Linguistics and literature

ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 583-611

]oltrnitl ot

Linguistics and literature" Prospects and horizons in the study of prose*

M o n i k a F l u d e r n i k

English Department, University of Freiburg, D-79085 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

Received November 1994; revised version October 1995

Abstract

The article reviews four explanatory models that try to analyze the function of linguistically salient elements in prose texts and demonstrates how these models have developed an increasingly more pragmatist approach. The operation of these models is explained on the example of passages of free indirect discourse. Two further types of expressive style are then introduced, and their metafictional quality is discussed in terms of a subversion of realist reading conventions. Such peculiar stylistic foregrounding fails to establish a workable connection with linguistic insights unless monitored by sophisticated literary interpretation. At such limits linguistics and literature turn out to be very dependent on each other yet at the same time to encounter the horizon of their cooperation.

"Wi th in five years we ' l l have three hundred thousand men in the pad- dies and jung les and never f ind them again. That was the French exper i - ence. Vie tnam is the worst poss ib le terrain both from a phys ica l and pol i t ical point o f v iew."

Obvious ly , these were not the words the Pres ident [J.F. Kennedy] wanted to hear, for he repl ied with an over tone o f asper i ty : "George , I a lways thought you were one o f the brightest guys in town, but y o u ' r e jus t crazier than hel l . "

I have often pondered the meaning of that s tatement, but I am still not sure what the Pres ident had in mind. Was he suggest ing that he would not let such a si tuation develop, or predic t ing that events would not evolve along that l ine?

(NYRB 39.4; Ball, 1992: 20) ~

I am very grateful to an anonymous reviewer for The Journal of Pragmatics for a number of very acute observations on the manuscript and for extremely helpful suggestions for improvement. Special thanks are due to Manfred Jahn for producing diagrams for Models A, B, C and C+ on the computer. An earlier and much reduced version of this paper was presented at the Eichst~itt Anglistentag in September 1993 and is forthcoming in Language and Literature. i The abbreviation NYRB stands for The New York Review of Books.

0378-2166/96/$15.00 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2166(95)00062-3

584 M. Fludernik / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 583~511

I. Introduction

The above anecdote is a typical case of Gricean implicature gone awry. Kennedy's refusal to answer George Bali's arguments against a deployment of troops in Vietnam is misinterpreted by Ball as an indirect speech act, as Kennedy rejecting his (Ball's) argument for pragmatic reasons. However, an interpretation by outsiders such as the present writer and reader may afford an entirely different perspective on Kennedy's flouting of the maxim of relation. As the 'tone of asperity' which Ball notices in the President's repartee already Signals, Kennedy may have wanted to imply something more general: that he did not want to be bothered about Bali's reasons; that to raise the issue was impolite or awkward in the present company; that he did not like to have his decisions questioned and criticized; and that George Ball should have known better than to bring this up in the first place. Such readings or interpretations are of a specifically literary kind since they go beyond the literality of Kennedy's supposed dictum, and they also exceed the scope of the linguistic category of the indirect speech act. In an indirect speech act the literal meaning of the utterance, by way of implicature, leads to a proposition that is logically and situationally related to it: It is hot in here for 'Please open the window'. George Bali's interpretation is one of implicature along these lines, reading "you're just crazier than hell" and "I always thought you were one of the brightest guys in town" as 'your argument is at fault'. Ball does take the accusation personally to some extent, but deflects its full force on his previous argument. In searching for referential meanings, he refuses to read the President's comment as a criticism of his performance in general, or - even worse - a literal judgment on his intellectual abilities.

Kennedy's retort, taken literally, is in excess of the argument it replies to: the tone of asperity and the exaggeration apparent in Kennedy's wording reflect an overreac- tion to the argumentative mode of Bali's scenario, a scenario that ultimately proved to be an accurate picture of the impending disaster in Vietnam. Kennedy's retort is flouting, not merely the maxim of relation ('Be relevant'), but in addition to that the cooperative principle itself. The President insinuates that Bali's speech act itself is inappropriate under the circumstances and that its utterance has resulted in an intol- erable situation for Kennedy. As a consequence, the President vents his exasperation with Ball by indulging in a tone of asperity and by spouting an excessive accusation of stupidity and insanity. This disproportionate characterization of Bali's mental capacities is, however, stylistically muted by its very hyperbolic wording: "crazier than hell" cannot be taken literally after all, and the use of "one of the brightest guys", by offering a disguised compliment, downtones the criticism voiced in its implicit negation ("I always thought you were [...] but [you are not]").

One can read this little anecdote as an allegory. In such a reading, George Ball (in the role of the literal-minded linguist) vainly attempts to understand the oracular enunciations of the literary scholar (allegorically represented by President Kennedy). Despite his knowledge of speech act theory and of indirect speech acts, Ball-the-linguist is still constrained by the theory of relevance and the cooperative principle, and hence unable to deal with the President's refusal to cooperate. Nor has he yet reflected on his own role in the linguistic exchange, on how he himself is situated

M. Fludernik / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 583-611 585

towards the literary scholar who, it turns out, does not like to be told that his own strategies may be at fault and who persists in clinging to his own ways of dealing with language.

In the present paper I would like to reflect on the recent paradigm shift within linguistics towards a pragmatic model of language use, a development that has provided us with a broader range of methods and areas of investigation. I will attempt to illustrate how this paradigm shift has made it possible to bridge the divide between the literary and the linguistic approaches to language. The development from Formalism through structuralism to the newer fields of discourse analysis, pragmatics and cognitive or natural linguistics 2 documents a concomitant shift in interest from more formal to more functional categories of language, from the langue to the parole. Likewise, the linguistic analysis of literature and the disciplines called linguistic stylistics or language & literature have undergone similarly decisive reconceptualizations, both in the wake of poststructuralist theory and on account of the increasing availability of oral language material. When analyzed by formalist and structuralist critics, literary texts tended to be treated in terms of new-critical and canonical literary approaches. By contrast, newer insights into the contextuality and intertextuality of literature (including the recent insistence on a more pragmatic definition of the literary: literature is what readers decide to interpret as literary), have resulted in an openness towards the recent more pragmatic approaches within linguistics, and have helped to bring about an acceptance of the oral language as a recognized object of study even for literary scholars.

On the background of this scenario one can now reconsider the possible ways in which the newest versions of linguistics can help to 'explain' the language of literature - a linguistic question - or ask how the new linguistics may become useful to the literary scholar - a concern for literary studies. I would like to start by consider- ing four models for the relation between a so-called linguistic object and its supposed literary and/or textual function. As an illustration for the working of these models I predominantly use passages of free indirect discourse, a mode of speech and thought representation that has attracted considerable attention from linguists (Bally, 1912a,b; Fillmore, 1974; Banfield, 1982; Von Roncador, 1988; Ehrlich, 1990) and literary scholars (Pascal, 1977; McHale, 1978, 1983; Fludernik, 1993) alike. I will sketch to what extent the linguistic toolbox is helpful to the literary reader and at which points even the most refined linguistic analysis has to be supplemented by specifically 'literary' (or, I will argue, mimetic) concepts. At the same time, I will argue, the recent developments sketched above have opened new horizons, new vistas of cooperation for both the literary scholar and the linguist, and they have done so in relation to the functional analysis of discourse. Higher-level interpretative activities relating to te.rts (including so-called literary ones), on the other hand, may be reserved for the hands of the literary critic and the literary enthu-

2 Natural linguistics, which is aligned with the work of Wolfgang Dressier and other Austrian linguists (Dressier et al., 1987; Dressier, 1989, 1990) somewhat overlaps with the concerns of cognitive linguistics as practiced by George Lakoff, Anna Wierzbicka and others - most easily accessible in the pages of The Journal of Cognitive Linguistics.

