N A R R AT I V E G R AV I T Y ‘This remarkable book builds on Chomsky’s key insight that language provides an inbuilt key to our identity as a symbol using species. To the role of grammar as a cognitive tool enabling us to construct “selves”, Nair adds a second tool in the realm of discourse: narrative. She has a wonderfully subtle account of the psychology of narrative as a “species of natural theory”. I anticipate that with this book she will be recognized as a major figure.’ Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University, USA ‘Nair’s brilliant study of narrative combines anthropological and sociolinguistic perspectives with cognitive ones to bring out the magical impulses that animate this genre.’ Michael J. Toolan, Professor of Applied English Linguistics, University of Birmingham, UK ‘An original and deeply grounded work, which thoroughly explores the major dimensions of narrative and yet provides a theoretical basis in the cognitive sciences, Narrative Gravity is eminently worth the intellectual effort required to read it.’ Brian McHale, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA Narrative Gravity is an intriguing, foundational exploration of the complex issues surrounding narrative and identity. Human beings have always been compulsive storytellers, inventing narratives in cultures and societies across the world. In this book, Rukmini Bhaya Nair asks why we feel compelled to fabricate stories in this way. Extending current research in cognitive science and narratology, the author argues that we seem to have an innate genetic drive to lie and fabricate as a way of gaining the competitive advantages such fictions give us, both individually and collectively. She suggests that stories are a means of fusing causal and logical explanations of ‘real’ events with emotional recognition, so that the lessons taught to us as children, and then throughout our lives via stories, lay the cornerstones of our most crucial beliefs. A natural and essential part of our ordinary conversations and our lives, the speech act of narrative appears central to the construction of our identities. Nair’s conclusion is that our stories really do make us up, just as much as we make up our stories. This elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated work is essential reading for students of linguistics, philosophy and literary theory – and for anyone who tells, reads, or listens to stories. Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor of Linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her previous publications include Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference (2002), Translation, Text and Theory: The Paradigm of India (ed: 2002) and Technobrat: Culture in a Cybernetic Classroom (1997).
Narrative Gravity
Conversation, Cognition, Culture
Rukmini Bhaya Nair
First published in 2002 by Oxford University Press, New Delhi
1
This edition first published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 2003 Rukmini Bhaya Nair All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rukmini Bhaya Nair. Narrative Gravity: conversation, cognition, culture / Rukmini Bhaya Nair. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Discourse analysis, Narrative. 2. Discourse analysis – Psychological aspects. I. Title P302.7.R85 2003 401'.41–dc21 2003041406
ISBN 0-203-30109-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-33989-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-30735-X (Print Edition)
For my parents Angela and Hiten Bhaya the best of listeners and thus—the best creators of stories
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qQ CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
ix
Introduction: First Conversational Steps
1
Chapter 1
Structural Simplicities The Grammar and Context of Narrative (Guru: Labov)
26
Chapter 2
Force, Fiction, Fit and Felicity Narrative as a Speech Act (Gurus: Austin, Searle)
69
Chapter 3
Performatives, Perlocutions, Pretence Deconstruction and the Narrative Speech Act (Gurus: de Man, Derrida)
129
Chapter 4
Cooperative Conventions Implied Meanings in Narrative (Guru: Grice)
167
Chapter 5
Rationality and Relevance Mental Codes and Cultural Memes in Narrative (Guru: Dennett)
201
Chapter 6
Turns at Talk Ethnomethodological Analysis of Narrative
249
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CONTENTS
Chapter 7
Self, State and Solidarity The Politics of Narrative
288
Chapter 8
Explaining Enigmas from Evidence The Cause of Narrative
311
Conclusion: Final Narrative Sutras
341
Appendix I:
The Flood
380
Appendix II:
Transcription and Translation
385
Appendix III:
Putative Emotive and Emotional Registers An Evolutionary Perspective
390
Appendix IV:
Placements
394
Appendix V:
A Possible Course on Narrative Based on this Book
397
Bibliography
399
Index
418
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qQ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A common convention in many cultures is that moral tags appear at the end of a telling. If so, this is a back-to-front book, for its genesis— or rather the story of origins that I have made up for it over the years— lies in three dicta. These were delivered a very long time ago by my supervisor at Cambridge, Stephen Levinson, when I first began writing my thesis. Remember, declared Steve mysteriously, that a supervisor is only an umbrella. Second, you cannot do research without dirtying your hands. And lastly, style is only the icing on the cake. It was armed with these astonishing hortatory weapons—un-wet perhaps, but also unenlightened, grubby and cake-less—that I set out on the winding pilgrimage that has finally resulted in the present work. And of course, I did have a hermeneutic go at the wisdom of my guru, St. Stephen, along the way. His adages were, after all, brutally easy to unpack. One, do not ask for guidance, find your own path; I am simply a device to protect you from the vagaries of the administrator gods up there. But for this, you are on your own—and so am I. That is the human condition. Two, muck about in the data—it is there that you will find real treasures; and three, don’t ever imagine you can get away with merely fooling around with linguistic niceties. Only the readers of Narrative Gravity can judge whether I have managed to live up to the standards set by Steve so many years ago, but my gratitude to him will always be immeasurable. Today, I can think of no better advice to give my own graduate students. Neither can words adequately describe the enormous grace, dignity and fortitude of the people of the flood-stricken villages of West Bengal
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who willingly shared their narratives and their hospitality even as they were left with nothing. I am deeply grateful to Ashok Mitra and Sujit Poddar for helping me to meet such unforgettable men and women. There were also others both in Cambridge and in Calcutta, the twin stations of my education, without whom I could never have got started. They include my first teachers of literature—Sajni Kripalani, Dipti Mitra, Yashodhara Bagchi, Ranajoy Karlekar; and the first of my literary friendships—with William Da Silva, Shubha Chakraborty, Nisha Grover, and Arun Kumar. John and Rani Drew, Sita Narasimhan, Ranjit, Ratna, Sudarshan, Sarita, Anmol, Michael Small, Leslie Barnett, Marion Owen, Penny Brown, Ursula and Peter Dronke, Nona Pike, Nell Hutton, Martin Rees and Caroline Humphrey, not to mention my comrades at Elmside, each made Cambridge the unforgettable place it will always be for me. At the same time, Roy Harris at Oxford boosted my confidence by suggesting that my thesis was publishable. Still later, Stephen Greenblatt and Richard and Mary Rorty were incredibly helpful at the Dartmouth School of Criticism and Theory— and continue to be the kindest and most admirable of friends. To Daniel Dennett, whom I have never met, I owe the marvellous phrase that I have used as the title of this book. In the millennial year 2001, I was fortunate again. At a seminar on narrative, I encountered Elinor Ochs, in whom I found a wonderful kindred spirit. Dan Slobin, Michael Bamberg, Nancy Budwig, Charles and Marjorie Goodwin, Chris Sinha, Johannes Wagner, Michael Chandler, Jan Anward and several others at the seminar, especially the participants on my course, commented on my work with great generosity. I thank them all—Chris and Johannes, in particular, for their hospitality and the stimulating atmosphere they managed to create around that most human of acts—story-telling. My students through the years have provided just the right doses of scepticism and support. Among many, I must single out Shirshanka Das, Manas Baveja and John Paul Bir Singh, whose suggestion that ‘Narrative’ be renamed ‘Nairrative’ is, fortunately, yet to be taken up! This trio actually managed to install on my computer a story-telling ‘programme’—roughly based on the rules I provide in Chapter 5 of this book—which endlessly churns out little tales about a chai-shop where customers go for all their favourite culinary items. While my admiration for the ingenuity displayed by Shirshanka, Manas and John in their ‘cooking up’ of this programme is boundless, an even greater benefit is the insight I now get whenever I switch my screen on—that even the most
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boring of human narratives easily surpasses anything the cleverest machine can serve up! I must also, in the same breath, thank Priya Rana for proofing and Sheeba Mathen and Bhumika Sharma, for putting up with the sheer boredom of typing up the appendices to this book. For the vivid painting on the cover, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the contribution of the artist, Arpana Caur. Caur’s figures—call them selfreflexive conversationalists, grim reapers spinning life-sustaining stories out of dark encounters with death or gendered subjects mediating the rise and gravitational fall of cultures—capture in a single image many of the issues it has taken me more than 400 pages to articulate in this book. I shall always be grateful, as well, to Farhad Mehta, who not only apprehended with immediate intelligence the relevance of ‘Harvest’ to the themes of my book, but enlivened our quixotic route through the National Gallery of Modern Art with charm and good humour. Finally, Narrative Gravity owes most to the brilliant comments and the exemplary friendship of Michael Toolan with whom I co-taught my first course on Narrative at the National University of Singapore. Were it not for teachers like Steve, friends like Michael and the inspired narrators of Midnapore District, I would still be dripping out there somewhere— sans umbrella no doubt. If I am home and dry today, it is entirely because of them.
