chapter, which relates a confrontation between the I-character and the character Toh, the obtrusive I-narrator adopts a different approach by casting an explicit irony on Toh. Such an irony is in contrast with the suppression of I-narrator’s opinion about Toh in Example (15): [26] ① (…) (a) But Chin Chye was not bilingual, and his style proved to be inappropriate for the Education Ministry. (b) He knew only to give orders and set imperatives. (c) On language issues, you have to persuade, not command. (d) I asked Chai Chong Yii to be his deputy and help oversee the ministry as Senior Minister of State for Education. (e) But Chin Chye said, “Either I am in charge or I am not.” (f) Fourteen days later, I announced that I myself would take over as Education Minister.5 ② (g) I helmed the ministry for four months, with Chai Chong Yi helping me out. (h) Chua Sian Chin took over from me on 20 October 1975. (i) 1He spoke only English, 2but I knew he would listen to me. (Lee 2012: 67) 5



Speech by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in Parliament on 23 February 1977 (Lee 2012: 77)



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Similar to Example (23), paragraph (1) is an extract from Lee’s speech in Parliament, as the footnote in sentence (f) indicates. Two deviant stylistic features attract readers’ attention. Sentence (c) contains the first instance of foregrounding in its use of the present tense and the second-person pronoun you, in contrast with the past tense and the third-person pronoun he in the rest of the paragraph. The foregrounding focuses readers’ attention on the narrator’s present evaluation, which builds in logical reasoning. The mimetic DS in (e) constitutes the second foregrounding against the narrator-centred report of the past events, reflecting to readers the consciousness of the character Toh, who sounds recalcitrant and irrational. The “mimesis within diegesis” facilitates the activation of the readers’ experiencing schemata, evoking their empathy for the rational I-narrator rather than the irrational character Toh. The empathy is likely to be extended to the I-character, whose dilemma has been told by the narrator. An irony on the character Tohemerges from the I-narrator’s disapproving attitude, denoted by modal expressions proved to be, He knew only to and have to, and Toh’s defiant tone explicated in the DS in (d).What is worthy of a moment of attention is the choice of the first name Chin Chye, which deviates from the full names of other characters such as Chai Chong Yii and Chua Sian Chin. The informal mode in addressing the character Toh can be seen as a social deixis that reveals the I-narrator’s affection for Toh, despite their divergent views. To a certain extent, the intimacy mitigates the hostility arising from the confrontation and neutralizes the irony explicated in paragraph (1). As shown in the analysis of Examples (25) and (26), the strategic use of foregrounding causes readers to ponder the meaning beyond the surface structure. The skilful exploitation of speech and thought presentation brings to mind an illusion of “mimesis within diegesis.” The mimetic effect activates the schema of experiencing, prompting the readers to be emotionally invested in what they see and feel. The I-narrator, however, has never lost control of the narrative situation through his strategic use of narrative and stylistic devices. For example, while deictic shifts facilitate readers’ access to the deeper level of the I-character’s consciousness, the return to the here-I-now deictic centre often reminds the readers of the narrator’s presence. The mimetic quality of DS, FIT and psycho-narration injects vividness into the otherwise plain and unemotional texts, dramatizing the feeling, whereas the rhetorical effect inherent in the foregrounded features empowers the dominating narrator to intensify his tone. The consistence and coherence in narration underscore the reliability of the narrator, whose interaction with the characters gives rise to the persona of the implied author, the guiding intelligence. Thanks to the strategic use of speech and thought presentation, the prominent I-narrator does not restrict himself to

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an external perspective outside the events he recounts but often taps into the act of showing to create the illusion of “mimesis within diegesis,” giving readers an internal view. Readers, as a result, naturally assume the seamless conflation of I-character, I-narrator and implied author, feeling close to the implied author and empathizing with his attitude and belief. 4.7 Conclusion I have explored, in this chapter, the point of view effect in Challenge in relation to the consciousnesses belonging to the readers, narrator and protagonist. To deepen the understanding of how readers take cognitive stance in reading and interpreting narratives, I have drawn upon Fludernik’s (1996) theory of narrativization (readers naturalizing texts by recourse to schemata), which complements the theory of foregrounding and defamiliarization (making familiar things strange to restore freshness in readers’ minds). The study zeroes in on the three key linguistic indicators of point of view. Deixis and DST are found to be useful in explaining how readers get inside a story; modality is indicative of a speaker’s subjectivity; speech and thought presentation offers an insight into how a narrator’s consciousness intermingles a character’s. By analysing examples from Challenge, I have demonstrated that character’s consciousness is pushed to the foreground through DS/DT and FIS/FIT. The mimetic effect created through these devices activates readers’ experiencing schema, enabling them to be emotionally invested in their immediate field of perception. The narrator’s consciousness rules in NRSA/NRTA, IS/IT, FIS and the paradoxical FDT in the form of present evaluation. In particular, the paradoxical FDT, unique to autobiography, is found to be effective in making plain the narrator’s ideas while commanding trust from his readers. The strategic use of different modes of speech and thought presentation in Challenge gives rise to the illusion of “mimesis within diegesis,” fostering a close relationship between the I-narrator, I-character and readers. My analysis has attested to the versatility of the first-person narrator in autobiography: the I-narrator can be transposed between a teller and a reflector, between the past and the present. Through a strategic integration of mimetic devices and diegetic measures, the narrator can never fail to make plain his attitude. In Challenge, the I-narrator has engaged in a dominant narrating self mode, in which empathy and irony emerge as the two main point of view effects. Subtly and consistently, the narrator shows empathy for the I-character and other characters who share his views but casts irony on those whose view he does not agree to.

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Defamiliarization resulting from the foregrounding restores freshness in the readers’ minds, alerting them to the attitude and belief embedded in the narration. The foregrounded linguistic features identified in Chapter 2, including underlexicalization, syntactic contrast, subtlety and coherence, are all present in the examples analysed in this chapter. These deviant features accentuate the ideologies such as linguistic instrumentalism and political pragmatism. The close narrator-reader relationship contributes to readers’ inclination to accept these ideologies. The harmony between the I-narrator and the I-character underlines a positive persona of the implied author, who adheres largely to the commonly perceived norms and attitudes of the real author Lee. This confirms Hypothesis I in Chapter 3, which is reproduced in Figure 4.4. Real Author Implied Author Narrator

Character

Figure 4.4  Narrative-communicative situation in Challenge

In the next two chapters, I will apply the same framework to analyse the Chinese version, Tiaozhan, in order to determine whether there are any shifts in foregrounding and point of view in a translated narrative situation and whether the translator’s voice contributes to such shifts. In the process, new critical issues concerning attitudinal unreliability and ideological discordance start to surface.

Chapter 5

Implied translator The “other” voice in translation and rewriting

5.1 Introduction In the foregoing chapters, I have developed a stylistic and narrative framework to investigate point of view effects arising from the interplay between the narrator’s and character’s consciousness. Lee’s English autobiography Challenge serves as the data. This and the following chapters will adopt the same framework to examine Tiaozhan, the Chinese version of Lee’s autobiography, in comparison with Challenge. As discussed in the beginning of this book, Tiaozhan is an assumed translation of the English version Challenge. The production of Tiaozhan understandably involved translators who have possibly left behind traces of their discursive presence. With additional participants joining the already complex narrative-communicative situation in a translated autobiography, it is interesting to re-examine the situation in order to determine whether shifts of point of view have taken place. To understand the role of a translator in narrative-communicative situation, I will first dwell upon Schiavi’s (1996) notion of implied translator and Hermans’s (1996/2010) concept of the “other” voice. Unlike other translated works with undisputable STs, a fundamental issue I need to address is the differences between Challenge and Tiaozhan that have shaken their translational relationship. Lefevere’s (1992) theory on rewriting is highly relevant in this context. Through the foregrounding analysis of Tiaozhan, I aim to zero in onto the deviant stylistic features that can be considered as the linguistic indicators of the “other” voice belonging to the implied translator. I will first examine Type I texts, which have zero to low similarities with the texts in Challenge to pinpoint the distinct and deviant linguistic features. This will be followed by the analysis of Type III texts, which share high similarities with their counterparts in Challenge, to determine whether the deviant features are indeed caused by the involvement of a translator. To differentiate the narrator in Tiaozhan from that in Challenge, the former will be named the wo-narrator, following the pronunciation of the Chinese first-person pronoun 我 (wo, I), in contrast to the I-narrator.

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5.2 The implied translator and the “other” voice There has been a general trend in narratology and stylistics that considers translated texts identical with their STs. Bal (1985: 50) is, however, one of the few naratologists who have acknowledged the change of the original effect due to the alteration in an author’s use of language, translation being one of the examples. She nevertheless asserts that the shift in translation is only restricted to the effect of use of language and does not affect the technical aspects of the story. This view is somewhat simplistic, underestimating the translator’s intervention in the narrative-communicative situation. Schiavi (1996: 14) put forward the concept of the implied translator, stating that the involvement of the translator in the production of the TT complicates the narrative-communicative situation that was proposed by Chatman (1978) (see 3.2.1). She stipulates: A reader of translation will receive a sort of split message coming from two different addressers, both original although in two different senses: one originating from the author which is elaborated and mediated by the translator, and one (the language of the translation itself) originating directly from the translator.  (Schiavi 1996: 14)

Figure 5.1 shows how Schiavi (1996: 14) has adapted Chatman’s (1978) diagram to represent the complex narrative situation in a translated work: R.A…|…I.A. – Nr-Ne-I.R./real translator – implied translator – Nr-Ne-I.R. of translation...|R.R. R.A. = real author, I.A. = Implied author, Nr = narrator, Ne = narratee, I.R. = implied reader, R.R. = real reader

Figure 5.1  Narrative-communicative situation in a translated narrative (Schiavi 1996: 14)

In the diagram, a translator undertakes the function of the implied reader but is distinguished from a “common” implied reader in his awareness of “the kind of implied reader presupposed by a given narrative” (Schiavi 1996: 15). This awareness will be expressed and codified within the translation. The concept of the implied translator is predicated on the same ground as that for the implied author. According to Schiavi (1996: 15), the implied translator shares “‘a set of presuppositions’ regarding norms and standards in force in the target culture” with the implied reader. Millán-Varela (2004: 39) further defined the implied translator as “the result of a combination of voices and presences (translator, publisher, proofreader, mediating texts) which have intervened in the translating process at various stages.”



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The implied reader of a translation is more complicated than the implied reader in a non-translated narrative situation. He is “the recipient of a set of presuppositions regarding the fictional world activated by the implied author and moderated by the implied translator,” as well as “translational norms and standards activated by the implied translator” (Schiavi 1996: 15). On the same note, Hermans (1996/2010: 199) asserts that a translated text has to address a dual audience, the original implied reader and a “secondary” or “new” implied reader who is situated in a different culture with a different frame of reference. As such, translators often intrude into the narrative to safeguard adequate communication with the “secondary” or “new” audience and leaves behind visible traces of their discursive presence, the “other” voice (1996/2010: 198). The “other” voice, as Hermans (1996/2010: 198) elaborates, manifests itself in three cases. In the first case, “the text’s orientation towards an Implied Reader and hence its ability to function as a medium of communication is directly at issue.” This is represented by hybrid situations in which the discourse offers manifestly redundant or inadequate information in an effort to reorient the text to the new implied reader. As a result of this, the orientation to the original implied reader disappears (Hermans 1996/2010: 199). The second case is self-reflexiveness and self-referentiality involving a special use of language such as idioms, polysemy and word play (1996/2010: 199), from which untranslatability arises. In dealing with these features, translations often run into “contradictions and incongruities which challenge the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief ” (1996/2010: 199). In addition, paratexts by means of brackets or notes remind readers of the explicit intervention of the translators (1996/2010: 199). The omission of self-contradiction statement to solve the problem of “institutional and statutory untranslatability” is another case of self-referentiality (1996/2010: 200). Hermans (1996/2010: 198), bafflingly, fails to articulate the third case of “contextual overdetermination,” which seems to overlap with the first two cases. The translator’s effort to reorient the TT towards the new implied author, as I shall argue, may result from contextual over-determination. His strategy in dealing with untranslatability may lead to an over-reaction to the context. “All these cases share a common link, namely the presence of inconsistencies, that is, elements which may affect the coherence and cohesion of the target texts,” as Millán-Varela (2004: 39) points out. She classifies three types of the presence of the translator’s voice, namely, visible presence by means of footnotes, audible presence through grammatical mistakes and use of pseudo-TT forms and invisible presence marked by foreignness and strangeness (2004: 42–47). Although Millán-Varela’s (2004) typology may sound more systematic than Hermans’s (1996/2010), no major breakthrough in the understanding of the “other” voice ensues.

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Along the line of attributing paratexts to translator’s voice in a “translation pact” that invites readers to read translated books as the originals, Alvstad (2013: 280) suggests that the voice(s) of translators do not break the pact but have the potential to strengthen it. She is thus against the idea of adding implied translator into Chatman’s (1978) model of narrative-communicative situation. Instead, she posits that the implied author constructed by readers in a translated narrative will be very much the same as that in its original, given that the translator’s voice is just one of the many voices in the narrative (2014: 275). As will be shown, Alvstad’s investigation of paratexts to draw such a conclusion is far from sufficient. The linguistic investigation of the narrative-communicative situation carried out in this study will produce plenty of evidence pointing to the translator’s voice that could ultimately alter the implied author readers construct. And, the implied translator itself encompasses more than just translators. Schiavi (1996) and Hermans (1996/2010) set the tone for investigating the translator’s voice in the translated narrative (see also Anderman 2007, Munday 2008, Slater 2011, Jiang 2012). Notwithstanding a risk of overemphasizing the translators’ visibility, in which the implied translator’s presupposition is superimposed onto the implied author’s, Schiavi’s (1996) and Hermans’s (1996/2010) investigation is predicated upon the concrete linguistic evidence that underscores the presence of the translator’s voice. It is this solid linguistic foundation that sets them apart from many other translation theories that have focused too much on the macro issues such as the translators’ agentive or activists role in enacting social changes. In gathering linguistic evidence, Schiavi (1996) and Hermans (1996/2010) first focus only on the TT to identify the voice of translators and then carry out the comparative analysis of ST and TT to retrace the translator’s step. This enables them to probe the conditions under which a text is produced and to anticipate the consequence the text creates, the interests it serves and the values it conveys. Such an approach is built upon Toury’s (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) model. The DTS model encompasses discovery and justification procedures to provide description and explanation for “whatever has been regarded as translational within a target culture” (Toury 1995: 25). The model first concentrates on the texts presented or regarded as translations within the target culture system to address their significance and acceptability and then maps them onto their assumed sources in order to identify the shifts and translation relationship. This will be followed by the generalizations on the translation as a whole, the translation equivalence that constitutes “the norm for the pair of texts in question,” and other considerations that govern the decision-making in the text production (1995: 36–38). Popescu (2009: 3) saliently summarizes DTS into a model that is product-oriented in describing “already existing translations,” process-oriented in investigating “the mental processes



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which unfold during the translation process” and function-oriented in describing “the role translations may play in the culture receiving them.” The DTS model fits well into my stylistic and narrative framework. Both start with concrete evidence drawn from an end product (in this case, the translated texts as the product of translation process), followed by generalizations about mental processes and roles of the participants during the production. The DTS model will thus be incorporated into the existing stylistic and narrative framework to examine the selected extracts from Tiaozhan (the TT) and map them with their STs in Challenge, if any. While the stylistic analysis will continue to direct my attention to the foregrounded linguistic features that are unique to Tiaozhan, the DTS model will guide the generalization on the process of translation. Before proceeding with the analysis, let me define the concept of implied translator in the context of Tiaozhan. I argue that it is plausible to consider the editorial team involved in the production of Tiaozhan as the implied translator. As acknowledged in Introduction, the translation relationship between Tiaozhan and Challenge is not fully justified in accordance to Toury’s (1995: 33–35) notions of translation postulates that prescribe an assumed translation. It is, however, undeniable that the responsibilities of the editorial team of Tiaozhan entail translation, given the transfer and inter-textual relationship established in the beginning of this book. For this reason, the implied translator of Tiaozhan may encompass the voices of editors, journalists, translators and proofreaders, who work for the Press and share a set of presuppositions with regard to the target readers and culture. 5.3 Rewriting The designation of Tiaozhan as the assumed translation in Introduction has accounted for the wide-ranging similarities between Tiaozhan and Challenge. This necessitates the existence of implied translator in the context of Tiaozhan. There is, however, a pressing need to address the large scale of differences between the two language versions. In this section, I will first dwell upon their different narratorial approaches before drawing on Lefevere’s (1992) concept of rewriting to understand the causes of the noticeable differences. 5.3.1 Narratorial differences The two language versions differ significantly in content coverage and event sequencing. The first chapters of the two versions provide good examples. The narrator’s reflective comments on the benefits of his English-education background

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and the constraints of a Chinese education are found in Tiaozhan (Li 2012: 22) but not in Challenge. The grisly scene during the Japanese occupation (Lee 2012: 28) and compliments of the returning British soldiers after WWII (Lee 2012: 31) are present in Challenge but absent in Tiaozhan. The narrator’s account of his complex relationship with the communists in Challenge (Lee 2012: 37, 41, 43, 44) is consistently omitted in Tiaozhan. The sequencing of the Chinese School students’ protest in Challenge (Lee 2012: 43–46) is totally different from that in Tiaozhan (Li 2012: 32–34), even though both versions cover the same events. Despite the parallel between the chapter titles of the two language versions as discussed in Introduction, sub-headings within each chapter of Tiaozhan differ from those in Challenge, the former giving more details with summative commentary and containing more sub-headings than the latter. Table 5.1 tabulates the comparison between the heading and sub-headings of the first chapter in each version: Table 5.1  Comparison of headings and sub-headings in Chapter 1 of Challenge and Tiaozhan Challenge 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11

Chapter 1 Language and my early years (1923–1959)

Tiaozhan

第一章 历史洪流塑造我的语文观 (1923–1959) ‘Chapter 1 The flow of history shapes my language perspective’ N.A. 来自讲英语和峇峇马来语的家庭 ‘Coming from a family speaking English and Peranakan Malay’ N.A. 学好英文，立志成为优秀律师 ‘Learning English well, aspiring to be an outstanding lawyer’ N.A. 日据时期开始学华文 ‘Starting to learn Chinese during Japanese Occupation’ Studying in England 重新找回华人的身份 ‘Re-discovering Chinese identity’ Language choice for my family 把三个孩子全送去华校受教育 ‘Sending all three children to the Chinese-medium schools’ Being a lawyer 认识语言与政治相关 ‘Understanding the relation between language and politics’ The 1995 Legislative Assembly 组织人民行动党 – 以华语和方言竞选 ‘Founding the election PAP − Campaigning in Mandarin and Dialects’ Language and the People’s N.A. Action Party Chinese-educated students vs 从学潮中体会华校生和英校生的不同 ‘Observing English-educated students the differences between Chinese-educated and Englisheducated students through students’ protests’ The 1956 All-Party Report on 福利车厂暴动带来的孕育双语教育的报告书 ‘Report Chinese Education on cultivating bilingual education brought about after Hock Lee bus depot riots’



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Except for the similarity in sub-heading 10, significant differences arise from the rest of the sub-headings between the two editions. This weakens the assumption that Tiaozhan is translated from Challenge. The notable differences in the headings and sub-headings cast light on different writing strategies and narratorial focuses. In contrast to the objective, static and plain language by means of proper nouns, concrete and abstract nouns in the English headings, the Chinese headings are markedly subjective, dynamic and rhetorical in the manifestation of evaluative expressions (学好 ‘learning … well,’ 立志 成为 ‘aspire to be,’ 找回 ‘rediscover’), verbs (组织 ‘found,’ 体会 ‘observe,’ 带来 ‘bring about’) and metaphors (历史洪流 ‘the flow of history,’ 塑造 ‘shape’). A comparison of the Chinese blurb (Example (27)) and English blurb (Exam­ ple (6)) further attests to the similarities and differences between the two versions, the former contributing to the translation relationship while the latter signifying a different narratorial approach: (27) （a）《我一生的挑战  – 新加坡双语之路》讲述李光耀50年来如何投注 心力，把新加坡从一个语言复杂、各说各话的前英国殖民地，打造成 一个多数人通晓英文，同时懂得自己母语的团结国家。（b）这位新加 坡的建国总理，面对巨大的政治挑战，始终坚持以英语作为各族通用 语，既有“马来海洋华人岛”的地缘政治因素，也有与世界接轨、求存发 展的考量。（c）但他也认定,如果独尊英语，必导致民族自信和文化认 同的伦丧。（d）双语政策因此是唯一出路，也是建国的基石之一。 …（e）南洋大学关闭始末、华校为何没落、特选中学如何应运而生等 等有关母语教育的重大事件和议题，本书都一一触及。 （f）国家的双语之路，其实也是李光耀的双语之路。 （g）1生于土生 华人家庭，他六岁开始和渔民的孩子一起接触华文，2但学习道路并不 顺遂，书中多次感性和详实的描绘了在人生不同阶段，因无法掌握好华 文而感到挫折和失落。 … （h）李光耀说，新加坡的语文问题就是政治问题。（i）双语教育影响 了过去和现在（也将包括未来）的好几代国人。（j）想知道政策推手 李光耀的全盘思考、决策和推行过程中种种不曾公布或鲜为人知的情 事，不容错过这本力作。 (Li 2012) ‘(a) My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore’s Bilingual Journey tells us how Lee Kuan Yew in the past 50 years was committed to turning Singapore from a polyglot former British colony into a united country where the majority of the population are proficient in English and their own mother tongues. (b) This founding prime minister of Singapore, faced with huge political challenges, insisted on making English the common language of different races, in consideration of the “Chinese island in the Malay sea” poligeographic condition with the objective to connect to the world for survival and development. (c) But he was

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also certain that the dominance of English would lead to the loss of ethnic confidence and cultural identity. (d) Bilingualism is thus the only solution as well as the cornerstone of the nation-building. … (e) The start and closure of Nanyang University, the dissolution of the Chinese-medium school and the introduction of Special Assistance Plan schools are the major events and agenda of the bilingual education to be covered in this book. (f) The nation’s bilingual journey is also Lee Kuan Yew’s bilingual journey. (g) 1Born in a Peranakan family, he started his contact with Chinese together with fishermen’s children when he was six years old but his learning path was not smooth, which is why 2this book describes in evocative detail his feelings of defeat and loss arising from his inadequate command of Chinese at the various stages in his life. … (h) Lee Kuan Yew said, Singapore’s language issue is a political issue. (i) The bilingual education has affected several generations of Singaporeans in the past and present (and also the future). (j) If (you) wish to know the policy maker Lee Kuan Yew’s complete thought, the unpublished or hardly known situations in his decision-making and implementation process, (you) should never miss this influential work (front and back flap of the cover of Tiaozhan).’

The semantic and syntactic similarities between the two opening statements in each blurb make sure both versions share the same theme right from the beginning. The partial equivalence between (27e) and (6b), (27f–g1) and (6c), (27g2) and (6d) affirms the process of transferring certain semantic and syntactic features of Challenge to Tiaozhan and sets up the inter-textual relationships. Conversely, the lack of parallel for (27b) to (d) in Example (10), which violates the transfer postulate, indicates a different editorial focus in the production of Tiaozhan. Subtle deictic differences between the two blurbs signify different social relationships between the implied author, narrator and protagonist. Through the variation of Lee Kuan Yew such as The founding prime minister of Singapore in (10b), the man born to English-speaking parents in (10d) and Mr Lee in (10f), the English blurb emphasizes Lee’s role as the narrator. The Chinese blurb remains evasive about who is the narrator by adopting impersonal noun phrase (NP) 本书 ‘this book’ and adverbial phrase 书中 ‘in this book.’ The difference is not trivial but reveals a crucial difference in the conditions under which Challenge and Tiaozhan were produced. While ghost authors were understandably involved in composing both versions, they probably assumed a secondary role in Challenge, subject to the approval of Lee, who is known for his control, precision and sophisticated English. Conversely, the ghost authors of Tiaozhan could have been given more freedom and authority due to Lee’s constraints in Chinese, playing a bigger role in producing



Chapter 5.  Implied translator 143

Tiaozhan. This could be precisely the reason why the Chinese blurb refrains from explicitly claiming Lee as the author, unlike its English counterpart. Different narratorial orientation becomes inevitable in the ending paragraphs of the two blurbs, both of which striving to attract the readers by emphasizing the originality and exclusivity of the book. The English blurb gives prominence to the implied readers by spelling out its target readers in (6g) and (i), whereas the Chinese blurb emphasizes Lee as the protagonist in (27h) and (j). The differences in the thematic statements ((27h) and (6j)) further reveals a contrast between an authoritative tone in Tiaozhan and a moderately objective tone in Challenge, the former more politically charged than the latter. 5.3.2 Poetics and patronage in rewriting Lefevere’s (1992: 9) view of translations as “the most obviously recognizable type of rewriting” lends itself well to accounting for the narratorial differences. By Lefevere’s (1992: 5) definition, “rewritings are produced in the service, or under the constraints, of certain ideological and/or poetological currents.” Rewriting entails adaptation and manipulation of the original works to make them fit in with “the dominant ideological and poetological currents of their time” (Lefevere 1992: 8). As he states, translation is the most influential type of rewriting “because it is able to project the image of an author and/or those works beyond the boundaries of their culture of origin” (1992: 9). The large extent of disparities between Tiaozhan and Challenge could result from the effort of rewriting, subject to a variety of control factors. Professional and patronage are proposed by Lefevere (1992: 14) as the “double control factor that sees to it that the literary system does not fall too far out of step with the other subsystems society consists of.” The professionals, according to Lefevere (1992: 14), are translators, critics, reviewers and teachers who belong within the literary system. Their aspects of professionalism equip them with the authority and status to rewrite the works of literature in order to adapt to the dominant concept of what literature should be (i.e. its poetics) and of what society should be (i.e. ideology). Patronage is exerted by persons and group of persons, entities and institutions including a religious body, a political party, publishers and media (1992: 15). It consists of ideological, economic and status components (Lefevere 1982: 3–4, 1992: 16). Patronage is usually more interested in the ideology than the poetics (Lefevere 1992: 15), delegating authority over poetics to the professionals to adapt the literary work in line with the patrons’ ideology (1992: 15–16). Given the influential status of the autobiographer Lee in Singapore and the mission of the Press, known for its affiliation to the government, the source of all

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three components of the patronage for Tiaozhan is likely one and the same patron, whose effort is primarily directed at upholding the value of bilingualism and exalting Lee’s contributions. This is in line with Gentzler’s (2016: 5) stipulation that news organizations, rather than to simply transfer ideas across culture, tend to politicize the act of translating and rewriting to instil in their readers the belief held by the institution they work for. Along this line, he hauls translators as “cultural heroes” whose act of rewriting is not to simply transfer ideas across cultures or borders but to introduce “new ideas, forms or expressions, and pathways for change” that can lead to revitalizing culture (2016: 8). Understandably, the implied translators involved in the production of Tiaozhan are hand-picked from the editors and journalists to ensure they are attuned to the dominant ideology of the patrons. Their livelihood and social status as the employees of the Press depend on the patrons too. This would translate into the acceptance of patronage, which means that the implied translators have to “work within the parameters set by their patrons and that they should be willing and able to legitimize both the status and the power of those patrons” (Lefevere 1992: 18). Meanwhile, the implied translators as professionals have their own ideological affiliation and specific understanding of the poetics dominant in the receiving literature (Lefevere 1992: 41). The ideology and poetics dictate the basic translation strategy and the solutions to problems concerned with both the “universe of discourse” (i.e. the subject matter) expressed in the original and the language the original itself is expressed in (1992: 41). As Lefevere (1992: 49–51) posits, the collocation of a certain ideology with a certain poetics gives rise to a certain strategy in a scale moving from conservative strategies to subversive strategies. The conservative strategies are usually adopted by a “faithful translator” inspired by a conservative ideology, whereas the subversive strategies, favoured by a “spirited translator,” are designed to make the reader question the prestige of the original. Lefevere’s (1992) theory of rewriting is useful in probing into the implied translator’s ideology in rewriting, but it has two limitations. By restricting rewriting to literary genres, Lefevere neglects the bulk of non-literary genres, which play an equally, if not more, important role in the larger socio-political context. By treating rewriting as a possible subversive strategy, Lefevere is advocating translation as the source of agency and activism, running the risk of overemphasizing the role of translators in enacting social changes, similar to other translation scholars belonging to the manipulation school. The same restrictions seem to apply to Gentzler’s insights on rewriting. In this study, I would rather focus on the linguistic evidence to investigate how the implied translator resorts to rewriting to solve the problems arising from the differences between the authorial ideological affiliation and the dominant ideology in the target culture. Example (28) serves as a point of departure.