586 M. Fludernik / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 583-611

siast (among them the hobby critic who may happen to earn her bread as a linguist). As for more basic reading skills, however, new functionalist insights into the texture of prose discourse suggest that one can no longer make a reasonable distinction between the matter of literature and the matter of linguistics. In this fruitful field of functionalist study none of the former classic dichotomies is preserved, all such boundaries having been converted into scales of shifting allegiances: oral vs. written language, literary vs. non-literary prose, literal vs. non-literal propositions, linguistics vs. literature.

2. Four models: From literary devices to signals and shifters

2.1. The Formal i s t paradigm

The Formalist analysis of prose and poetry started out with a model (here diagrammed as M o d e l A ) in which linguistically definable departures from 'the norm' were treated as artistically significant choices. A device of deviation 3 (pri~m ostra- neniya - Shklovsky, 1965) was treated as a salient, foregrounded unit which is argued to produce an inevitable aesthetic effect. Whether that aesthetic effect signifies the 'stoniness of the stone '4 or the 'literariness' ( l i teraturnost ' ) of the text per se (Muka~ovsk~, 1964), it was in any case linked to a perceptible othemess, a deliberate differing from the norm, which was a norm of the ordinary language.

0 [] / ' .

Model A: Deviations

Model A reads as follows. The continuous line from left to right signifies the linear text, and the intervening circle, square, and triangle represent the textual elements which are foregrounded as literary devices.

Bakhtin had already discussed at length how - particularly in passages of quasi- direct discourse (a form of free indirect discourse) - colloquial and 'ora l ' elements would tend to be foregrounded in this manner. Unlike Shklovsky's, Bakht in ' s foregrounded elements, however, serve to mark, not the l i terariness of Gogol ' s 'Over- coat ' , but the mimetic or realistic evocation of Akaky Akakievich's language. 5 The concept of deviation from the norm has also received some criticism from scholars such as Riffaterre (1959, 1960) and Trabant (1974), who noted the impossibility to

3 Lemon and Reis's translation has "technique of defamiliarization" (Shklovsky, 1965: 18), but the standard term in the Anglo-American tradition is deviation, particularly in the camp of linguistic stylis- ticians (Levin, 1963; Fairley, 1973). 4 Compare: "And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony" (Shklovsky, 1965: 12). 5 See also Volo,~inov's examples from The Brothers Karamazov (1986: 131).

M. Fludernik / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 583--611 587

define the norm from which such devices - now, in stylistics, called stylist ic rather than l i terary devices - could be said to deviate. Levin (1963), Fairley (1973) and others had also argued that linguistic devices such as those employed in e.e. cum- mings's poetry constituted a secondary norm such that so-called normal English syntax would stand out as a deviation from the textual (i.e. contextual) norm of cum- mings's language. Riffaterre therefore proposed to define the stylistic device as a deviation from a contex t rather than from an undefinable norm. Yet he, too, never fully resolved how to define this new concept of context. Riffaterre neither broached the question of where the immediate context begins or ends, i.e. whether the relevant context is a context in terms of the same sentence, paragraph, etc.; nor did he inquire into the cognitive perceptibility of such deviation, the cognitive salience of the supposed literary device. His examples, inversion and lexical foregrounding, are particularly recalcitrant to a determination of whether and exactly how they deviate from their context (Fludemik, 1993: ch. 6).

To this list of dissenting arguments one can add the realization of the unfortu- nate theoretical consequences of Model A. Riffaterre's devices appear to lack a systematic relation with one another, protruding from their textual environment as single entities of potential literary significance. (I have tried to render this fact in the diagram.) This conception of deviational items has led to the illicit interpretative practice of attaching a 'meaning' to the stylistic device, a meaning which supposedly emerges directly from the very use of the deviation and then leads to a fallacious essentialist definition of the stylistic device as signalling one particular interpretation. For instance, occurrences of the historical present, via the self-evi- dent 'presentness' of the present tense, easily trigger a reading in which historical presents 'presentify' the events they relate, that is 'make present' or 'vivid' what is recounted in the present tense. Besides constituting a somewhat circular argument, such simple interpretative moves from the phonological, syntactic or morphological levels straight to the supposed meaning of a deviational device really need to be regarded as an unwarranted short-cut from the level of language form to that of textual functions; this has been documented extensively by recent discourse-analytic work on the historical present tense (Schiffrin, 1981; Wolfson, 1982; Johnstone, 1987; Fludernik, 1991, 1992a). In parallel fashion, the classic analyses of Baudelairean and Shakespearean phonological patterns presented by Jakobson and L6vi-Strauss (1962), Riffaterre (1966), Short (1973a), Werth (1976) and Posner (1982) have evolved in the direction of radical (self-)criticism in which the jump from the merely formal level of the text to its overall interpretation was recognized to be a premature and illicit linking of disparate (formal and semantic) data.

Turning to free indirect discourse, my chosen illustrative material, I want to note at the outset that free indirect discourse can, and indeed has been, interpreted in accordance with Model A. In such an application, a passage of free indirect discourse in its entirety is conceptualized as a deviation from the surrounding narratorial norm - mostly on the basis of exclamatory constituents and lexical indices (col- loquialisms). Typical passages that fulfill such expectations are the following examples.


She would come to class in the mornings, her pale eyes glittering, too bright, and laughingly confess she had not had the time to correct their books or prepare the new lesson: should they read some poetry instead? Tara was charmed. The girls said she had a 'boyfriend.' What had the principal caught her at? Had she tried to elope? With the blonde Buddhist monk? The gossip grew wilder.

(Clear Light of Day; Desai, 1980: 128) 6

Miranda looks up at the sky. Clear. Clear as a bell. But the chickens pinned up in wire cages is making an awful racket. She gotta get them out of there soon or they'll start eating each other alive. She don't know why folks believe chickens are cowardly. She's seen two of 'em stand toe to toe and peck each other to death.

(Mama Day; Naylor, 1989: 229)

His wise May - how he had loved her for that letter! But he had not meant to act on it; he was too busy, to begin with, and he did not care, as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of Madame Olenska's champion.

(The Age of Innocence, xiii; Wharton, 1970: 120)

Such clear cases of free indirect discourse can easily be interpreted as units of signification, with the various interrogative, exclamatory and lexical elements working together as sub-elements of the alleged device. What the application of Model A to free indirect discourse fails to provide is a really convincing analysis of the meaning of such a passage. For instance, once the third quote has been established as free indirect discourse and identified as an exclamation attributable to Archer, no more specific meaning can be attached to the 'device'. Moreover, Model A does not work at all in cases where there appear to be an insufficient number of linguistic elements which would unambiguously characterize a passage as free indirect discourse. Only a reading of the text from the perspective of the mimetic illusion it projects (see the examples given below under 2.3) will suggest the (overwhelmingly) more verisimi- lar categorization in terms of a 'clear case of free indirect discourse'.

2.2. The functional shift: Simple and complex

I now turn to newer conceptualizations of the functions of linguistic elements in prose texts. In these, linguistic devices are conceptualized metaphorically in terms of signals or markers. Models B, C, and C+ (see below) all afford an entirely new viewpoint on the function(s) of salient phonological, syntactic or morphological elements. This new perspective is closely aligned with the shift from a sentence-based linguistic analysis to a discourse-based mode of research. The notion of a linguistic system (langue) is here applied to the discourse level on which macrostructural discourse units interact. Analyses of texts in accordance with models B, C, and C+ are moreover self-professedly recipient-oriented and contextualized (pragmatic). From

6 Passages of free indirect discourse are printed in italics, my own emphases in bold italics, and original emphases in underlining.


the formal, static, and essentialist paradigm of Model A one therefore moves in the direction of the more pragmatic concerns of Models B, C, and C+.