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qQ INTRODUCTION: F I R S T C O N V E R S AT I O N A L S T E P S
The Rigveda is one of the world’s oldest texts. In it, the goddess Speech, personified and self-reflexive, speaks : I move with the Rudras and the Vasus, with the Adityas and all the gods. ... The one who eats food, who truly sees, who breathes, who hears what is said, does so through me. Though they do not realize it they dwell in me. Listen ... what I tell you should be heeded ... I gave birth to the father on the head of this world. My womb is in the waters, within the ocean, I am the one who blows like the wind, embracing all creatures. Beyond the earth, beyond the sky, so much have I become in my greatness. ...1
Three thousand years on, our intuitions about the mysteries of speech, its infinite range and great power, appear to have changed very little. What perhaps has altered more radically is our speech about Speech, the conversations we hold about language and the narratives we tell ourselves about its locus and origins. Most people interested in the relation of language to the world no longer subscribe to the view that speech ‘embraces all creatures’ or ‘moves with the gods’. De-divinized and de-natured, speech is today indubitably a human-centred faculty, located within. Neither Noam Chomsky, nor Jacques Derrida, nor John Searle, all otherwise pulling in very different philosophical directions, 1Translated by Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 1981, p. 63. O’Flaherty annotates the phrase ‘Listen, you whom they have heard...’, which, according to her, means ‘literally, one who is heard, or who is famous; a triple pun on the common root ‘hear’ in ‘listen’, ‘they have heard’ as well as ‘heeded’. Such a pointed reference to ‘famous’ addressees, embedded in this pun, seems to offer evidence of a certain linguistic sophistication.
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would for one moment deny this fundamental premise of twentiethcentury thought. If a creature is born human, there is no escape from speech; if it is not, there is no entry into speech. One consequence of this sealing in of speech within the human ambit alone seems to have been that our theories about language and our theories about ourselves have come very close together. In this book, I present arguments in the interconnected areas of linguistic pragmatics, cultural studies and the philosophy of language that: a) reveal the ways in which recent theories of communication have either eliminated, eroded or foregrounded the role of the speaking human subject; b) highlight those interconnections between speech or conversation and narrative which affect our understanding of the words–world nexus, exhibited in familiar clusters of concepts such as truth, fiction, representation and pretence; or, intentionality, inference, cognitive relevance and conversational implicature; or, speech act, structure, rule, function and use; c) develop the idea of narrative as a species of ‘natural theory’, designed— that is, biologically, psychologically and culturally—to probe into contexts, explore hypotheses and present explanations of the enigmas we encounter in the daily business of living, as well as of facing death.2 Later in that same immodest paean of self-praise I quoted in the beginning, the Rigvedic goddess Vac or Speech comments with mordant irony on what appears to be a causal connection between her queenly pre-eminence and her consequent dismemberment. Speech is so important that she cannot remain whole. She has to be divided. Her riches must be distributed, partitioned by the gods. 2These objectives are related insofar as a) has as its focus not just theories of language, but rather theories of linguistic communication, which perforce make reference to intersubjective notions like ‘speakers’ and ‘hearers’ or, to put it somewhat more loosely for the time being, to conversations. Further, conjectures about ‘narrative as theory’ such as those proposed in b) strongly indicate that we should observe spontaneous story-telling in the conversational domain, where it is most prolific and ‘natural’ (See Chapter 1, for instance, which considers the structuralist approach to the narrative of William Labov, who has long been a spokesperson for the position that complex literary narratives can be analysed with precision only in the wake of studies which record the circumstances of their natural habitat—the conversational space). The attempt to describe narratives in conversation, in turn, then leads us on to underwrite c), because a close study of some extensive domain such as conversational narrative must affect, maybe even significantly alter, our more general ideas about linguistic interchanges, about speech.
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I am the confluence of riches. ... The gods divided me up into various parts, for I dwell in many places, and enter into many forms. ...
My own work in this book could be seen as concerning itself with some of the implications of partitioning speech in the several ways we have invented, especially in this century. When Roland Barthes, for example, declares in an imperious sweep that the narratives of the world are numberless, he seems precisely to be echoing the triumphant words of Vac celebrating the ‘many forms’ she ‘enters into’.3 I, for my part, here renew Vac’s claim that the conversations of the world are correspondingly countless. The bangs and whispers, susurrations and explosions that ensue when these two super-genres of discourse—conversation and narrative— fuse, form the subject matter of Narrative Gravity. Storytalk A parodically simple version of the hierarchical embedding that relates those mammoth abstractions—communication, conversation and narrative—might look like this: COMMUNICATION
LANGUAGE-BASED
OTHER e.g. gestures, non-linguistic sign systems such as traffic signals, etc.
ORAL
CONVERSATIONAL
NARRATIVE
OTHER e.g. written texts
OTHER NARRATIVE e.g. speeches, lectures, etc.
OTHER e.g. philosophical tracts, official documents, etc.
OTHER e.g. questions, arguments, greetings, discussions, etc.
Fig. 1 3Barthes, ‘A Structural Analysis of Narrative’, in S. Heath, translated 1977, p. 79.