Chapter 5.  Implied translator 145

Example (28) is parallel to Example (9), as both tell the same anecdotes and share some similar features such as the rhetorical question and Chinese idioms: (28) （a）但是，在新加坡，如何寻找下一个曾经学过12年华文的总理呢？ （b）华校已经不存在了。（c）你可以找到特选学校毕业、在北大或 清华待了一两年的，有语言能力，但文化背景不同。（d）1就像中国 前副总理吴仪跟李显龙总理说“步步高升”，总理的回应“高处不胜寒”是 很自然的，2因为他读过这些典故，不是他学来回答问题的，是他的华 文文学知识的一部分。（e）但即便是总理，当他谈预算案时，必须提 前复习所有的技术词汇、金融词汇。（f）国庆群众大会的演讲，他可 以充分地掌握语言。（g）但他还会为一些要点和关键字眼做好准备， 先与新闻秘书陈怀亮讨论正确的用法，最后再修饰。  (Li 2012: 229) ‘(a) Nevertheless, in Singapore, how (can one) find the next Prime Minister who have learnt Chinese for 12 years? (b) Chinese-medium schools are no longer in existence. (c) You could find someone who graduated from the SAP schools and stayed in Beida and Qinghua for one or two years, (and) had the language competence but came from a different cultural background. (d)  1Which is why when then Chinese Vice-Premier Wu Yi uttered “bu bu gao sheng” to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the Prime Minister’s rejoinder “gao chu bu sheng han” is spontaneous, 2because he read these literary allusions before, which were not learned to answer questions but were part of his knowledge of Chinese literature. (e) But the Prime Minister still had to learn and revise all the technical vocabulary and financial vocabulary before he discussed the Budget. (f) He was at ease with the language at his National Day Rally speech. (g) But he had to prepare the main points and key words and discuss their correct usage with his press secretary Chen Hwai Liang so as to make improvement.’  (Li 2012: 229)

The strategy of rewriting is clearly at work given the large extent of discrepancy between the English and Chinese extracts. The rhetorical question in (28a), partially parallel to the rhetorical question in (9b), is brought to the beginning of the paragraph. The omission of the explanation of the two Chinese idioms inside the quotation marks is likely an effort to orient the text to the new implied TT readers, who are familiar with the idioms and thus need no explanation. The consistent choice of 总理 ‘the Prime Minister’ instead of 李显龙 ‘Lee Hsien Loong’ or 显龙 ‘Hsien Loong’ is adherent to the target culture convention, which shows greater respect to government leaders than the source culture does, despite the fact that the choice could run the risk of altering the narrator-character relationship. Example (28) provides much more elaborations as compared to Example (9). The implied translator’s professional status as the journalist and editor could

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contribute to such a strategy in pursuit of precision. It is perhaps due to his journalistic instinct that a more precise and specific statement about the character Lee Hsien Loong’s attributes in (28a) 曾经学过12年华文的总理 ‘the Prime Minister who have learnt Chinese for 12 years’ is adopted to replace the vague statement in (9a) equally comfortable in Mandarin. Perhaps fearing that the description of the character’s advantages in (c) and (d) could be interpreted as a sense of superiority, the implied translator adds the concessive arguments in (e) and (g) that illustrate the character’s constraints in Chinese to neutralize the praise of the character. This could be a move to align with the institutional goal to construct positive images of the political leaders without sounding boastful. It could also be motivated by the implied translator’s own ideological affiliation with Confucian values, which advocate modesty and neutrality. As illustrated by Example (28), the theory of patronage is rather effective in pinpointing the ideological consideration in the process of translation and rewriting. The implied translator who works for the Press, aligning himself with the patron’s ideology, resorts to rewriting until the TT is deemed acceptable to the dominant ideology in the target culture. The implied translator’s upbringing also endows him with certain ideological affiliation that plays a part in shaping his decision in dealing with the linguistic, cultural and ideological differences between English and Chinese. While Lefevere’s (1992) theory of rewriting expands the frontier of this study beyond the micro-aspects of language, it is still necessary to carry out the micro-analysis of the selected texts from Tiaozhan through the foregrounding analysis in order to understand the poetics favoured by the translator. After all, the partial justification of Tiaozhan as an assumed translation and the additional stipulation that Tiaozhan is a form of rewriting attest to the difficulties in classifying Tiaozhan as an “ideal” type of translation and make a case for multi-level exploratory analyses, which open up a range of new possibilities. Next, adopting the DTS model, my approach is to examine the Chinese texts (the TTs), map them onto their STs and then formulate the generalization on the translation process. As mentioned in Introduction, three types of texts in Tiaozhan have been identified in terms of their similarities to the texts in Challenge. In order to provide an objective description of the language and style of Tiaozhan, Type I texts, have hardly any syntactic and/or semantic equivalence in Challenge, are first examined on the assumption that they are the original texts or STs. The focus is on the foregrounded linguistic features in Tiaozhan and their functional significance. The findings will shed light on the ideology in the Type I texts. The contrastive analysis of Type III texts, which are close translations of their STs, will direct attention to their subtle differences in style and transitivity. Such differences are indicative of the “other” voice representing the implied translator’s discursive presence. If



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the foregrounded features present in Type I texts are found prevalent in Type III texts, this will point to the fact that the implied translator adopts the same strategy governed by their understanding of poetics in solving problems arising from the linguistic, cultural and ideological differences between the STs and TTs. The analysis of Type II texts, which are instances of rewriting and account for the majority of the selected examples, will be carried out in Chapter 6. 5.4 Foregrounding and transitivity in Type I texts Type I texts extracted from Tiaozhan can be read as if they were original texts due to their lack of parallel texts in Challenge. The objective is to identify the foregrounded features that yield functional significance. While the claim of Type I texts as the original texts seems to contradict with my earlier presumption of Tiaozhan as the pseudo-original, there is no doubt that, at certain points in the production of Tiaozhan, the implied translator rewrote part of the texts to align with the ideological patronage. As will be shown in 5.4.1, some examples from Tiaozhan discuss the same issues covered in Challenge in a completely different approach. This affirms a process of rewriting, in which the implied translator’s understanding of poetics and alignment to the dominant ideology influence the way they write and reflect their style. Based on the stylistic analytical framework set up in Chapter 2 (see 2.3), the stylistic enquiry into Type I texts has identified four deviant features in the categories of lexicon, syntax, figure of speech and context and cohesion in Tiaozhan, namely, overlexicalization, syntactic foreignness, circumlocution and overevaluation and incoherence. These features form a contrast to the linguistic patterns consistently exhibited by Challenge, such as underlexicalization, syntactic contrast, rhetorical subtlety and coherence (see Chapter 2). The foregrounding analysis will incorporate the transitivity analysis to attend to the functional significance derived from transitivity. 5.4.1 Overlexicalization Lexical features of Chinese language are mainly realized through its rich vocabulary characterized by four-character idioms. The vocabulary, as Fowler (1996: 214) perceives, influences the way a speaker structures his experience and is highly indicative of the scope of his experience. Distinct lexical features manifested in Tiaozhan include journalistic expressions, formal vocabulary, value-laden expressions and intensive figures of speech. In particular, overlexicalization gains in prominence. It refers to “extensive and repetitive use of sets of terms for related concepts, so that particular lexical systems, and the ideas they symbolize, become foregrounded”

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(Fowler 1996: 218). Overlexicalization is exemplified by the two short extracts, Example (29) and (30), which have no parallel in Challenge. Example (29) is the third paragraph in the beginning of the fifth chapter of Tiaozhan. The dominance of relational process denoted by 是…的 (shi…de, i.e. be construction) is commonly found in the opening of retrospective first-person narrative to set up the network of references that navigate readers (Fludernik 2009: 44): (29) （a）新加坡学生的成绩能够走到这一步很不容易。（b）很多人认为这 是因为新加坡得天独厚， 地理位置优越， 成就是自然而然的。（c）事 实并非如此。（d）我们这里的每一盆植物都是苦心栽种，经过悉心培 育， 修剪和施肥。（e）这里的人也是一样， 培育过程是心力交瘁的。  (Li 2012: 140) ‘(a) The (examination) results of the Singaporean students are achieved without ease. (b) Many people considered this achievement inevitable due to Singapore’s uniqueness and geographical advantage. (c) This is not true. (d) Our every plant here is planted painstakingly, nurtured with great care, undergoing trimming and fertilization. (e) The same applies to the people here, whose upbringing is full of trial and tribulations.’  (Li 2012: 140)

Given the predominance of four-character idioms such as 得天独厚 ‘uniqueness’ and 心力交瘁 ‘full of heart and effort’ which are inherent lexical features in the Chinese language, the presence of the Chinese idioms in Example (29) is understandable, not necessarily an instance of overlexicalization. What constitutes overlexicalization is the extensive use of synonyms and near-synonyms such as 苦 心栽种 ‘planted painstakingly,’ 悉心培育 ‘nurtured with great care’ and 心力交 瘁 ‘full of trial and tribulations.’ The analogy between horticulture and education serves to concretize and animate the abstract concept, mapping the conceptual repertoire of the narrator. The overlexicalization and uses of figures of speech are foregrounded linguistic features that contribute to information intensification and style elevation. They signal to the readers an important message: the protagonist and his government have put in their utmost effort to give the best education to the people in Singapore. The overlexicalization in Example (29) therefore accentuates a passionate authorial tone. Similarly located at the start of the third chapter of Tiaozhan, Example (30), however, forms a contrast with Example (29) in its strategy of overlexicalization that results in tautology and redundancy: (30) （a）1南洋大学是东南亚的第一所华文大学，2它一开始就注定失败， 因为它与历史洪流背道而驰。（b）在东南亚的政治土壤中栽培中国 的果树， 既无法在新加坡成长，也不可能在东南亚任何国家容身。 （c） 南大从一开始就注定失败。 (Li 2012: 70)



Chapter 5.  Implied translator 149

‘(a) 1Nanyang University is the first Chinese university in Southeast Asia, (and)

2it was doomed to fail from the very beginning, because it was against the tide

of history. (b) The Chinese fruit trees planted in the political soil of Southeast Asia were unable to grow in Singapore and also impossible to survive in any other countries in Southeast Asia. (c) Nantah was doomed to fail from the very beginning.’  (Li 2012: 70)

Starting with a relational clause that contextualizes the action or events, Example (30) casts a highly subjective tone by means of modal expressions such as 注定 ‘doomed to’ and 不可能 ‘impossible.’ Metaphors such as 政治土壤 ‘political soil’ and 中国 的果树 ‘Chinese fruit tree’ in (b) are recurrent rhetorical features in Tiaozhan. Referring to the Southeast Asian political environment and Nanyang University’s (Nantah) pro-China mission, respectively, the metaphors in (b) reiterate the fact that the closure of Nantah is due to its incompatibility with the socio-political environment, an idea which has already been explicated in (a2). Sentence (c) is foregrounded because it repeats (a2) almost word-for-word, aside from the slight variation in the grammatical subjects. While such repetition is usually effective in reiterating the theme after a long stretch of texts, it is redundant in this short extract, given the proximity between the repeated sentences. Additionally, the proliferation of the expressions with similar meanings and negative connotations, such as 背 道而驰 ‘against the tide of history,’ 无法…成长 ‘cannot grow’ and 不可能…容身 ‘cannot survive,’ constitutes tautology, which functions to emphasize the inevitable failure of Nantah. The repetition and tautology constitute overlexicalization but leave noticeable information gaps. For instance, there is a lack of cross-reference that links Chinese fruit tree to Nantah. Neither is there any proper contextualization for the assertion that the Chinese fruit trees were unable to grow in Southeast Asia. While the overlexicalization strengthens the authorial tone, the gap and incoherence create barriers for readers to comprehend the message. As Fowler (1996: 219) reiterates, “(a) proliferation of terms in some semantic field indicates an unusual preoccupation with a part of the culture’s, or the writer’s, experience.” The profusion of horticultural terms by means of figure of speech and value-laden idioms as shown in Example (29) and (30) is apt in the Chinese culture formed through China’s long history of agriculture. It suggests an ideologically driven wo-narrator, who prizes overlexicalization over context and coherence. His greater emphasis on the political consequence of Nantah results in the information gap and incoherence that hinder readers’ identification with the passion in the authorial attitude.

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5.4.2 Syntactic foreignness Syntax in Chinese is characterized by parataxis. 1 The Chinese language exhibits three distinct features in word order (Li and Thompson 1989: 19–20). First, grammatical subjects in Chinese are not structurally well defined, and the basic sentence structure can be described in the topic-comment relation rather than the subject-predicate relation. Secondly, the word order is governed primarily by the semantic factors (i.e. meaning) rather than grammatical functions. Thirdly, Chinese adheres to the Verb-Object or Object-Verb order, in which modifiers must precede their heads. Needless to say, the paratactic structure and the three characteristics of word-­ order are manifested in Tiaozhan. There is, however, no shortage of subject-prominent structures organized in hypotaxis. 2 They bear resemblance to the syntactically well-defined English constructions but are syntactically awkward in Chinese. Such constructions are manifested in Example (31). The passage deliberates upon the rationales for the bilingual policy, which was discussed in Example (10), in a very different approach (see 4.2.2): (31) （a）独立之初， 我们面对的问题是如何谋生？ 如何存活？（b）这是 200万人生死攸关的问题。（c）我们明白单靠母语，无论是华语、马来 语或淡米尔语，都是没有办法谋生的。（d）而这个周围都是马来人的 多元种族新兴国家， 绝不能选择华语作为共同语，否则，国家一定会 乱，在国际上也无法生存。（e）我们作为一个依靠国际贸易的国家， 只有加强学习英语，才有好日子过。 （f）于是， 让人民穿暖吃饱安定等“共同利益”的政治经济前提下，我 们选择了英语为共同语。（g）而在“公平”的社会前提下，我们必须为 人民提供学习各种母语的平等机会。（h）学习母语，还附带了解自己 种族文化历史， 建立文化底蕴， 能在人前信心满满， 有了抬头挺胸的 底气的作用。（i）这是我们制订双语政策的重要理念。  (Li 2012: 59) ‘(a) At the beginning of independence, the issue we faced was how to make a living? how to survive? (b) This was an issue that was critical to the 2 million people’s life and death. (c) We knew that simply relying on the mother tongue, be it Chinese, Malay or Tamil, is not possible to make a living. (d) This multi-racial newly independent country which is surrounded by Malays cannot choose Mandarin as the common language, otherwise the country would surely be chaotic, neither could it survive internationally. (e) We as a country

1. Parataxis is “a sequence of clauses of similar status linked by ‘and’ and ‘then’ or merely an implied temporal link, with very few subordinate clauses or non-temporal cohesive ties” (Fowler 1996: 229). 2. Hypotaxis is defined by Oxford English Dictionary as subordination of one clause to another.



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that depends on international trade can only strengthen our English learning in order to lead a good life. (f) Hence, on the basis of the eco-political consideration of common benefits that make sure the people are well-fed and warmly-clad, we chose English as the common language. (g) On the basis of the social consideration of fairness, we must provide equal opportunities for the people to learn various mother tongues. (h) Learning mother tongues also comes with the functions that enable one to know his ethnic culture and history, build a cultural foundation, exhibit full confidence in front of others, and have pride and confidence. (i) These are the important rationales based on which we formulate the bilingual policy.’  (Li 2012: 59)

There is no lack of paratactic Chinese structures with implicit linkage such as sentences (a) to (e) in Example (31) and the clauses within sentences (d) and (h). The passage, however, contains the syntactic constructions bearing close resemblance to the hypotactic English structures. For example, the lengthy premodified NPs in (d), (e) and (h) are reminiscent of the English NPs post-modified by relative clauses. The appositive in (c), 无论是华语、马来语或淡米尔语 ‘be it Chinese, Malay or Tamil,’ loosens the structure which should have been closely knit, reminding us of English subordination structure. Ungrammaticality arises from the errant use of two question marks within the declarative (a). This passage is also marked with semantic density (see 2.2.1). The largely formal style is interspersed with colloquial expressions such as 国家一定会乱 ‘the country would be chaotic’ and 有好日子过 ‘lead a good life.’ The syntactically well-defined parallelism in (f) and (g) 在…前提下, 我们 ‘on basis of … we…’ casts a rhetorical effect, but the awkwardly lengthy NP construction in (h) impedes reader’s comprehension. Overlexicalization is present too, in the form of near-synonyms such as 信心满满 ‘exhibit full confidence’ and 抬头挺胸 ‘have pride and confidence.’ The syntactically awkward and ungrammatical constructions are indicative of the sub-standard Chinese, probably as a result of transferring the English structure to the Chinese text. “Foreign” to Chinese readers, these strange constructions defamiliarize readers. The profusion of value-laden expressions, idioms, negation and political jargon is equally defamiliarizing, alerting the readers to their functional significance and ideological value. In addition, the intensive deontic modality denoted by 无法 ‘cannot,’ 绝不能 ‘by no means,’一定 ‘must,’ 只有… 才 ‘only…then…’ and 必须 (must) casts a highly authoritative tone with a desire to mobilize the readers into actions or cognizance. Overall, Example (31) evokes a perception of a controversial wo-narrator. He endeavours to emphasize the importance of English and mother tongues through overlexicalization and foregrounded modality at the sacrifice of syntactic precision.

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5.4.3 Circumlocution and overevaluation Having examined the lexical and syntactic features, let us now focus our attention on the figures of speech to probe into their functional significance. As shown in the earlier examples, figures of speech such as parallelism, repetition, metaphors and similes, manifested in Tiaozhan, play an important role in signalling a passionate authorial tone. Examples (32) and (33) are no exception to this. Example (32) has no parallel in Challenge except (c3), which corresponds to (n) in Example (23): (32) （a）为什么他们有这个“不从众，不受大环境左右”的勇气呢？（b) 这 是因为他们有了一整套的价值观念体系。（c）他们深信：“1我就是我。 2我是来学你们的科学，学你们的工艺，学你们怎样进入工业化时代。 3我并不是来学留长头发，学穿肮脏的牛仔裤，学赤着脚走路，还有学 穿那些印有古古怪怪口号的汗衫。4这些东西跟你们在太空上的成就是 毫无关联的。”（d）1我的儿子能做到这一点， 2是因为他们具有两个价 值观念体系， 3还有那道德精神的调节器，4那是他们在华校承接好的。  (Li 2012: 117) ‘(a) Why did they have the courage of “not following the trend, not subjected to the circumstances?” (b) This was because they had a whole set of value system. (c) They firmly believed: “1I am I. 2I am here to learn your science, learn your craft, learn how you enter the era of industrialization. 3I am not here to learn to keep long hair, learn to wear dirty jeans, learn to walk about barefoot, and learn to wear T-shirts with strange slogans printed on them. 4These things have nothing to do with your achievements in space.” (d) My sons were able to do this, [is] because they had two values systems, and that moral adaptor, which they received from their Chinese school.’  (Li 2012: 117)

Starting with a question and answer pair in (a) and (b), Example (32) exhibits the formal distinctness in the form of DT in (c) and most markedly the parallelism in the repetition of verb 学 ‘learn’ within the DT. This verb entails duality denoted by the material process of action being taught or the mental process of gaining knowledge. The parallelism and repetition constitute foregrounding. Together with the duality of action and consciousness, they accentuate a positive image of the characters (my sons), who are the agents and sensers. The first- and second-person pronouns in the DT construe a dialogic relationship between the characters and readers, aligning the readers’ consciousness with the character’s consciousness. A notable feature concerning transitivity is the process of being denoted by the repetition of the Chinese copula 是 (shi) ‘be’ (Li and Thompson 1989: 147) within and outside the DT. In particular, the copula 是 ‘be’ in the simple sentence (c1),



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我就是我 ‘I am myself,’ is heavily foregrounded with the repetition of first-person pronoun wo. It deviates from a typical copula construction which contains only one referential NP as the subject linked to a non-referential NP by the copula verb, the latter characterizing the former (1989: 149). The copula 是 ‘be’ in (d2) functions as markers of special affirmation (1989: 151) whereas 是 ‘be’ in (d4) is part of the shi…de construction, which functions as nominalization that clarifies and confirms the assumption already in the air (1989: 590). Complication, however, arises from 是 ‘be’ before the verb 学 ‘learn’ in (c2) and (c3). The copula 是 ‘be’ could function as the marker of nominalization, similar to that in (d4), but the missing de violates the nominalization rule, making the sentence ungrammatical. Notwithstanding the ungrammaticality, the profusion of 是 ‘be’ in relational clauses plays an emphatic role in characterizing the characters. Semantic contradiction arises from the ending statement (d), which apparently repeats what is stated in (b). The phrase 两个价值观念体系 ‘two value systems’ in (d) contradicts with 一整套的价值观念体系 ‘a whole set of value system’ in (b). Adding to this contradiction is the metaphor 那道德精神的调节器 ‘that moral adaptor,’ the meaning of which is vague despite the demonstrative pronoun 那 ‘that.’ Linked to 两个价值观念体系 ‘two values systems’ by the conjunction 还 有 (and), the metaphor implies three value systems altogether, intensifying the semantic contradiction already inherent in (b) and (d) and widening the semantic gap that puzzles the readers. The semantic contradiction and vagueness are indicative of the narrator’s preoccupation with the benefits of the value system imbibed from the Chinese education. Additionally, a defective collocation arises from the implicit verb-object relation between the verb 承接 ‘accept (a task) or connect to (the preceding text)’ in (d3) and the NP 调节器 ‘adaptor’ in (d4) – the verb 承接 ‘accept’ hardly collocates with a physical object or a concept. To summarize, the defective collocation, ungrammaticality and semantic contradiction create ambiguity, which impairs the readers’ comprehension of the text. They are fundamentally the consequences of a strategy of circumlocution that uses more words to convey a meaning that could be expressed more concisely and directly in fewer words. The wo-narrator laboriously praises the characters and excessively extols the value of the Chinese education by means of parallelism, repetition and metaphors. This amounts to an overrated statement or simply, overevaluation, which is defined in this study as speaking highly of an idea or a concept more than it deserves. In the same vein, the wo-narrator in Example (33) engages in circumlocution to deal with the mistakes in formulating the bilingual education policy in a roundabout way. The same issue is discussed in Example (21) (see 4.5.2):

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(33) （a）到了70年代末，我们终于明白有些学生连一种语文也无法掌握，莫 说要掌握两种语文。（b）一个人即使读双语，也只能有一个主导语，没 有办法把两种语文都学好。（c）从前我不明白，因为我看到家里三个孩 子在华校学华文，在家学英文，两种语文都学得很好。（d）难怪我的同 僚林金山对我说：“你的孩子可以，不要以为我的孩子也可以。”（e）我 当时真就以为他的孩子也可以，最多是水平有点差异，其实，我错了。 （f）每个人的智力跟学语言的能力是不一样的，我以为是一样，后来才 知道是不一样。  (Li 2012: 179) ‘(a) By the end of the 70s, we finally understood that some students were not able to grasp one language, let alone two languages. (b) A person, even if he studies two languages, could only have one main language and by no means could he grasp two languages. (c) Earlier on, I did not understand this, because I saw my three children learning Chinese at school, learning English at home and having learnt both well. (d) No wonder my colleague Lim Kim San said to me: “(The fact that) your children can should not lead you to think my children can too.” (e) At that time, I really thought his children could, at most at a slightly different level, but I was wrong actually. (f) A person’s intelligence differs from his language learning ability, (and) I thought they were the same but only knew later that they were not.’  (Li 2012: 179)

Example (33) is manifested with mental processes, primarily denoted by the cognitive verbs明白 ‘understood,’ 以为 ‘thought’ and 知道 ‘knew,’ with an exception of the perceptive verb看到 ‘saw.’ Some mental clauses repeat one another semantically such as (e) and (f). They remind us of interior monologues in a fragmented stream of consciousness. Subjectivity is foregrounded by the profusion of modal adverbs such as 终于 ‘finally,’ 连 ‘even,’ 真就 ‘really,’ 其实 ‘actually’ and 才 ‘only,’ and modal phrases like 难怪 ‘no wonder,’ 莫说 ‘let alone’ and 最多 ‘at most.’ The subjectivity belongs to the retrospective wo-narrator, whose presence is signalled by the temporal deixis, such as 从前 ‘earlier on,’ 当时 ‘then,’ and 后来 ‘later.’ The colloquial quality in the language prevails not only in the DS in (d) but also in the psycho-narration in (e) and (f). It nevertheless contradicts with the choice of formal expressions such as 差异 ‘difference’ in (e) and literary expression 莫说 ‘let alone’ in (a). A search for the underlying meaning reveals an evasive wo-narrator who reflects on his mistakes by resorting to circumlocution. Instead of stating that the protagonist’s children were more intelligent than an average person, the wo-narrator tacitly adopts a DS in (d) to convey the meaning through the character Lim Kim San. Seen from this angle, the fragmented stream of consciousness, repetitive cognitive mental processes and inconsistent style are all instances of circumlocution. The wo-narrator’s equivocal attitude forms a striking contrast with the I-narrator’s candid confession in English as shown in the analysis of Example (21).

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The two examples analysed in this section illustrate the exploitation of figures of speech that amounts to circumlocution and overevaluation with the objective to glorify the protagonist. Unfortunately, the ungrammaticality, defective collocation, semantic contradiction and inconsistent style give rise to equivocation that undermines clarity and comprehensibility. 5.4.4 Incoherence In the last category of our foregrounding analysis, context and cohesion, incoherence, as illustrated by Example (32), strikes us as deviant. It is found in Example (34), which shares partial similarities with Example (19). I will zero in on the parts of Example (34), including (a), (d) and (e1), which have no parallel in Example (19) to illustrate that incoherence and other deviant features are unique to the Chinese text: (34) （a）1陈六使看不清这个形势，2他其实也不了解中国。（b）他不明白 东南亚国家的内部政治。（c）本区域新兴国家的政府皆对源自中国的 共产主义威胁怀有戒心，并视共产主义运动为颠覆活动。（d）马来西 亚独立后排华，印度尼西亚和泰国也排华。（e）因此，一所1由亲中国 的商人创立，吸收全东南亚华人子弟，只为团结华人，宣扬华族文化丶 华族语文 2的大学，一开始便遭惹东南亚各国怀疑。 (Li 2012: 72) ‘(a) 1Tan Lark Sye did not recognize this situation, 2(and) he actually did not know China. (b) He did not understand the domestic politics of the Southeast Asian countries. (c) The governments of this region’s newly independent countries were wary of the communist threat from China, and viewed the communist movements as subversive activities. (d) Malaysia marginalized Chinese after independence, Indonesia and Thailand marginalized Chinese too. (e) Therefore, a university 1founded by a pro-China businessman, that admitted children of all Southeast Asian Chinese, with the objective to unite Chinese and promote Chinese culture and Chinese language, 2would evoke suspicion right from the start.’  (Li 2012: 72)

Incoherence arises from the lack of semantic linkage between the topic statement (a) and sentences (b) to (e). There has been a gradual shift from generality to specificity, but the insertion of (a2) 他其实也不了解中国 ‘neither did he actually know China’ violates the intra- and inter-sentential connections. The statement (a2) is neither relevant to the subsequent text nor to the preceding clause, resulting in incoherence. Particularly noteworthy is the use of 遭惹 (zao re) ‘evoke and irritate,’ which is not only morphologically erroneous (the correct form is 招惹 (zhao re), ‘provoke’ but also inappropriate in its collocation with the abstract noun 怀疑 ‘suspicion.’ A better choice would be its near-synonym 遭到 (zao dao) ‘evoke.’