O o o o o o 1 3 a [] [] [] o A A

Model B: Linear processuality

Model B illustrates a simple reconceptualization of foregrounded devices in terms of cognitively salient signals. The linguistic element works as a shifter in accordance with the Jakobsonian (1971) proposals: with the change from one formal linguistic element to the second, a radical reinterpretation is required. Jakobson's example is of course that of the shift into direct discourse with its concomitant complete realign- ment of deictic signals. Each signal serves to mark a radical reinterpretation of the subsequent textual material. Harald Weinrich's discourse processes, in particular the shift from, say, a discussing to a narrating passage, have also been analyzed in such terms; however, Weinrich's model (1985 [1964]) is actually much more sophisticated and really an instance of Model C (see below). With regard to free indirect discourse, some anticipatory explicit 'announcements' of a subsequent passage of free indirect discourse could just conceivably be analyzed on the pattern of model B, as in the following example which has both an anticipatory speech act verb and a belated confirmatory identification:

'Well, ' said she [Sylvia], 'Octavio, you are too generous to be imposed on in any thing, and therefore ! will tell you my heart without reserve as absolutely as to heaven itself, if I were interceding my last peace there.' She begged a thousand pardons of him for having concealed any part of her story from him, but she could no longer be guilty of that crime, to a man for whom she had so perfect a pass- sion; and as she spoke she embraced him.

(Love-Letters; Behn, 1987: III, 279)

The context here allows for a reading of the italicized passage as a representation of Sylvia's speech acts. There are no formal expressive elements in the passage to warrant such an identification. 7 However, within the context of the literary mimetic illusion projected by the text, both the explicit narratorial confirmation after this passage (which also 'shifts back' into the narrative proper, i.e. the plot) and the more implicit anticipatory signal (by way of a passage of direct discourse, which inevitably denotes a situation of dialogue) support an analysis in terms of a marked case of free indirect discourse. The example, however, also demonstrates that Model B, as it stands, is not particularly well suited to dealing with free indirect

7 The Behn passage, one might argue, employs a lexical feature (the intensifier construction in so perfect a passion) which appears to corroborate a free indirect discourse reading once one has conceived of the idea that this might be a speech act representation.

590 M. Fludernik / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 583--611

discourse. Mode l B cannot take care of the regular ' e xp re s s ive ' case (which mode l A was able to manage fair ly well) , nor is it o f any use in cases of ambigui ty . (Com- pare below.)

Model C: Shifting also to different levels (Weinrich)

M o d e l C extends the concep t of s ignals in the d i rec t ion o f a mul t i - l eve l discourse ana lys i s and posi ts that l inguis t ic s ignals mark the shift f rom one level of d i scour se to another . W e i n r i c h ' s theory o f tenses, which is f requent ly in te rpre ted in acco rdance with M o d e l B, rea l ly ins tant ia tes a mul t i - l eve l d i scour se m o d e l s ince the shif t f rom a nar ra t ing to a d i scuss ing tense, or the use of t empora l me taphor , cor re la tes wi th a r e a d e r ' s ac t ive in te rpre ta t ive in tervent ion. 8 M o d e l C, which is stil l ba s i ca l ly a mode l of t empora l l inear i ty (even if, f rom the left to the r ight , one m o v e s between leve ls ra ther than on one s t ra ight l ine) , is mos t p romi - nent ly e x e m p l i f i e d in recen t accounts o f oral narra t ive . S tud ies in conver sa t iona l s to ry te l l ing have ou t l ined the ex i s t ence o f a plot level of the nar ra t ive and o f at leas t two o ther levels , those of b a c k g r o u n d in fo rmat ion ( e m b e d d e d or d e l a y e d or ien ta t ion) and o f c o m m e n t a t o r y or eva lua t ive as ides . Such a t r ipar t i te m o d e l is an t i c ipa ted in L a b o v and W a l e t z k y (1967), open ly p r o p o s e d by Po lany i (1978), and impl ic i ty a c k n o w l e d g e d by Quas tho f f (1980). 9 Indeed, a four th level o f meta - nar ra t ive migh t also be pos i t ed to exis t which w o u l d re la te to p ropos i t i ons con- ce rn ing the act o f nar ra t ion , and it m a y perhaps be a rgued to inc lude the f r aming sect ions o f a s tory (abstract , init ial or ienta t ion; f inal reso lu t ion and evaluat ion) . A comparab l e four- leve l s tructure also exis ts for a rgumenta t ive prose where the bas ic

8 For those unfamiliar with Weinrich's model I here provide a brief summary of the major relevant points. Weinrich distinguishes between Sprechhaltung ('speaker's attitude'), Sprechperspektive ('perspective'), and Reliefgebung ('reliefing'). In the first category, the speaker has an option between Besprechen ('discussing') and Erzdhlen ('narrating'), between an attitude of direct relevance, that is, and an attitude of relaxation. A shift from a narrating tense (the past tense system) to a discussing tense (the present tense system) triggers the listener's additional attention to the message which will now concern more immediately relevant issues. (The gnomic present or the present tense of narratee-address are typical instances of such a shift.) Weinrich's perspective concerns aspects of temporal relativity - the expression of simultaneity, antecedence and prognostic:~tion; and the concept of reliefing characterizes the well-known opposition between pass~ simple and imparfait. The term temporal metaphor (Tempus- Metaphorik) is used by Weinrich (ch. VIII) to describe temporal shifts which concern more than one dimension, i.e. they involve, for instance, a shift from a narrating to a discussing tense as well as a shift from simultaneity to antecedence. Free indirect discourse can therefore frequently be described in terms of temporal metaphor Within Weinrich's model. 9 A similar position appears to be taken in Halford (1993), who distinguishes between prosodic coordination, subordination, superordination, and interordination; in her transcription of oral narrative material these categories coincide with the shifts both between levels and within the basic level (coordination vs. interordination). See also my own contributions in Fludernik (1991, 1992a,b).


level j° is one of argumentation. (In narrative the basic level consists in narrative clauses.) This is supplemented by the two levels of asides for comment plus evaluation and belated background information respectively, and one additionally has a meta-discourse level ("The reason I 'm telling you this ...").

Such a four-level discourse model allows for a much more precise specification of the concept of the signal. Linguistic markers can now fulfill a great variety of functions. Some signals, like Weinrich's non-foregrounded temporal markers, are signals of obstination (Weinrich, 1985: 14): they merely indicate that no change in interpretation is required.tJ (In my representation this happens in relation to the signal which is drawn as a circle.) Others, still on the basic level, mark specific points of the basic level of the discourse, for instance the next 'point ' of the argument or its conclusion, or - in the narrative realm - the next ' turn ' of the plot, the onset of a narrative episode, the resolution point, etc. t2 (I have diagrammed this in the shift from squares to diamonds.) Other signals indicate a shift onto a different discourse level or the resumption of the basic level after asides (in the diagram: the triangle and the square). The dotted line refers to the basic level and to the linearity of the text.

The most frequent linguistic signals correlating with such discourse functions are various types of discourse markers (Schiffrin, 1987). In the following example, but anyways is a typical marker of the resumption of the storyline after an aside:

74 but anyways I picked up the stick / 75 put my head to the door / 76 and I couldn't see anything / 77 and I stepped ou t / /

(Hoffbauer, 1991: 86; Halford, 1993: 344)

In oral storytelling shifting between levels appears to be indicated frequently by into- national means, a strategy naturally unavailable in the written language.

In argumentative prose important discourse points are not only frequently signalled by the use of causai adverbs: thus, so, hence, therefore, etc. In present-day journalistic prose, a change to a new topic is, for instance, frequently indicated by the fronting of a relational element (with or without concomitant inversion). Such a relational element provides a transition to the subsequent argument as well as supplying a connection with what has gone before. In this manner the named relational elements help to attune the reader to a new topic while indicating how this new topic relates to the preceding discourse-marking its relevance for the argumentative context:

to I am borrowing Lakoff's term basic concepts (Lakoff, 1987) for my 'basic level' of discourse. ~ 'Obstinate Zeichen' are temporal morphemes (such as past tense -ed) which recur throughout a stretch of text and, within this text, merely signal that reference to the past is continuative. ~2 See Fludernik (1991) and Halford's category interordination.


Contributing to the economic growth, moreover, was an unprecedented tide of immigration.