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At each level of Figure 1, it’s apparent that the left node seems prima facie the more important, even as we recognize that this effect comes to be created, at least partly, as an artefact of the manner in which this node is named, while the ‘other’ node is merely exemplified. However, if conversation is at all to be pursued, we cannot avoid this basic concession to Vac’s dominion. It’s part of the othering nature of language that it forces upon its subjects an endless series of value-laden representational choices. Commonsensically, then, one obvious place to begin a study of communication and its cognitive repercussions is with some hypotheses about the necessary features for a theory of conversation. Over the recent decades, a number of philosophers have attempted to describe the conventions that seem necessary to the maintenance of a conversational exchange (Grice, Austin, Searle, Schiffer, Lewis, Sperber and Wilson, Recanati). Simultaneously, research in ethnomethodology, relying on that wonderful mnemonic invention, the tape-recorder, has turned up a list of features characteristic of the turn-taking mechanisms of conversation. Thus, ordinary language and casual conversation, once almost unnoticed in analyses of communication, have by now gained huge ontological respectability. For this reason, the task for a theory of human communication today may well be to explain the striking similarities in the norms of conversation that appear to have evolved across cultures, as well as account for those nonconformist instances which some researchers (Ochs Keenan, Polanyi) have noted in societies such as the Malagasy. Should we at this point seek a rough-and-ready heuristic that facilitates this task, we could hardly avoid being influenced by that near manic devotion to a procedural logic that distinguishes linguists and philosophers. Such a methodology would require us to begin by outlining—if only ultimately to reject—a Swiftian set of step-by-step operations: Hunting Down a Theory of Communication : Instruction Manual. I. Locate an area of behaviour where communication appears to be taking place, even if a definition of communication is not a priori available— conversational narrative might do as a candidate, for example.4 II. Once an area is located, identify the basic units of ‘communication’ in the area and name and describe them, still without an adequate definition of what ‘communication’ is. Note that, at this second stage, a large number of meta-theoretical terms might be required, such as those invented by 4Wittgenstein’s famous arguments on the difficulties of finding a definition for the
concept ‘game’ in Philosophical Investigations, 1953, p. 432, are obviously relevant here.
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speech act theory or the Gricean Theory of Conversational Implicature for just such a purpose. III. Identifying and describing a ‘basic unit’ of communication—let’s say, something like a question or an assertion for instance—must be followed by specifying a set of rules which govern the functioning of these units. Naturally, these rules are not directly observable; rather, they are conceptual devices that enable an explanation of the observations and descriptions made in stages I and II. In the process, some of your original descriptions may have to be ‘corrected’ or reformulated. At this stage, an abstract picture of communication, that is, a ‘theory’ of it, has, speaking optimistically, almost been formulated. IV. The rules devised at stage III have to be inter-related, and inconsistencies minimized; also, concepts such as, for example ‘implicature’, ‘intention’, ‘reference’, etc., that underpin the rules as a whole, have to be explicated. And now hey presto, that we have something like a full-fledged ‘theory’ to be reapplied, with caution, to the ‘data’ with which we began, we might just be able to extract an answer to our original, impossible question— what is communication? Or if we still do not have a satisfactory answer to this mammoth question, we do at least have the resources for generating a great deal of scepticism about the value of such unwieldy questions, about that endless looping back, that almost loopiness, which marks a certain kind of inquiry. I shall begin arbitrarily, by describing narrative as a dynamic structure that converts ‘talk’ into ‘text’. Its function is to make some parts of a communicative loop or chain—in our particular case, casual conversation— both potentially detachable and iterable. A ‘good story’ is one that can be ‘taken away’ by listeners and/or tellers and repeated in other conversations, other contexts, other cultures. It may also undergo further structural conversion into other media such as written text, film, drawings, and back again. While it is true that this aspect of conversational story-telling has not been much remarked on, it is, as I see it, one of the most noteworthy features of narrative as a cognitive format. The structure of narrative appears beautifully adapted to time-transfer, to taking away, to having and holding in some kind of formal permanence. The point becomes clearer if we contrast narrative with conversational structure for a moment, and dwell on the difficulties of ‘fit’ between the two. Conversational structure, it seems to me, is interventionist. It technically permits the possibility of interruptions and/or disruptions of a speaker’s talk at all times with immediacy. Why this technical openness to ‘challenge’ leads, in practice, to far fewer breakdowns of communication than are in theory possible, is an intriguing question that crops up in
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various chapters of Narrative Gravity, especially those that discuss the ‘rationality’ of moves within the language game of story-telling. But let me just note here that conversational structure is typically ‘alternating’, with an ABABAB pattern that requires a constant relocation of the deictic centres of ‘self’. Conversation presumes an exchange of ‘I’ with ‘you’ at every turn, quite literally. What Bakhtin famously called the ‘dialogic imagination’ is nowhere as evident as in ordinary conversation, although, again, Bakhtin himself did not emphasize this almost mechanical aspect of ‘dialogue’. Most researchers, however, now agree that narrative, often idealized as ‘monologic’, is quite unlike conversation in that it is structurally ‘sequential’, displaying an ABCDEF pattern. How to fit the long, monologic, past-ist, narrator-centred and closed ABCDEF sequence of narrative into the short, dialogic, present-ist, deictically changing and open-ended ABABAB alternation of conversation? Solve this puzzle and some of those elusive constraints on communication that Vac in her wisdom decreed so many evolutionary cycles ago might begin to reveal themselves. The Paradoxes of the Authorless Narrative and of Fictional Discourse From puzzles to paradoxes: for a longish stretch of human history, as we’ve just noted, narratives have constituted an integral and extensive part of our oral repertoire, which consists chiefly of everyday conversation. Conversation, in turn, offers the most widespread evidence of our largely language-based, and thus unique communicative gifts, among the world’s species. This is the basic embedded relationship that Narrative Gravity is obsessed with, in one way or another, throughout its ten chapters. Barring this first chapter and a final one, the eight chapters at the centre of the book coil themselves around a set of three ‘paradoxes’, loosely related to the basic three objectives outlined in a), b) and c) earlier. The first paradox is Dennett’s Paradox of the Authorless Narrative. Is it possible to conceive of a narrative without a narrator?, asks Dennett (1991), and proceeds to demonstrate with the concrete example of ‘A Party Game called Psychoanalysis’ that such a situation is indeed imaginable.5 In Dennett’s account of this game, one player—the dupe— is sent out of the room, and told that when he comes back he will have to guess at a story told by one of the people in the room. Once he has 5Compare A. Banfield’s idea of ‘Speakerless Narratives’ in Unspeakable Sentences, 1982.
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pieced the story together through a process of asking yes–no questions, he will have to identify the teller of the story and proceed to psychoanalyse him or her. But, unknown to him, there is no story, and the others in the room have simply agreed that if the last letter in the dupe’s question is in the first half of the alphabet, they will answer in the affirmative, and otherwise in the negative.6 For example: Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. Y.
Is it a romantic story? No. Has Hollywood made a film based on the theme? Yes. Directed by Hitchcock? Yes. Not Psycho? No. Would it be The Birds, by any chance? Yes.