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Apart from the incoherence, several deviant features observed in the earlier examples are found in Example (34). The parallelism in (d) can be considered circumlocution that uses more words than required to emphasize the adversity of the political situation in Southeast Asia. The lengthy premodifiers of the NP in (e) are syntactically awkward in Chinese, echoing the hypotactic structure of English NPs. Overlexicalization is present in the repetition of the near-synonyms of 华 人 and 华族 ‘the ethnic Chinese’ in (e). The foregrounding indicates an effort to discredit the character Tan Lark Sye in order to justify the protagonist’s decision to close Nantah. Such an intention is nevertheless not so visible in Example (19) in its neutral vocabulary, sophisticated syntax and coherence (see 2.5.1). The incoherence resulting from the lack of inter- or intra-sentence connection and defective collocation is found prevalent in more examples as our analysis unfolds in the subsequent sections. The incoherence seems to be a side effect of circumlocution, in which the wo-narrator says more than he is required to or deliberately remains vague or evasive. In summary, the foregrounding and transitivity analysis of the Type I texts have identified overlexicalization, syntactic foreignness, circumlocution, overevaluation and incoherence as the deviant stylistic features. The search for the functional significance of the deviant features underscores the politically charged wo-narrator who narrates laboriously and passionately to construct a positive image of the protagonist but unintentionally creates confusion among the readers. The overlexicalization, circumlocution and overevaluation are perceived to be the characteristics of journalistic or political language in Mandarin Chinese (Huang and Liao 2002: 311). They comply with the poetics acceptable in the Chinese culture, which tends to count on style elevation to create reading pleasure. The absence of these features in Challenge prompts us to attribute these features to the implied translator of Tiaozhan, who works for the Press. To a certain extent, the four deviant features identified in the earlier section correlate to the three cases of “other” voices belonging to the implied translators as identified by Hermans (1996/2010). For example, overlexicalization can be seen as an instance of providing redundant information in the implied translator’s effort to re-orient the text to the new readers. Syntactically awkward constructions and incoherence are self-referential as they indicate the substandard command of grammar by the implied translator. Circumlocution and overevaluation could be the result of contextual overdetermination. The presence of the above deviant stylistic features in Type I texts, however, cannot exclude the possibility that they are typical of the real author’s or ghost author’s Chinese writing style, unless similar features are found in the texts with corresponding STs. It is therefore necessary to investigate whether these features are prevalent in Type III texts, which find close parallels in Challenge and whether they result from the direct syntactic or semantic transfer from the English texts.

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5.5 The “other” voice in Type III texts The large extent of similarities between Type III texts and their parallels in Challenge attests to the translation relationship between Challenge and Tiaozhan. There is, nonetheless, a varying degree of dissimilarities between Type III texts and their counterparts. My objective in this section is to investigate whether the four stylistic features identified in Type I texts are present in Type III texts with reference to their STs. The translational relationship inherent in Type III texts makes it straightforward to attribute these stylistic features to the translator if they are indeed prevalent in Type III texts but not in the STs. As will be shown, the “other” voice of the translator increases gradually from a faint “passive” voice to a pleasing “active” voice along with the increasing differences between Type III texts and their STs. 5.5.1 Faithful translator with “passive” voice The examples chosen in this section exhibit a high degree of lexical, syntactic and cohesive similarities to their STs. In these extracts, translation is clearly governed by a “faithful” strategy that prizes syntactic and semantic equivalence between the ST and TT. The minute ST-TT difference unveils a faithful translator with a discreet or “passive” voice. Example (35) matches Example (17) almost sentence-by-sentence, discussing the merging of Nanyang University into University of Singapore: (35) （a）这是痛苦的调整。（b）我同南大学生两次交谈，表示理解他们 的困难，也鼓励他们坚持下去。（c）当联合校园的英校生埋怨他们的 进度被加入的华校生拖慢时，我斥责他们的态度。（d）我说，帮助同 班的华校生是他们的社会责任，如果彼此的处境对调，有一天，新加 坡的经济必须依赖中国跨国公司，有强烈互助精神和对中国文化感到 自豪的华校生，一定会义不容辞地向英校生伸出援手。 (Li 2012: 92) ‘(a) This was a painful adjustment. (b) I spoke to Nantah students twice, expressed my understanding of their difficulties, and also encouraged them to persevere. (c) When English-school students in the joint campus complained that their progress was slowed down by the infusion of Chinese-school students, I reprimanded their attitude. (d) I said, it was their social responsibility to help their Chinese-school classmates, (and) if their situation had been reversed, one day, Singapore economy had to rely on Chinese multinational companies, Chinese-school students, with strong mutual help spirit and pride in Chinese culture, would certainly obligatorily and rightfully lend a helping hand to the English-school students.’  (Li 2012: 92)

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Transitivity in Example (35) is similar to that of Example (17), manifested with verbal clauses denoted by 交谈 ‘spoke,’ 表示 ‘expressed,’ 埋怨 ‘complained’ and 斥责 ‘reprimanded.’ Minor deviations in word order and sentence segmentation between Example (35) and (17) are mainly due to the inherent differences between paratactic Chinese and hypotactic English. While the long and complex sentence (35d) is grammatical and coherent, its lengthy and awkward NP with premodifiers bears a close resemblance to the English NP post-modified by a prepositional phrase in Example (9d) as shown below: (35d) 有强烈互助精神和对中国文化感到自豪的华校生 ‘Chinese-school students, with strong mutual help spirit and pride in Chinese culture’ (17d) Chinese-stream students, with strong mutual help habits and pride in Chinese culture

The syntactic similarity confirms our earlier speculation that the syntactically awkward constructions are transferred from their English counterparts. Example (35) is also marked by the prevalent value-laden expressions with positive connotation, such as 强烈互助精神 ‘strong mutual help spirit,’ 义不容辞 ‘obligatorily and rightfully’ and 伸出援手 ‘lend a helping hand.’ Most of them find their equivalence in Example (17) except the phrases 强烈互助精神 ‘strong mutual help spirit’ and 义不容辞 ‘obligatorily and rightfully.’ They could have been replaced by 强烈互助习惯 ‘strong mutual help habit’ and 竭尽所能 ‘try one’s best,’ respectively, which are semantically closer to their STs than the existing phrases. The enhanced positive connotations are slanted towards the TT readers, especially those who were the former Chinese-school students being praised by the wo-­narrator. The profusion of the positive near-synonyms exemplifies overlexicalization in a resounding tone. The overlexicalization, absent in Example (17), which adopts a plain and neutral style, could possibly be the linguistic indicator of the “other” voice, pending for further evidence. A discrepancy arises from the collocation between the verb斥责 ‘reprimanded,’ and the object 他们的态度 ‘their attitude’ in (35d): a person object is more appropriate than the impersonal object for the verb 斥责 ‘reprimanded’ as in the case of reprimanded them in Example (17c). The defective collocation deviates from the otherwise sophisticated constructions, which largely match their STs. The implied translator is envisaged to have replaced the person object, them, with an impersonal object, attitude, in an effort to mitigate the harsh tone, given that reprimanding an attitude is less confrontational than reprimanding a person. If so, this subtle change could be an instance of contextual overdetermination by the implied translator and thus discloses the “other” voice from the translator. The “other” voice is, however, discreet and passive, indicative of the translator’s minor intervention in the context



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where the positive image of the protagonist is projected. At the moment, such a speculation is still tentative until further evidence is gathered. To summarize, the semantic and syntactic similarities between Example (35) and (17) produce evidence in support of their translation postulates. The similar transitivity also indicates the translator’s conscious effort to adopt a “faithful” strategy wherever possible. The foregrounded features such as awkward syntax, defective collocation and overlexicalization, which are absent in Example (17), could be indicators of the implied translator’s discursive presence in an effort to produce an equivalent or “faithful” translation while orienting the text towards the TT readers. The passive “other” voice of the implied translator is also detected in Example (36), which is parallel to Example (20). The fact that Example (20) was extracted from a letter written in English retrievable from the official archive 3 offers convincing evidence of the ST-TT relationship between the English and Chinese texts. The similarities between Example (8) and (36) attest to the inter-textuality, affirming the transfer from English to Chinese: (36) （a）理事会主席黄祖耀在1980年3月18日写给我，也同样发给媒体的回 信中表示，他曾希望把南大的教学媒体改成英文和实行联合校园计划， 从而缓和学生的人数减少。（b）然而，他现在认识到“若不及早改变这 样的趋势，南大将在一两年内面对自然死亡”。（c）他也说南大在许多 老一辈的新加坡人民心目中占有特别地位，“这种热爱南大的精神是不 能轻易抛弃的”。（d）但他个人认为“国家利益比这种依依不舍的情感 重要”。 (Li 2012: 94) ‘(a) In a letter the council chairman Wee Cho Yaw wrote to me on 18 March 1980, and also released to the media, (he) indicated, he had hoped to change Nantah’s medium of instruction to English and implement the joint campus scheme in order to arrest the declining number of students. (b) Nevertheless, he now realized that “unless this trend is corrected as early as possible, Nantah would face a natural death in one or two years’ time.” (c) He also said that Nantah occupied a special place in the heart of many older Singaporeans, “this spirit of love for Nantah cannot be lightly discarded.” (d) But he personally felt that “national interest is more important than this reluctance to part.” ’  (Li 2012: 94)

Similar to Example (20), Example (36) is manifested with verbal processes 写给 ‘wrote to,’ 表示 ‘indicated’ and 说 ‘said,’ and mental processes 希望 ‘had hoped’, 认 识到 ‘realized’ and 认为 ‘felt’. The extracts of the letter are presented in the speech and thought presentations such as IS (a), DT (b, d) and DS (c). Cohesion is achieved

3. http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/lky19800318.pdf

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mainly by means of conjunctions such as 然而 ‘nevertheless’ and 但 ‘but’, in the same way as in Example (20). The complex NP with sentence-like premodifiers in (36a) exemplifies a direct syntactic transfer from the English relative clause post-modifying the head noun in (20a) (In his reply to me on March 18, which was also released to the media…). This results in the syntactic foreignness that reminds us of the discursive presence of the translator. The positive value-laden phrase 热爱南大的精神 ‘the spirit of love for Nantah’ in (36c) and the literary idiom依依不舍 ‘reluctance to part’ in (36d), in contrast to the neutral expressions the fund of goodwill and emotional attachment in (20d), are instances of overevaluation that emphasizes the importance of Nantah in favour of the TT readers. In the two examples analysed above, the semantic and syntactic parallels and similar transitivity between the English and Chinese texts indicate a skilful and discreet implied translator who is guided by a “faithful” translation strategy. Probing the underlying meaning in these examples, we can infer that the translator’s prudence and passiveness is not coincidental but intentional. Both examples explicitly praise the Chinese-speaking community while accentuating the protagonist’s wisdom and foresight. It is therefore unnecessary for the implied translator to intervene in the narrative situation. The four foregrounded features that characterize Type I texts are found in Type III texts but not in their STs. Some of the features such as syntactic foreignness and incoherence are observed to have resulted from a “faithful” translation strategy adhering to the ST language conventions. This triggers a speculation that the rest of the deviant features are also attributable to the implied translator: in a conscious effort to represent the STs faithfully and reorient the TT to new readers, the implied translator unwittingly leaves behind traces of his discursive presence indicated by the deviant features. The “faithful” strategy, however, is only warranted on the condition that the positive persona of the protagonist Tiaozhan aims to construct is not compromised, as will be shown in the next section. 5.5.2 Skilful translator with “active” voice In the face of imminent threats to the positive image of the protagonist who reflects the image of the autobiographer, the translator is observed to intrude into the communication by means of manipulation, leaving behind traces of an “active” voice that could cause changes to the image portrayed and ideology presented. Example (37), a close translation of Example (22), exemplifies the translator’s manipulation under the influence of his ideological affiliation:



Chapter 5.  Implied translator 161

(37) （a）1我们的挑战是，2如何有效地教导日益普遍讲英语的新加坡人， 3让华文成为华族的第二语文。（b）我认为最好的途径是让家长在家 里用华语同孩子交谈，就算他们的词汇有限也不要紧。（c）一旦孩子 从小熟悉了华文的发音和句子结构，在学校学习华文就会容易得多。 （d）1总之，我们的教育体制必须按环境的转变作出调整，2没有什么 政策是不能更改的。（e）如果华文的经济价值提高了，家长和学生要 更深入学习华文，我们就必须满足他们。（f）不过，选择在于家长和 学生，不在于政府。  (Li 2012: 223) ‘(a) Our challenges are: how to effectively teach the increasingly Englishspeaking Singaporeans and make Chinese the second language of the ethnic Chinese. (b) I believe the best way is to get parents to speak Mandarin to their children at home, never mind if their vocabulary is limited. (c) Once a child is familiar with the pronunciation and sentence structure of Chinese from young, learning Chinese in school will be much easier. (d) In general, our education system must adapt to the change in the situation, (and) no policy cannot be changed. (e) If the economic value of the Chinese language increases, (and) parents and students want to learn Chinese in more depth, we must satisfy them. (f) However, the choice is exercised by parents and students, not by the government.’  (Li 2012: 223)

As compared to Example (22), Example (37) exhibits a similar level of epistemic modality in the profusion of modal verbs (会 ‘will,’ 必须 ‘must’ and 不能 ‘cannot’), modal adverbs (就算 ‘never mind if’ and 一旦 ‘once’) and gnomic sentence (没有 什么政策是不能更改的 ‘no policy cannot be changed’). The passage casts a mixed formal and informal tone, similar to that of Example (22), through the formal lexical choices (如何 ‘how,’ 教导 ‘teach,’ 途径 ‘path’) and colloquial expressions ( 就算 ‘never mind if,’ 容易得多 ‘much easier’). Example (37) is syntactically parallel to Example (22) almost segment by segment, except for (37d) which is equivalent to the combination of (22d) and (e). This minor deviation, however, creates incoherence. Without any conjunction, (37d1) and (d2) should have been connected to each other based on sequentiality or consequentiality, which is lacking in the sentence. A plausible way to organize them is to place the generic statement (d2) before the specific statement (d1) in accordance with the topic-comment sequence in Chinese. The incoherence is likely the by-product of the “faithful” translation strategy that prizes the adherence to the ST sequence. The replacement of the full stop by the comma violates the pre-existent logical link, indicating a substandard command of Chinese punctuation, which is in line with our earlier observation. Similarly, the syntactically awkward construction in 37 (a2) 日益普遍讲英语 的新加坡人 ‘the increasingly English-speaking Singaporeans’ underlines a strategy

162 Translation of Autobiography

of adhering to the syntactic structure of the complex NP, an increasingly Englishspeaking population in (22a). While the syntactic foreignness may impede the readers’ comprehension of the message, a subtle change to the meaning in (a3) could mitigate the impediment. In specifying 让华文成为华族的第二语文 ‘making Chinese the second language of the ethnic Chinese,’ (37a) is more accurate and precise than (22a), which contains imprecise statement (to teach Chinese effectively as a second language to an increasingly English-speaking population 4). Such an approach exemplifies Hermans’s (1996/2010) second case of self-referentiality, in which the translator corrects the defects in the ST, unintentionally revealing his presence. The conscientious implied translator presumably moves to safeguard the political correctness of the statement in (37a). This political sensitivity could have been developed through his professional status as a journalist or an editor. The implied translator nevertheless indiscreetly creates incoherence and syntactic foreignness, which further indicate his unwanted presence. In Example (38), the final example of this chapter, the “other” voice becomes more articulate in the translator’s effort to portray the positive image of the protagonist for the TT readers. The example contains two paragraphs, largely parallel to their STs but with greater variances in syntax, vocabulary, transitivity and coherence, as compared to Example (37). The first paragraph of Example (38) is largely equivalent to Example (18), whereas the second paragraph matches the extract from Challenge provided in the footnote 5: (38) ① （a）1959年人民行动党执政之初，曾多方扶助华校。（b）我虽然 是个英校生，但是我和华校生一样热切渴望保留华文教育的精髓。 （c）我明白华校生求职困难，所以上台执政后，多方为他们打开门 户找出路。 ② （d）1我要求马来西亚大学开设大学先修班让华校毕业生攻读，2 我让政府部门录取南大毕业生的人数，3超过马大生。（e）我提供 奖学金给优秀华校毕业生到新大和外国，我给优秀南大毕业生奖学 金到外国读研究院。 (Li 2012: 62)

4. The English-speaking population also comprise the Malays and Indians, whose mother tongues are Malay or Tamil rather than Chinese. 5. (a) 1I asked the University of Malaya in Singapore, 2later to become the University of Singapore, 3to have pre-university classes for Chinese school students. (b) 1I urged government departments to recruit more Nanyang University graduates as Executive Officers, 2a grade behind Administrative Officers because their English was not good enough. (c) I offered scholarships to outstanding Chinese school students to further studies at the University of Singapore, or overseas. (d) I gave outstanding Nanyang University graduates scholarships to do postgraduate studies abroad.8 (Lee 2012: 72)



Chapter 5.  Implied translator 163

① ‘(a) In 1959 when the PAP first took over the government, (we) provided aids to the Chinese schools in many ways. (b) I was an English School student, but I shared the same desire of Chinese School students to preserve the essence of Chinese-language education. (c) I understood the difficulties of Chinese school students in finding jobs, therefore after taking office, (I) opened doors for them to look for job opportunities in many ways. ② (d) 1I asked the University of Malaya to offer pre-university classes for Chinese school leavers, 2(and) I let government departments to recruit Nantah graduates, 3 who outnumbered the UM’s graduates. (e) I provided scholarship to outstanding Chinese school graduates to further studies at the University of Singapore or overseas; I gave outstanding Nantah graduates scholarship to do postgraduate studies abroad.’  (Li 2012: 62)

Apart from the lexical and syntactic similarities between Example (38) and its ST, the mental and material processes underlined in Example (38) have their exact matches in the ST. What strikes me as deviant is the contrast between material processes 打开 ‘opened’ and 找 ‘looked for’ in (38c) and the desiderative mental process wanted in (18d). The former implies that the action signified by the metaphor opened the door was undertaken by the protagonist, whereas the latter indicates that it was his intention to carry out the action. The insertion of the adverbial 多方 ‘in many ways’ in (38a) and its repetition in (38c) are foregrounded, both emphasizing the multitude of the effort of the protagonist and his government in aiding the Chinese schools and their students. The repetition constitutes overevaluation in contrast to the neutrality in their English counterparts (the financial aid and to find ways), indicative of a glorifying effort to project a positive image of the protagonist. The repetitious 我 ‘wo’ in the Chinese text, deviant from the null-subject dominant Chinese syntax, is at odds with the collectivism-dominant Chinese culture. While the repetition of the first-person pronoun I in the English texts is in line with the subject-dominant English syntactic structure and congruent in the individualism-oriented English culture, the repetition of wo underscores an emphasis on the protagonist’s contributions. The handling of two parentheses in the ST, later to become the University of Singapore and a grade behind Administrative Officers because their English was not good enough is worth a moment’s attention. The decision to omit the first parenthesis, which sets the context, could be stylistically oriented to enhance conciseness. The replacement of the second parenthesis by a null-subject construction (38d3) 超过马大生 ‘outnumbered the UM graduates’ is politically inclined. It indicates a strategy to please the new TT readers, who probably experienced the discrimination against them. The insertion of the comma in front of (38d3) is inappropriate, as it severs the semantic tie between Nantah graduates and outnumbered the UM graduates, resulting in semantic ambiguity and incoherence.

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The footnote 8 at the end of the English extract indicates the existence of ghost author in Challenge while affirming its ST status: 8Address

by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to members of Nanyang University, 28 October 1959; address by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to the Historical Society, Nanyang University, 10 February 1978 (Lee 2012: 77)

The omission of the footnote in Tiaozhan signals an effort to erase paratexts that could have jeopardized the book’s status as the autobiographer’s original work. More importantly, the exclusion of the footnote conceals the involvement of the implied translators and thus constitutes the erasure of translator, an observation consistent with our earlier findings. The differences identified between Example (38) and its STs give rise to a disparity between the matter-of-fact I-narrator and the self-applauding wo-narrator. As can be seen, despite the large extent of semantic and syntactic similarities between the STs and TTs, the increasing differences between Type III texts and their STs have already amounted to a change, albeit small, in the attitudes of both the narrator and protagonist. In general, a person’s style may vary from language to language, but his attitude is unlikely to swing between languages. It can be therefore concluded that the inconsistent attitude could have resulted from the implied translator’s failure to align himself deictically and emotionally with either the narrator or the character in his dedication to glorify the protagonist. The deviant linguistic features are thus the linguistic indicators of the “other” voice, the discursive presence of the implied translator. As the analysis of Examples (37) and (38) has shown, the implied translator skilfully rewrites some parts of the text in order to ensure political correctness and minimize any imminent negative impact on the protagonist’s image. While his professional experience equips him with such skilfulness, his ideological alignment with the Press drives him to glorify the protagonist in order to achieve the institutional goal to portray a positive image of the implied author. The translator’s manipulation creates a dual effect: his pleasing strategy orients the narrative to the TT readers whereas his “active” voice glorifies the protagonist and his policy. Notwithstanding the translator’s skilfulness, he has unavoidably left behind traces of his discursive presence in the form of the four deviant features.



Chapter 5.  Implied translator 165

5.6 Conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to address the abundant differences between Tiaozhan and Challenge. Drawing on Lefevere’s (1992) rewriting theory, I speculate that Tiaozhan is a form of rewriting under the influence of the implied translator’s understanding of poetics and ideological patronage. Schiavi’s (1996) insights on the narrative-communicative situation involving translation enables me to view the journalists and editors involved in the production of Tiaozhan collectively as an implied translator, who share similar stylistic traits and institutional affiliation. Based on Hermans’s (1996/2010) findings on the “other” voice, I have focused on the linguistic indicators of the implied translator’s discursive presence. Based on a stylistic analytical framework integrated with a DTS approach, my foregrounding and transitivity analysis of Type I texts, which hardly find any parallel in Challenge, has identified four deviant stylistic patterns, namely, overlexicalization, syntactic foreignness, circumlocution and overevaluation, and incoherence. The prevalence of these four features in Type III texts, which are close translations of their STs in Challenge, but not in the STs, points to the possibility that these features are the indicators of the “other” voice associated with the implied translator. Some deviant features, such as syntactic foreignness and incoherence in Type III texts have been observed to result from a direct transfer from English to Chinese governed by the “faithful” translation. Overlexicalization, circumlocution and overevaluation underline the implied translator’s deliberate effort to reorient the texts to new TT readers and to align with institutional goals so as to project a positive image of the protagonist. The subtle differences between the TT and ST, which have amounted to a slight change in the authorial attitude, affirms the speculation that the differences are caused by the implied translator. The deviant features unique to Tiaozhan are thus the linguistic indicators of the “other” voice belonging to the implied translator. In the event that a positive light is cast on the protagonist, as with Example (35) and (36), the “other” voice is faint and passive in the implied translator’s effort to produce a “faithful” translation. In face of any imminent threat that could undermine the positive image of the protagonist, the “other” voice intrudes into the communication by adapting the TTs, resulting in a pleasing “active” voice. The “other” voice of the implied translator has so far been found to be largely constrained to stylistic differences. The next chapter will focus on Type II texts, which contain some similarities as well as notable differences as compared to their parallel texts in Challenge to determine the impact of the implied translator’s involvement on point of view effects, a change of which that could possibly alter the image of the implied author.

Chapter 6

Translating the “other” Unreliable narrator and discordant voice

6.1 Introduction This chapter will continue the thread of examining the “other” voice in translated narratives. I have argued in Chapter 5 for the role of implied translator in translation and rewriting and identified the linguistic indicators of the “other” voice belonging to the implied translator in Tiaozhan. I will explore in this chapter how the “other” voice interacts with the character’s and the narrator’s point of view by concentrating on the point of view effect in Type II texts selected from Tiaozhan. Located between the two extremes of the spectrum of syntactic and semantic similarities between Tiaozhan and Challenge, Type II texts share similarities with their STs in some aspects but differ in others. Drawing on the discussion of constituting consciousness in Chapter 4, I will begin this chapter with a hypothesis of the “other” consciousness mediating among the narrator’s, character’s and TT readers’ consciousnesses. Given that irony and empathy are two important point of view effects unveiled through the analysis of Challenge in Chapter 4, I will examine how irony and empathy are dealt with in Tiaozhan. Effort will be made to further define irony in terms of fallible filter and unreliable narrator (Chatman 1990) as well as discordant voice (Cohn 2000). The first part of the foregrounding analysis will focus on ironies on the fallible filters that have been found in Challenge with close attention to any incongruity in the narration. The second part will delve deeper into the incongruities that call into question the narrator’s reliability and result in a discordant narration. 6.2 The “other” consciousness in translated narrative In Chapter 4, I have argued that the I-narrator in autobiography creates an illusion of mimesis within diegesis, even though he engages in a narrating selfmode. When the mimetic quality blends in well with the diegetic quality, as in the case of Challenge, readers’ consciousness is aligned to both the I-narrator’s and I-character’s consciousnesses. A harmony between the narrator, character and

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readers will foster a close narrator-reader relationship. With the added role of the implied translator, the relationship between the three participants could be altered. Hypothetically, in a translated narrative, the consciousness of the implied translator could be superimposed on the narrator’s and character’s consciousness, thus effecting changes in point of view. To match the “other” voice proposed by Hermans (1996/2010), which represents the discursive presence of the implied translator in a translated text, I refer to the inner consciousness underpinning the translator’s discursive presence as the “other” consciousness in this study. Like the “other” voice, the “other” consciousness is the product of the implied translator’s idiolect, his concept of how the poetics of autobiography in the TT culture should be and his understanding of the subject matter. The implied translator’s alignment with the goal and ideology advocated by the institution he works for (the Press), his professional instinct and his own ideological affiliation could also form part of his consciousness. Unlike the “other” voice which is revealed by linguistic indicators, the “other” consciousness is deeply concealed behind the surface structure. Based on Fludernik’s (1996: 49) stipulation that “all narrative is built on the mediating function of consciousness,” I posit that the “other” consciousness constitutes the fourth form of consciousness in a translated narrative, mediating among the three constituting consciousnesses belonging to the readers, narrator and protagonist, respectively (see 4.2.1), as illustrated in Figure 6.1.