(NYRB 36.20 [1989]: 161)

A central concern of the human rights movement in recent years has been the difficulty of holding accountable the officials who have been responsible for crimes against humanity.

(NYRB 40.15 [1993]: 49)

In sixteenth and seventeenth-century prose I have moreover noted a specific strategy in the use of fronting and inversion structures. In a series of points and compar- isons the last element is emphasized by means of such fronting (the object-NP is placed before the verb phrase, and there is concomitant subject-verb inversion), as in the subsequent extract from Fisher.

[...] the Hunter taketh and J'uftayneth more largely for the loue that he hath to his game, then doeth many religious perfons for the loue of Chrift. For albeit, the relygious per fon ryJeth at mydnight, which is painefull to hyr in verie d6ede, yet fh6e went before that to hyr bedde at a conuenyent houre, and alfo commeth after to hyr bedde agayne. But the Hunter ryj'eth early, and fo continueth foorth all the long day, no more returning to his bed vntill the verie night, and yet peraduenture he was late vp the night before, and full oftes vp all the long nightes. And though the religious woman faft vntill it be noone, the which muJ't be to hir paynfull, the hunter yet taketh more payn which fafteth vntill the verye night, forgetting both meate and drink for the pleafure of his game. The religious woman singeth all the forenoone in the quier, and that alfo is laborious vnto hir, but yet the hunter J'ingeth not, but he cryeth, halloweth, and jhooteth all the long day, and hath more greater pains. The religious woman taketh much labour in comming to the quyer and fitting there fo long a leaf on, but yet no doubt of it more labour taketh the Hunter in running ouer the fallow and leaping ouver the hedges, and cr6eping thorow the buJhes then that can b6e. And would to God that in other thyngs, that is to Jay, touching worldly honours, worldly ryches, worldly pleafures, would to God that the relygious perfons many of them might profite as much in myndfulneJ'fe in freking of ChriJ't, as the Hunter doeth in J'reking of his game [...]

(Fisher, 1876: 366-367)

After a series of oppositions in which the hunter's exertions are again and again argued to be more strenuous than those of the nun, the paragraph ends on a final contrast between prolonged contemplative immobility and extensive physical exercise, adding a moral injunction to the clergy for their alleged lack of serious commitment. Alternatively, the same strategy of fronting can be used to highlight the summarizing conclusio after a series of argumentative points (illustrated here by a passage from Roper's Life of Sir Thomas More):

M. Fludernik / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 583~511 593

And because he was desirous for godly purposes somtyme to be solitarye and sequester hymselfe from wordly company, a good distance f rom his mansion house builded he a place called the Newe Buildinge [...] in which as his use was upon other dayes to occupye himselfe in prayer and studye togeather, soe on Fry- daye there usually continued he from morninge to eveninge spending his tyme only in devoute prayers and spiritual exercises. [...]

Thus delighted he evermore not only in virtuous exercises to be occupied himselfe, but alsoe to exhorte his wife and children and houshoulde to embrace and followe the same.

(Roper, 1910: 219-220)

In our first example from Fisher, the bold-italicized passage highlights the final comparison between the hunter and the nun before the argument shifts to the 'moral ' of the comparison. In the passage from Roper (which I have cut drastically) More's saintliness is outlined and the most notable outward signs of his piety are emphasized by means of the fronting construction. The final "Thus delighted he evermore" summarizes the previous argument which had consisted of a series of anecdotes meant to instantiate More's claim for saintliness. These details accumulatively present instances of religious conduct, thus symbolizing More's saintliness both metaphorically (his conduct is similar to a saint's) and metonymically (representing all the pragmatic attributes that go with saintly behavior).

Discourse markers from the oral language similar to those noted in reference to conversational narratives, moreover, reappear in early written texts, seemingly as remnants from oral storytelling. See, for instance, the following passage from Malory:

Than kynge Arthure lette sende for all the children that were borne in May-day, begotyn of lordis and borne of ladyes; for Merlyon tolde kynge Arthure that he that sholde destroy hym and all the londe sholde be borne on May-day. Wherefore he sente for hem all in payne of dethe, and so there were founde many lordis sonys and many knyghtes sonnes, and all were sente unto the kynge. And so was Mordred sente by kynge Lottis wyff. And all were putte in a shyppe to the se; and some were four wekis olde and som lesse. And so by fortune the shyppe drove unto a castelle, and was all to-ryven and destroyed the moste party, save that Mor- dred was cast up, and a good man founde hym, and fostird hym tylle he was fourtene yere of age, and than brought hym to the courte, as hit rehersith aftirward and towarde the ende of the MORTE ARTHURE.

(Malory, 1971: 37)

In this passage than and so fulfill discourse functions in relation to the narrative structure. So occurs in result and end-state summarizing clauses - in one case additionally reinforced by inversion: "And so was Mordred sente [...]". Than (in the first sentence of the passage) marks a new development: King Arthur's fateful decision to imitate Herod's slaying of the innocents. The than at the end of the paragraph, however, could be argued to signal the shift to an omniscient narrator position and is


therefore interpretable as linking up with a shift to the level of meta-narrative commentary.

Traces of this multi-level system of textuality are rare in later prose because of the replacement of episodic narrative structure with larger units of discourse (Fludernik, 1992a; 1996: ch. 4). As a result, only the onset of larger units is marked regularly in Elizabethan prose. Such a marking - by means of it so happened or it for tuned - involves a shifting onto a higher macrostructural level of discourse (the meta-narrative level) but fails to preserve the complexities of the oral pattern.

Fortune, envious of such happy success, willing to show some sign of her inconsistency, turned her wheel and darkened their bright sun of prosperity with the misty clouds of mishap and misery. F or it so happened that Egistus, King of Sicilia, who in his youth had been brought up with Pandosto, desirous to show that neither tract of time nor distance of place could diminish their former friend- ship, provided a navy of ships and sailed into Bohemia to visit his old friend and companion [...].

(Greene, Pandosto; Salzman, 1987: 156)

I t f o r t u n e d a poor mercenary shepherd that dwelled in Sicilia, who got his liv- ing by other men's flocks, missed one of his sheep, and thinking it had strayed into the covert that was hard by, sought very diligently to find that which he could not see, fearing either that the wolves or eagles had undone him (for he was so poor as a sheep was half his substance), wandered down toward the sea cliffs to see if perchance the sheep was browsing on the sea ivy, whereon they greatly do feed.

(ibid., 173)

Besides these very prominent markers highlighting the onset of larger macrostructural units, little remains of the complex system of interrelating discourse markers operating in conversational narrative.

2.3. Reinterpretation and discourse processes

Model C, in the above mechanistic reading, still proposes that linguistic signals trigger certain 'meanings' , even if these meanings are then defined in functional terms and regulate attention levels and discourse structures rather than immediate semantic categories. Model C also conceptualizes such signals as operating on a level of subliminal awareness as part of a discourse grammar which after sufficient exposure becomes internalized and part of readers' narrative (or discourse) com- petence. Model C, however, does not yet take account of some crucial characteris- tics of the reading process and the dynamics of interpretation during textual processing. I therefore suggest that Model C needs to be improved upon by incorporating the interactional and (re)interpretative factors that play a crucial role in the reading process. I attempt to diagram this below as M o d e l C+. These interactional and reinterpretative aspects of textual processing are constitutive of a con-


structivist (Glasersfeld, 1989; Schmidt, 1992) understanding of textuality. Jahn (under review) has attempted to provide a similar analysis in which he discusses reinterpretational strategies under what - in analogy with Meir Sternberg (1982) - he calls the 'Proteus Principle'. The crucial importance of reinterpretations of earlier textual material in the light of later textual signals has of course been recognized before this, as for instance in work produced at the Porter Institute of Semiotics (McHale, 1978; Perry, 1979; Ron, 1981). A frequently noted example of belated reinterpretation is the famous sentence Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune on a grand scale (Great Expectations, xviii; Dickens, 1974: 165), which later emerges as deriving from Pip's wishful thinking rather than the narrator's retrospective evaluation. Whereas the reader may initially interpret this passage as a prediction by the first-person narrator, the eventual outcome of the novel discloses it as a rendering of Pip's thoughts, as a passage of free indirect discourse. If read with the frame of Model A in mind, this immediately reveals the inadequacy of Model A: the passage only becomes an interpretable device by hindsight.