From this amusing illustration, Dennett7 goes on to contend that just as there can be narratives without narrators, so there can be ‘selves’ or the illusion of identity produced in individuals without any recourse to a foundational notion of personality. Human ‘selves’, according to Dennett are ‘centres of narrative gravity’, since humans are programmed to extrude narratives as naturally as spiders spin webs or beavers build dams. Each day of their lives human beings tell stories—to themselves and to others around themselves. A human life is constructed out of such pre-programmed activity. It is this differentiated layering of multiple narratives that produces in human beings the illusory feeling that they are intentional agents ‘born with’ distinct selves. Two chapters of Narrative Gravity are pulled together by this paradox. They are: Chapter 4 on the work of Grice and Lewis, which presents for the first time a set of maxims for narrative implicature, based on Grice’s more general rules for conversational implicature; and 5 on the mnemonic salience of narrative, which attempts to link Sperber and Wilson’s ideas on 6Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1990, pp. 10–16. 7Dennett is careful to introduce a ‘contradiction’ clause here, which guards against
an answer lower down in the sequence of questions negating information yielded earlier. This basic concession to ‘rationality’, I will argue, seems reminiscent of a Gricean framework where a language game works only if certain ground rules for communication have been accepted by conversational ‘players’ in the first place. In other words, even ‘authorless narratives’ require ‘conversational agents’ who agree upon, initiate and sustain a logically prior process of communication.
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conversational relevance with Dennett’s own work on cultural memes, and also offers my own theory of narrativity. Many recent novelist–commentators on narrative—Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco—have, as we know, remarked on that peculiar sense of an ‘unbearable lightness of being’ to which the human self is naturally subject. If stories indeed anchor the flyaway human soul, then this book—Narrative Gravity—can be read as exploring the psychological antithesis of, as well as antidote to, this particular ‘authoritative’ malaise of the human soul. The second paradox is Searle’s celebrated Paradox of Fictional Discourse. How can words both possess and not possess their ‘ordinary’ meanings in a piece of fiction?8 What are the belief states of ‘selves’ when they enter the universal discourse of ‘fiction’? Searle’s startlingly direct answer to these deep questions is that the speech act of fiction is ‘parasitic’ upon the more basic act of assertion. Fictional discourse is exactly like the assertion except that the ‘sincerity condition’ which enjoins truthfulness is ‘suspended’ in such cases. Hence, ‘truth’ is automatically sacrificed in narrative. My position in Narrative Gravity, on the contrary, is that there can be a lot of truth (facts as well as tenets of cultural faith) in a fictional assertion, and that audiences know how to negotiate facts in a fictional story without a) making a binary distinction between the categories of ‘fiction’ versus ‘assertion’ and b) having to relate fiction ‘parasitically’ to the prior and more basic speech act of assertion. A simple example will make the point. Suppose we were to compare an adult and a child telling the very same story—the story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, say. Now let’s have a scenario where the child who repeats this story, which she has first heard from her mother, to her little sister at bedtime, actually believes in the truth of her assertions. She does truly believe Goldilocks ate up the little bear’s pudding, broke his chair and was generally hateful. So does her little sister. Therefore, no ‘sincerity condition’ can, logically, have been suspended during this particular telling of ‘Goldilocks’ for either listener or hearer. But do we then want to maintain that the little girl’s story, which has exactly the same content as her mother’s original account, where we will assume for the sake of sanity that the mother did not believe in the truth of her assertions, is now a genuine assertion, while her mother’s earlier ‘parasitic’ utterance was not? Does the story of Goldilocks really turn ‘factual’ the moment context of belief alters from a mother-to-child telling to a child-to-child telling? It can surely not be so alarmingly simple to effect changes in ‘the 8‘The Logical Basis of Fictional Discourse’ in Speech Acts, p. 1972.
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logical status of fictional discourse’, unless we have a very weak notion of logic operating here. Might it not be more elegant simply to say that mother and child both intend to produce narrative speech acts, rather than maintain that one is making a specious attempt at assertion while the other isn’t? In fact, the relevant difference for speech act theory between fictional and non-fictional narrative, as I suggest in my chapter on Austin and Searle’s formulation of speech act theory may lie in what Searle himself termed in another context ‘direction of fit’. Earlier I mentioned another problem of ‘fit’, where there’s a tension each time the monologic, closed ABCDEF pattern of narrative has to fuse with the dialogic, openended ABABAB pattern of a conversational sequence. Within speech act theory another, less formal, more semantic ‘fit’ characterizes a division seen as basic within the category of narrative itself. According to Searle, in a fictional representation, the world may be said to be made a posteriori to match the words of the teller; in a factual one, the teller’s words may be taken to conform to certain a priori elements in the world. Hence, if a story is presented as made out of factual material, the element of belief (B) in its truth should ideally be 1. However, if a story is fictional, the element of belief could be either 0 or greater than 0 (but less than 1). The range of B, that is, in the truth of any narrative can be represented as being between the extreme points 0 and 1, but there is no sharp line to be drawn between fictional discourse and factual material. Consequently, a simplifying hypothesis underlying this research is that we neither need to make, nor make, any binary distinctions in our assessments of narrative. Indeed, it may be believability (plausibility) rather than belief (commitment to truth) that is the important criterion in assessing narrative material, both fictional and factual. ‘Truth’ in general seems not to be a critical criterion in the evaluation of narrative. In the context of story-telling, truth could be a standard that is, as Sperber and Wilson might put it, cognitively irrelevant. Instead, I suggest that there is a cline from most fragile (implausible, boring and culturally alienated) to most durable (plausible, interesting and culturally salient) along which audiences can grade all kinds of narrative material— fictional or factual, oral or written, conversational or rehearsed. From this it follows that even if a teller’s narrative is openly presented as fictional, it still has to be organized as ‘non-fragile’, so that its audience agrees, by temporary fiat, to a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. But if the teller goofs by constantly stressing the dramatic nature of story material, chances are that the audience will respond with yawns (mental yawns, at any rate, even if politeness forbids a physical expression of boredom), because then their reactions become limited to exclamations of horror, surprise
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or disbelief at every turn. Thus, overemphasis on reportability by a teller may often have the paradoxical consequence that audiences are exhausted and ultimately bored to tears. The appeal of telling a story by stressing ordinary common ground is that audiences can participate actively in the process of telling, and so resist boredom. Paul de Man famously described an endemic attitude towards texts in a community of readers as incorporating ‘a resistance to theory’, but if we seek to characterize narrative itself as a kind of proto-theoretical endeavour, then how do conversationalists contrive to ‘resist’ the theory that a story presents them with? An answer that I explore pretty intensively in Narrative Gravity concerns the ways in which conversationalists display an almost programmed commitment to grading or evaluating the stories they are submitted to along a cognitive axis that registers boredom, implausibility and cultural irrelevance. It is as if the ‘self’ that a teller projects through her narrative is being communally tested, examined for its social robustness. As in any exam, the examinee’s production is ‘fragile’ insofar as it is exposed to negative evaluations, for, if listeners as narrative examiners are to perform their own roles with maximal authority, they are bound to seriously ‘resist’ the teller’s narrative, giving it a good grade only if it can manage to overcome their objections. To read the pleasures of the narrative encounter in terms of the metaphor of an examination may be to impose too strict a reading on it. Nevertheless, in a book which attempts to treat narrative as a kind of theory, concerned with matching the ‘evidence’ displayed in a teller’s tale with the knowledge one has of the world, both emotionally and perceptually, there is already incipient a concept of examination—the potential, and often actualized cross-examination of the story and storyteller by a community of listeners, as well as the self-reflexive examination of her own story by a teller. ‘Plausibility’ and ‘fragility’ must thus be understood as interactional concepts when applied to narratives, unlike ‘truth’ or, to a lesser degree, the ‘felicity conditions’ of speech act theory. It is the task of an audience to evaluate a narrative as interesting or credible, and not in the interests of a narrator to inform them that it is so. Whereas a strong case can be made for the truth of a narrative being independent of whether audiences believe it or not, a narrative cannot be said to be plausible unless audiences in particular conversational contexts ‘pass’ it on this count. This, indeed, is where the ‘power’ of an audience resides—to decide from moment to moment, on the basis of incoming evidence, where the boundaries lie between the imagined and the real in a teller’s tale.