Constituting Consciousness

Teller’s consciousness

Protagonist’s consciousness

The “other” Consciousness

Reader’s consciousness

Story-telling Schema

Viewing

Telling/Reflecting

Experiencing

Figure 6.1  Constituting consciousness and the “other” consciousness in a translated narrative

The addition of the “other” consciousness could lead to the shifts in point of view in a translated narrative including autobiography. Presumably, the extent of the shifts is insufficient to cause any significant change in the persona of the implied author portrayed by the autobiographer. In the event that the intervention of a manipulative

Chapter 6.  Translating the “other” 169



translator is substantial, there could be a major transformation in point of view. Under such circumstances, the wo-narrator neither recounts the experience of the protagonist faithfully nor presents his point of view felicitously, resulting in an altered persona of the implied author and distorted ideology. Figure 6.2 re-captures the two hypothetical narrative situations, proposed in Chapter 3, by factoring in the translator’s mediation. Real Author Implied Author

Translator

Narrator

Character

Real Author Implied Author

Translator

Narrator

Character

Figure 6.2  Hypothetical narrative situations I and II in a translated autobiography

Deixis, modality and speech and thought presentation, as discussed in Chapter 4, are fertile ground for exploring the interplay of the constituting consciousnesses. Deixis gives readers the access to the minds of characters and narrators (Fludernik 2009: 78). Modality characterizes the speaker’s subjectivity (Fowler 1996: 78–79). The modes of speech and thought presentation are expressive devices for orienting the narration to a character’s or a narrator’s point of view. It remains questionable whether an implied translator is conscious of the functions of these stylistic and narrative devices and capable of adapting them to the TT context. In order to gain some insights into this, I shall turn to the narrative

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situation in Tiaozhan. Given that the irony in Challenge is mostly targeted at the fallible filters without any trace of an unreliable narrator, any incongruity in dealing with them in Tiaozhan may call into question the “other” consciousness. To probe into the incongruities with regard to irony, the notions of fallible filter, unreliable narrator and discordant narration are highly relevant. 6.3 Fallible filter, unreliable narrator and discordant narration The concepts of “unreliable narrator” and “fallible filter” have been briefly discussed in Chapter 3. Let us now take a closer look at the concepts and add in a concept of discordant narration. Booth (1961: 158) introduces “fallible or unreliable narrator” to describe the narrative situation, where the implied author “carries the reader with him in judging the narrator.” As he elaborates, a reliable narrator “speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work,” whereas an unreliable narrator does not (Booth 1961: 158–159). Given that “most of the great reliable narrators indulge in large amounts of incidental irony,” Booth (1961: 159) cautions that “difficult irony is not sufficient to make a narrator unreliable” and neither is unreliability “a matter of lying.” Unreliability emerges only when “the narrator is mistaken, or he believes himself to have qualities which the author denies him” (Booth 1961: 159). Booth’s definition highlights an important aspect of an unreliable narration, in which the narrator is unconscious of unreliability and victimized by the author. This notion of unreliability is further developed by Chatman (1990), who distinguishes between two forms of “untrustworthiness” with different ironized targets. One of them is the unreliable narration, in which “the narrator’s account of the events (including what any character says or thinks) seems at odds with what the text implies to be the facts” (1990: 149). In other words, a secret ironic message is conveyed by the implied author to his implied reader at the expense of the narrator, as shown in Figure 6.3. Implied author → Narrator → Story (Characters) –→ Narratee → Implied Reader ∆

Figure 6.3  Secret “ironic” message on an unreliable narrator (Chatman 1990: 151)

The other kind of irony is fallible filtration, in which “a character’s perceptions and conceptions of the story events, the traits of the other characters and so on, seem at odds with what the narrator is telling or showing” (Chatman 1990: 149). The narrator invites the narratee to enjoy an irony at the expense of one of the characters (Chatman 1990: 151). In other words, the irony originates from the narrator and is targeted at the fallible filter, as indicated in Figure 6.4.



Chapter 6.  Translating the “other” 171

Implied author → Narrator → Story (Fallible Filter) → Narratee → Implied Reader ∆

Figure 6.4  Secret “ironic” message on a fallible filter (Chatman 1990: 151)

To further illustrate the differences between the two forms of “untrustworthiness,” Chatman (1990: 153–154) makes references to the distinction between speaker-conscious irony and speaker-unconscious irony, each of which consists of an ostensible message and an implicit message. Fallible filtration entails speaker-conscious irony, in which the speaker consciously practices the irony, signalling to his readers to privilege the underlying message over the ostensible message. Unreliable narration embodies speaker-unconscious irony in that the speaker is unaware of the disparity between the two messages and “delivers what he understands to be single, straight-forward message” (1990: 154), but the ostensible message is called into question by an underlying message intended by the author. The distinction between speaker-conscious and speaker-unconscious irony provides a method for attributing the irony to the narrator or the author depending on whether the narrator is conscious or unconscious of the irony. Such a distinction will also be drawn upon to determine whether the irony in the translated narrative is translator-conscious or translator-unconscious. An understanding of this gives a glimpse of the “other” consciousness. Cohn (2000: 307) deepens the understanding of unreliability by distinguishing between two kinds of unreliable fictional narration: “a factual kind of unreliability that is attributed to a mis- or disinformed narrator, unwilling or unable to tell what ‘actually’ happened”; an ideological kind that is attributed to a biased or confused narrator who induces his reader to look for a different meaning from behind the story. She names the ideological kind of unreliability as discordant narration: (Discordant narration) intends to signify the possibility for the reader to experience a teller as normatively inappropriate for the story he or she tells. It suggests the reader’s sense that the author intends his or her work to be understood differently from the way the narrator understands: in a way that can only be discovered by reading the work against the grain of the narrator’s discourse, providing it with a meaning, that, though not explicitly spelled out, is silently signalled to the reader behind the narrator’s back. It intimates as well that the narrator, far from being conceived as the author’s mouthpiece, is expressly and artfully created vocal organ whose ideology clashes with his or her tale. (Cohn 2000: 307)

A discordant narration in a fictional work can be diagnosed through textual features of a narrator’s subjective opinions by ways of verbalizing the judgement gnomically or adjectivally (Cohn 2000: 307–308). However, the textual presence of a narrator’s subjective opinions only highlights the possibility of discordant narration but gives

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“no inducement for understanding the narrator as a discordant voice” (2000: 308). The diagnosis of discordance is subject to two conditions: first, “the narrator’s normative views clash in some manner with the story he tells”; second, the reader is able to “attribute the biases and confusion inscribed in a work’s normative discourse to its author rather than to its narrator” by tracing the discordance to “the biographical, or generational-historical circumstances” (2000: 308). Cohn’s (2000) argument sheds light on the ideological significance in the unreliable narration and provides useful textual tools to diagnose discordant narration. Her restriction of discordance to ideological kind of unreliability is somewhat biased. As will be shown in Section 6.5, the accumulation of factual discrepancies and attitudinal inconsistence may give rise to ideological discordance. Cohn’s (2000) exclusion of autobiography from the diagnosis of “discordance” is also dogmatic. She states: …the diagnosis of discordance can apply only to a fictional narrative, not to the kind of story-telling (oral or written) that presumes to refer to real facts: though we often apply the term “unreliable” to voices we regard as wrong-headed in non-fictional works (historical, journalistic, biographical, or autobiographical), the narrator of such works is the author, the author is the narrator, so that we can not attribute to them a significance that differs from the one they explicitly proclaim.  (Cohn 2000: 307)

In the above statement, Cohn (2000) presumed the conflation of author and narrator in autobiography, which has already been disputed in Chapter 3. She has also ignored a translated narrative situation where the “other” voice belonging to the implied translator mediates between the implied author and narrator. In the next section, I set out to investigate how the implied translator in Tiaozhan deals with the ironies on the fallible filters which are found in Challenge in order to determine whether he is conscious of such ironies and whether there is any shift in point of view. 6.4 Fallible filters and translator-conscious irony My comparative analysis of selected examples from Type II texts of Tiaozhan and their STs have identified three scenarios pertaining to the irony on fallible filters. Given that the irony cast on a fallible filter is usually accompanied by the empathy for the protagonist evoked from readers, as shown in Chapter 4, I will also pay attention to empathy.

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6.4.1 Irony and empathy retained In the first scenario, the irony and empathy found in the STs have been largely retained in the TTs. Fallible filters manifest themselves in speech and thought presentation, as illustrated by the following three examples. In Example (39), a secret irony from the wo-narrator is cast on the character the desk clerk, who lacked geographical knowledge. The irony on the fallible filter in this example matches the implicit irony in its ST (Example (11)): (39) （a）柜台的人问我是中国人吗？ （b）1我说，2不是，3我是马来亚人。 （c）他说，那是哪里？ （d）我详细说，我来自新加坡，那是属于马 来亚的一个地方。（e）对方过后还是说，没关系，就写你是中国人。 （f）在他眼里，我跟中国人没有两样。（g）自那时起，我有了“我是 华人”的意识。  (Li 2012: 25) ‘(a) The desk clerk asked me (whether) I was a Chinese? (b) 1I said, 2I am not, 3I am a Malayan. (c) He said, what is that? (d) I added with more details, I come from Singapore, that is a place belonging to Malaya. (e) He later still said, never mind, I’ll put you down as Chinese (from China). (f) In his eyes, I was no different from the Chinese (from China). (g) From then on, I had the awareness of “I am an ethnic Chinese.” ’  (Li 2012: 25)

What strikes me as deviant is the series of problematic DS/IS in Example (39). In the absence of a colon and quotation marks, (a) appears to be an IS, but the question mark makes it a DS. Sentence (b) looks like a DS marked by the truncated structure 不是 ‘am not,’ but its DS status is cancelled by the absence of quotation marks. The same applies to (c) to (e). The omission of quotation marks, the replacement of colons by commas and the retention of question marks are instances of defective punctuation in Chinese (Huang and Liao: 2002: 155–156). The defective punctuation, reminiscent of the discursive presence of the implied translator found in Type I and III texts, is nevertheless absent in Example (11). The speech filler well and abridged language Chinese?, both of which convey a secret ironic message on the fallible filter in Example (11), are absent from Example (39). The lost irony is nevertheless made up for by the irony in the added statement (f) 在他眼里，我跟中国人没有两样 ‘In his eyes, I am no different from the Chinese (from China).’ The irony, targeting the character 柜台的人 ‘the counter clerk,’ seemingly explains the counter clerk’s view but secretly hints to readers his ignorance. The statement (f) can be considered as an FIT. It orients the narration to the protagonist’s point of view, enhancing experientiality that evokes empathy from the readers towards his dilemma. The fact that the irony is derived from the FIT in (f), which has no parallel in Example (11), pinpoints the implied translator as the source of the irony and empathy.

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The construction inside the quotation marks “我是华人” ‘“I am an ethnic Chinese”’ in (g) is foregrounded to accentuate the theme. Against the backdrop of absent quotation marks for DSs, the quotation marks do not denote a speech or quotation but function as an emphatic marker, drawing attention to the special connotation of being an ethnic Chinese. A careful reader would be alerted to the sudden switch from 中国人 ‘the Chinese from China,’ repeated in (a), (e) and (f) to 华人 ‘ethnic Chinese’ in (g). Given the semantic ambiguity inherent in the polysemic English proper noun Chinese, which means either the Chinese from China or the ethnic Chinese in Example (15), the decision to switch from 中国人 ‘the Chinese from China’ to 华人 ‘ethnic Chinese’ in Example (39) is not accidental but purposeful. In declaring “I am an ethnic Chinese,” the wo-narrator implicitly refutes the counter clerk’s misconception that the protagonist was the Chinese from China, while emphasizing the protagonist’s identity as the ethnic Chinese, the social and cultural identity Lee and his allies endeavour to construct for the Singaporean Chinese. These features, uniquely found in the TT, reinforce the book’s didactic mission to establish the social identity of the ethnic Chinese. The defective punctuations, however, alert readers to the discursive presence of the implied translator, attributing these features to the implied translator rather than the narrator. Readers, with the awareness of the mediating consciousness from the translator, tend to view from a distal position. Example (40) also illustrates the transfer of irony and empathy from its ST (Example (26)). Differing from the irony denoted by modal expressions in its ST, the irony on the fallible filter in Example (40) is deeply concealed and realized through DSs. Unlike the enhanced diegetic quality in Example (39), mimetic quality is strengthened in Example (40). However, this does not warrant a closer narrator-reader relationship due to the injection of the “other” voice: (40) （a）之后李昭铭去了南大，我叫杜进才接掌教育部，并叫蔡崇语在他 监督下掌管这个部门。（b）但杜进才说：“要嘛由我全权掌管，要嘛 不！”（c）在这个情况下，我只好说：“好，我来管就是。”（d）14 天 后，我宣布出任教育部长。 （e）1975 年，教育部换部长如走马灯。（f）16 月李昭铭离开，杜进才 接任 13 天后，2我接手四个月，蔡善进于 1975 年 10 月20 日再从我手中 接过棒子。  (Li 2012: 60) ‘(a) Later on, Lee Chiaw Meng went to Nantah, (so) I asked Toh Chin Chye to take over the Education Ministry, and asked Chai Chong Yii to be in charge of this department under his supervision. (b) But Toh Chin Chye said: “Either I am fully in charge, or (I am) not!” (c) Under such circumstances, I could only say: “Alright, I will take over.” (d) Fourteen days later, I announced that I myself would take over as Education Minister.



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(e) In 1975, the change of the Education Minister is like the revolving lamp. (f) 1In June, Lee Chiaw Meng left, (and) 13 days after Toh Chin Chye took over, 2I was in charge for four months, before Chua Sian Chin took up the baton from me on 20 October 1975.’  (Li 2012: 60)

The DSs (b) and (c) in Example (40) simulate the conversation between the protagonist and the character Toh. Unlike the problematic DS observed in the earlier example, the DSs in this example adhere to the standard Chinese DS forms with the appropriate use of quotation marks and colons. This could suggest that the implied translator encompasses a different translator who has a better command of Chinese grammar than the one involved in the earlier example. The colloquial language in the form of the truncated structure 要嘛不 ‘or not,’ speech-final particles 就是 ‘jiushi’ and the parallelism 要嘛…要嘛… ‘either… or’ add a dramatic flavour to the tense political situation. The dramatic effect contributes to experientiality that activates readers’ experiencing schemata. The exclamation mark (!) in DS (b) strengthens Toh’s insistent tone, heightening the tension, whereas the full stop in DS (c) signals the protagonist’s moderate attitude. The contrast between the protagonist’s modest attitude and Toh’s stern tone is likely to evoke readers’ empathy for the protagonist. The comparison of Examples (40) and (26) singles out (40c) as an addition and the omission of (26a–c). In openly stating Toh’s weaknesses, (26a–c) casts an irony on Toh with an underlying message that Toh was not an ideal candidate for the Minister of Education and thus justifies the protagonist’s decision to ask Chai Chong Yii to assist Toh. Their absence in Example (40) avoids the subjective judgment or the latent prejudice in the wo-narrator but erases the irony on the fallible filter Toh. A secret irony, however, arises from the insertion of prepositional phrase in (40a) 在他监督下 ‘under his supervision’ and the DS (40c). The addition of (40c) activates readers’ schemata of a bickering between two friends, animating the atmosphere to counteract the tension between the characters. The insertion of the preposition phrase in (40a) hints at the irrationality of Toh, who rejected the appointment because he wanted to be solely in charge, even if Chai Chong Yii was to be supervised by him. The subtle additions, alerting readers to the protagonist’s dilemma, are likely to evoke readers’ empathy for the protagonist. The irony is more tacit than that in (26a–c), evading the explicit accusation of Toh. Given Toh’s strong rapport with the Chinese community in Singapore, the deeply concealed irony could be a strategy to re-orient the narrative to the target culture that largely empathizes with Toh. 1 1. Toh has a strong support from the local Chinese community and helped Lee in a power struggle between two factions of the People’s Action Party in the 1960s.

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Despite the mimetic quality in the first paragraph, redundancy is manifested in the second paragraph of Example (40), leading to incoherence. For instance, (f 1) partially repeats (a) whereas (f 2) reiterates (d). While (e) and (f 1), which have no parallel in Example (26), could underscore the translator’s strategy to summarize the situation, (e) interrupts the information flow, leading to incoherence. Such incoherence, largely in line with the earlier observation, is the linguistic indicator of the “other” voice belonging to the implied translator. The simile 如走马灯 ‘like the revolving lamp’ and metaphor 接过棒子 ‘took up the baton,’ absent from the ST, are also consistent with the manifestation of figure of speech in Type I and III texts, indicative of the kind of poetics favoured by the translator. With the awareness of the “other” consciousness belonging to the implied translator, readers tend to distance themselves emotionally from the narrator or protagonist. Example (41) adopts a similar strategy as Example (40) in dealing with the ironic message emanating from the narrator and targeted at the fallible filter. It entails enhanced mimetic quality derived from the psycho-narration. The irony, embedded in the DS and psycho-narration, is largely parallel to that in its ST (Example (13)): (41) （a）一天晚上，他的中国同行问他：“新加坡有多长时间的历史？40 年？我们有5000 年了。你们想教我？” （b）他们已经从我们这里学到了 一些，相信自己更优秀。（c）所以我说，好吧，交给他们。（d）说心 里话，其实他们说的也没错，因为他们选择派到苏州的人，比我们派去 的人水准更高。（e）1我们送到那里的每个人，2他们都有两个人对应， 就像篮球赛一样，3而且这两人都比他聪明，4所以很快就跟上来了。 （f）因此，他们并不真的认为我们优秀。（g）1他们认为，2我们领先 是因为以前他们被孤立了，3而我们没有，4才更快学会了他们所要学习 的东西。（h）这是他们的想法。  (Li 2012: 237) ‘(a) One evening, his Chinese counterparts asked him: “Hong long is the history of Singapore? 40 years? Ours is 5000 years. You want to teach me?” (b) They have already learnt something from us here and believed they were superior. (c) So I said, alright, hand (it) over to them. (d) Frankly speaking, what they said was not far wrong, because the persons they chose and sent to Suzhou were better than the persons we sent. (e) 1For every person we sent there, 2they had two to mark him like in a basketball match, 3and these two persons were smarter than him, 4so they overtook him very quickly. (f) Hence, they did not really think we were superior. (g) 1They thought, 2we were ahead of them because they had been isolated before, 3but we were not, 4and thus acquired what they wanted to learn faster. (h) This is their thought.’  (Li 2012: 237)

A deviant feature in this example is the juxtaposition of an undisputable DS (a) and a problematic DS/IS (c). The sentence-final particle 吧(ba), which is called the advisative particle in Chinese linguistics (Li and Thompson 1989: 308), is a typical



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conversation marker in Chinese, categorizing (c) as a DS. The absence of the colon and quotation marks, however, signifies (c) as an IS. The pair (a) and (c) simulates the dialogue between the characters, his Chinese counterparts, and protagonist, as if (c) is the rejoinder of (a). The characters’ speech in (a) sounds aggressive and arrogant, whereas the protagonist’s speech in (c) is modest and candid. The contrast between the characters’ arrogance and protagonist’s modesty signals to the readers an underlying ironic message on the fallible characters, his Chinese counterparts, who thought highly of themselves. A comparison of Examples (41) and (17) identifies a similar irony on the fallible filters but different ways of signalling the irony to the readers. The consciousness of the protagonist is reinforced through the orality and generality in (41c) 好吧， 交给他们 ‘alright, hand over to them,’ which has no equivalence in Example (17). The replacement of the spatial deixis Singapore and the Chinese in Example (17) by the person deixis 我们 ‘we’ and 他们 ‘they’ in Example (41) indicates a higher degree of subjectivity in the latter than in the former. The enhanced mimetic quality should have assigned the readers more access to the protagonist’s point of view, encouraging their empathy for the protagonist. The mimetic quality is nevertheless countermanded by the incoherence and syntactic foreignness. For instance, incoherence manifests itself in the semantic ambiguity in (e) and (g) caused by an inappropriate use of null subjects. The long, convoluted and rambling sentences (e) and (g) also remind us of the syntactic foreignness as a result of a faithful translation strategy, adhering to the syntactic structures of (17d–f). The incoherence and syntactic foreignness points towards the unwanted presence of the implied translator in his effort to manipulate the readers into viewing the secret irony in favour of the protagonist. The awareness of the implied translator’s consciousness impedes the readers’ emotional alignment to the protagonist. All three examples of Type III texts analysed in this section have retained the secret irony on the fallible filter cast by the I-narrator. The retention of the irony demonstrates that the translator is aware of the underlying ironic message intended by the I-narrator. He skilfully deploys various narrative devices to transfer the speaker-conscious irony in the STs to the TTs in such a way that the new readers understand it from an angle favourable to the protagonist. In this regard, the secret irony intended by the narrator can be said to be translator-conscious. Although the translator is “infallible” in dealing with the irony, he has left behind traces of his discursive presence revealed by various linguistic indicators. As a result, despite the enhanced mimetic quality as in Examples (40) and (41), readers are alerted to the “other” consciousness mediating between the narrator’s and protagonist’s consciousnesses, hence viewing from a distance. The changes in point of view have nevertheless not amounted to any significant distortion.

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6.4.2 Irony and empathy created In the two examples under examination in this section, the irony that is non-existent or implicit in their STs has been created. Unlike the examples analysed in the earlier section, the manipulation of the irony runs the risk of falsifying the narrator’s intention, calling into question the implied translator’s “trustworthiness.” In Example (42), explicit irony is cast on the protagonist’s political opponent, Lam Tian, but such an irony is hardly detected in its ST, Example (24): (42) （a）另一名和我同样是客家人的民主党候选人蓝天是当铺老板，华校 出身，在中华总商会代表客家社群。（b）他公然向我挑战，要我跟 他以华语或方言进行辩论。（c）他说，华族的语文我读不来，也写不 来，没有能力代表华族选民。（d）我当然没法接下来他的战书，感到 窘迫极了。  (Li 2012: 30) ‘(a) Another Democratic Party’s candidate, a Hakka like me, Lam Tian, is a pawnshop owner, (who was) educated in Chinese-medium school (and) represented the Hakka community in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. (b) He openly challenged me and wanted me to debate with him in Chinese or dialect. (c) He said, the language of the ethnic Chinese, neither could I read, nor could I write, (so) I could not represent the Chinese voters. (d) I certainly could not accept his order of war and felt deeply embarrassed.’  (Li 2012: 30)

Example (42) exhibits two distinct formal features. First, it displays semantic sophistication by means of value-laden expressions such as 公然 ‘openly’ in (b) and 窘迫 ‘embarrassed’ in (d). The metaphor 战书 ‘order of war’ adds to the literariness. Secondly, the thematic-fronting structure, the colloquial expressions and parallelism in the IS in (c) 华族的语文我读不来, 也写不来 ‘the language of the ethnic Chinese, neither could I read, nor could I write’ constitute foregrounding against the background of the largely formal language. It appears to stress the protagonist’s constraints in Chinese but conveys a secret ironic message on Lam Tian’s arrogance. The irony is reinforced by the contrast between the derogatory adverb 公然 ‘openly’ revealing Lam Tian’s aggressive attitude and the neutral adjective 窘 迫 ‘embarrassed’ signifying the protagonist’s embarrassment. A sense of contempt is concealed in the NP 当铺老板 ‘the pawnshop owner’ in (a), which can be seen as a strategy to discount Lam Tian’s credibility. Conversely, the I-narrator in Example (24), which is marked by its plain and neutral language, remains objective by making plain the advantages of the character Lam Tian over the protagonist in (24c) Unlike me, he spoke Chinese fluently. The I-narrator appears truthful and sincere by sharing his emotions with his readers in (24f) 1I was deeply embarrassed 2although I tried not to show it. The omission of



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(24c) and (24f2) in Example (42) reveals an effort to conceal the sense of inferiority in the protagonist and points to the implied translator’s intervention. The discursive presence of the implied translator is indicated by the lengthy and complex NP in (a), which remind us of the syntactic foreignness as a result of transferring the semantic and syntactic features from a complex English NP containing a relative clause as a pre-modifier. The choice of 华族的语文 ‘the language of the ethnic Chinese’ instead of 华文 ‘Chinese language,’ corresponding with 华族 选民 ‘ethnic Chinese voters,’ makes strategic use of overlexicalization to serve the purpose of educating the readers on the importance of Chinese language. Overall, Example (42) casts a mocking wo-narrator who hints to his reader to enjoy an irony at the expense of Lam Tian. Given the absence of such an irony in Example (24), the irony on the fallible filter is likely to be consciously implemented by the politically charged implied translator in his effort to discredit Lam Tian and evoke empathy from TT readers towards the protagonist. The implied translator’s discursive presence indicated by syntactic foreignness and overlexicalization, however, alerts the readers to the additional layer of the mediating consciousness in the narration. Similarly, Example (43) embodies a secret irony that is not detected in its ST (Example (15)). Unlike the explicit irony in Example (42), the irony on the fallible filter Toh Chin Chye in Example (43) is tacit, “turn(ing) on the reader’s sharing of the narrator’s attitude toward the character’s misguided attitudes” (Chatman 1990: 152): (43) （a）就以林金山和杜进才两位同僚为例，他们的方言比华语说得 好。（b）他们和我讨论这件事，论点很有说服力，没有反驳余地。 （c）杜进才说：“我们是中国南方移民，很自然说的是南方方言，何苦 要迫使自己学习中国北方话呢？” （d）他还举出一个尖锐的例子，说明 两三代之间的联系将随方言消失而丧失。（e）1他说，2他的女儿在学校 学习英语和华语，3却不会说福建话，4当她到马来亚太平去探望祖母的 时候，5两人不能交谈，6这是很大的损失。（f）我告诉他，我承认这是 损失，但这是无法不付出的代价，是没有办法避免的。（g）我们不希 望孩子们因为语文问题，失去优势。  (Li 2012: 152) ‘(a) Take Lim Kim San and Toh Chin Chye for example, they spoke dialects better than Mandarin. (b) When they discussed this issue with me, their arguments were very convincing, without any room for counter-argument. (c) Toh Chin Chye said: “we are southern Chinese immigrants, and naturally speak the southern dialects. Why are we forcing a northern Chinese dialect on ourselves?” (d) He even illustrated his point with a sharp example of how links between generations would be lost along with the disappearance of dialect. (e) 1He said, 2his daughter learnt English and Mandarin in school 3but could

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not speak Mandarin, 4(and) when she visited her grandmother in Taiping in Malaysia, 5they could not communicate, 6(and) this was a huge loss. (f) I told him, I agree that this was a loss, but this was the price we mustn’t not pay and was unavoidable. (g) We do not want our children to lose their competitive edge because of the language issue.’  (Li 2012: 152)

Unlike the I-narrator in Example (15), who is upfront about the resistance from the characters Lim Kim San and Toh Chin Chye, the wo-narrator in Example (43) is evasive about such confrontation. Starting with a compliment on the two characters in (a) and (b) and ending with IS in (f) and NRT in (g), the wo-narrator refrains from explicitly refuting Toh’s argument. Nevertheless, expressions with negative connotation (损失 ‘loss,’ 失去 ‘lose’), negation (是没有办法避免的 ‘is unavoidable’) and double negation (无法不付出的代价 ‘the price we mustn’t not pay’) implicitly counter Toh’s argument. These lexical features are instances of overevaluation, functioning to emphasize the importance of the policy that promotes Mandarinspeaking and discourages the use of dialects. The defective collocation in 尖锐的 例子 ‘a sharp example’ could have been resulted from a “faithful” translation of a poignant example in (15d), revealing the implied translator’s discursive presence. An irony emerges in (43b) through the foregrounding of two rhyming phrases with the same meaning: 很有说服力 (heng3you3shuo1fu2li4) ‘very convincing’ and 没有反驳余地 (mei2you3fan3boy2u2di4) ‘undisputable.’ They are instances of overlexicalization, which seemingly affirm Toh’s argument in (c) to (e) but actually convey a secret ironic message targeting Toh. The ironic message in (43b), which has no parallel in Example (15), is attributable to the translator, whose discursive presence is indicated by overlexicalization, overevaluation and defective collocation. By implanting the secret irony on Toh in Example (43), the narrator guides readers to question the validity of Toh’s argument. The analysis of Examples (42) and (43) is consistent with the preliminary findings in Chapter 5 about the skilful implied translator, who strenuously safeguards the positive image of the protagonist in the face of resistance or doubt from other characters. He creates ironies to hint to the readers on the misguided attitude of the fallible filters. The ironies, absent in the STs and present in the TTs, may be implanted by the implied translator to influence the readers to view the fallible filters negatively and thus empathize with the protagonist. The imposition of the irony on the fallible filters can nonetheless incur changes in the wo-narrator’s attitude, leading to the falsification of the implied author’s intention.