Model C+: Expectation, reinterpretation and holistic frames

As in Model C, the dotted line here represents the basic level of the discourse, narrative or argumentative, and linguistic signals (diagrammed as squares, circles and triangles) shift between the basic level, the commentatory and the orientational levels. In Model C+, the arrows which have been superimposed are meant to indicate that interpretative moves on the part of the textual recipient may help to revalorize the function of these signals by recategorizing earlier passages as belonging to a different textual level, or by projecting expectations about textual continuities (which may then be vitiated by the occurrence of other textual signals). Even more impor- tantly, Model C+ can help to visualize the very constitution and interactionality of generic and linguistic factors.

Interpretatory processes, one can argue, both produce the recognition of linguistic markers as well as being triggered by them in the first place. This can be illustrated with reference to the Malory passage quoted above. Read in a sentence by sentence mode, each individual so or than appears to be a purely lexical element, with than meaning 'and then', 'at that time', and so meaning 'therefore', 'in consequence thereof', or 'in this manner'. Only in the context of a narrative structure are these linguistic elements then reinterpreted as discourse markers. If one reads this text as a narrative, then certain linguistic elements are recognized as signalling a shift between narrative discourse levels. Nor do any of these signals hold a monop- oly of a biunique form-function correlation. Double and triple functions of dis-


course markers are the rule rather than the exception. In oral narrative, for instance, so operates quite easily both as a signal resuming the plot-level (Polanyi, 1978) and as an incipit (i.e., beginning of episode) marker. There can therefore be no logical one-way interpretation of such linguistic signals as inevitably evoking, or relating to, a narrative structure. On the contrary, the fact that one is reading a narrative text subliminally puts one into a receptive frame of mind; on encountering certain linguistic signals, one then starts to process them in accordance with patterns of narrative structure, finding support and confirmation in the presence of such discourse signals.

A good argument for the cognitive saliency of narrative episode points (or 'turns') can therefore be adduced from the multifunctionality of linguistic elements on the one hand (so), and on the other from the marking of such points by a variety of different devices. As we have seen, the resumption of the plot level in conversational narrative, for instance, can be signalled by means of so but also by but anyways. An even more striking example is the handling of episode incipits. These, as I have argued elsewhere (compare Fludernik, 1991, 1992a,b), can be marked by means of three sets of devices individually and in loose combination: discourse markers; the historical present tense; fronting (usually with inversion):

Doun of his hors Aurelius lighte anon, And with this magicien forth is he gon [...]

(Canterbury Tales, 'The Franklin's Tale', F 1183-84; Chaucer, 1987: 183)

Soe fe l l it out within a monthe or thereaboutes, after the makinge of the Statute for the Oathe of the Supremacye and Matrymonye, that all the preistes of London and Westminster [...] were sente for to appere at Lambeth before the Bishop of Canterburye [...]

(Roper, 1910: 250)

He accepting of the offer, and vndertaking that enterprise, homeward he c o m e s to do his purpose.

( 'Life of St. Oswen'; Lives of Women Saints, 1886: 101) 13

Model C+ correlates with a holistic cognition of argumentative or narrative structure. This holistic generic frame also accounts for the reader's or listener's intuitive grasp of narrative structure and its functional properties. Reinterpretation therefore always implies the evocation of frames of reference, whether these are merely plot- oriented or generic. Since frames cannot be represented in diagrammatic fashion, the sketch of Model C+ has had to remain a very imperfect graphic adumbration of reinterpretative processes.

Let me now return to the example of free indirect discourse. Reinterpretation certainly plays a crucial role in studies on free indirect discourse as my earlier quota-

t3 In this text one also finds numerous examples of incipits signalled exclusively by the historical present tense.

M. Fludernik /Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 583-611 597

tions from Aphra Behn and the sentence from Great Expectations have already documented. In the absence of what are usually perceived as 'clear signals of free indirect discourse', passages can - on principle - be ambiguous between a reading of 'narratorial statement' and 'character 's speech or thought act' 14 (evaluation/prognostication/omniscience vs. subjective opinion/plot element/limited validity). They can also be ambiguous between the attribution of an expressive passage to either the narrator or a character. According to the mimetic contract n5 said to obtain between authors and readers, narrative texts are decoded mimetically, as referring to the projected illusion of a representational world. In the given instance, therefore, the illusion of a (plot-related) speech or thought act or of a voice (with its subjectivity and evaluative stance) is immediately brought into play. That is to say, since readers interpret narrative texts within a representational frame, reading a certain passage in terms of free indirect discourse is tantamount to positing that a particular person said or thought something at this point in the narrative, and the very likelihood of such utterance or thought within the fictional scenario (Ron's Epistemic and Semiotic Motivation) will crucially determine whether a free indirect discourse reading is attempted at all. Such likelihood (or w'aisemblance) relates to a mimetic understanding of the narrative function, with the proviso that narrative is not defined as a naively mimetic imitation of the fictional reality but as the linguistic evocation of a fictional setting by means of mimetic illusionism. ~6 Retrospective signals which redefine earlier passages as free indirect discourse are quite common. The following is an example from present tense narration:

He [Dr Smallweed] is borne into Mr Tulkinghorn's great room, and deposited on the Turkey rug before the fire. Mr Tulkinghorn is not within at the present moment, but will be back directly. The occupant of the pew in the hall, having said thus much, stirs the fire, and leaves the triumvirate to warm themselves.

(Bleak House, xxvii; Dickens, 1975: 432)

Rather than merely noting retrospective identifications or projective announcements (a feature already describable in terms of Model B), Models C and C+ can, however, be utilized for the analysis of free indirect discourse in more fruitful and more complex ways. Instead of interpreting free indirect discourse as a single and unitary 'device ' , one can argue that free indirect discourse exists only as a complex syntactico-semantic entity on a subliminal level of the reading process. Texts are read not with a frame of mind that categorizes the representations of speech and thought acts into chunks of direct, indirect, and free indirect speech (although the

14 The term thought act is here used, not in the meaning of a Searlean speech act, but to designate a thought that constitutes an action unit on the story level. ~5 The term mimetic contract enjoys wide currency among literary scholars. A good because precise definition of this concept is provided by Ron (1981: 27-28) under the title of the 'Mimetic Cooperation Principle (MCP)', which he models on Grice's Cooperation Principle. Since the definition is lengthy and mathematical, I refer the reader to Ron's essay. ~6 For an extended argument on these lines see (Fludernik, 1993:17-20 et passim and 1996: ch. 4).


former two are much more widely known), but - on the basis of mimetic interpretative parameters - as discourse providing an illusion of reference to a fictional or real world. Even the 'clearest ' case of free indirect discourse is read NOT as free indirect discourse but as the representation of a specific speech or thought act, and - if the situation does not warrant the occurrence of such a speech or thought act - could be interpreted quite easily as the writer's or narrator's evaluative or subjective comment. I have argued (Fludernik, 1993; 1995) that free indirect discourse, even on a purely linguistic level, is a frame phenomenon with a variety of different linguistic elements confirming or triggering a free indirect discourse reading and that it has only two necessary referential and syntactic requirements. Referential parameters such as noun phrases referring to the speech participants of represented discourse in free indirect discourse need to be aligned with those of the surrounding reporting discourse, and - syntactically - there is a negative condition that bars VP+that-S" structures (she maintained that-S') from free indirect discourse but allows all other syntactic collocations and environments. 17 One can therefore easily employ Model C+ to process free indirect discourse as a linguistic and literary phenomenon which is established by the coordination of several signals on different levels of analysis.