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There is no safe passage for a story-teller. She can keep only one eye on her story, the other ‘glittering eye’ must constantly be fixed on the Wedding Guest, Coleridge’s ambiguous symbol for an enthralled listener. For, if a teller fails to hold the attention of her listeners, they may at any time mentally break away from her tale, judging her facts too fantastic to accept, or her fiction too mundane. But then, where does such potentially capricious exercise of authority on the part of listeners leave the logical distinction between fact and fiction that is Searle’s concern? Do listeners, for example, use the speech act criteria of sincerity to distinguish between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, or do they make use of categories other than, and different from, the speech act ones, in order to ‘make up their minds’ on these questions? Searle’s paradox enables us to focus on some of these issues. In Narrative Gravity I suggest that, despite Searle’s misgivings, no rules of language are ‘suspended’ in either fictional or factional discourse. Rather, it is the intense focus in any story-telling activity on the ways in which the ‘rules’ of language are complied with to yield ‘ordinary meanings’, which any listener can anticipate, that enable us to revel in their ‘extraordinary meaningfulness’—that is, their emotional effect on us. The reason why we accept rather than reject even the uncomfortable effect of fear, anger, dread that a narrative might have on us, derives from our recognition of its specific ‘force’ as a speech act. Narrative creates emotional resonances through purely linguistic means. Stories force upon us a series of judgements about the linguistic construction of our experiences, and especially our most moving mental experiences. This is the main factor that makes Searle’s description of the logic of a fictional story as a wayward non-compliance with the ‘rules’ of language appear just a little perverse to me. Nor is this just to quibble; it’s more to say that, if one were to isolate the phrase ‘fictional story’ in the passage from Searle quoted earlier in this section, the main emphasis in this book will be on the manner in which the linguistic logic of the nominal head ‘story’ contains and subsumes the logic of its adjectival qualifier ‘fictional’. Story-telling seems to me to permit high quality resolutions of experience, either representing it analytically as fiction or reappraising its contingencies as factual narrative. It is this ability to crystallize experience, re-form it, so that it allows us to reform, or at least review, ourselves, that we celebrate when we share our stories. Narrative Gravity thus develops a critique of Searle’s answer to his own paradox by tracking its implications in Chapter 2, which constructs for the first time in the literature on speech act theory, a set of original felicity conditions on the meta-speech act of
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narrative, but which also tries to show why these grid-like conditions in fact fail to capture some of the finer and more interesting features of narrativity. Chapter 3 on deconstruction and Derrida, and on Paul de Man and Jonathan Culler’s critiques of speech act theory, and Chapter 7 on the ‘fictionalization’ of true accounts of disaster return to Searle’s Paradox. Two kinds of crisis come together in this seventh chapter: real life disaster and the linguistic problems of deciding upon meaning, given the fleeting immediacy of natural conversations. How do we cope? It is suggested here that the crises of meaning that Searle discusses are not just characteristic of fiction but could rather be forced on individuals across cultures by the larger structure of narrative, both fictional and non-fictional. The Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick of Narrative Lastly, there is my own paradox. The metaphor it embodies runs through those chapters—1, 5, 6 and 7, 8—which are concerned, respectively, with the grammar of narrative, its cognitive patterns, the mechanisms of conversation, and the cultural forces that shape story-telling. In short, these are the chapters of the book that have to do, in one way or the other, with structural enticements. What is supposed to happen in an Indian rope trick is well known. In some of the more intriguing versions of the trick, a magician cuts up a small boy (or an apple or a wriggling snake, or even, if you will, the afore-mentioned goddess Vac!), and then tosses the pieces into the air where they, predictably, disappear. The magician then unwinds his rope, climbs it, defying small forces like gravity, retrieves the invisible bits, puts them together, and descends with a miraculously coalesced little boy (or snake, or apple, or goddess). Cheers from the assorted audience if our magician gets it right, boos if he does not! It is my contention that a story-teller performs a feat quite similar to the Indian magician’s—and equally mysterious. She takes familiar objects and cuts them up, reorganizes them, defamiliarizes them, involves them in a mythic toss-up. These effects she achieves by flighting the sinuous rope of narrative into the air. But why? Is it not perverse to take ‘reality’, distort or destroy it, and then simply put it together again? There are many answers to this question—answers that are iteratively explored in Narrative Gravity—but one answer is obvious. There is a certain delight, an inexplicable thrill, in challenging the everyday world which we take for granted, a world where our feet are firmly planted on the ground and where the laws of gravity, temporal order, mechanics and
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biology unfailingly prevail. An illusionist’s skill lies in using these very laws to trick us, or our brains, into believing that they no longer hold. So too the story-teller at one and the same time deceives and delights us with her artifice. Indeed, she delights us because she deceives us. At the same time, it is important to recognize that much of the power of narrative comes not just from the fact that it takes us into imaginary or impossible worlds, but that it in fact reassures us, structurally reassures us, that things come right back in the end to where they were in the beginning. The narrative movement is generally from terra firma to terra incognita and back. The linearity and temporality of prototypical narrative, its firm closures, its very constructedness, seems to possess huge psychological advantages. As in the Indian rope trick, the end of narrative is often recovery. All the freely floating parts of a narrative—its snaky tail, its envenomed irony, its spine of content—have to be recombined perfectly in the air, out of sight, and brought down to earth again. That is often the prime satisfaction of narrative. It is what audiences in many cultures, ancient and contemporary, expect of a ‘good’ story. If the postmodern narrative without clear beginnings, middles and ends puzzles and troubles readers, then this book argues that these feelings are not entirely surprising. The epistemology of the postmodern story often runs counter to the narrative teleology that we culturally imbibe. A few years ago, the literary journal Granta published a theme issue entitled ‘The Storyteller’ which asked, and then responded to, a question of semantics displayed prominently on its jacket. What does ‘story-teller’ suggest? Folk-tales, myths, sea-voyages, a cartoon campfire: in short, writing that is distinctly unmodern [italics in original].9
That editorial stress on the ‘unmodernity’ of story-telling is revealing. It implies that the activity of story-telling has its roots in a pre-literate, primarily oral, certainly pre-modern, even perhaps a ‘primitive’ ethos. At the same time, the irrepressible urge to tell a simple story, or alternatively, simply tell stories, is one which contemporary civilization has hardly managed to rid itself of. For, the pre-literate instinct still seems to inform the written corpus of the most sophisticated of twentieth-century writers, such as Bruce Chatwin, Rysard Kapuscinski and John Berger, whose work is foregrounded in this particular volume of Granta. The idea is that we fall back on the strong supportive structure of linear narrativity, especially in those instances when we are exploring ‘strangeness’. For example, when we track cultures far away in time and space from our 9Granta, 1987, book-jacket.