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6.4.3 Irony and empathy erased Contrary to the created ironies in the foregoing examples, the ironies intended by the I-narrator in the STs are lost in the two examples under examination in this section. Example (44), parallel to Example (1), erases a hidden sarcasm cast on the characters the Chinese from the West Indies by the I-narrator. The erasure of sarcasm could probably be driven by political considerations: (44) （a）1我在伦敦的时间虽然不长，2可是经常出入伦敦戈登广场 (Gordon Square) 一个叫中国协会 (China Institute) 的体验，3却让我终生难忘，4并 成为影响我后来自己努力不懈学习华语， 以及为新加坡人积极推动双语 教育的动力。 （b）这个中国协会，是英国人用八国联军的庚子赔款资助的。（c）俱乐 部开放给来自全世界的华人，为穷学生提供免费的下午茶。（d）我因 此遇见世界各地的华人，华族文化失落程度最大的是来自西印度群岛 的华人。（e）我那时觉得我绝对不能跟他们一样，我也开始有了一股 不会讲华语或不懂华文的很严重的失落感。（f）我决定以后绝不让孩 子重蹈覆辙。  (Li 2012: 24) q44

‘(a) 1Though I did not spend much time in London, 2my experience of frequenting a place in Gordon Square (Gordon Square) called the China Institute (China Institute) stayed with me for the rest of my life, 3and became the motivation for me to learn Chinese diligently 4and actively promote bilingual education for Singaporeans. (b) The China institute was financed from the Gengzi Indemnity of the eight-power alliances. (c) The club was open to the ethnic Chinese from all over the world, and provided free high tea for poor students. (d) I therefore met the Chinese from all parts of the world, (among whom) those with the largest extent of deculturalization were the Chinese from the West Indies. (e) I then felt I would absolutely not want to be like them, (and) I also began to feel a strong sense of loss about not being able to speak Chinese or understand Chinese. (f) I decided I would from then on never allow (my) children to repeat the same mistake.’  (Li 2012: 24)

Example (44) exhibits formal distinctiveness in the aspects of lexical choice, coherence and syntactic structure. At the lexical level, the language is formal in favour of idiomatic expressions such as 终生难忘 ‘stayed with me for the rest of my life,’ 努力不懈 ‘diligently’ and 重蹈覆辙 ‘repeat the same mistake.’ Coherence is mainly achieved through conjunctions, such as 虽然…可是 ‘though,’ 却 ‘but’, 并 ‘and,’ 以及 ‘as well as’ and 因此 ‘therefore.’ Syntactically, the opening statement (a) is markedly long, encompassing complex NPs with lengthy pre-modifiers functioning

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as the subject in (a2) and the object in (a4). Resembling an English NP post-modified by relative clauses, it is syntactically awkward in Chinese. The syntactic foreignness signifies the translator’s discursive presence. The English words beside the Chinese proper nouns such as 伦敦戈登广场 (Gordon Square) and 中国协会 (China Institute) are the paratexts of self-referentiality that reveals the “other” voice (Herman 1996/2010, see 5.2). The ending statement (f), short and simple, deviating from the rest of complex sentences, is foregrounded. The foregrounding accentuates the theme of the autobiography: the lack of proficiency in the Chinese language gives rise to a sense of loss in a person’s cultural and ethnic identity. A comparison of Examples (44) and (1) has identified two omissions in Example (44) that are politically significant. The first is the omission of the detailed descriptions such as the background about Gengzi Indemnity in (1c) and the description of the Chinese from the West Indies in (1i). Through the choice of Boxer’s Rebellion 2 in Example (1), the I-narrator assumes a pro-western worldview and an uncritical stance towards imperialism. The replacement of Boxer’s Rebellion with 庚子赔款 ‘Genzi Indemnity’ in Example (44) tactfully evades criticism from the TT readers, who are largely attuned to the anti-imperialism mentality. The second omission concerns the mild sarcasm about the West Indie’s poor English in (1i) they spoke in singsong West Indian “English.” The ironic message might have been eliminated to eschew racial discrimination and to align with the overall formal and neutral tone in the passage. The lost irony, however, reduces the reading pleasure and erases the witty quality of the narrator. As a result, the TT readers are presented with a serious wo-narrator who lacks a sense of humour, unlike the witty I-narrator. The irony that exists in the ST but is erased in the TT could result from the translator-conscious effort to suppress the sarcasm on the Chinese from the West Indies and portray the positive image of the protagonist. The awareness of the mediating consciousness belonging to the translator prevents the readers from entering the consciousness of the protagonist or the narrator. In a similar vein, the removal of the secret irony originating from the I-narrator on the character my father in Example (2) from Example (45) is motivated by ideological considerations. The example also contains factual discrepancies that point to an indiscreet translator: (45) （a）母亲是个有智慧而且个性坚强的女人。（b）从小，她总是不厌 其烦地提醒我别像父亲那样, 出身富家子弟却无一技之长。（c）130 年 代世界经济大萧条，祖父的事业受到打击，2家道中落后，只有中学学 历的父亲因为没有专业资格，先在蚬壳公司管理店面，后来负责管理 新山、岜株巴辖、土都浪等地的仓库。 2. To many pro-China readers, Boxer Rebellion denotes imperialism and a sense of humiliation in view of the historical events associated the term represents. The term “boxer” entails contempt.



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（d）这件事给我的启示就是，为免过朝不保夕的生活，最好去学一门 专业。（e）所谓专业，有三种选择：医学、法律、工程。（f）新加 坡有医学院，却没有法学院和工学院。（g）我不喜欢学医，如果学工 程，将来也必须为他人工作。（h）法律却可以自立门户，是一种自由 的行业。（i）后来父亲对自己年轻时不努力也感到后悔，他极力劝我 搞专业。（j）所以在 1936 年，我 13 岁升上莱佛士书院那年，已经立 志要当一名律师。  (Li 2012: 21) ‘(a) My mother is an intelligent and persevering woman. (b) Since I was young, she patiently reminded me not to follow the footstep of my father, who was a rich man’s son but without any special skill. (c) 1In the 1930s during the Great Depression, my grandfather’s business was badly hit so the family lost its fortune, 2(and) my father, who had only secondary school education, without any professional qualification, first managed a shop house in the Shell Oil Company, and later was responsible of managing the depots at Johor, Batu Pahat and Stulang, etc. (d) This episode dawned on me that in order not to lead an unsecured life, it is better to study for a profession. (e) The so-called professions consist of three options: medicine, law and engineering. (f) Singapore had medical schools but did not have law schools or engineering schools. (g) I did not like medicine and if I studied engineering, I had to work for others in future. (h) Practicing law could allow (me) to set up (my) own business, and is a profession with freedom. (i) Later on, my father was full of remorse for not studying hard when he was young and urged me to specialize in a profession. (j) Therefore, in 1936, when I was 13 years old and enrolled in Raffles Institution, I had already made up my mind to be a lawyer.’  (Li 2012: 21)

There is a stark contrast between the characters 母亲 ‘my mother’ and 父亲 ‘my father’ in the profusion of value-laden expressions. Phrases with positive connotations describe my mother such as 有智慧 ‘intelligent,’ 个性坚强 ‘persevering’ and 不 厌其烦地 ‘patiently.’ Conversely, negativity is associated with my father as in 别像 父亲 ‘not to follow the footstep of my father,’ 无一技之长 ‘without any special skill,’ 没有专业资格 ‘without any professional qualification,’ and 不努力 ‘not studying hard.’ These value-laden expressions remind us of overlexicalization and overevaluation, pervasive in Tiaozhan and indicative of the “other” voice of the translator. The contrast highlights the protagonist’s family’s dilemma and invents an edifying story that inspires readers and evokes their empathy. The wo-narrator consistently adopts a serious and assertive tone without any trace of irony. Conversely, the I-narrator in Example (2) exhibits a mockery and disrespectful attitude through the use of the exclamation alas and the person deixis his father. Their omission in Example (45) removes the irony on my father, which is incompatible to the target culture with “the Confucian political and moral tradition” that encourages paternalism and authoritarianism (Milne and Mauzy 1990: 111).

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The addition of (i) about my father’s remorse and advice mitigates the adverse effect arising from the negative image of my father. The statement heightens the values of diligence endorsed by the TT culture: if you do not study hard, you will regret after you grow up. The emphasis on his parents’ involvement in the protagonist’s development also lends itself well to the collectivism favoured by the TT culture’s Confucian tradition. The insertion of (i) between the reasoning in (e) to (h) and the decision in (j), however, interrupts the logical link, creating incoherence that reveals the “other” voice from the translator. The lost irony can therefore be seen as a deliberate effort of the translator to orient the narrative to the TT readers. Such a move is ideological significant. Two factual discrepancies concern the job of my father and the location of his workplace. While (2f) states storekeeper as my father’s job, (45c) says that his job was to manage a shop ‘管理店面,’ equivalent to a shopkeeper. 3 Making a reference to the earlier memoirs (Lee 1998: 46; Li 1998: 51), I have noted a consistency in designating my father as a storekeeper. This suggests a lapse in (45c). Additionally, the subordination of Batu Pahat and Stulang to Johor in (2g) indicates that Batu Pahat and Stulang are located in Johor, but the coordination among them in (45c), that is, 新山、岜株巴辖、土都浪等地 ‘Johor, Batu Pahat and Stulang, etc.,’ implies that they are three independent places. The fact that Batu Pahat and Stulang are districts in the state of Johor brings to light the second inaccuracy in (45c). The factual discrepancies reveal the indiscretion of the implied translator, although severe distortion is not triggered. The analysis of Examples (44) and (45) has once again uncovered the “other” consciousness belonging to the implied translator, who manipulates the irony on the fallible filter. He erases the irony in order to make the text politically correct and ideologically appropriate in the TT culture. In so doing, he injects his own voice into the narration by imposing his consciousness onto the three constituting consciousnesses belonging to the character, narrator and readers. In this sense, the irony imposed on the fallible filter is translator-conscious. Needless to say, the mediating consciousness of the translator alerts the TT readers to the translator’s intervention, hindering their access to the consciousness of the protagonist and narrator. In all examples analysed in Section 6.4, the translator’s manipulation of irony has not yet amounted to a significant distortion of the narrator’s point of view and misrepresentation of the implied author’s persona. Unless reference is made to their STs and except for minute factual discrepancies, no self-evident contradiction 3. The interpretation of storekeeper as shopkeeper is usually applicable to American English, not the British English adopted by the book.

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has been found in these examples. The analysis of more Type II examples in the next section, however, has identified the factual, attitudinal and ideological contradictions that cast irony on the unreliable narrator, resulting in significant shifts in point of view. 6.5 Unreliable narrator and translator-unconscious irony Self-evident contradictions manifested themselves in the examples to be analysed in this section. The contradictions undermine the reliability of the wo-narrator, prompting me to search for differences between what the implied author intends and what the narrator tells or shows. The ST-TT comparison leads to the discovery of misrepresented facts, attitudes and ideology. The pervasive linguistic indicators of the “other” voice in Type II texts consistently pinpoint the implied translator as the source of the unreliability. Based on Currie’s (2010: 156) assertion that an ironist is more unreliable than the unreliable speaker he is ironizing, an irony-prone implied translator, as I argue, could be more unreliable than an unreliable narrator. In exploiting irony and empathy, he may have produced factual discrepancy, attitudinal inconsistency and ideological discordance, the accumulation of which results in a discordant narration. 6.5.1 Factual discrepancy I will illustrate how factual discrepancies arise from incongruities within the TTs and cross-checks with reference to their STs. As compared to the factual imprecision identified in Example (45), Example (46), which has some parallels in Example (8), contains a larger extent of factual discrepancy. In recounting the protagonist’s struggle with language in his early years, the wo-narrator constructs the positive image of my mother, who resisted the matriarchy represented by the character my maternal grandmother or, simply, my grandmother: (46) （a）1外祖母关心我的教育，2因此，从小我就开始了跟双语困难纠缠 搏斗的日子。（b）1929 年我还不满 6 岁，她坚持我跟其他渔民的孩子 一样，到住家后面一所亚答屋私塾， 跟一个独居在那里的华文老师学 华文。（c）1这个老师也许没有受过太好的教育，2他说的福建话比华 语多，3并且只教我们死背一些不明白意思的词语，还要我们学写毛笔 字，让我很苦恼。（d）1我向母亲诉苦，2她仍要我接受华文教育，3把 我转送去如切一带的俊源学校。

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（e）俊源学校是华校，老师全以华语教课，我是个来自全讲英语和峇 峇马来语家庭的学生，对这样的华文教育很快就招架不住。（f）同学 不会说英语，说的华语都带着浓浓的方言口音。（g）几个星期后， 我 再恳求母亲替我转校。（h）1母亲违背了外祖母的意愿，2把我转到德 乐英校去。（i）1这所学校鼓励学生说英语，隔壁直落古楼马来学校很 多马来学生也转到这里。（j）1在那里，我学得如鱼得水， 只用六年时 间就完成七年的小学教育，毕业考到全校第一名，2中学进入当时只录 取最优秀学生的莱佛士书院(Raffles Institution)。  (Li 2012: 20) ‘(a) My maternal grandmother paid attention to my education, 2therefore, since young I have started my days of struggling with bilingual difficulties. (b) In 1929 when I was less than 6 years old, she insisted I join other fishermen’s children at a private school behind our house in an attap hut and learn Chinese from the Chinese-language teacher who lived there alone. (c) 1The teacher, perhaps due to lack of good education, spoke more Hokkien than Mandarin, 2and only taught us to memorize words that we had no idea of what they meant, 3and also made us learn to write Chinese calligraphy, which made me feel very frustrated. (d) 1I complained to my mother, 2 (but) she still wanted me to receive Chinese education, and 3had me sent to Choon Guan School in Joo Chiat. (e) Choon Guan School was a Chinese-medium school, (and) the teachers all taught the lessons in Chinese, (and) I was a student from a family only speaking English and Baba Malay, and very soon was unable to cope with such Chinese education. (f) My fellow students could not speak English and the Mandarin they spoke had strong dialect accents. (g) After a few weeks, I again pleaded with my mother to transfer me to another school. (h) 1My mother defied my maternal grandmother’s intention 2and had me transferred to Telok Kurau English School. (i) This school encouraged the students to speak English, and many Malay students from the Telok Kurau Malay School in the next compound transferred here too. (j) 1There, I learnt very quickly like fish swimming in the water and finished the 7-year primary school education in 6 years, graduating as the first top pupil in the school 2and enrolled in Raffles Institution (Raffles Institution), which then only admitted the best students.’  (Li 2012: 20)

Example (46) consists of two contradictory statements concerning who made the decision to transfer the protagonist to Choon Guan Chinese School and later to Telok Kurau English School. The statement (d) 我向母亲诉苦，她仍要我接受华 文教育 ‘I complained to my mother, but she still wanted me to receive the Chinese education’ implies that my mother was the one who insisted on my Chinese education. It, however, contradicts (h1) 母亲违背了外祖母的意愿 ‘My mother defied my grandmother’s intention’: if it were my mother who wanted the protagonist to receive the Chinese education as stated in (d), then she did not have to defy my

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grandmother’s intention. Such a contradiction prompts us to probe its source by making reference to its ST (Example (8)). The factual discrepancies become inevitable through the ST-TT comparison. While the wo-narrator says that my mother wanted the protagonist to receive Chinese education and sent him to Choon Guan School in 46 (d2), the I-narrator states that my grandmother allowed a change of school but was adamant that I continue with my Chinese education in (8g). It remains vague with regard to who sent the protagonist to the school by means of passive voice in (8h) I was sent to Choon Guan School in Joo Chia Terrace…. Reference is then made to the relevant texts in Lee’s earlier autobiography in English and Chinese as shown in the table below. ST

TT

I complained bitterly to my mother, and she made representations to my grandmother. But a young woman of 22 could not overrule an experienced matriarch of 48 who had brought up nine children from two marriages, and was determined that I should receive some education in Chinese. My grandmother allowed a change of school, however, and I was sent to Choon Guan School in Joo Chiat Terrace. (Lee 1998: 35)

我向母亲诉苦，她就向外祖母提意见，但母亲 当时只是个 22 岁的少妇，外祖母却是个 48 岁 的经验丰富的家长，养大了两次婚姻所生的九 个子女，她决心让我受一些华文教育，于是把 我送到离家一英里，在如切台的浚源学校。 ‘I complained bitterly to my mother, so she made representations to my maternal grandmother, but my mother was just a 22-year-old young woman whereas my maternal grandmother was a 48-yearold experienced matriarch who had brought up nine children from two marriages, (and) she was determined that I should receive some education in Chinese, and had me sent to Choon Guan School in Joo Chiat Terrace.’ (Li 1998: 32)

Despite the slight differences in the ending statement in the above texts, both correspondingly declare my grandmother as the decision-maker, who wanted the protagonist to receive education in Chinese. The statements are consistent with Example (8) but different from Example (46). We can therefore infer that the factual imprecision occurs in Example (46). Three factors could possibly contribute to the imprecision. First, the implied translator made a mistake in converting the passive voice in I was sent to into the ba-construction 把我转送去 ‘having me sent to’ by adding a wrong subject 母 亲 ‘my mother.’ Secondly, the implied translator improved the linguistic cohesion in (46h) by replacing 祖母 ‘my grandmother’ with 母亲 ‘my mother,’ given the seemingly incoherent statement in the ST: I pleaded with my mother but it was my grandmother who allowed a change. Third, the implied translator wanted to emphasize the important role of my mother, following the contour of the positive image of my mother, as observed in Example (45). In highlighting the obduracy

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of my grandmother in (46h1), Example (46) portrays my mother as someone who bravely challenged the matriarchy. Another minor factual discrepancy identified through the ST-TT comparison arises from the different durations the protagonist spent in Chong Guan School: a few months in (8l) versus 几个星期 ‘a few weeks’ in (46g). The factual imprecision resides again in Example (46), if reference is made to Lee’s earlier autobiography in English and Chinese, both of which specify two to three months (Lee 1998: 35; Li 1998: 32). The contradiction could cause the readers to experience the wo-narrator as inappropriate for the story he tells, thus casting a secret irony on the mis- or dis-informed wo-narrator. It is unlikely for the author to have intended such a secret irony on the narrator, who is assumed to be identical with the implied author. In point of fact, the factual discrepancies deviate from the norms of Lee, who is known to be a “ruthless seeker of high standards” and “the model of perfection” (Josey 2012: 21). It is posited that the source of the secret irony on the wo-narrator is the translator, whose discursive presence is disclosed through various linguistic indicators. Indeed, the linguistic indicators of the “other” voice are manifested in Example (46). The topical sentence (a2), without any parallel in Example (8), is typical of the journalistic language that highlights the theme in the beginning. Despite the conjunction 因此 ‘therefore,’ it lacks intrinsic cause-effect relation with the preceding sentence (a1), giving rise to incoherence. Instances of overlexicalization are observed in (e) in the use of near-synonyms such as 华校 ‘Chinese school,’ 华语教课 ‘Chinese as the teaching medium’ and 华文教育 ‘Chinese education’ to highlight the dilemma of the protagonist. The simile 我学得如鱼得水 ‘I learnt very quickly like fish swimming in the water’ in (j) and the exhaustive description of the protagonist’s academic achievements are also reminiscent of overevaluation that emphasizes the protagonist’s eminence. The English words beside the proper noun 莱佛士书院 (Raffles Institution) in (j) is a textual deixis that maps the TT back to the ST and a paratext that gives a clue to the implied translator’s intervention. The implied translator’s interference is nevertheless convert and discreet. The consistency in designating 母亲 ‘my mother’ as the agent of the action 把我转送去 ‘had…sent’ in 46 (d3) and (h1) suppresses the factual imprecision. The omission of the statement in 12 (o2), which implies the low standard of the Malay school, is possibly driven by political considerations. Notwithstanding the discretion, the factual incongruities, together with the overlexicalization and incoherence, alert readers to the implied translator’s discursive presence. The irony that victimizes the wo-narrator is thus, in effect, cast on the implied translator. Unlike the translator-conscious irony cast on fallible filters identified in the earlier section, the implied translator seems to be unaware of the irony on the unreliable narrator. In his effort to exalt

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the intelligence of the protagonist and construct a positive image of my mother, the implied translator unintentionally creates the factual discrepancy that casts irony on the mis- or dis-informed wo-narrator, who fails to tell what “actually” happened. Although the unreliability derived from the factual imprecision causes the TT readers to be wary of what the wo-character tells, the discrepancies identified in Example (46) have not yet amounted to the attitudinal unreliability in the wo-narrator. The next two examples illustrate that factual discrepancies, coupled with attitudinal inconsistence, will heighten readers’ awareness of an unreliable narrator. 6.5.2 Attitudinal inconsistence As we all know, effective communication is fundamentally built upon consistency in facts and attitudes. Inconsistency, be it factual or attitudinal, may sow a distrust in the speaker and result in communication breakdown, as shall be seen in the subsequent examples. Example (47), corresponding to Example (12), depicts the interaction between the protagonist and the character Jiang Zemin (Jiang hereafter), China’s former president. Conversations in the form of DSs are marked features that enable the wo-narrator to optimize the mimetic quality in the narration. A contradiction, however, arises from the modality in the DSs, signalling the attitudinal unreliability in the narration: (47) （a）所以我认为讲华语能够在我和中国领导人之间营造某种融合关 系。 （b）在早期当他们对美国以及西方世界还缺乏足够了解的时候， 江泽民会邀请我出席晚宴，谈论外部世界的事情。 （c）他会抓住我的 手问我：“跟我说说西方对我们的真实看法！” （d）我告诉他，“如果我 是你，每次他们来中国的时候，我不会展现所有成功的地方。我也会让 他们看不成功、落后的地方，这样显示中国还大有改进的余地。”  (Li 2012: 228) ‘(a) Therefore, I think speaking Mandarin enables me and the Chinese leaders to foster a certain kind of harmonious relationship. (b) In the early days when they lacked the understanding of America and the West, Jiang Zemin would invite me to attend dinner, to discuss issues of the external world. (c) He would hold my hand and ask me: “Tell me what the West really thinks of us!” (d) I said to him, “If I were you, when they visit China, I would not show them all the successful places. I would also show them the unsuccessful, underdeveloped places, (and) this indicates that China has much room for improvement.” ’  (Li 2012: 228)

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A highly distinct feature in the paragraph is the repetitive epistemic modal auxiliary 会 4 ‘hui,’ which denotes the speaker’s moderate confidence in the truth status of the reported actions 邀请我 ‘invite me’ in (b), 抓住我的手 ‘hold my hand’ in (c) and Jiang’s speech in (d). The tentativeness in reporting the actions and speeches denoted by hui may be congruent with the narrator’s description of hypothetical situations in the following extract: 因此，外国投资者来新加坡时，有宾至如归的感觉，当他们听了经济发展 局的介绍之后，他们会说，“好，我相信你。” 但他们到了苏州，没法直接 沟通，需要翻译。他会想：“他会履行他的承诺吗?” 两种情形大不一样。 ‘Therefore, when foreign investors come to Singapore and feel at home, after they listen to the Economic Development Board’s briefing, they will say, “Alright, I trust you.” But when they arrive at Suzhou but are unable to communicate and have to depend on interpreters. He will think: “Will he keep his promise?” The two scenarios are very different.’ (Li 2012: 232)

The imaginative quality in (47c) is nevertheless at odds with the past event denoted by the temporal deixis 在早期 ‘in the earlier days.’ Even within Example (47), the imaginary quality in (b) and (c) is incongruous with the factuality of the protagonist’s action and response in (d) 我告诉他 ‘I said to him.’ The incongruity raises a question: if Jiang’s action and speech were tentative, how could the protagonist’s rejoinder be factual? The self-evident contradiction between the tentativeness and factuality in reporting the dialogues between the two characters therefore undermines the reliability of the wo-narrator. To determine the source of the irony cast on the unreliable wo-narrator, I made reference to the ST (Example (12)). Past tense has been consistently used in the reporting clauses of the DSs in Example (12), in contrast to the inconsistent modality in Example (47). While (47b) 江泽民会邀请我 ‘Jiang Zemin would invite me’ and (12a) President Jiang would often seek my views share the same tentativeness denoted by the epistemic modal verbs 会 ‘hui’ and would, respectively, the epistemic modality in (47c) differs from the facticity denoted by the past tense verbs in (12b): (12b) Once, he held my hand and asked me… (47c) 他会抓住我的手问我 ‘He would hold my hand and ask me’

The difference resulting from an inconsistent translation strategy signals the “other” consciousness of the politically sensitive implied translator. Driven by the awareness that a sense of superiority exhibited by the narrator over China’s former president Jiang would evoke uneasiness among the pro-China TT readers, the implied 4. The Chinese modal verb hui is semantically parallel to the English modal verbs will, would, can and could, depending on the context.



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translator could have resorted to hypothesizing the scene through epistemic modality to eliminate the sense of superiority. In so doing, he indiscreetly injects factual unreliability into the narration, casting irony on the wo-narrator. The irony, I argue, is translator-unconscious. In his effort to mystify the event and avoid offending the TT readers, the implied translator unintentionally creates the inappropriate tentativeness in speech presentation that ironizes the wo-narrator. The same strategy of speech presentation is used in Example (48), which largely corresponds to Example (14). In Example (48), a series of FIS are deployed to recount the protagonist’s firm stance against the Chinese activists, who argued for Chinese to be prioritized among the four official languages in Singapore. In contrast to the prevalence of modal auxiliary verbs in Example (47), there is a scarcity of modal auxiliary verbs. However, this does not translate into the subsumed subjectivity. On the contrary, the subjectivity is heightened by the mixture of interrogatives and exclamations. While the subjectivity and FIS could facilitate readers’ entry into the protagonist’s consciousness, an unpredictable attitudinal change within the short passage disorientates the readers, calling into question the wo-narrator’s reliability in reporting such thoughts: (48) （a）这两个人当场就被我狠狠训斥了一顿。（b）我说，你想把新 加坡变成斯里兰卡吗？ （c）为了僧加罗语 丶 淡米尔语的语文问题 而暴乱吗？ （d）这样做，这里的马来人 丶 印度人还有什么前途？ （e）这样做，只有把他们变成恐怖分子！（f）这是不可能的，这是 废话！（g）1如果我们以华文为工作语文，除了引起内部骚乱，2我们 能怎样生活？ （h）我们能跟谁做生意？ （i）跟台湾吗？（j）跨国公 司为什么来我们这里投资，就因为我们懂英文。（k）否则他们宁可去 台湾，那里成本更便宜。  (Li 2012: 48) ‘(a) I gave these two persons a stern dressing-down. (b) I said, did you want Singapore to become Sri Lanka? (c) Riots occurred because of the language issue with Sinhalese and Tamil? (d) In doing so, what prospects would the Malay and Indians here have? (e) In doing so, they could only be turned into terrorists! (f) This was impossible, this was non-sense! (g) 1If we set Chinese as the working medium, apart from the domestic riots, 2how could we make a living? (h) Who could we trade with? (i) With Taiwan? (j) Multinational corporations invested here with us because we know English. (k) Otherwise, they would rather go to Taiwan, where it was cheaper.’  (Li 2012: 48)

The problematic DS in (b) is worthy of a moment’s attention. While its DS status is signified by the second-person pronoun 你 ‘you,’ the question mark and question particle 吗 (ma), the absence of quotation marks and colon cancels its DS status. The defective punctuation and the problematic DS, prevalent elsewhere, reveal the discursive presence of the translator right from the beginning.