The following passage, which has no expressive features (just like the earlier quotes from Behn and More), illustrates the crucial importance of interpretation for the establishment of a free indirect discourse-reading. In fact, in this case, the clause she is not able to see his passion and his grief, if read as free indirect discourse, is read in this manner purely as the result of an interpretative move which relates to the reader 's evaluation of Sylvia 's character as presented throughout the book.

[...] she reconciles him with every touch, and sighs on his bosom a thousand grateful vows and excuses for her fault, while he weeps his love, and almost expires in her arms; she is not able to see his passion and his grief, and tells him she will do all things for his repose.

(Love-Letters; Behn, 1987: III, 280)

One can of course argue that Sylvia is here presented as not being able to suffer the sight of Octavio 's plight (narrator 's omniscient psycho-narration) rather than as saying that she cannot endure to see him suffer so for love of her (free indirect discourse). The verbum dicendi tells ("and tells him she will do all things for his repose") does not provide any definitive evidence one way or the other; the passage can be construed to read that Sylvia suffers at observing Octavio 's passion and therefore, as a consequence, tells him that she will do everything to please him, or it can be read as a representation of an utterance, which is then clarified or retrospectively corroborated by "tells". My preference for a free indirect discourse reading relies instead on a larger interpretative frame, on the consistent presentation of Sylvia in Book III as a scheming and insincere manipulator who exploits

17 For details see Fludernik (1993, esp. ch. 3).


the men who have had the ill fortune to fall in love with her both emotional ly and financially.

Circumstances are somewhat different in cases where linguistic elements o f expressivity occur in the text and ambiguity arises from the question o f attribution.

[...] he [Brilliard] advanced near the door, but finding it shut walked yet with greater impatience, every half minute going to the door; at last he found it yield to his hand that pushed it: but oh, what mortal can express his j oy ! His heart beats double [...]

(ibid., II, 21 1)

In this example Brilliard can be pictured to exclaim to himself how inexpressible is his joy at finally being allowed to become Sylvia 's lover. 18 However, it would be equally convincing - particularly on the basis o f the generic conventions still current in the seventeenth century - to read this clause as the narrator 's ~9 stereotypical avowal of poetic incompetence. The above passage therefore represents a true case of ambiguity . Factually, it does not really matter greatly whether one attributes this passage to Brilliard or to the narrator. Brilliard's happiness and his awareness o f being happy remain uncontested in both readings. The two kinds of attribution merely differ between explicitly making Brilliard say something to himself in so many words or having the narrator express these sentiments by way of empathetic exclamation. 2° In contrast to the previous example passage, where the choice between ' c o m m e n t ' or ' speech act ' had far-reaching interpretative consequences, this is not at all the case in the present instance: the difference in voice does not have an evaluative significance.

3. Playful expressivity and literary pragmatics

Having outlined the above four models o f dealing with linguistic elements and their functional importance, I now want to turn to a number of complex textual features - still linked to the topic of speech and thought representation and to free indirect discourse - that have received little extended analysis and merit to be taken much more seriously. As I will argue, even the most pragmatically oriented applications o f Model C+ here fail to render an adequate account o f the function o f linguis-

~ This joy, ironically, is short-lived since Brilliard, having indulged in a triple quantity of the love potion he was supposed to imbibe for optimum sexual performance, spectacularly fails in his nightly mission. More ironically still, he is additionally abused in his romantic expectations since the woman he visits (but fails to sleep with) is not, as he believes, Sylvia but her maid disguised as her mistress. ~9 The narrative of Love-Letters is rather peculiar. Part I consists only of letters, Part II has an increasingly lengthy narrative commentatory discourse between a series of letters, and Part III is mostly narrative (with only few letters) and even finally presents the narrator in persona as attending Octavio's cer- emony on the occasion of his taking Holy Orders. 20 Adamson (1995) outlines several such ambiguous cases in Bunyan's Grace Abounding.


tic elements unless one considers the specifically stylistic and pragmatic aspects of their use.

3.1. The meta-reflexive problematization of the voice factor

The first of these categories, which is typically a very literary one, I will call tongue-in-cheek. It concerns cases in which the fact that linguistic markers operate to trigger a 'voice' reading is foregrounded explicitly in the text (sometimes even by means of meta-narrative comments), with the result that the mimetic illusion is therefore bared and emptied of its automatic effet de reel quality. This needs to be distin- guished from cases of dead-pan irony in which the narrator, without explicitly voicing any dissent, represents a character's outlook which is patently unacceptable in terms of the general values of the book. In contrast to the tongue-in-cheek cases that I will get to presently, dead-pan irony, whether explicitly attributed to a specific character's vision or not, has no explicit distancing frame. It is therefore closer to standard types of free indirect discourse - if read as discourse representation, that is. 21 To clarify the difference, here is an example of dead-pan irony from Salman Rushdie's Shame:

The elections which brought Iskander Harappa to power were not (it must be said) as straight-forward as I have made them sound. As how could they be, in that country divided into two Wings a thousand miles apart, that fantastic bird of a place, two Wings without a body, sundered by the land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God ... she remembers that first day, the thunderous crowds around the polling stations. O confusion of people who have lived too long under military rule, who have forgotten the simplest things about democracy! Large numbers of men and women were swept away by the oceans of bewilderment, unable to locate ballot-boxes or even ballots, and failed to cast their votes. Others, stronger swimmers in those seas, succeeded in expressing their preferences twelve or thirteen times. Popular Front workers, distressed by the general lack of electoral decorum, made heroic attempts to save the day. Those few urban con- stituencies making returns incompatible with the West-Wing-wide polling pattern were visited at night by groups of enthusiastic party members, who helped the returning officers to make a recount. Matters were much clarified in this way. Outside the errant polling stations large numbers of democrats assembled, many holding burning brands above their heads in the hope of shedding new light on the count. Dawn light flamed in the streets, while the crowds chanted loudly, rhythmically, spurring on the returning officers in their labours. And by morning the people's will had been expressed, and Chairman Isky had won a huge and absolute majority of the West Wing's seats in the new National Assembly. Rough justice, Arjumand remembers, but justice all the same.

(Shame, ix; Rushdie, 1984: 178-179)

2~ See my analyses of dead-pan irony (Fludernik, 1992c) for a more extensive discussion of the issue, as well as the chapter on reflectorization (Fludernik, 1996: ch. 5).


The deliberate rifling of poll boxes is here described in the most harmless fashion, euphemistically distorting the extent of the violence and its motives. The text attributes this passage to Arjumand's memories without, however, explicitly reducing the language to her exclusive point of view. A further point to be noted in contradistinc- tion to free indirect discourse and the category of tongue-in-cheek narrative to be introduced in the next paragraph is the near-absence of expressive features in relation to the prominence of evaluative lexis (which, significantly, is utterly unreliable).

My first example of a tongue-in-cheek passage comes from Middlemarch:

Will Ladislaw was struck mute for a few moments. He had never been fond of Mr Casaubon, and if it had not been for the sense of obligation, would have laughed at him as a Bat of erudition. But the idea of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor 's back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole) - this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust [...]

(Middlemarch, xxi; Eliot 1986: 237)

Readers ' expectations are explicitly brought into play in this passage. After an initial clause of psycho-narration from, clearly, the narrator's omniscient perspective (note the irrealis "would have"), one gradually moves from the seemingly narratorial ("the idea of") to a series of increasingly more subjective expressions foregrounded by a series of expressions employing anaphoric this, with this adorable young creature obviously linked to Ladislaw's point of view (The narrator 's terminology in describing Dorothea does not allow for the patronizing and 'male ' adorable.) At this point the reader apparently already finds herself 'within' Ladislaw's mind and is therefore likely to be puzzled at mouldy futilities (a more likely candidate for the narratorial style). As if mind-reading the reader 's reactions, the narrative here intrudes to explicitly attribute the locution to Will and to proceed with the sentence in a more omniscient manner. 22 The passage foregrounds and comments on the mechanics of using linguistic (lexical) markers to indicate voice, and by doing so deliberately undercuts the mimetic illusion which typically underwrites the technique. A second, less subversive example is the following from Mary McCarthy's The Group:

Her mother 's sister had a villa in Fiesole, and Libby had spent a year there as a child, going to the sweetest dame school in Florence, and countless summers afterwards - to be exact, two; Libby was prone to exaggerate.