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‘own’, as Chatwin does when he tells of the aborigines of Australia, Kapuscinski when he writes of central Africa, and John Berger when he speaks of other ‘ways of looking’ at Europe’s art and social practices, we tend to follow the distinctly ‘unmodern’, but well-beaten, path of the traveller’s tale. The contours of a classic narrative structure—the rope of narrative—enables us to accept ‘defamiliarization’ more easily, smoothly. Narrative, then, is a linguistic structure designed to facilitate cultural cross-overs. That much is clear, but what makes it a discourse universal is its play, its constant shadow jousts, in all cultures, with death—death which is the most certain of species-happenings as well as the most unimaginable. Among the questions Narrative Gravity asks, for instance is: Why? Why is it that the typical image of the ‘story-teller’ in so many cultures is that of an old person, and seldom that of a child or young adult? One answer is that the collective experience of a community, its longest memories, are embodied in the persona of an old man or woman. Another pragmatic response is to suggest that old people, no longer part of the central labour force, have more time to devote to this activity, to keep children out of mischief, etc. In this book, however, I argue for a more complex position. It is this—not only are the aged perceived in several societies as repositories of cultural meme memory, living memebanks as it were, but they are assumed, reasonably enough, to be closer to death, to the narrative closure of their own lives, than any others. It was in fact John Berger, although not in the Granta volume, who once perceptively referred to the figure of the story-teller as ‘Death’s secretary’. For, even on those rare occasions when the figure of a storyteller turns out to be that of a young and beautiful woman like Scheherazade, it is under the shadow of death that her stories are told. Story-telling thus becomes a mode of keeping death at bay, of sustaining life. The more imaginative excess Scheherazade can come up with, the more Dennettian memes she can recall to add to her narratives, the more she is insured against her death being added to all the deaths before her own. This point has been made in other contexts before, but here I use it to suggest that, of the many psychological boundaries that narrative teaches us to breach, one of the most salient is that between personal extinction and cultural preservation, between the teller’s imminent mortality and her audience’s immanent satisfaction. Among the lessons to be derived from the Indian rope analogy are the following: narrative, like magic, is a culturally approved mode of performance. It involves actors, illusions and the creation of psychological effects in the minds of audiences. Audiences, I argue, are crucial to the successful progress of a narrative because the illusionary effects of story-
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telling have to be played out in their minds, not in the story-teller’s. This is one of the ‘paradoxes’ that the analogy of the Indian rope trick highlights—no audience, no narrative completion. Listening to a narrative, like witnessing a magician’s act, is a relatively inexpensive means of trying out patterns of living, situations and emotional reactions that one may never experience, or want to experience, in one’s own life. The feelings, among others, of curiosity, awe, pity, sheer fun, and final reassurance that a narrative evokes—those indirect ‘perlocutionary effects’ of speech act theory—must occur in our minds, not just or even necessarily, within the story-teller’s. Consider how very curious this ordinary fact is. Most cultures operate within a framework where we believe we do things like eating, sleeping, going shopping and making love primarily for our own benefit and pleasure. Story-telling on the other hand seems to manifest a contrary impulse; our altruistic pleasure in telling a story comes not from pleasing ourselves but others, creating silent effects in their minds that we cannot often physically observe. One can understand why a story pleases, or might please a listener, but what’s in it for the teller? Again, many nuanced answers are possible but here is a straightforward one. Narratives are culturally prized, and sometimes dismissed, because they teach us to extend our experience as well as our powers of reasoning, sometimes dangerously. A skilled teller of narratives may risk disapproval if his stories are judged unsuitable by the community—the cautionary tale of Salman Rushdie is a striking example from our own times.10 Strong social approval and community bonding are the major psychological gains that might accrue for ‘good’ story-tellers. It is my contention that the main battles over the kind of ‘object’ narrative is have to be fought mainly in mental terrain. Victories and losses in the realm of story-telling, which seems so overt an activity, have to be understood in terms of covert and hidden mental evaluations and community judgements.11 Our problem as researchers is to find observable correlates for the complex processes that we ‘know’ must go on out of sight during and after the telling of a story. 10In several of my essays on Rushdie’s novels (see Bibliography), I attempt to explain why Rushdie’s use of the techniques of dream-narrative, gossip, etc., to fictionalize the ‘history’ of religious communities, nations, etc., has provoked such furious reactions. The subversive elements in Rushdie’s three main novels, especially The Satanic Verses, have to be understood, I suggest, at least partly in relation to the idea of a writer’s ‘imagined community’, which may include any community which imagines him, as well as his own imagining(s). 11 See A. McCabe and C. Peterson, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Vol. 13, Number 6, 1984, on the psychology of ‘What Makes A Good Story?’