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Following the problematic DS, the subsequent sentences (c) to (k) can be considered as either FDS or FIS, due to the absent tense indicators inherent in the Chinese language. My back translation renders them into the FIS in line with its English ST. Subjectivity ensues in the variation of interrogatives (b, c, d, g, h and i) and declaratives ending with exclamation marks (e and f). Most of the interrogatives are essentially rhetorical questions that require no answer. The exclamation turns on a harsh criticism on the addressees. The parallelism in (d) and (e) denoted by the repetition of 这样做… ‘in doing so’ constitutes foregrounding that creates an impact on the readers. The two attributable relational clauses 这是不可 能的，这是废话! ‘This is impossible, this is nonsense!’ within (f) reflects a strategy of overevaluation. The repetition and overevaluation do not seem compatible with the ambiguity in (b) and (c), where the wo-narrator vaguely mentions that the riot was caused by the language problems concerning Sinhalese and Tamil without specifying the reasons. The stern attitude in (e) to (g) recedes into a moderate attitude at the end of the passage in the complex sentence (j) containing a question and answer and declarative (i). The volatile attitudinal change signifies the erratic emotion in the merging consciousness of the wo-narrator and protagonist in the FIS, causing readers to view them with distrust. A closer reading of Example (48) with reference to Example (14) reveals significant differences between the ST and TT, despite their syntactic and semantic similarities. The absence of the politically sensitive expressions such as racial strife and discrimination against (Malays and Indians) in Example (48) points to the politically prudent wo-narrator. His discretion nevertheless runs into incongruity with the choice of radical vocabulary such as 暴乱 ‘riots,’ 恐怖分子 ‘terrorists’ and 废话 ‘nonsense.’ The omission of (14e) would China give us jobs, which casts doubt on China’s economic power even though it was a fact at the time of utterance, avoids inducing unhappiness from the TT readers from China. But the minor sentence (i) 跟台湾吗？ ‘with Taiwan?,’ which suggests a sense of contempt, risks offending the readers from Taiwan. The wo-narrator’s discretion and indiscretion alert the readers to his attitudinal unsteadiness, which undermines his reliability. By contrast, the I-narrator in Example (14) exhibits emotional and attitudinal stability (see 4.4.2). The fact that the attitudinal inconsistence is derived from the addition and omission points to the implied translator as the source of the unreliability. The unreliability, however, is not intended by the implied translator but reflects his unconscious mind. In his effort to orient the narrative towards the TT readers and stress the ideology against Chinese chauvinism, the implied translator could have unintentionally created emotional and attitudinal contradictions. The unreliability uncovered through the analysis of Examples (47) and (48) is mainly restricted to the factual and attitudinal inconsistence. As the extent of such

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unreliability increases, it will account for what Cohn (2000) defines as ideological unreliability that gives rise to the discordant voice in the narrative, altering the image of the implied author. Just as Chatman (1990: 143) asserts: “(a)ttitudes, of course, are rooted in ideology, and the narrator is as much a locus of ideology as anyone else, inside or outside the fiction.” 6.5.3 Ideological discordance Cohn (2000: 308) emphasizes: “a sense of discordance arises only when the narrator’s normative views appear to clash in some manner with the story he or she tells.” The examples analysed in this section produce evidence of the ideological unreliability arising from the conflict between the wo-narrator’s and the implied author’s normative views. In the following two extracts, the wo-narrator recounts the protagonist’s experience during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore. Self-contradictory statements are nonetheless manifested in both texts and reveal an unreliable narrator, whose ideological affiliation deviates from what is generally believed to be the real author’s normative views. Example (49) is partially parallel to Example (3): (49) （a）1第一次真正面对外语不通的障碍，2是 1942 年 2 月 15 日，3日本 挥军南下，占领新加坡时期。（b）我因为不懂日军说的话，也看不懂 墙上张贴的通告，挨了一记耳光。 （c）那个时候，新加坡所有公告都以夹杂着汉字的日文发布。 （d）1在新的统治者手下，我的英文知识已经没有价值，我因为对日军 既害怕又憎恨而不愿意学日文，2转而自修华文。（e）我认为学习华文 总比学习日文好，华文至少是我自己的语文，而不是令人憎恨的征服者 的语文。  (Li 2012: 22) q49

‘(a) 1The first time I encountered the foreign language barriers, 2was on 15 February 1942, 3 (when) Japanese forces strutted south and occupied Singapore. (b) Because I did not understand the language spoken by the Japanese force, neither (did I) understand the public notices posted on the wall, I was slapped across the face. (c) At that time, all public notices were written in Japanese which contained the Chinese characters. (d) Under the new rulers, my knowledge of the English language was of no value, and I, because of my fear and hatred for the Japanese forces, was unwilling to learn Japanese, so I learned Chinese by myself. (e) It seemed to me that learning Chinese would be better than learning Japanese, at least Chinese was my own language, not the language of a much hated conqueror.’  (Li 2012: 22)

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The short passage is manifested with three incongruities. First, the circumstantial relational clause (a) suggests the date 1942 年 2 月 15 日 ‘15 February 1942’ as the day when the protagonist encountered the language barriers. The date actually marks the beginning of the Japanese Occupation of Singapore (Lee 1998: 50; Li 1998: 55). The misreading seems to be caused by the comma inappropriately inserted between (a2) and (a3) that severs their semantic tie. The defective punctuation is indicative of the implied translator’s discursive presence, as identified in the earlier examples. The second incongruity is a subtle attitudinal disparity arising from the choice of the neutral noun 征服者 ‘conqueror’ over the derogatory noun 侵略者 ‘invader,’ the latter more appropriate in expressing the resentment than the former. The mild attitude denoted by 征服者 ‘conqueror’ undermines the fear and hatred signified by other value-laden expressions such as 害怕 ‘terrified,’ 憎恨 ‘hate’ and 令人憎恨 ‘much hated.’ It also contradicts the humiliation suffered by the protagonist after being slapped by a Japanese soldier. While the attitudinal inconsistence alerts a careful reader to the unreliability of the wo-narrator, the semantic and syntactic parallel between (3f) and (49e) attributes the inconsistent lexical choice to a “faithful” translation strategy adhering to the ST. The I-narrator in the ST exhibits a moderate resistance to the Japanese forces by choosing the neutral noun conqueror in (3f). The choice of neutral noun in Example (49e) is, however, incongruous with the context in which the protagonist was slapped by the Japanese soldier and the deep hatred emphasized by the wo-narrator. The third incongruity lies in the semantic gap centring around the iconic construction (b) in the verb phrase 挨了一记耳光 ‘being slapped across the face.’ In continuation with (a), (b) implies that the protagonist’s first encounter with the language barrier was being slapped across the face, which took place on 15 February 1942. An opening like this certainly creates suspense, inducing readers’ desire to find out more about the incident. Countering such an expectation, the subsequent sentence (c) deliberates on the language used in the public notice without giving any information on how the protagonist was slapped by the Japanese soldier. The wo-narrator’s failure to offer any detail about the incident is at odds with his usual strategy of exhaustive descriptions. It is true that the protagonist’s experience of being slapped is recorded in Lee’s earlier memoirs. As stated in Lee (1998: 53) 5, the incident of the protagonist being slapped took place on a different occasion during the Japanese Occupation with no connection to not knowing Japanese: 5. The similar event is recorded in the Chinese edition, Li (1998: 65), but is not provided here due to space constraints.



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My first encounter with a Japanese soldier took place when I tried to visit an aunt, my mother’s younger sister, in Kampong Java Road, just across the Red Bridge over the Bukit Timah canal…he thrust the bayonet on his rifle through the brim of my hat, knocking it off, slapped me roundly, and motioned me to kneel.  (Lee 1998: 53)

To probe the cause of the factual discrepancy, a comparison of Examples (49) and (3) draws our attention to the following seemingly parallel texts: (3d) The fact that I did not know the language of new rulers of Singapore hit me hard. (49b) 我因为不懂日军说的话，也看不懂墙上张贴的通告，挨了一记耳光 ‘Because I did not understand the language spoken by the Japanese force nor did I understand the public notices posted on the wall, I was slapped across the face.’

Given the polysemic verb hit, the Verb+Object+Complement (VOC) construction hit me hard in (3d) could have been mistranslated into a physical action of being slapped across the face at its face value due to a misreading in the process. The implied translator might have failed to recognize the metaphorical sense of hit in its collocation with the abstract subject the fact. The mistranslation, however, intensifies the atrocity of the Japanese invaders and resonates with the deep hatred for Japanese invaders from the TT readers. It unfortunately creates the semantic gap and incongruities. The omission of the description of the gory exhibition of dismembered Chinese men, found in Example (3), also in Lee (1998: 60–61) and Li (1998: 73) is indeed puzzling. The grisly scene, if included in Tiaozhan, would have lent itself well to illustrating the Japanese’s barbaric act and echoing the TT readers’ hatred for the Japanese invaders. As stated in Example (3), the incident was a major trigger of the protagonist’s desire to learn Chinese. With its omission, what motivates the protagonist to learn Chinese during the Japanese Occupation becomes as simple as to read the notice in Japanese, which contains Chinese characters. While the description of the grisly scene could be removed due to its seeming irrelevance to the theme of the book, which concentrates on the language issue, its omission, unfortunately, violates the logical-semantic connection between (b) and the subsequent paragraph. More importantly, it eliminates a significant factor that motivates the protagonist to learn Chinese. The defective logic thus casts an irony on the mis- or dis-informed wo-narrator. He fabricates the protagonist’s agony of being slapped to disclose the Japanese invaders’ cruelty, on the one hand. On the other hand, he omits the elaboration of the Japanese’s barbaric act to downplay the Japanese’s inhumanity. The incoherence arising from the unsound logic indicates the “other” voice of the implied translator. Given that the irony on the unreliable narrator is mainly derived from the omission and mistranslation, the source of the irony seems to

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be the implied translator, driven by his professional aptitude and ideological inclination. He must have omitted the statement this grisly scene made me even more determined to learn Chinese so that I could understand such notices in Example (3e), upon sensing that the pragmatic motives to learn Chinese is politically incorrect and unacceptable to many TT readers who would have expected the protagonist to react more subversively. The removal of such politically insensitive statement thus evades the TT readers’ scepticism. It nevertheless projects an unreliable wo-narrator whose political inclination swings irrationally. The same ideological unreliability is observed in Example (50), in which the wo-narrator recounts cautiously the protagonist’s decision to learn Japanese, a highly sensitive topic in the TT culture. The passage is largely parallel to Example (4) with some notable differences: (50) （a）在日本人的占领下，起初人人都不知所措。（b）父亲没有工作， 我没有学院可读， 三个弟妹都失学了。(c）我后来意识到终究还得找份 工作，我只好到布连拾街一家日军总部开办的日语学校学习日语，以便 日后容易谋生。 (d）日语课的老师是个日本人，三个月后，我学会了片 假名和平假名，考试及格， 获颁证书。 (e）的确， 学过汉字，对学习日 文是帮助不小的。  (Li 2012: 23) ‘(a) Under the Japanese Occupation, at the beginning, everybody did not know what to do. (b) (My) father had no work, I had no college, my three brothers and sisters had no school. (c) I later realized (that I) eventually had to find a job, (so) I had no choice but went to the Japanese school in Prinsep Street run by the Japanese Military Headquarters to learn Japanese. (d) The Japanese language teacher was a Japanese, (and) after three months, I learnt to write katakana and hiragana, (and) I scored a pass in the exam and was awarded a certificate. (e) Indeed, having learnt Chinese characters somewhat helped me in learning Japanese.’  (Li 2012: 23)

Starting with a generic statement (a) on everybody’s predicament during the Japanese Occupation, the wo-narrator exploits the parallelism in (b) that constitutes foregrounding to impress upon readers the protagonist’s dilemma. To be sure, an understanding of the background could mitigate the readers’ animosity towards the protagonist’s decision to learn Japanese, which is stated in (c). The readers may thus come to terms with the protagonist’s decision to learn Japanese and his achievements in learning Japanese described in (d). Although the concluding statement (e) strategically echoes the theme of the book on the benefits of learning Chinese, it lacks the logical-semantic connections with the preceding sentences, resulting in incoherence that reminds us of the unwanted presence of the translator. A comparison between Examples (50) and (4) reveals a subtle difference in the two opening statements:



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(4a) My resistance to the Japanese language lessened over the months. (50a) 在日本人的占领下，起初人人都不知所措。 ‘Under the Japanese Occupation, at the beginning, everybody did not know what to do.’

While I-narrator candidly admits the protagonist’s lessened resistance to the Japanese, the wo-narrator highlights everyone’s dilemma. The wo-narrator’s approach could reflect the implied translator’s strategy to create a shared frame of reference with TT readers to resolve the ideological clash between the protagonist’s pragmatic approach and the TT readers’ resentment against the Japanese invaders. A factual discrepancy with regard to the location of the Japanese school is detected through the ST-TT comparison: Queen Street in Example (4) versus Prinsep Street in Example (50). Given that Queen Street is indicated as the location of the Japanese school and Prinsep Street as the location for the Prinsep Street Chinese School in Lee’s earlier English and Chinese autobiography (Lee 1998: 61; Li 1998: 73–74) and Example (4), the mistake inevitably occurs in Example (50). This factual imprecision departs from the real author Lee’s high standard and precision. Similarly, the wo-narrator’s emphasis of the protagonist’s deep hatred for the Japanese invaders in Example (49) and his evasiveness regarding the protagonist’s lessened anti-Japanese resistance in Example (50) also deviate from the norms of Lee, who is known for his political pragmatism (Milne and Mauzy 1990; Chua et al. 2002; Tan 2012). Lee is perceived to adopt a pragmatic approach (Holden 2008: 182, see 2.4.3), rather than a “rabble-rouser” approach, to the Japanese Occupation of Singapore (Josey 2012: 26). As can be seen from Examples (49) and (50), the factual and attitudinal incongruities detected in the two examples have already triggered the ideological discordance in the narration. The discordance, however, does not originate from the author: it is the last thing for the author to have intended the narrative to be understood differently from the way the narrator understands, given their presumed conflation in autobiography. The source of the discordance is the implied translator, whose discursive presence has been indicated by the incoherence, defective punctuation, indiscreet choice of words, mistranslation of polysemy and rewriting. The ideological unreliability conveys a mixed message of the “other” consciousness belonging to the implied translator. In the translator’s effort to capitalize on the TT reader’s hatred for Japanese invaders, the “face value” of the verb polysemic hit is selected, perhaps out of his professional instinct as a journalist or editor, to stir up the resentment and evoke empathy from the TT readers with the protagonist. The protagonist’s pragmatic approach to the Japanese occupation has been downplayed to avoid conflicting with the TT readers’ anti-Japanese resistance. In addition, the anti-Japanese emotion in the narration has been intensified in order to align the ideology in the text to the dominant ideology in the TT culture. In orienting the

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narrative towards the TT readers, the implied translator runs the risk of fabrication and distortion, which reflect his indiscretion. As a result, the incompatibility between the ideology of the real author and that of the wo-narrator alerts readers to the discordant voice, which undermines the wo-narrator’s reliability. The final example in this chapter, and this book, further illustrates the discordance arising from the ideological unreliability in the narration, pinpointing the translator as its source. Corresponding to Example (5), Example (51) accentuates the central theme of Tiaozhan, that is, knowing one’s mother tongue will avoid deculturalization and rootlessness. Similar to Example (5), Example (51) is the juxtaposition of the present evaluation and retrospection on the issue of mother tongues. The wo-narrator verbalizes his subjective opinion gnomically through the psycho-narration and adjectivally through figures of speech and descriptive language. His normative views unfolded in the passage somewhat deviate from that of the I-narrator: (51) （a）没有人告诉我英语不是我的母语，可是在我心灵深处很清楚这不 是我的母语。（b）1我和妻子芝都出身英校，2在英国深造期间，我们 很清楚地感受到自己因为不懂华文而吃亏，3我们深感从前在英校所接 受的一套价值观并不属于自己。（c）1我们没有全盘接受不属于自己 文化的价值观，2又没有自己的文化底蕴，3使我们感到不踏实，4两头 不到岸。（d）从前在英校所读的课本和教师所讲述的世界，同我生活 的现实世界完全扯不上关系。（e）1我和其他莱佛士学院学生一样，没 有学到本身的亚洲文化，又不属于英国文化，2说英语的我，又跟自己讲 方言和华语的华族群众有隔阂，3结果迷失在两种文化之间。（f）1我和 芝决定不让孩子吃这个文化亏，2决定把他们送进华校，3融入生意盎然、 充满朝气和自信的华社群众当中，4即使英文程度受影响也在所不惜。 （g）我自己也下定决心把华文学好，不懂母语吃文化亏是逃不掉的： 这就是现实。  (Li 2012: 25–26) ‘(a) No one ever tells me that English is not my mother tongue, but deep in my heart I am very aware that this is not my mother tongue. (b) 1I and My wife Choo were both educated in the English-medium schools, 2(and) while studying in England, we became very aware of how we lose out on not knowing Chinese, 3we deeply felt that the set of values we accepted (were inculcated) in the English schools did not belong to us. (c) 1We did not fully accept the values from the culture that did not belong to us, 2 neither did we have our own cultural underpinnings, 3(and) this made us feel uneasy, 4(we) drifting away from both sides of the river. (d) The world of the past depicted by the textbooks and teachers at the English schools bore no resemblance to the reality where I lived. (e) 1I was like other Raffles College students, not well-tutored in their own Asian culture, yet not part of the British culture either, 2(and) speaking English, I felt separated from the mass of the ordinary Chinese who spoke



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dialects and Mandarin, 3as a result I was lost between two cultures. (f) 1I and Choo decided we should not let our children lose out on culture, 2and decided to send them to Chinese-medium schools, 3integrating them into the dynamic, energetic and confident Chinese community, 4we would not regret if their English level would be affected. (g) I myself also made up my mind to learn Chinese well, (and) (the fact that) people lose out on not knowing their mother tongue is inescapable: this is the reality.’  (Li 2012: 25–26)

The profusion of psycho-narration signifies the wo-narrator’s firm control over reporting the protagonist’s consciousness and conveys a powerful message on the importance of mother tongues. Incongruities, however, abound in the passage. For instance, while (b3) (在英校所接受的一套价值观 ‘the set of values we accepted in the English school’) implies that the characters my wife Choo and I had accepted the values, (c1) retracts it by stating that 我们没有全盘接受不属于自己文化的价值 观 ‘We did not fully accept the values of the culture that did not belong to us.’ Semantic overlaps manifest themselves in (b3) and (d), as well as in (c2) and (e1). Both (b3) and (d) emphasize the irrelevance of what the characters learned in English schools to the real world they lived, whereas (c2) and (e1) acknowledge the lack of the characters’ own cultural underpinnings. While the semantic repetition could function to accentuate the theme, they constitute redundancy and incoherence, calling into question the wo-narrator’s reliability in his narration. The wo-narrator is also seen to exploit circumlocution and overlexicalization to please TT readers. The opening statement (a), beginning with a negation and foregrounded by the repetition of 不是我的母语 ‘not my mother tongue,’ exemplifies circumlocution. It is rhetorical in declaring the wo-narrator’s emotional detachment from the English language. The recursive choice of 吃亏 (chi kui, ‘lose out on’), a colloquial expression denoting the fear-of-failure mentality (or Kiasuism), sounds hollow and insincere in its collocation with the abstract noun culture (吃文化亏 ‘lose out on culture’) in (f) and (g). Overlexicalization manifests itself in the concentration of near synonyms. For instance, the metaphor (c4) 两头不到岸 ‘drifting away from both sides of the river’ reiterates the lost feeling expressed in (e3) 结果迷 失在两种文化之间 ‘I was lost between two cultures,’ whereas 生意盎然 ‘dynamic’ is synonymous with 充满朝气 ‘vigorous’ in (f3). The circumlocution and overlexicalization create a pretentious and flattering sense that causes the readers to experience an insincere narrator. The contrast between negativity in (c) and positivity in (f) further attests to a strategy of flattery. Gloom and pessimism permeate the narration that describes the feeling of deculturalization in verb phrases that come with negative connotation, such as 吃亏 ‘lose out on,’ 感到不踏实 ‘feel uneasy’ and 两头不到岸 ‘drifting away from both sides of the river.’ Conversely, excitement and optimism can be felt in the

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indulgent praise of the Chinese community through positive expressions such as 生 意盎然 ‘dynamic,’ 充满朝气 ‘vigorous’ and 自信 ‘self-confident.’ The contrast creates a “feel-good” effect among the TT readers who belong to the Chinese community being praised by the wo-narrator. Attitudinal and ideological differences between the wo-narrator and I-narrator emerge if reference is made to Example (5). The matter-of-fact and unemotional I-narrator, engaging in a highly coherent narration, displays a sophisticated command of language. In his consistent choice of relatively neutral expressions such as self-confidence and self-respect, the I-narrator exhibits no trace of flattery in his narration, let alone the contradiction or incoherence exhibited by the pretentious and flattering wo-narrator. By contrast, the wo-narrator resorts to the flattery strategy by means of the semantic contrast between positive and negative value-laden expressions. He conceals the protagonist’s earlier subscription to the values of the Western cultures and the fact that English is his dominant language, creating an illusion of pro-Chinese attitude. This illusion contradicts the observation made by some scholars on Lee’s cultural and linguistic underpinning. As Josey (2012: 600) observed, Lee is “among ‘the small number of outstanding students’ who did penetrate to the basic value of Western culture,” although these students later became aware of “their uprooted, floating position” and “lack of cultural identification.” Milne and Mauzy (1990: 112) noted that, despite the bilingual policy implemented by Lee’s government with an objective to strike a balance between English as the tool to achieve modernization and mother tongue as the means to retain traditional value and cultural identity, “the balance has shifted too far in favour of English.” Emerging from Example (51) is an implied author, who is flattering and somewhat incoherent. The pretentious implied author departs from the commonly perceived norms of Lee, who “is said to be impervious to flattery and to hate sycophants, although his very dominance encourages such” (Milne and Mauzy 1990: 104). The politically charged implied author with an ideology in favour of the TT culture differs from the implied author portrayed by Challenge, who displays an affiliation with political pragmatism and exhibits sophisticated logic. While Cohn (2000) painstakingly differentiates ideological unreliability from factual unreliability, disqualifying the latter as a discordant voice, the foregoing analysis of Type II texts has shown that the accumulation of factual discrepancy and attitudinal inconsistence has already resulted in ideological unreliability and discordant voice in Tiaozhan. The evidence gathered has shown that the unreliability is not intended by the implied author but implemented by the translator, whose discursive presence is revealed by the various linguistic indicators of the “other” voice. Just as the wo-narrator is unconscious of the irony on himself, the translator seems unaware of the irony either. The factors contributing to the translator-unconscious irony are



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twofold. First, in his effort to highlight the theme and orient the narrative towards the TT readers, the translator could have unintentionally overdone it, resulting in incongruities. Secondly, the awareness of the ideological conflicts between the pro-English policy initiated by the protagonist and the TT reader’s pro-Chinese attitude prompts the translator to attune the narration to the dominant ideology in the TT culture. Given the implied translator’s professional status as the journalists or editors who work for the Press, the “other” consciousness reflects the way an institutional translator works. Overall, he is complicit in the manipulation of the texts to fulfil the institutional goal of portraying a positive image of the protagonist and shaping the ideology of readers. But at every step, he acts dubiously on his own driven by his ideological inclination, professional instinct and personal understanding of poetics acceptable in the TT culture. All the examples analysed in this section can therefore be viewed as attempts to mystify the protagonist’s experience in order to manipulate readers into empathizing with the protagonist. But the discordance casts doubt on the “trustworthiness” of the wo-narrator. The unreliability in narration alerts readers to the mediating consciousness belonging to the translator, causing them to be wary of what is being told. Several instances of the TT texts which have exact matches in Lee’s earlier autobiography, as in Examples (49) and (51), affirm the assumption of ghost author, who assumed the translator’s role in the production of Tiaozhan. The inconsistent linguistic features, such as the problematic DS, indicate that the implied translator encompasses different translators. 6.6 Conclusion I have, in this chapter, analysed selected examples of Type II texts, which contain syntactic and semantic similarities with their parallel texts in Challenge albeit with notable differences. All four deviant stylistic patterns identified in Type I texts and Type III texts are present in Type II texts. Their prevalence in Tiaozhan and absence in Challenge affirm their status as the linguistic indicators of the “other” voice belonging to the translator, as I argued in Chapter 5. My analysis, first focusing on the ironies cast on the fallible filters and empathy evoked from the readers, has identified three scenarios, in which the ironies are retained, erased or created. The ironies are translator-conscious, based on my observation that the translator makes strategic use of the ironies to manipulate the TT readers into witnessing the event with empathy. I have so far gathered evidence to show that the translator is conscious of the ironies on the fallible filters, given his

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conscious effort in dealing with the narrator’s irony on the fallible filters to project the positive image of the protagonist. He has nevertheless left behind traces of his discursive presence that alert readers to the “other” consciousness superimposed on the narrator’s and character’s consciousness. The translator-conscious irony is detectable through the ST-TT comparison and largely constrained to a small scale without any significant contradiction. The search for incongruities within the TT texts draws attention to self-­ contradictory statements pertaining to facts, attitude and ideology in the Type II texts. The contradictions cast secret ironies on the moral and intellectual qualities of the unreliable wo-narrator. Factual discrepancy amounts to the distortion of facts verifiable from other sources. Attitudinal inconsistence alerts the readers to the mis- or dis-informed narrator. The concurrence and recurrence of factual and attitudinal unreliability, deeply rooted in ideological underpinnings, give rise to the ideological unreliability that results in discordant narration. As a result, the flattering, pretentious and ideologically charged wo-narrator projects an image of the implied author who departs from the matter-of-fact, no-nonsense and pragmatic norms of the real author Lee. The irony cast on the unreliable wo-narrator is least likely to be intended by the implied author who counts on the autobiography for self-representation marked by the proclaimed “truthfulness” (see Chapter 1). The fact that the incongruities arise mainly from the addition, omission or rewriting, together with the prevalent linguistic indicators of the “other” voice, pinpoints the translator as the source of the irony. In the absence of evidence pointing to the translator’s conscious effort in inserting the irony on the unreliable narrator, I argue that the irony on the unreliable wo-narrator is translator-unconscious. Given his profession as a journalist or editor, it is unlikely for the translator to ironize the narrator, as, in so doing, he would have jeopardized his professional and economic status. The irony could only be the side effect of the translator’s conscious effort to portray a positive image of the implied author and orient the narrative to the new TT readers. In conclusion, the unreliability in the wo-narrator interrupts readers’ access to the protagonist’s and narrator’s consciousnesses, resulting in a distant narrator-reader relationship. The “other” consciousness belonging to the implied translator, superimposed on the constituting consciousnesses in the narrative, has effected a significant transformation in the character’s point of view and undermined the wo-narrator’s reliability. This results in an altered persona of the implied author emerging from Tiaozhan, representing an image that deviates from the real author. By this, I confirm the hypothetical narrative situation II as proposed in 3.3.4 and reproduced in Figure 6.5.

Chapter 6.  Translating the “other” 203



Real Author Implied Author

Translator

Narrator

Character

Figure 6.5  Narrative-communicative situation in Tiaozhan

In the Conclusion chapter, I will summarize the findings and offer further insight into the translator’s role in transforming the point of view that gives rise to an altered persona of the implied author in Tiaozhan.