(The Group, viii; McCarthy, 1964: 169)

22 The first part of this sentence can actually be read as free indirect discourse on the lines of exclamatory structures (cf. Fludernik, 1993: 162). The point here is not that the foregrounding of the linguistic toolbox vitiates a free indirect discourse reading (as soon as the entire passage is read as Will's voice, there is no alternative to a free indirect discourse interpretation), but that the mimetic illusion is deliberately bared.

602 M. Fludernik / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 583--611

Again, Libby's narrative of her experiences in Italy is implied by the expressive markers, but the voice factor is then commented on in ironic and self-reflexive manner, corroborating the reader's recognition of Libby's language, yet at the same time distancing the reader from the mimetic illusion.

In these two examples the explicit attribution of lexical items to a character serves to reinterpret the previous passage as free indirect discourse. The following two examples, on the other hand, use explicit commentary (in the first case) and an exclamation (in the second) in order to reintroduce a subjective viewpoint for a passage that cannot be read as a speech or thought act (in free indirect discourse) even after this comment has been processed. Reinterpretation there still is, but on the lines of a rendering of the character's perceptions (and the device is then duly dubbed 'narrated perception'):

But alas, sunset light was unsympathetic to her [Mrs Manresa's] make-up; plated it looked, not deeply interfused. And he [Giles] dropped her hand; and she gave him an arch roguish twinkle, as if to say- but the end o f that sentence was cut short.

(Between the Acts; Woolf, 1982:146 [1941])

I drank right from the frosted spigot and tossed the empty pitcher in a trash can, but only after I 'd lit a match to look at those initials incised in white metal. The engraver had worked cleverly; at first glance the design seemed to be a flourish in a scroll. The letters became apparent only after - ouch ! I dropped the pitcher and it made a pathetic clang against the bottom of the trash can.

(Nocturnes for the King of Naples; White, 1978: 19-20)

"As if to say" appears to introduce a more narratorial mode, but is undercut by the reference to a "sentence". Reinterpretation on the basis of a mimetic reading breaks down since Mrs. Manresa cannot be pictured as saying anything at all. One promptly understands, however, that Giles was appreciating Mrs. Manresa's "arch roguish twinkle" and trying to formulate a sentence exemplifying it. That Giles has problems expressing his feelings is apparent elsewhere in the book; see, for instance, the phrase "he had no command of metaphor" (ibid., 43). Here, too, Giles's tentative interpretation of Mrs. Manresa's twinkle (which may be more in the eyes of the beholder than a matter of fact) remains mute. The second passage from Edmund White is even more interesting. Again, what one seems to have is a narratorial account of the first person narrator's experience, an account that additionally appears to summarize events rather than presenting them in any detail. The exclamation ouch! - which needs to be located on the level of the experiencing self - radically undermines the reading of the passage as summary retrospective account and requires, on the contrary, that one postulates a complete synchronization between the language of the text and the narrated events. Retrospectively, therefore, what first appeared to be a summary of events turns out to be (i.e., is reinterpreted as) a syn- chronized account of the experiencing self's perceptions. Again, formal criteria are not available. Passages change their status on the plot level as a consequence of a

M. Fludernik /Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 583--611 603

process of reinterpretation which is triggered by a deliberate reference to the opera- tions of the mimetic illusion within the narrative text.

3.2. Ghosts

My second category, which I have dubbed rampant expressivity, can be illustrated by passages which flaunt expressive elements and therefore seem to evoke a mimetic voice factor: they appear to suggest that one is here dealing with a passage of free indirect discourse. However, in the context no unitary speech or thought act can be attributed to the person or character who would obviously be the most likely candidate to have uttered these sentiments or to have thought along these lines. Nor can the narrator or writer (in the journalistic examples) be made responsible for the expressive tenor of the relevant passages. The second of my two examples is from a journalistic article and therefore even more interesting than the many passages quoted in discussions of reflectorization.

[...] one of her [Libby's] highest ambitions was to have a story or a poem published by Harper's. A n d lo and behold, hoM your hats, girls, it had happened to her finaUy a year ago this last winter.

(The Group, viii; McCarthy, 1964: 170)

The great royal gardens of France owe their existence to a war that took Charles the VIII down through Italy until, in 1495, he reached the kingdom of Naples, which was ruled at the time by the mad Alfonso II. Alfonso wasn't just mad, he was mad about gardening, and he is said to have fled with packets of his favorite seeds, so that he could start new gardens in exile in Sicily. So Charles got to see, and to inhabit, a state-of-the-art garden - La Duchesca - and it had avenues, and fountains and baths and - oh - it had a hippodrome and there was nothing like it in France.

(New York Review of Books; Fenton, 1993: 23)

In the first passage Libby - contrary to appearances - is not telling her classmates about her experiences as a journalist. The first sentence quoted here is the conclusion of a story about Libby's problems with a supposedly original article for the Vassar school journal (which she edited) and the scandal caused by the discovery that this article had been lifted from Harper's. The flashback concentrates on the invectives against Libby, whose enthusiasm for Harper's is resented by the other students. There is no specific fictional time in chapter 8 of The Group at which Libby is orally telling anything to her classmates, and the deictic a year ago is fairly preposterous since - even if calculated from the chronological endpoint of the novel, Kate's funeral - the publication of the story would have to be dated as having occurred as early as still during Libby's stay at Vassar or immediately thereafter. Libby's dis- heartening experiences as a reviewer in New York (which form the core of chapter 8) suggest that she did not manage to get published with Harper's just yet. The a year ago therefore needs to be anchored with the retrospective stance of a deictic

604 M. Fludernik / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (I 996) 583-611

centre located at some temporal remove from the story frame of The Group. That would implicate either the narrator or Libby in a later incarnation. The problem is that neither option is convincing in the given context. The narrator does not emerge as a persona anywhere else in the novel, and therefore cannot very well be apostro- phizing "girls" to whom the story is being told; nor is there any indication that this could be a latter-day Libby (except for the stylistic features), particularly since no scenario of what will happen to the dramatis personae after the final funeral is provided in the novel. The expressive features of this passage therefore evoke a voice, possibly Libby's, but this voice cannot be located in relation to the plot. Expressiv- ity is dislocated from its mimetic function.

In the second quotation, which is from a historical article, the linguistic vagaries of the journalist are all too apparent. The author employs a (by now quite current) literary style which these days is frequently found in interviews and features sections. The immediate mimetic illusion evoked suggests that he is quoting the very thoughts of Charles VIII. However, as becomes apparent on brief reconsideration, Charles never uttered these words - the passage is not intended to represent a (historical) (internal) speech act, but is meant to picture Charles's frame of mind by means of an exclamatory series constituting a (not so) objective correlative to the childish delight the experience of La Duchesca must have caused the French king. All of this is pure linguistic effect without mimetic anchoring - a voice projection beyond plot requirements. In a recent paper, Sylvia Adamson (1995) has outlined similar journalistic strategies in the New Journalism which likewise institute a highly expressive deictic centre in a text, linking it to a possible story-internal viewpoint which cannot be specified. Adamson quotes the following passage:

And so all of a sudden, in the mid-Sixties, here comes a bunch of these lumpen- proles, no less, a bunch of slick-magazine and Sunday-supplement writers with no literary credentials whatsoever in most cases - only they're using all the techniques of the novelists, even the most sophisticated ones - and on top of that they're helping themselves to the insights of the men of letters while they're at it

- and at the same time they're still doing their low-life legwork, their 'digging', their hustling, their damnable Locker Room Genre reporting.