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In the Indian rope trick, the magician reconstructs the mutilated body in an invisible space. This is the most crucial part of his trick, yet we do not get to see it. What we witness is the ‘whole’ once again at the end of the act. How ‘real’ then was the magician’s reconstitution? At one level, we know there was never any cutting up, so there cannot be any glueing together; substitution perhaps, sleight of hand, but no glue. Yet, at another level, we accept the evidence of our ‘senses’ that we did witness a dismemberment and a ‘return to life’. What narratives teach us is to live with this contradiction between beliefs we hold to be true, and ‘facts’ which seem to undermine those beliefs. The ‘paradox’ thrown up—literally!—by my Indian Rope Trick of Narrative is that story-telling enables, even encourages us to enjoy contradictions and irrationalities without having to abandon a basic commitment to ‘rational’ choices, causal explanations and so on. As I show in Chapters 6 and 7, many patently ‘false’ or ‘unbelievable’ narratives may be fashioned so as to provide evidence for a moral truth or a generalization in which we, as individuals or members of a culture, do believe, such as ‘God helps those who help themselves’, or ‘It takes a thief to catch a thief ’. The role that narratives play in naturalizing processes of ‘reasoning’ such as relating causes to effects and inductive evidence to deductive inferences, forms a chief theme of this book. Although it was art that Saint Augustine called ‘reason in the making’, that coldly beautiful definition could apply as well to the narrative process. As ‘art’, stories often present or encourage ‘false’ beliefs; what needs to be emphasized is that this fact does not in any way adversely affect our ability to reason in and through them. Indeed, by driving a wedge between ‘words’ and the ‘world’, between representations and reality, they may encourage exactly the kind of sophisticated reflexivity that is needed for abstract, structured, linear thought. Songlines What do stories achieve? In Australian aboriginal myths, the story-teller is a person whose walkabouts criss-cross the continent, so that it springs into being. Every bush, every stream, every clod of earth and human habitation owes its existence to a performative summoning up via narrative. The acts of naming and reference go together; and prior to naming there is only nothingness. That is why it is so important for the story-teller to cover some ground as he tells his stories; were he to stick to only one place, the world would obviously be much, much smaller. To talk as you walk expands both space and time. What stories do, then, is
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not just to sing the world into existence, but to keep the show going, and growing, afterwards. Socio-biologists now speculate that stories, like gossip, were an ancient means of social grooming, through which individual members of the human species both ratified their own existence in the eyes of the community, and the community’s extension in themselves and others.12 But this notion that we exist individually and communally, in, and through, the production of stories, imaginings, brings us back, circling, to the question of what exactly it is that we share when we share stories. To whom do stories belong? How is individual ownership of a story established and maintained, since it is necessarily a shared resource, depending for its ‘value’ on its hearers acknowledging its perlocutionary force and its performative qualities? When stories are passed on as texts within, as well as across, communities, does not the moral issue of plagiarism, the case of ‘pretended’ authorship, then inevitably arise? Are stories ‘fragile’ in the same way that ‘selves’ are fragile, subject to the same processes of mortality, and the same sorts of morality? Who or what are the subjects of narrative? A slew of questions! In Narrative Gravity, we are especially concerned with narratives of disaster, which are required to create a world—an ante-deluvian world, pre-flood. As we know, the theme of havoc wrought by flood is an archetypal one in many cultures, often directly associated with myths of creation. The contemporary, first person, factual, oral, spontaneous, conversational, and in the main, female, witnessing of suffering recorded in this book thus form an intriguing continuum with the traditional third person, fictional, written, literary, rehearsed, and on the whole, male, narrativization on the same theme. Indeed, it could be argued that all these narratives demonstrate something similar—that the human self at an unnatural time, a time of crisis, responds by weaving extra self-protective shells of narrative. Which may be why ancient cultural flood narratives remain with us still, still displaying that durable weave. Likewise, the stories of flood recorded in my corpus could remain in their community repertoires many centuries from now—ensuring the long-term survival of their tellers. We live through our narratives, and the images we make of ourselves in our narratives are the ones that circulate in perpetuity. So what kinds of images of ourselves can we discover in our narratives, past and present? Harriet Ritvo, discussing in another context the classes or categories of 12I refer here to current work on language as an early species ability, carried out, for
example, by researchers like Robin Dunbar and his group at University College, London.
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being to which humans could saliently compare themselves, found only two—a) animals, surrogate nature, and b) God(esses?).13 Through, or in, these forms of existence, Ritvo suggested that we perceive self-images— mortal or immortal; either morally debased or almost divine. In Narrative Gravity, I speculate about adding a third category to hers—machines, and particularly machines like robots and computers which are explicitly created to be human or humanlike, but thought to be lacking a ‘self’, and therefore neither moral nor immoral but simply a-moral. Certainly Dennett, whose anti-foundationalist work on the ‘narrative self’ this book considers in detail, believes that we are comparable to machines, if not actually machines.14 Dennett tells us that narrative activity is our chief mode of self-creation. I argue further that narrative is probably an important instrument of selfprotection as well. It provides, by convention as well as by implication, a format for defining an individual’s social territory, and thereby, that individual’s unique identity within a community. The detours into discussions of Labovian and psycholingusitic ‘story grammars’(Chapter 1); of narrative as a fictional speech act which pays rich dividends in terms of inducing affect or ‘perlocutionary effects’ (Chapter 2); of the deconstruction of performative speech act analyses of interpersonal communication (Chapter 3); of Gricean ‘implication’ and Lewisian ‘convention’ in narrative (Chapter 4); of the enthnomethodology of oral, conversational narrative (Chapter 5); of the mnemonics and meme-power that stories characteristically display across cultures (Chapter 6); of the politics of narrative as ‘real’ accounts, ‘crisis’ or ‘disaster’ (Chapter 7); and, finally, of fiction as enigmatic truth tales (Chapter 8), each leads back ultimately to the question of the ‘sources of self’. Every bend in the theory of narrative seems to affirm the existence of a self who remains ‘fragile’ to the extent that her stories can at any time come under attack from other narrators/tellers. At worst, she can be turned into a social pariah by any widespread and/or powerful perception that she is unable to handle the demands of ‘impliculture’—my extension of the Gricean concept of 13Ritvo, H. The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, 1990. 14I’ve read with interest that Dennett is actually a consultant to a project at the
Massachussetts Institute of Technology which aims to construct a machine, ‘a life-like robot called COG, which will be able to see, touch, and talk to you ... what will all this yield? The hope is that it will explain nothing less than what makes us tick’ (Times Higher Educational Supplement, June 3, 1994). As I had already written on the subject of Nair’s Communicating Cogs for a draft version of this book, I am particularly amused by this development, and wish it all the success it deserves!
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implicature, explained in Chapters 4 and 5—and so does not ‘fit into’ the cultural group. Thus, her claims to identity, to a place within society, can result in mental death through a negative evaluation of her stories. In this respect, a kind of ‘care of the self’—its protection and projection as it is achieved through narrativization—becomes an important concern in the final chapters of this book, where various moral discomforts, pushed away in the earlier chapters, gather darkly and can no more be ignored. These last exploratory chapters of Narrative Gravity consider tape-recordings made, for the most part, in several severely flooded Bengal villages during the major floods of 1978. The ‘self’ is obviously under severe assault, physical and mental, at such times, when one’s whole existence is, literally, awash. At such times, narratives become almost a sole means for rebuilding a lost world, and embankments of words become a chief way to shore up the ‘self ’ and somehow ensure the survival of memory in a community immersed all at once in a tragic logic.15 At any rate, it seems a reasonable hypothesis that the ‘self’ and all that it ‘means’ can most acutely be understood through those devastating stories of crisis that describe a near death of selfhood. In a way, therefore, these personal narratives of calamitous ‘natural kind’ disaster cannot help but constitute an extensive and homogenous corpus in another language of the classic danger-of-death stories first studied in English by Labov and Waletsky (1966) and Labov (1972). There are, however, differences. Labov recorded ‘nominal kind’ dangers, such as fights and knifings, and his environments were metropolitan and rural. Chapter 7 shows how the apparently inconsequential differences between dangers to the self from a natural-kind source and a nominal-kind source have major consequences for how we theorize narrative and its role in a wider political context. This change of gears from ‘problems and paradoxes’ to ‘enigmas and empathies’ in Chapters 7 and 8 means, effectively, that they form what Labov would call a kind of evaluative ‘coda’ to the book. The silt of human emotion that such narratives carry seem to me to problematize anew those ‘logical’ problems of the distinctions between factual and fictional narrative by carrying them over into a ‘real world’ where ‘historical’ accounts of disaster, classically concerned with 15Since the floods in question were possibly the most severe known in the region for the century, they formed a topic of conversation almost everywhere and at all levels. This data is therefore of some socio-linguistic interest. In view of this and of its relative unfamiliarity, I include in Appendix I, an extract from an official statement made at the time, detailing the nature and extent of these floods. In Appendix II, I set out the notation I have used in transcribing this and other data, as well as the procedures I have broadly followed in my translation of Bengali into English.