Conclusion

I began this study with an observation of the different feel in Lee’s English and Chinese memoirs Challenge and Tiaozhan. The lack of research in autobiography from the thriving fields of stylistics and translation studies presents challenges as well as opportunities for this project. Leveraging on an interdisciplinary framework, I sought to show that autobiography displays deviant linguistic features that constitute foregrounding, producing point of view effects as intricate as that of novels. I also tried to demonstrate how the transformation of foregrounding and point of view in an assumed translation of autobiography gives rise to an altered persona of the author and reveals the translator’s voice. Challenge and Tiaozhan were chosen as the data set for my comparative stylistic analysis. 1. Seeing the point and hearing the voices In order to show that autobiography as a genre exhibits distinctive features, I compared it with other types of life-writing, such as biography, historiography, novels and fictive autobiography. I summarized the characteristics of autobiography as a genre into four pairs of binary oppositions, namely subjectivity and objectivity, truth and myth, comprehensibility and exceptionality, and private and public sphere of existence. My survey of literature from narrative psychology, literary criticism, linguistics and translation studies has further attested to autobiography’s multi-dimensional nature. Autobiography as a narrative was assigned the functions of self-making and world-making. It was often exploited to enact changes in society and inculcate nationalists’ interests into citizens. Language of autobiography was found to be attached referential and rhetorical values so as to fulfil the social functions of autobiography. I then put forth a stylistic analytical framework, which enabled me to scrutinize linguistic and stylistic categories in order to identify distinctive linguistic features constituting foregrounding. The framework also allowed me to draw on Hallidayan transitivity system and Fowler’s (1996) linguistic criticism to interpret the functional significance of the foregrounded stylistic features. My preliminary analysis of Challenge based on the framework identified several deviant features, including underlexicalization, syntactic contrast, rhetorical subtlety and enhanced

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coherence. These features defamiliarized readers, alerting them to an authorial attitude, which was affiliated with linguistic instrumentalism and purism, elitism and political pragmatism. The insights drawn therefore answered the first research question spelt out in Introduction: deviant linguistic patterns that constitute foregrounding were pervasive in a political autography, such as Challenge, and their functional significance unveiled authorial attitudes and ideologies. Turning to the point of view effect arising from the foregrounded features, I encountered difficulties in attributing the point of view to the character, narrator or author. I therefore engaged in a theoretical discussion of the narrative-communicative situation in autobiography to explore the relationship among the three participants. Drawing evidence from Challenge, I interrogated the commonly perceived conflation of author, implied author, narrator and character that would presumably result in a single point of view in autobiography. I argued for their non-identification in three ways. First, the attitude and ideology of the implied author presented in autobiography is far more restricted than those of the real author. Secondly, the narrator’s consciousness intermingles with the character’s consciousness, each constituting part of the implied author. Thirdly, the narrator is separated from the character by a difference in age and experience: the older self experienced the past but inhabits the present and tends to judge the younger self. To understand readers’ role in constructing an implied author, I introduced Fludernik’s (1996) narrativization to complement defamiliarization in explaining how readers’ consciousness would be aligned to a narrator’s consciousness or a character’s consciousness through the activation of their real-life schemata. I subsequently concentrated on deixis, modality and speech and thought presentation as three of the key linguistic indicators of point of view to expound the interplay between the narrator, characters and readers. Zooming in on the use of these devices in Challenge through a foregrounding analysis, I singled out a narrating-self mode, which created an illusion of “mimesis within diegesis.” Irony and empathy emerged as two main point of view effects. Rather consistently and tactfully, the I-narrator was observed to ironize the characters with whom he disagreed. The subtle irony on fallible filters evoked readers’ empathy for the protagonist. As a result of the reliability in narration, an implied author constructed by readers was found to largely adhere to the generally perceived normative view of the autobiographer, Lee. The case study of Challenge, therefore, answered the second research question that point of view effects derived from foregrounding contributed to the construction of the autobiographer’s image among readers. Adopting the same theoretical and analytical model, I shifted my attention to the translation of autobiography, keeping Tiaozhan in view as the case in point. Given the varying degrees of similarities and differences between Challenge and Tiaozhan, I argued for Tiaozhan to be an assumed translation as well as a form of

Conclusion 207

rewriting. I designated the editors and journalists responsible for the production of Tiaozhan at the Press as the implied translator, after considering the socio-­cultural contexts of the production. Their understanding of poetics and acceptance of ideological patronage shaped their decisions in translation and rewriting. Their discursive presence signified the “other” voice in the translated autobiography. Through the foregrounding analysis of Type I texts, which shared zero to low similarities with Challenge, I identified the deviant stylistic patterns, including overlexicalization, syntactic foreignness, circumlocution and overevaluation, and incoherence in Tiaozhan. As these features were also found prevalent in Type III texts, which were highly parallel to their STs, mainly as the result of omission, addition, adaptation and direct semantic and syntactic transfer, they were the linguistic indicators of the “other” voice belonging to the implied translator. The deviant linguistic features exhibited by a translated autobiography formed a sharp contrast with those of its ST, thereby answering the third research question by pinpointing the stylistic differences between autobiography and its translation and attributing such differences to the translator. Moving deeper from the surface linguistic features to the underlying consciousness, I undertook an investigation into how the “other” consciousness belonging to the implied translator intermingled with the narrator’s and character’s consciousnesses. I focused my attention on empathy and irony in Tiaozhan to determine whether the implied translator was conscious of the two main point of view effects identified in Challenge. The implied translator was seen to retain, create or erase the ironies so as to manipulate readers’ empathy. He was observed to be “faithful” with a “passive” voice in some situations where positive light was cast on the protagonist. In other situations where the positive image of the protagonist was at stake, the implied translator was noted to skilfully orient the texts to construct a positive image of the protagonist among the new TT readers, injecting an “active” voice. This showed that the implied translator was conscious of the irony and its function to manipulate readers’ empathy. Unfortunately, the pervasive linguistic indicators of his discursive presence alerted readers to the “other” consciousness superimposed on the narrator’s and character’s consciousnesses. In some examples analysed, self-contradictions arising from factual discrepancies and attitudinal inconsistence ironized the wo-narrator and undermined his reliability. The concurrence and recurrence of the factual and attitudinal unreliability gave rise to the ideological discordance and thus instigated an altered persona of the implied author. As a result, the implied author of Tiaozhan was portrayed to be politically pretentious, ideologically charged and somewhat logically incoherent. Such traits differed from what the implied author of Challenge displayed and departed from the norms of the real author. The irony on the unreliable wo-narrator, largely residing in the addition, omission and rewriting, was likely to be caused

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by the implied translator rather than the implied author: it was highly impossible for the implied author to ironize the narrator who presumably shared the same identity in autobiography. The translator, nevertheless, was not conscious of the irony he created, which was the side effect of his effort to orient the narrative to new TT readers and project a positive image of the implied author among them. In this regard, the translator-unconscious irony was actually cast on the translator, undermining his reliability. The translator-unconscious ironies have amounted to a subtle change in point of view effects in the narrative situation in Tiaozhan: the awareness of translator’s mediation caused readers to view the implied author with a pinch of irony and distrust. Such a point of view effect has already departed from that in Challenge, where readers viewed the implied author with empathy. This addressed the fourth and final research question on how the point of view effects would differ between autobiography and its translation and whether the translator was aware of the impact caused by the different points of view on the autobiographer’s image. Let me dwell upon the socio-cultural context where the implied translator was situated to decipher the findings about translators. As reiterated, the implied translator under examination is not a prototypical translator but a team of journalists and/or editors by profession. Their working conditions reflect a common condition in the real world. Many projects involving translation were done by amateur translators who were professionals in other fields and were assigned to perform the duty of translation. Regardless of the number of translators involved and the type of professions they held, they all constituted the implied translator. In the case of Tiaozhan, the penetration and prevalence of all four deviant linguistic features throughout attested to the fact that the translators working for the same institution displayed professional universality in their translating behaviour. Working under pressure with multi-tasks, the translators unavoidably made mistakes. Given the synchronized publishing of the ST and TT as in the case of Challenge and Tiaozhan, the production of TT was likely based on the draft or incomplete ST, thus making the translation more prone to inaccuracy. As can be seen, the differences between Tiaozhan and Challenge are not resulting from mistranslation – a matter of incompetence, but from rewriting – a matter of intervention. The translator was caught between replicating the ideology represented in the narrative, advocating the institutional ideology and his own ideological affiliation. His decision was also governed by his professional instinct and understanding of poetology. All these factors could contribute to confusion and negligence that gave rise to the incongruities, eventually projecting a mildly altered persona of the implied author. If based on Venuti’s (2008) idea, which advocates the visibility of translators in dealing with the cultural and socio-political differences between the ST and TT, the unreliable translator could be viewed as a form of insubordination or subversion to

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launch a secret resistance to the authority. Such an argument, however, would be weakened by the abundant evidence for the translator-unconscious ironies. Despite the translator’s discursive presence, as I have shown, the trajectory of the intrusive translator has never crossed over to an activist’s path to intentionally ironize the wo-narrator in order to influence the readers to intervene in the social-political conflicts surrounding bilingualism in Singapore. All evidence gathered so far points to a translator who acts paradoxically (ir)responsibly out of his conscious and unconscious mind. The findings highlight the fact that every decision made by a translator may have a far-reaching impact over and above the linguistic aspects. Therefore, greater discretion must be exercised in translating autobiography as well as in commissioning such a project. 2. Towards a multidisciplinary and transnational framework My research has put together the relevant academic fields by laying its theoretical foundation on stylistics and translation studies and consolidating the theoretical insights from autobiographical studies and narratology. The discussion of the genre of autobiography summarizes the distinctive features of autobiography exemplified by a political autobiography. It sheds new light on the existing life-writing literature that focused very much on literary autobiography. The analysis of the same autobiography in two languages also injects originality into autobiography and stylistic research, which usually examines monolingual autobiography or assumes that a translated autobiography is no different from its original. Applying foregrounding analyses to autobiography may broaden the scope of stylistics, which has largely focused on the conventional literature. The instances of foregrounding in a political autobiography confirm that a stylistic enquiry into ordinary texts is equally, if not more, meaningful as compared to that on literary texts. In addition, the stylistics model set up in this study has been applied to the analysis of non-English medium (Chinese in this case) texts. The model has facilitated a systematic search for the linguistic indicators of the “other” voice belonging to the translator. It has injected a global, in particular, an Asian perspective into the current stylistic research, which is dominantly Eurocentric and Anglocentric. Through the comparison of point of view effects in the ST and TT, translation studies have provided sound evidence and explanations for the elusive issues of the narrator and implied author relationship, especially pertaining to unreliability and discordant voice. The findings thus raise the awareness among narratologists that a translation differs from its original text, not just in linguistic forms but in all other aspects, such as narrative-communicative situation and author-reader relationship.

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The contexts of the ST and TT under examination differ from the binary of “domestic” versus “foreign” (Venuti 1995/2008) contexts involving different countries or regions under different socio-political systems. The findings may offer a glimpse of the translator’s behaviour in a bilingual society like Singapore, adding to the understanding of universality in translator’s behaviour proposed by Toury (1995). On a small scale, by concentrating on the micro aspect of the translation, this project demonstrates that stylistics provides concrete linguistic evidence for abstract propositions and macro issues. I embarked on this research project with a keen interest in its practical significance, particularly in the Asian contexts. The intricate network of relationship in translations, as illustrated by this study, has made a case for an international framework of institutionalizing and professionalizing the translation practice in Asia. The lack of translation-quality standards calls for a joint effort from governments and non-government organizations to put in place an internationally recognized accreditation system. Hopefully, the findings yielded from this study will enable translators, amateur or professional, to reflect on their practice and thus make discreet decisions in the translation process. An understanding of the impact of the involvement of translator on the image and ideology presented by a work or document will also enable translation service users to manage the pre- and post-translation processes more cautiously (see Gouadec 2007: 21–27). The interdisciplinary research model therefore offers new avenues for future studies. The subsequent iteration of this model will evolve into a framework that embraces multidisciplinary, cross-cultural and transnational collaboration. 3. Final remarks My motivation for this book at the beginning was as simple as to find out why Challenge and Tiaozhan give different “feels,” and as ambitious as to continue the activist thread of advocating translators’ missions to enact social changes. The findings of this study achieved a middle ground between the two extremes. The point of view derived from foregrounding in Challenge differs from that in Tiaozhan, giving rise to the different “feels” in the two extracts observed in the beginning of Introduction. As a result, two different implied authors emerge from the English and Chinese versions of Lee’s autobiography. Their subtle differences can be calibrated by the contrast between the “self ” and the “other” with reference to the binary oppositions inherent in autobiography. In the case of Challenge, the implied author allows readers more access to the “self,” who exhibits higher subjectivity and inhabits closer to the private sphere of existence. The reliability in narration enhances the truth value of the autobiography. Conversely, the implied author of

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Tiaozhan conjures up a myth of the “self.” The unreliability of the wo-narrator alerts readers to the “other,” who intrudes into the narrative-communicative situation with the “other” voice and consciousness. While the distant relationship between the wo-narrator and readers may fail to perform the self-making and world-making functions of Tiaozhan, the “closeness” among the I-narrator, characters and readers in Challenge comes closer to fulfilling such a mission.

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Index A Abbott  75–76, 213 adaptation  13, 143, 207 addressees  3, 33, 72–73, 120, 192 addressers  72, 136 aesthetic  22, 45, 56, 214, 216, 219 affiliation  130, 143, 200, 219 author’s  56, 64 institutional 165 agency  33, 39, 71, 144, 213 agents  4, 60, 152, 188 aligning  34, 114, 124, 146, 152 alignment 147 cognitive 124 emotional 177 psychological 125 alliance  23, 32 alliteration 38 Alvstad  6, 10, 138, 213 ambiguity  43, 51, 69, 89, 153, 192 analysis, three-level  70–71, 82 analytical framework  147 anaphoric references  63 Anglocentric 209 anti-imperialism mentality  182 anti-Japanese resistance  60, 197 appositions 61 Aristotle 34 artificiality 117 Asia 210 Asian contexts 210 cultures  62, 198 perspective 209 values 7 Asimakoulas  4, 213 assertiveness  79, 116, 124 assumed translation  14 asynchronous publication  6 attitude  76, 164, 183, 185, 202, 206

attitudinal  185, 189, 200 disparity 194 inconsistence  172, 185, 189, 192, 194, 200, 202, 207 stability 192 unsteadiness 192 Attridge  27, 213 authenticity  12, 31, 37, 45, 76, 102, 217, 219 author  3–4, 10–12, 15–16, 24–25, 35, 43–44, 51, 56–58, 60–65, 67–68, 70–79, 90–91, 102–3, 170–72, 205–6 ghost  26, 29, 75, 142, 164, 201 implied, see also implied author omniscient 92 authorial 77–78 assertiveness 57 attitude  3, 5, 64, 149, 165, 206 identity 38 ideological affiliation  144 narrator  77–78, 85, 88, 93, 121, 123 persona  38, 75 subjectivities 26 tone  44–47, 92, 109, 148–49, 152 traits 35 authoritarianism  183, 219 authority  25, 142–43, 209 author-narrator distinction 76–77 author-reader relationship  63–64, 209 authorship  11, 24, 75–76 autobiographer  2–3, 11–12, 24–26, 28–32, 34–35, 37, 44, 51, 55, 64, 99, 102, 160, 164, 168 autobiographical  21, 25, 27, 32, 76, 81, 172, 215, 218

exceptionality 27 language  16, 43–44, 64–65 memory  31–32, 39, 54, 121, 216, 218 realism 43 self 32 style 35 autobiographical contract  20, 25, 73, 217 autobiographical studies  5, 30, 39, 209 autobiography  2–8, 10–12, 16, 19–39, 41–65, 67–97, 99–102, 122–26, 132, 167–68, 172, 186– 88, 200–202, 205–10, 214–19 debunked 44 genre of  23, 39, 107, 209 literary  24, 32, 38, 209 minority 19 monolingual 209 national  19, 33–34 non-literary 38 political  28–29, 33, 45, 57, 76, 209 self-authored 11 women’s  19, 218 awareness  16, 25, 29, 50, 136, 173–74, 176–77, 182, 189–90, 201, 208–9 awkward  150–51, 156, 182 constructions  156, 158, 161 syntax 159 B Baba Malay  186 ba-construction 187 Baker  4, 213, 215 Bakhtin 108 Bal  69, 79, 88, 136, 213 Banfield  4, 84, 101, 122, 125, 213 Barros  19, 35–36, 214 beliefs  35, 49, 51, 75, 81, 83, 91–92, 96, 99, 105, 107, 132–33, 144

222 Translation of Autobiography

Benton  24–25, 214 Besemeres  37, 39, 214 bilingual  15, 130, 218 competence 70 education  6–9, 63, 140, 142, 153, 181 policy  7–8, 13, 78, 150–51, 200 bilingualism  5–9, 11–15, 30, 70, 142, 144, 209 binary opposition  9, 19–20, 27, 29, 32, 39, 41, 205, 210, 213 biographers 24 biography  20–21, 23–25, 29, 205, 214–15, 217 bios 30–31 blurb  73, 75–76, 142–43 Boase-Beier  4, 214 Boldrini  25–26, 214 Booth  4, 74–75, 170, 214 Bosseaux  4–5, 214 boulomatic 106 Boxer Rebellion  53–54, 182 brevity  57–58, 120 British colony  73, 76, 141 culture  62, 198 English 184 Bruner  27, 31–33, 38–39, 70, 79–80, 83, 123, 214 C Cambridge  55–56, 127, 213–18 Cambridge Examination Board 56 Cambridge University  56, 126–27, 216 camera eye  77–78, 113, 118 canonical literature  20–21, 27, 29 Cantonese 7 Carter and Nash  41–43, 57, 214, 219 Chai Chong Yii  130–31, 174–75 Chapman  42, 214 character  33–35, 63, 67–68, 71–74, 77–80, 82–96, 101–5, 107–10, 112–19, 122–23, 130–33, 152–53, 169–70, 179–82, 206 character’s attitude 107

consciousness  89, 92–93, 99–101, 107, 109, 111, 114, 116–18, 126, 129, 132, 135, 152, 202, 206–7 characters fallible 177 reflector 86 Charles Dickens  26 Charlotte Brontë  26 Chatman  4, 68–69, 71–72, 75–77, 79, 82, 84, 88–91, 136, 138, 167, 170–71, 214, 217, 219 Chesterman  13, 214 chiasmus  37, 216 China Institute  53–54, 57, 181–82 Chinese  8–9, 12, 14, 59–60, 111–13, 142, 150–51, 155–57, 161–62, 173–74, 177–78, 181– 82, 186–88, 190–91, 193–94 autobiographies  2, 5, 197 chauvinism 192 community  8, 175, 199–200 culture  119, 149, 156, 158 dialects 7–8 heritage  62, 73 language  59, 61, 73, 81, 115, 125, 127, 147–48, 150, 155, 161, 179, 182, 186, 192 literature 145 value system  127–28 Chinese-educated  9, 12, 128, 140 Chinese education  8, 13, 70, 81, 140, 153, 186–88 Chinese High  117–18 Chinese-language education 120, 163 Chinese-medium schools  62, 81, 85, 121, 140, 142, 145, 178, 186, 199 Chinese school education  126, 157 Chinese schools  81, 104, 120, 127, 140, 152, 157–58, 162–63, 188 Chinese Singaporeans  73, 106, 122 Chinese-speaking community 9, 160 Chinese-stream students  119, 158

Choon Guan School  81–82, 186–88 circumlocution  147, 152–56, 165, 199, 207 clause  61–62, 104, 120, 122, 125, 130, 150–51, 155 embedded 124 material  74, 82 mental  82, 106, 154 relational  149, 153, 194 relative  105, 151, 179, 182 subordinate  62, 104, 124, 150 verbal  119, 158 cline  42–43, 108–10 cognition  82, 89, 120 cognizance  42, 118, 151 coherence  61, 63–64, 127, 131, 133, 137, 147, 149, 156, 162, 181, 206 adaptive 32 enhanced  64, 121 partial  33, 64 cohesion  47–49, 53, 61–64, 128, 137, 147, 155, 159, 187 Cohn  20–21, 26, 28, 75–77, 85, 109–10, 167, 171–72, 193, 200, 214–15 collectivism 184 collocation  62–63, 127, 144, 155, 158, 195, 199 defective  153, 155–56, 158–59, 180 colonialism 34 communist  9, 121, 155 complex NP  160, 162, 179, 181 see also noun phrase comprehensibility  27, 29, 39, 44, 155, 205 concurrence  202, 207 conflation  16, 36, 65, 67, 73, 76, 172 partial 83 perceived  73, 206 presumed  86, 197 conflict  76, 109, 193, 213 inter-ethnic 7 Confucian 183 values 146 conjunction  38, 42, 54, 56, 58, 62–63, 121, 128, 130, 153, 160–61, 181, 188

Index 223

connection  33, 62, 95, 194 inter-sentential  63, 155 intra-sentence 156 logical  63, 195–96 connotation  22, 71, 174 derogatory 60 consciousness  2–3, 31–32, 86–87, 92–93, 107, 111–13, 117– 21, 125–26, 130–32, 152, 154, 167–68, 184, 206–7, 214–15, see also character’s, narrator’s, translator’s consciousness constituting 100–101, 167–69, 184, 202 inner  9, 62, 168 mediating  122, 174, 179, 182, 184, 201 merging  121, 192 ruling  100–101, 124–25 construction  3, 148, 150, 153, 158, 174, 195, 206, 218 copula 153 iconic 194 modal verb  79 null-subject 163 syntactic 151 ungrammatical 151 context  16, 47–49, 53, 57, 61, 64, 102, 106, 135, 137, 147, 149, 155, 158, 210 cultural 30 multicultural 4 contextualization 149 contextualize  5, 7, 39, 149 contextual overdetermination 137, 156, 158 continuum  106, 214 control  82, 89, 116, 121, 142, 199 author’s 91 narratorial 123 narrator’s  108, 110, 128 convergence  114, 118 Conway  31, 215 Cook  46, 101, 215 copula 152–53 cultural conventions  27, 31 identity  8, 37, 142, 174, 200 pluralism 7 sensitivity 37

culture  12–13, 15, 20, 27, 37, 44, 47, 62–63, 137, 139, 143–44, 149, 151, 198–99 Currie  75, 82–83, 94, 110, 185, 215 D Danielewicz  33, 215 deautomatization 46 decolonization  33, 216 deculturalization  181, 198–99 defamiliarization  46–47, 99, 101, 104–5, 132–33, 206 defamiliarize  91, 104–5, 114, 151 defective punctuation  173–74, 191, 194, 197 deictic centre  102–3, 113, 116, 118, 127 character’s 108 empty 101 here-I-now 131 narrator’s  113, 118 zero-point  113, 127 deictic shifts  36, 102–4, 113, 127–28, 131 Deictic Shift Theory. See DST deixis  5, 36, 92–93, 95–97, 99, 101–2, 105, 132, 169, 206, 218–19 compositional  102, 124, 127 person  102, 115, 124, 128, 183 social  102, 104, 115–16, 131 spatial  85, 95, 102, 104, 112–13, 118 spatio-temporal 84 temporal  79, 85, 95, 102, 104, 113, 118–21, 127–28, 154, 190 textual  102, 105, 120, 123, 130, 188 deontic  105–7, 112, 124–25, 151 Descriptive Translation Studies. See DTS desiderative  106, 120–21, 163 deviance  41, 46, 219 deviant  2–4, 6, 47, 49, 52, 55, 115, 119, 124, 128, 131, 135, 155–56, 163–65, 205–8 collocations 60 lexical choices  56 deviation  35, 46–47, 83

devices  38, 108, 132, 169, 206 linguistic  54, 76, 90 literary  42, 68 dialects  7–8, 62, 111, 116, 129– 30, 140, 178–80, 199 dialogue  12, 59, 108, 177, 190 dichotomy  42, 64, 85, 94 didactic  33–34, 39 diegesis  99, 108, 119, 121, 126, 167 diegetic  79, 108, 114, 122–24, 128, 132, 167, 174 Direct Speech. See DS Direct Thought. See DT discordance  172, 193, 197–98, 201 discordant narration  167, 170–72, 185, 202, 215 voice  167, 172, 193, 198, 200, 209 discourse  43, 49, 68–69, 72, 101, 137, 214–15 character’s  72, 80, 85, 118 narrator’s  80, 85, 118, 171 discursive presence  135, 137, 159–60, 164–65, 168, 173–74, 177, 179–80, 182, 188, 191, 200, 202, 207, 209 distance  57, 63, 77, 85, 91, 113, 176–77 distinction diegesis/mimesis 108 narrator/character 80 distinctiveness formal  46–47, 49–50, 52, 181 functional  4, 45, 47, 50–52, 64 representational 47 distortion  11, 83, 177, 184, 198, 202 double-voiced  33, 215 drama  21, 43, 72, 117, 217 dramatizing 131 DS (Direct Speech)  36, 79, 85, 89–91, 93, 95–96, 105, 107–16, 118, 122, 130–31, 154, 159, 173–77, 189–90 DST (Deictic Shift Theory)  36, 103–4, 132 DT (Direct Thought)  108, 111, 117–18, 123, 138, 152, 159

224 Translation of Autobiography

DTS (Descriptive Translation Studies)  138–39, 146, 165, 219 dual audience  137 dual voices  108–9 E elitism  8, 56, 64, 206 elitist purism  8–9 embodiedness 100 emotion  14, 23, 31, 82, 89, 92, 110, 113, 120–21, 129, 178 empathize  114, 132, 175, 180, 201 empathy  109–10, 112, 119, 121, 126, 128–29, 131–32, 167, 172–75, 177–78, 181, 183, 185, 201, 206–8 enacting  138, 144 enactment 33–34 English-educated students  117, 140 English-language school  81 English-medium schools  62, 120, 198 English-school students  157 English-speaking population 125, 162 epistemic  105–7, 112, 115, 124– 25, 128, 161, 190–91 equivalence  142, 158, 177 equivocation 155 erasure  14, 164, 181 estrangement  93, 95–96 ethnic Chinese  7–8, 156, 161– 62, 173–74, 178–79, 181 Eurocentric 209 Eva Hoffman  37 exceptionality  27, 29–30, 32, 39, 44, 65, 205 exclamations  55–56, 175, 183, 191–92 experiencing self  80–82, 84, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123 experientiality  100, 108, 111, 114, 116–18, 127, 173, 175 F fable 68–69 fabula  68–72, 80, 82, 96, 100, 103, 118, 124 facticity  26–30, 190

factual discrepancies  172, 182, 184–85, 187–89, 195, 197, 200, 207 factuality  26, 54, 57, 190 faithful  114, 160, 194 fallible filters  90, 109, 114, 116, 129–30, 167, 170–74, 176–77, 179–80, 184, 188, 201–2, 206 fallible filtration  109, 170–71 FDS (Free Direct Speech)  108, 110, 127, 192 FDT (Free Direct Thought) 108, 110, 123, 125 fiction  19–21, 26, 28–30, 36, 43, 56, 67, 69, 94, 193, 214–16 autodiegetic 36 fictional autobiography  25 fictionality 26 fictive autobiography  20–21, 25–26, 29, 36, 39, 80, 205 FID (Free Indirect Discourse) 5, 92–93, 95–96, 110, 115, 123 filter 90 first-person narration  73, 85, 92, 123 narratives  79, 85, 217 narrator  74, 77–78, 80, 87, 89, 93, 102, 132 first-person pronoun  62–63, 78, 104, 111–13, 115, 118, 120– 22, 125, 135, 153, 163 FIS (Free Indirect Speech)  79, 85, 109–11, 114–18, 132, 191–92 FIT (Free Indirect Thought) 109, 131–32 Fludernik  68–70, 74, 76–78, 80, 86–88, 95, 99–102, 104, 108, 110–11, 123, 132, 168–69, 206, 215 focalization  3, 85–88, 90, 92, 94–95, 117 double 86–87 external  86–88, 93 internal  86–88, 93 zero  86, 93 folk psychology  27 foregrounding  2–6, 41, 45–48, 50–52, 54–56, 58–59, 61, 63–64, 114–16, 125–26, 128–29, 131–33, 156, 205–6, 219

foregrounding analysis  16, 47, 49, 52–53, 65, 67, 99, 135, 146–47, 155, 167, 206–7 formal distinctness  152 Fowler  3–4, 41–42, 45–47, 50–51, 54, 62, 64, 84, 88–89, 91–95, 105–6, 124, 147–50, 205, 215 Free Direct Speech. See FDS Free Direct Thought. See FDT Free Indirect Discourse. See FID Free Indirect Speech. See FIS Free Indirect Thought. See FIT functional grammar  45, 49, 52, 64, 105, 215 functional significance  2, 44, 48, 50, 53, 64, 67, 146–47, 151–52, 156, 205–6 functions ideational 49 interpersonal  49, 105, 107 self-making 126 textual 49 world-making  31–33, 41, 123, 126, 211 G generalizations  86, 138–39, 146 Genette  68–69, 76, 80, 84–93, 96, 108, 123, 215 Gengzi Indemnity  181–82 genres  3, 16, 20–21, 24–25, 27–29, 39, 41, 44, 69, 72, 205, 217 literary  2–3, 19, 144, 214, 218 non-literary  19, 144 Gentzler  6, 144, 215 ghostwriter 22 glorify  28, 76, 155, 164 graphe 30–31 Gusdof  24–25, 28–29, 215 H habitualization  47, 59 Hainanese 7 Hakka  73, 81, 128, 178 Halliday and Matthiessen  45, 49–51, 64, 105–6, 120, 215 Hallidayan Functional Grammar 52 Hamilton  21–22, 215