(Adamson, 1995, quoted from the handout)

We are therefore at another juncture between what is explainable and describable in linguistic terms and what can be analyzed only within a pragmatic context exceeding even that of a mimetic illusion as customarily projected by narrative texts. If this kind of rampant expressivity does not constitute a purely literary (i.e., fictional) strategy, it is certainly a stylistic device which deserves the name - a deliberate strategy based on a set of linguistic features which are indicative of the observable voice factor.

3.3. The linguistic viewpoint

In what way, then, do the two stylistic strategies which I have described above relate to Models A to C+, or to linguistic explanations of stylistic features in general?


For one, both techniques employ the mechanics of the deictic center, 23 of the marking of expressivity, and to that extent the strategies are objectively there. Like free indirect discourse, also, the techniques can be regarded in a unitary fashion (a passage of rampant expressivity, a passage of tongue-in-cheek), or - alternatively - as a set or series of expressive features which serve to evoke a voice factor. What is crucial to the two uses of expressivity, however, is NOT their linguistic shape but their interpretation, and, in particular, the attribution of voice. That attribution, in turn, can only operate in accordance with a mimetic reading model - and fails to sat- isfy the reader because there is no consistent way of aligning these passages with convincing representational scenarios: Libby does and does not utter these plati- tudes; Charles, in a historical text, is not supposed to get his enthusiasms transcribed in 'verbat im' manner. The process of determining how one could possibly relate such expressivity to a realistic scenario displays the interpretative prognostication and retrospective correction processes linked with Model C+; but it is hard to link the linguistic signals in the text, except in their accumulative signification, with the dynamics of sense-making. After all, the parameters of interpretation are narrative ones and the relevant frame one of schema-theoretic vra i semb lance rather than a simple form-function mechanism, even if complicated to the extent of Model C+.

4. Concluding remarks

This brings me back to the old question of what linguistics can do for the literary critic. In contrast to the Formalist and Structuralist analyses of literature, which accorded literature a privileged place in a hierarchy of discourses and attempted to outline specific linguistically definable techniques meant to characterize the 'abnor- mal ' and hence ' l i terary' quality of literature, recent developments within the disci- pline of linguistics have tended to deny the distinction between the literary and the non-literary use of language, even when they then shifted the responsibility for the literary reading onto the pragmatic context (Searle, 1974-75; Pratt, 1977). Likewise, in the literary camp, literature has been broadened to include much non-canonical writing (popular literature, minority literature, journalism), and literary studies in the wake of intertextual approaches or on Foucauldian lines have additionally decon- structed the notion of an individual text and are now dealing in discourses and their (implicitly and frequently ambivalent) ideological commitments.

There is hence no longer a need for linguistics to define the l i terary in literary language - literary language at best displays, or deliberately flaunts, a literary style - a degree of complexity less common for the more 'user-friendly' texts of historical or journalistic prose. Linguistics therefore has the task of documenting, not incompati-

23 The term deictic center can be defined as the combination of all those linguistic markers of subjectivity which deictically relate to a speaker's or experiencer's T. The concept is an expanded version of Biihler's deictic Origo (B/ihler, 1934; translated in Jarvella and Klein, 1982: 9-30) on the basis of Ann Banfield's proposals (1982) about the anchoring of subjectivity in SPEAKER or SELF. The term deictic center is first used by Wiebe (1990) and in Banfield's (1987) term empty centre.


ble alternatives, but a graded scale of basically similar or identical techniques which, in a specifically literary context, may be deployed with greater complexity and sophistication. In this way, linguistics appears to lose its earlier heuristic function and becomes more or less a descriptive tool for the analysis of stylistic features which are now more syntactic and 'theoretical' than the old stylistic analysis of appreciation (le mot jus te) , but operate in a similarly 'appreciative' manner. As we have seen above, linguistics can help provide us with discourse models which - in the context of the establishment of a mimetic illusion as typical for narrative texts - supply an adequate description of interpretative processes and their relation to discourse markers and such higher-level phenomena as free indirect discourse. And there remains an area of avowedly 'literary' uses of these strategies where the linguistic toolbox is being deliberately foregrounded. If such techniques exist only in the written language, this is no doubt linked to the availability of planning (Ochs, 1979) in the written language and therefore, for merely technical reasons, a metalin- guistic option reserved to writing. Yet the strategy preserves a pocket of linguistic use for 'its own sake' (for self-reflexive purposes) that has traditionally been regarded as the key note of literary language.

Linguistics therefore no longer massively helps to characterize the realm of literature, nor is there any immediate relation between linguistic analysis and the 'meaning' of an entire text. Most stylistic analyses do not make any large-scale claims about the novel or poem they deal with, but establish small-scale and low-level factors which only indirectly influence interpretations of the text in its entirety. Malo- ry 's narrative structure, which can be outlined in detail with the help of discourse markers, prestructures the presentation of the plot in significant ways and implicitly throws some light on Arthur's handling of things, but it does not immediately lend itself to a direct interpretation of the Morte D 'Arthure. Likewise, the passages from Behn's Love-Let ters and the discussion of whether or not to interpret them as free indirect discourse contribute little to an interpretation of the novel; again, a circular process takes effect by means of which one's estimation of Sylvia determines ambiguous passages to be read as her speech acts, and at the same time this decision reinforces the negative picture of Sylvia's hypocrisy so that the passage inevitably becomes one more proof of her falseness.

No scenario is here proposed that would allow linguistics to determine the field of literature for the literary scholar. The horizons afforded by pragmatics, on the contrary, consist precisely in the decisive abjuration of that false idol - the linguistic definition of literature. This allows linguistics and literature to enter a new phase of coexistence and mutual cross-fertilization. Literature is no longer cut off from 'language as usual', but is an integral part of language use and amenable to the very same kinds of linguistic analyses as are oral storytelling, 'legalese', or TV commer- cials. The removal of the barrier between literature and other kinds of writing and speaking opens the field rather than closing it, since - and that is the second aspect of the new horizons - it allows linguists to follow up discourse-oriented approaches into the realm of literature, where generic considerations then turn out to be important pragmatic factors. Literary texts thus provide the scholar of language with a test- ing ground for the most advanced theoretical models. By the same token, literary


scholars are now enabled to appreciate the extent to which linguistic devices or techniques (free indirect discourse, metaphor, inversion), previously considered literary, rely on their functions within language in general, and this now makes it possible to gauge literary effect more carefully and circumspectly without jumping from the existence of a specific dev ice to its 'literary quality'. If certain linguistically definable elements appear to operate differently in literature, this is, precisely, because the context is a narrative one and a fictional one to boot. The same linguistic devices m e a n differently in an argumentative context precisely because the context is one of argumentation, and different (argumentational) cognitive schemata are triggered which reinforce a different functional recognition of linguistic materials.

New horizons, finally, can be glimpsed in a new set of questions and methods made possible for literary and linguistic scholars alike in the wake of discourse analysis and pragmatics. Whether one wants to gather these new approaches under the label of literary pragmatics or not (Sell, 1991), they have already become a most fruitful area of research in many countries. Among the new opportunities afforded by these developments one can point out the many applications of discourse analysis to literary texts, which have yielded a number of fascinating studies of fictional and dramatic dialogue as well as a renewed attempt to come to grips with a particularly long-lived crux, the historical present tense. 24 In my own field, narratology, recent developments have perhaps paved the way for finally answering the question of how narrative operates on the intermediate structural level between the sentence and the chapter, how the discourse itself produces plot and narrativity. Rather than appearing as a failure of the application of linguistics to literature, the new linguistics constitutes both a challenge to traditional literary paradigms and an opening for exciting research in new areas, an opening that did not exist for lack of the concep- tual tools of discourse analysis. New ways are being proposed of analyzing how narrative or poetry developed over time, liberating literary studies from the fetters of their self-imposed exile from ordinary language. The vistas that I am here outlining have already helped to trigger a number of eminently stimulating and invigorating questions. It is to be hoped that the mere presence of such horizons will help to erase the unjustifiable divide which has continued to exist between linguistics and literature in their institutionalized encrustations.

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