Index 225

Hampl and May  28, 215–16 hanyu pinyin 10 Harding  4, 215 Heidt  79, 81, 215 Hermans  3–4, 6, 42, 46, 135, 137–38, 156, 162, 165, 168, 182, 215 heterobiography 26 histoire 68–69 historicity  23, 28, 30, 54, 70, 80–81 historiography  20–21, 28–29, 69, 205 Hokkien  7, 81, 116, 129, 186 Holden  19, 33–34, 39, 60, 197, 216 homodiegesis 86 Howarth  28, 34–36, 216 Huddleston  105–6, 216 humour  112, 182 hybridity  25, 94 hypotactic  151, 158 hypotaxis 150 I I-character  36, 74, 79–83, 85–86, 96, 110, 112–16, 118, 121–22, 124, 127–33 I-character’s attitude 116 belief 130 consciousness  112–13, 124, 131, 167 discourse 124 emotion 116 feeling 129 mind 117 subjectivity  118, 120, 124 identities  25, 31, 37, 39, 44, 77, 91, 208, 216 author’s  20, 37 ethnic  15, 182 narrator’s 20 national 9 protagonist’s 174 social 174 identity crisis  37 identity theft  26 ideological affiliation  9, 144, 146, 160, 168, 193, 208

alignment 164 belief  9, 128 differences  146–47, 200 discordance  133, 172, 185, 193, 197, 207 evaluation 90–91 patronage  147, 165, 207 significance  50, 172 unreliability  193, 196–98, 200, 202 ideology  14–15, 75–76, 88–90, 92, 133, 143–44, 146, 185, 192–93, 197–98, 200–202, 206, 208, 210, 213–19 author’s  88, 92 character’s 92–93 imperialism 182 impersonal  78, 87, 93, 142, 158 implied author  71–72, 74–79, 82–83, 89–90, 95–96, 99–100, 110, 131–33, 136–38, 164–65, 168– 72, 193, 200, 202–3, 206–10 implied reader  31, 71–72, 74, 103, 136–37, 170 implied translator  135–39, 141, 143–47, 149, 151, 153, 155–65, 167–69, 172–80, 184–85, 187–89, 191–92, 195–98, 201–2, 207–8 I-narrator  36, 74, 76, 79–83, 96, 110–16, 118–19, 123–25, 128–33, 135, 167, 177–78, 180–83, 197–98, 200 incoherence  147, 149, 155–56, 160–63, 165, 176–77, 184, 188, 195–97, 199–200, 207 incongruities  17, 83, 109, 137, 167, 170, 185, 190, 192, 194–95, 199, 201–2, 208 attitudinal 197 factual 188 indirect speeches  89–90, 109, 114 individualism 163 intentionality  22, 29 interior monologues  95–96, 110, 123, 154 internal point of view  25, 90–91 interpreters  15, 190 interrogatives  57, 115–16, 118, 191–92

intertextuality  13, 159 intertextual relationship  12–13 intervention  110, 115–16, 137, 158, 168, 208 I-reflector  36, 81–82, 112 ironize  191, 202, 206, 208–9 irony  43, 112, 114, 126, 129–32, 167, 170–84, 188–89, 191, 195, 200–202, 206–8 speaker-conscious  171, 177 speaker-unconscious 171 translator-conscious  172, 188, 202 translator-unconscious  185, 200, 208–9 J Japanese  59–61, 193, 195–97 forces  59–60, 193–95 Gakuen 60 invaders  195, 197 language  60–61, 197 Japanese Occupation  59–60, 140, 193–97 Jawad  37–38, 216 Jeffries  4, 46–49, 59, 216 Jiang Zemin  189 journalists  5, 15, 24, 75, 139, 144–45, 162, 165, 197, 201–2, 207–8 juxtapose  87, 110, 129 juxtaposition  43, 78, 111, 113, 118, 124, 176, 198 K Kasabova  31, 216 Kermode  27, 216 Kiasuism 199 Kwa Geok Choo  62–63 L language formulaic 64 journalistic 188 objective  44, 53 ordinary , 53 subjective 44 Leech and Short  4–5, 41–42, 44–49, 51–52, 57–58, 62, 64, 72–73, 94, 108–10, 114–17, 119–20, 123, 216

226 Translation of Autobiography

Lee Hsien Loong  104, 145 Lee Kuan Yew  6–7, 10–11, 33, 73–74, 130, 141–42, 164, 216–17 Lefevere  6, 135, 139, 143–44, 146, 165, 216–17 legitimation  47, 59 legitimizing 34 Lejeune  3, 20, 22–23, 25, 30, 73, 217 levels of analysis  67–69, 71–72 lexical  48, 53, 59, 64, 152, 157, 163 categories  47–48, 53 choice  181, 194 collocation 60 features  53, 147–48, 180 lexicon  57, 147 Lianhe Zaobao  10–11, 213, 217 Lim Kim San  116, 129–30, 154, 179 lingua franca  7–8, 12 linguistic criticism  41, 45, 50, 52–53, 64, 205, 215 linguistic indicators of point of view  16, 67, 95–97, 99, 132, 206 linguistic instrumentalism  8–9, 15, 56, 64, 128–29, 133, 206 linguistic purism  130 linguistic purist  56, 61 linguistics  3, 47, 50–51, 84, 200, 205, 213, 215, 219 literariness  22, 26–27, 41–44, 51, 57, 59, 64, 178, 214–15 literary criticism  19–20, 30, 36, 38, 205 literary critics  19, 33–34, 36–39 literary language  4, 42–44 M Malay  8, 12, 59, 81, 115, 150–51, 162, 186, 191–92 Malaya  111, 162–63, 173 Malay-medium schools  81, 85, 121, 188 Malaysia  53–54, 116, 121, 155, 180 Mandarin  7–8, 12, 62, 81, 104, 116, 125, 129–30, 140, 146, 150, 161, 179–80, 186, 199 Mandel  26, 44, 217

manipulation  31, 88, 143, 160, 178, 201, 217 school 144 translator’s  160, 164, 184 Marcus  25, 217 marginalization  8, 121 matriarch 187 matriarchy  185, 188 McIntyre  4, 46–49, 59, 86, 89, 102–3, 216–17 mediation  108, 114, 121–23, 129–30 narratorial  96, 99, 108 narrator’s  87, 100, 104–5, 108, 119–21 third-party 12 translator’s  169, 208 memoirs  5–6, 9–10, 14, 20–23, 28, 34, 39, 184, 194, 215–16 memories  31–32, 38, 58, 215, 218 metaphors  43, 59, 93, 103, 141, 149, 152–53, 163, 199 Millán-Varela  4–5, 136–37, 217 Milne and Mauzy  183, 197, 200, 217 mimesis  99, 108, 111–14, 118, 126, 167 mimesis within diegesis  126, 129, 131–32, 206 mimetic effect  79, 107, 109, 111, 113–16, 118, 124–25, 130–32 quality  108, 112–13, 125, 127, 131, 167, 174, 176–77, 189 mind style  90, 92, 95, 218 misreading 194–95 mistranslation  195, 197, 208 modal auxiliaries  115, 118, 190 modality  5, 51, 78–79, 92–97, 99, 101, 105–7, 112, 114–15, 124, 132, 169, 189, 206 modalization 105 modes authorial narrator’s  78 narrator-centred 128 reflector-character 81 teller-character 81 monologues intérieur  90 monosemic  42–43, 53–54 monosemy 44 Morini  4, 36, 38–39, 81, 217

mother tongues  2, 7–8, 73, 141, 150–51, 162, 198–200 Mousley  37, 217 mouthpiece  79, 110, 171 Mukařovský 45 multilingual  4, 14 Munday  4, 138, 217 mystifications 31 mystify  191, 201 N Nantah  7, 9, 12, 119, 122, 149, 156–57, 159–60, 163, 174 Nanyang University  12–13, 70, 142, 149, 157, 162, 164 naratologists 136 Narcissism 23 narratee  71–72, 103, 136, 170 narrating  68–69, 80, 94, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121 narrating self  80–82, 84, 96, 109 narration  89–91, 93, 117, 119– 20, 122–23, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 167, 169, 189, 191, 197–201 narrative-communicative situation  16, 51, 67, 71–72, 74, 83, 100, 103, 121, 133, 135–36, 138, 206, 209, 211 narrative psychology  20, 30, 205 Narrative Report of Actions. See NRA Narrative Report of Speech Acts. See NRSA Narrative Report of Thought. See NRT Narrative Report of Thought Acts. See NRTA narrative situation  71, 74, 77, 83, 86, 110, 121, 127–28, 131, 133, 136–37, 160, 170, 172, 208 hypothetical  83, 96, 169 narrative structure  67–71, 80, 96, 100 narrative text  68–72, 82, 91, 96, 103 narrativity 100 narrativization  99–101, 104–5, 132, 206 narratologist  33, 76–77, 79, 209

Index 227

narratology  2, 5, 76, 136, 209, 213, 215 natural  100, 215 narrator  31–33, 67–68, 71–83, 85–96, 99–105, 107–10, 112–15, 117–19, 121–26, 128–33, 135–36, 167–72, 176–77, 184–85, 206–9 authoritative 78 covert 77 disinformed  171, 202 embodied 87 omniscient  86–87, 93 overt 77 retrospective 79 third-person  73, 93 narrator-reader relationship 126, 133, 168 narrator’s attitudes  89, 107, 179 consciousness  77, 100, 105, 109–10, 118–19, 123–24, 126, 132, 202, 206 National Day Rally  145 nationalist  33–34, 37, 39 naturalization 100–101 near-synonyms  148, 151, 155– 56, 158, 188 negation  2, 151, 180, 199 Nehru 2 neoliberalism 34 neutrality  36, 54, 60–61, 146, 163 nominalization  120, 153 non-fictional  72–73, 79, 172 norms  15, 37–38, 46, 88, 103, 110, 133, 136, 138, 170, 188, 197, 200, 207 linguistic  3, 46 pragmatic 202 translational 137 noun phrase (NP)  49, 54–55, 59–60, 74, 76, 120–21, 142, 151, 153, 156, 178 novels  4–5, 20–21, 26, 36, 42–43, 53, 67, 69, 71–72, 76–77, 80, 123, 205 NP. See noun phrase NRA (Narrative Report of Actions)  108, 110, 127

NRSA (Narrative Report of Speech Acts)  109, 115–16, 118–22 NRT (Narrative Report of Thought)  108, 110, 180 NRTA (Narrative Report of Thought Acts)  109, 112, 118–21 null-subject 163 O objectivity  23, 25–30, 36, 39, 44, 54, 59, 70, 81, 205 Olney  3, 19–20, 33, 214–18 omission  110, 115, 137, 145, 164, 173, 175, 178, 182–83, 188, 192, 195, 202, 207 omniscient  25, 78, 87 ordinariness  27, 43–44, 64 orient  84–85, 113, 145, 159, 169, 173, 184, 192, 197, 201–2, 207–8 orientation  20, 51, 94, 122, 137, 143 originality  11–12, 35, 143 “other” consciousness  167–68, 170–71, 176–77, 184, 190, 197, 201–2, 207 “other” voice  3, 6, 135–37, 156–59, 162, 164–65, 167–68, 172, 174, 176, 182–85, 200–202, 207, 209, 211 overevaluation  147, 152–53, 155–56, 160, 163, 165, 180, 183, 188, 192, 207 overlexicalization  147–49, 151, 156, 158–59, 165, 179–80, 183, 188, 199, 207 P Palmer  110, 117, 217 paradox  32, 43, 77, 112 paradoxical FDT  110, 119, 123–26, 132 paralepsis  87, 123 parallelism  37, 43, 46, 60–61, 127, 151–53, 156, 175, 178, 192, 196, 216 paraphrase  122, 216 paratexts  10, 34, 137–38, 150, 164, 182, 188 parentheses  71, 163

past tense  78, 81, 104, 115–16, 120–22, 124, 128, 131, 190 patronage  143–44, 146 patrons 143–44 People’s Action Party (PAP) 120, 140, 163, 175 Peranakan  7, 140, 142 persona  2, 16, 75–76, 99, 119, 131, 168, 214 altered  83, 96, 169, 202–3, 205, 207–8 glorified 76 positive  133, 160 public 25 perspective  3–4, 20, 35, 44, 67, 77, 80, 85, 87, 94–95, 102, 126 external  84–85, 93, 123, 132 internal  84–85, 87, 93 psychological 31 reader’s 35 translatological 5 visual 87–88 phonology  43, 48 phraseological 91 plot  68–70, 72, 80, 82, 96, 100, 103, 118, 124 plurality  29, 43 plurisignification 88 poems  21, 53, 104, 218 poetics  143–44, 146–47, 156, 165, 168, 176, 201, 207, 214, 218–19 point of view  4, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75–77, 79, 81, 83–95, 97, 206 character’s  68, 85, 92–95, 108, 118, 120, 130, 202 conceptual 89 ideological  89, 91–92, 95 interest 89 narrator’s  89–90, 93–94, 96, 126, 130, 167, 169, 184 psychological  89, 92–94 spatial 91 spatio-temporal  89, 91 temporal 91 political correctness  162, 164 polyphonic 110 polyphony 108 polysemic  43, 60, 174 polysemy  42, 44, 137, 197 Popescu  138, 217

228 Translation of Autobiography

position  3, 28, 39, 51, 84–85, 88, 90–92, 102, 114, 119, 127 positive image  76, 146, 152, 156, 159–60, 162–65, 180, 182, 201–2, 207–8 postulates  12, 14, 19–20, 35, 72, 75, 87 pragmatism  64, 219 political  9, 128, 133, 197, 200, 206 Prague School  3, 41, 45, 64 present evaluation  7, 32, 70, 80, 82, 106, 123–24, 128, 131–32, 198, 217 present perfect tense  70, 124 present tense  104, 110, 112, 123–25, 131 process behavioural 50 existential 50 material  50, 152, 163 mental  50, 118, 120–21, 129, 138–39, 152, 154, 163 relational  50, 148 verbal  50, 74, 116, 118–19, 159 profession  24, 55, 183, 202, 208, 215 professionals  143–44, 208 pronouns  54, 62–63, 81, 84, 111–12, 114, 116, 118, 121–24, 131, 152–53, 191 prose fiction  111, 216 protagonist  23–25, 32–33, 73–74, 86–87, 112–13, 115–18, 159–60, 162–65, 174–80, 182, 186–89, 191–92, 194–97, 200–202, 206–7 protagonist’s consciousness  100–101, 118, 168, 177, 191, 199 point of view  173, 177 proverbs  106, 124–25 pseudotranslation 12 psychological impact  47, 55, 119, 125–26, 128 psychologists  19, 31, 33, 38–39, 79 psycho-narration  110, 125, 131, 154, 176, 198–99

Q quasi-mimetic  100, 126, 128 quotation marks  54, 111, 122– 23, 145, 173–75, 177, 191 R Raffles College  62, 198 Raffles Institution  55, 183, 186, 188 reader  31, 33, 35–36, 43, 68–70, 72, 75, 77, 79, 87, 102, 128, 136–37, 170–72, 179 implied, see implied reader reader’s consciousness  99–102, 105, 115–16, 119, 168 readership  9, 30 real author  33, 71, 73–76, 79, 82–83, 89, 96, 99, 133, 136, 169, 193, 198, 202–3, 206–7 real reader  71, 136 récit 68 referentiality  31, 54 reflector  77–78, 84–85, 87, 100, 113, 132 relationship author-narrator 77 inter-textual  139, 142 narrator-character  86, 145 relationship postulate  12 reliability  17, 110, 131, 167, 185, 190–92, 198–99, 202, 206–8, 210 Renza  23, 28–29, 218 reorient  137, 156, 160, 165, 175 repetition  46, 56, 58, 61–63, 107, 115–16, 118, 124, 128, 149, 152–53, 156, 163, 192, 199 resemblance  27, 69, 90, 123, 150–51, 158, 198 resentment  9, 61, 194, 197 resistance  9, 60–61, 73, 180, 194, 197, 209 retranslation 213 retrospect  80–82, 198 rewriting  6, 135, 139, 143–47, 165, 167, 197, 202, 207–8, 215, 217 theory of  144, 146, 165 rhetorical devices  38, 47, 59 effect  59–61, 112, 124–26, 131, 151

functions 38 value  36, 39, 205 rhetorical question  104, 145, 192 Rimmon-Kenan 88 Rosengrant  38, 218 Rubin  31, 39, 218 Russ  3, 218 Russian Formalists  45–46, 68 S SAP. See Special Assistance Plan schema  20, 36, 100–101, 112–13, 118, 124, 131–32 schemata  100–101, 104, 114, 126, 132, 175, 206 experiencing  100, 114, 116, 129, 131, 175 telling 122 Schiavi  5–6, 79, 135–38, 165, 218 Schrauf  31, 39, 218 Segal  102–3, 218 self  21–23, 30–32, 37, 80, 95–96, 111, 202, 210–11, 214, 218 authentic 31 narrative 218 second 75 self-referential  35, 156 self-referentiality  137, 162, 182 self-reflexiveness 137 self-reflexivity 22 self-representation  22, 29, 31, 202 self-translation 38 semantic  6, 48, 58, 89, 142, 159–60, 164, 167, 179, 192, 194, 199, 201 ambiguity  163, 174, 177 contrast  61, 76, 127–28, 200 density  42–44, 57, 59, 151 equivalence  146, 157 Semino  4, 218 sensers  120–21, 152 sentence-final particle  176 sentences complex  56–58, 158, 182, 192 declarative  57, 104 empty-centred 125 generic  106, 124 gnomic 161 minor  48, 59, 192

Index 229

sequence  34, 49, 57, 150 chronological  44, 58, 70 psychological  44, 57–58, 62 topic-comment 161 sequentiality 161 shifts attitudinal 60 point of view  2, 17, 168, 172, 185 Shklovsky 46 Short 110 Simpson  3–4, 84, 94, 106, 111, 218 Singapore  5–9, 13–14, 70, 73–74, 141–42, 216 Singaporean  7, 104, 115–16, 127, 142, 148, 159, 174, 181 Singapore Press Holdings  5, 11, 216 Singlish 8 singularity  27, 213 slant  3, 88–90, 95 Slater  138, 218 Smith  19, 23, 30, 80, 218 Smith and Watson  19, 21–22, 24–26, 28–30, 33, 76, 79 Smorti  31–32, 64, 79, 218 Southeast Asia  106, 121, 149, 155–56 Speak Mandarin Campaign  7–8, 13, 70, 129 Special Assistance Plan (SAP) 7–8, 13, 70, 127–28, 142, 145 speech and thought presentation  51, 96–97, 99, 101, 107–11, 117, 126, 129–32, 159, 169, 173, 206 speech presentation  96, 99, 108, 110, 191 Stanzel  77–81, 84–88, 90–93, 95–96, 104, 123, 218 Starobinski  30, 35–36, 218 Stockwell  102–3, 218–19 story  19–20, 23, 25, 27, 32–33, 68–69, 73–74, 80, 84, 86, 100, 102–3, 132, 170–72, 214–15 story-telling schema  36, 100–101, 168 see also schema, schemata story world  77–78, 84, 89 Straits Times Press  10, 213, 216

structuralists  31, 84 style  34–36, 38–39, 41, 46, 50, 77, 92, 110, 130, 146–47, 156, 213–18 stylistic  4–6, 33, 36–39, 41, 45, 48, 50–52, 64–65, 84, 88, 126, 130–31, 139, 157, 205 stylisticians  4, 35–36, 38, 41, 46, 94 stylistics  2–5, 16, 20, 30, 36, 41, 45, 135–36, 139, 165, 169, 205, 209–10, 216, 219 subject  21, 24, 32, 59, 68, 77–78, 120, 130, 142–43, 153, 172, 177, 182, 187 abstract 195 extended 60 grammatical  57–58, 149–50 subjectivity  22–23, 25–26, 29–30, 39, 44, 102, 107, 115, 117–18, 124–25, 129, 154, 191–92, 205, 210 character’s 115 narrator’s 106 speaker’s  105, 132, 169 subject matter  20, 27, 105, 144, 168 subject-verb-object (SVO)  59, 61 subordination  150, 184 subversive , 121, 155 suppress  22, 54, 56, 130, 182 surprise  46, 54, 80, 104 suspense  60–61, 194 Suzhou Industrial Park  113 SVA structure  57 SVO (subject-verb-object)  59, 61 synchronized publication  9, 13, 208 synonyms  28, 148, 199 syntactic  6, 44, 47–48, 57, 59, 92, 114, 142, 152, 162–63, 177, 179, 181 complexity 57–58 contrast  58–59, 64, 116, 118–20, 125, 133, 147, 205 foreignness  147, 150, 156, 160, 162, 165, 177, 179, 182, 207 iconicity  44, 57–58, 62–63, 128

linearity 57 parallels  160, 194 transfer  160, 207 syntax  8, 43, 48, 58, 89, 106, 124, 147, 150, 156, 162–63 synthesis  41, 67 syuzhet 68 T Taiwan  115, 191–92 Tan Lark Sye  121, 155–56 target culture  12, 14–15, 37, 136, 138, 144–46, 175, 183 target texts (TT)  12, 137 tautology 148–49 taxonomies  21, 23, 87, 89, 102, 217 teller  77–78, 84, 132, 171, 218 teller mode  81, 100 temporality  22, 81–82 tense  112, 114, 118, 122, 124, 175 tense-markers 106–7 tense shift  122 texts homiletical 43 institutional 43 third-person narration  30, 72, 92–93 thought presentation  51, 96–97, 99, 101, 107–11, 117, 123, 126, 129–32, 159, 169, 173, 206 Todorov  68–69, 217, 219 Toh Chin Chye  116, 174–75, 179–80 Tolstoy 21 tone  54, 58, 110, 114, 131, 138 authoritative  143, 151 ironic  54, 56, 109 Toolan  4, 76, 94, 111, 114–15, 117, 122, 219 Toury  12, 38, 138–39, 210, 219 transfer postulate  12, 142 transitivity  5, 16, 41, 49–51, 92–93, 95–97, 146–47, 152, 158–60, 162, 205 transitivity analysis  50, 52, 147, 156, 165 translatability 4 translated autobiography  2–3, 5, 39, 83, 95, 135, 169, 207, 209

230 Translation of Autobiography

translation  2–4, 6, 10–12, 14–17, 37, 39, 135–39, 143, 146, 157, 165, 167, 192, 207–10, 213–19 assumed  9, 12–14, 76, 135, 139, 146, 205–6 theories  17, 138, 214 translation pact  10, 138, 213 translation postulates  38, 139, 159 translation relationship  6, 10, 138–39, 141, 157 translation studies  2–5, 20, 30, 205, 209, 213–15, 217 translator  2–5, 10–11, 14–16, 37–39, 135–39, 143–44, 146, 157–60, 169, 174–77, 182–84, 191, 200–203, 207–10, 216–17 implied, see implied translator real 136 spirited 144 unreliable 208 translator’s behaviour  16, 210 consciousness  3, 177 intervention  83, 136, 179, 184, 188 voice  3–4, 133, 137–38, 205, 215–16 Traugott  41, 219 trustworthiness  178, 201 truth  25–26, 29–32, 39, 44–45, 105–6, 114, 124, 205, 216

Tymoczko  37, 39, 219 typology of point of view  51, 84, 94 U underlexicalization  53–57, 64, 112, 119, 133, 147, 205 ungrammaticality  49, 151, 153, 155 universality  208, 210 unmediated  9, 36, 112–13 unreliability  79, 90, 110, 170– 71, 185, 189, 192–94, 200–202, 209, 211 attitudinal  133, 189, 202, 207 factual  191, 200 ideological 171–72 unreliable narration  77, 170–72 narrator  77, 82, 90–91, 167, 170, 185, 188–89, 193, 195, 202 untranslatability 137 untrustworthiness 170–71 Uspensky  4, 51, 84, 88–92, 96, 219 V value-laden expressions  56, 147, 151, 158, 178, 183, 194, 200 value systems  127, 152–53 van Peer  4, 42–43, 45, 217, 219 Venuti  4, 11, 208, 210, 219

Verb+Object+Complement 195 verba sentiendi  92–93, 95–96 verbatim  108, 111, 122–23 verbs  48, 53–54, 56, 60, 76, 106, 118–19, 122, 141, 152–53 catenative 106 copula 153 modal  79, 107, 161, 190 viewpoint  73, 94, 100, 117, 215 Vinay and Darbelnet  6, 219 vocabulary  51, 53–56, 92, 125, 145, 147, 161–62 objective  55–56, 58 voices  2–3, 5, 14, 37, 44, 67, 80, 85–86, 88–89, 95, 109–10, 136, 138–39, 205, 213 diegetic  79, 81 double 93 mimetic  79, 81 second 3 translator’s, see translator’s voice W Warner  4, 36, 39, 44, 219 Wee Cho Yaw  122, 159 Widdowson  4, 219 wo-narrator  149, 153–54, 156, 158, 169, 173–75, 180, 182–83, 185, 187–94, 196, 199–201, 207, 209, 211

Index (Chinese)

B 峇峇 186 峇峇马来语 140 北大 145 C 蔡崇语 174 陈怀亮 145 陈六使 155 D 淡米尔语 150 第二语文  161, 178–79, 181, 198 东南亚  148, 155 杜进才  174, 179 F 方言  178–79, 198 福建话 185 福利车厂 140 父亲 182–83 G 庚子赔款 181 H 华人 181 华社 198 华文  141, 145–46, 161, 173, 185–87, 193, 198 华文教育 185 华校毕业生 162 华校生  140, 154, 157, 162, 178 华语  150–51, 161, 181, 186, 189 华族  161, 178–79, 181, 198 黄祖耀 159

J 价值观  152, 198 江泽民 189 经济发展局 190 俊源学校 185

S 双语 185 双语教育 140–41 双语政策  141, 150 苏州工业园 176

K 客家 178

T 台湾 191–92 特选学校 145 特选中学 141

L 莱佛士学院 198 李光耀 141 李显龙 145 林金山  154, 174, 179 M 马来人  150, 191 马来西亚 155 马来西亚大学 162 马来学生 186 马来亚 173 马来语 150 母亲  182, 186–87 N 南大  148, 159 南大毕业生 162 南洋大学 148 Q 妻子芝 198 清华 145 R 人民行动党 162 日本人 196–97 日军  193, 195–96 日文  193, 196 日语 196

W 文化  141, 150, 198–99 X 新加坡  141, 148, 176, 183, 191, 193, 217 新加坡报业控股 11 新加坡人  161, 181 新山 182 Y 印度人 191 印度尼西亚 155 英国殖民地 141 英文  141, 193 英校 198 英校生  157, 162, 198–99 英语  140–41, 186 语文  141, 154, 178–79, 191 语文观  13, 140 Z 中国  155, 189 中国人 173–74 中国文化 158

This book presents an interdisciplinary study that straddles four academic ields, namely, autobiography, stylistics, narratology and translation studies. It shows that foregrounding is manifested in the language of autobiography, alerting readers to an authorial tone with certain ideological ailiations. In refuting the presumed conlation between the author, narrator and character in autobiography, the study emphasizes readers’ role in constructing an implied author. The issues of implied translator, assumed translation and rewriting are explored through a comparative analysis of the English and Chinese autobiographies by Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew. The analysis identiies diferent foregrounding practices and attributes these diferences to an implied translator. Further evidence derived from narrative-communicative situations in the two autobiographies underscores divergent personae of the implied authors. The study aims to establish a deeper understanding of how translation and rewriting have a far-reaching impact on the self- and world-making functions of autobiography. This book will be of special interest to scholars and students of linguistics, literature, translation and political science.

“This book provides a research model on autobiography and its translation, characterized by its integrated utilization of a varied number of linguistic, stylistic, narratological and translational theories and concepts. The validity of such a model has been put to test through the case study of Lee Kuan Yew’s English and Chinese autobiographies. Its argument is forceful, its analysis detailed and perceptive, and its indings signiicant.” TAN Zaixi, Hong Kong Baptist University

isbn 978 90 272 5883 0

John Benjamins Publishing Company