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recording ‘facts’, are contrasted with the quasi-literary ‘personal’ tellings of people, and especially women, where the main concern is to illuminate ‘suffering’. Here we are forced to tread the intellectually most murky, but also perhaps deepest, waters of narrativity—issues of power and ownership, agency and institutional control in Chapter 7; and notions of explanation, coincidence, enigma and the incomprehensibility of death and an end to our narratives, in Chapter 8. It is the fragility of our theorizing about, as well as through, narrative, that is the ironic theme of these last chapters. The final chapter of the work, ‘Narrative Sutras’, then attempts to knot together as many of the theoretical loose ends that the analogy of the Indian rope trick naturally suggests, using the format of a textual device nearly as ancient as the goddess Vac herself. The sutra is a brief gnomic summary of an entire thesis or argument which can be ‘unknotted’, or, alternatively, left bereft of any interpretation whatsoever, depending on an interlocutor’s interest. Looping back to the detailed and often tedious arguments presented in the book, is only one of the ways to unknot a sutra. There are several alternative Alexandrian methods of cutting the Gordian knot as well, which depend largely on the reader’s ingenuity. For a shot at unknotting a sutra, turn to page 347, but consider before then the following schematic representation of some of the positions on narrativity and the self that we have discussed so far. The Goddess Speaks Position I—The Authorless Narrator of Dennett—We are not singular selves, and our narrative texts do not really have the singular authors we take them to have. The fact is that we are machines. Sophisticated biological machines, it is true, but still machines, designed to endlessly produce the ‘multiple drafts’ of narrative from which we derive, fallaciously, our ‘singular’ self-representations. Consciousness within the Dennettian perspective is epiphenomenonal; we attribute ‘intentional stances’ to others, and to ourselves, because we postulate for each body a mental centre, but this is just a convenience. A self is a narrative congeries, so to speak, rather than a unity. Dennett’s anti-essentialist, and possibly anti-moralist arguments thus dissolve the part/whole system so central to the ‘thing-in-itself ’ structural analyses, not to mention the categorical moral dicta that Kant held were part of a ‘universal’ ethical order.16 Position II—The Searlean Performer—Strong opposition from this quarter to Dennett’s ‘anti-humanist’ anti-foundationalist stand. We have to be different from machines because we, unlike ‘them’, have intentions,
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feelings, desires. We actually understand what words mean, rather than merely produce ‘correct’ responses as a machine, however complicated, might. We can tell fiction from non-fiction, truth from falsity, as no animal or machine can. Ergo, we cannot be machines. Short Reply from Dennett to Searle—Searle begs the question when he claims that we understand words while machines don’t. How can he ever know? Why not think of it this way? Machines are not (yet) us, but we are machines. It’s only that we are very special machines—meaningproducing machines, rationalizing and feeling machines; and the way we achieve these effects of feeling (excitement, happiness, sorrow, curiosity) is by extruding narratives. Our narratives make us the feeling, thinking, rational creatures we imagine ourselves to be. They teach us to handle both fact and fiction and they create the illusion of an intentional ‘Centre of Narrative Gravity’. Very Short Reply from Searle to Dennett —Not to nit-pick. But doesn’t ‘very special machine’ beg the question in much the same way as it was suggested ‘actually understand’ does? Position III—Nair’s Communicating Cog—Having, literally, by shameless recourse to the story-teller’s cloak of absolute licence, put words into the mouths of Dennett and Searle, it seems the guilty party must speak up. Assuming a mediatory role, Nair sees merit both in Searle’s emphasis on human performativity and Dennett’s focus on human design. She has no problem at all with Dennett’s idea that we are biological machines designed to produce narrative self-representations, but because the norms for such self-representations are initially learnt (as Dennett admits, even insists), she feels that our ‘own’ narratives strands are umbilically connected to those produced by ‘others’ within the community. We can only learn narrative performance from other humans in the first place, and not from either gods, animals or machines. This is not to suggest that we cannot teach a robot to tell stories, and then learn from it in turn, but rather that narrative activity, unlike language, is not, and very probably could not have developed as, a solitary pastime. It must always have required the presence of a specifically human community for narrative interaction to take place—given that other species show no great predilection either for 16Unless one were to argue that such moral injunctions were biologically programmed, just like language rules or the propensity to produce narratives. I’m not sure how Dennett would respond to this line of enquiry, as he does not address it in his book, but as a liberal thinker, he would sooner or later surely be drawn to take a position on it, especially as he is now committed to building an intelligent, ‘feeling’ robot .
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lying, or for language, or for conceptualizing the passage of time. For Nair, narrative, somewhat like sex, is an interlocking device for selfperpetuation that has of necessity to involve at least two members of the human community before it can work. It evokes the same high affect (love, despair, agony, fear, curiosity, surprise) because it too relies on the dialogic, or even as Bakhtin might have it, a polyphonic imagination. Like the body, narrative, to be ‘creative’, needs interpretive listeners as well as active tellers. Nair therefore wants to replace Dennett’s ‘authorless narrative’ with the idea of a ‘co-authored narrative’. She wishes to suggest that those ‘multiple drafts’ of narrative that Dennett says are spun round a supposed singular ‘self’ actually have ‘multiple authors’ as well. That is, all our narratives have to be communally authored, and authorized, by listeners whose job it is to ‘correctly’ process tellers’ implicultural meanings. Even though the single authorships of selves is a convenient fiction, which, given our physical separation from each other, all societies must, in general, underwrite, Nair holds that narrative activity depends on tacit acceptance of the notion of multiple authorship in all human communities. The ‘paradox’ of the narrative function of language is that it both promotes the illusion of separateness, and at the same time, implicates us in inter-dependence. We may also infer something about the moral positions we could take towards ‘our’ narratives from this paradox. Since we cannot, in fact, ever manage to produce any narrative, simple or complex, entirely on our own, it follows that ‘care’ of narrative ‘selves’ should be a shared onus. The alternative to communal ‘multiple authorship’ is not single self-adducing ‘multiple drafts’, but the silence, or silencing, of the self. A consequence is that no single ‘author’ can ever be held solely responsible for the narratives he has ‘intentionally’ produced, since his stories could not have been performed at all without the cognitive input of the communit(ies) which produced him, and his particular illusion of an authorial ‘self’, in the first place. Every individual ‘self’, according to Nair, is thus a cog, big or little, in the wheel of community. Of course, this cog-in-the-wheel analogy may at first glance appear distasteful to those who see it as reductive, and a denial of individuality, insinuating that each one of us has our assigned ‘place’ in a fixed social system, and that’s that. However, I’d like to reiterate that the main feature of a cog is that it is designed to lock in with other cogs, its jagged edges fashioned to smoothly fit with other edges to produce motion and energy. Our boundaries of self are both defined and extended when we meet with others through our narratives. As I suggested earlier, we communicating cogs may
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well have command over two basic kinds of narrative—narratives of the self and narratives to the other. Our centres may be created by the first kind of narratives, but our boundaries, our defences, are marked by the second kind. We are cogs whose business is to communicate—to perform intricate, interlocking narrative dances. That is what stimulates us most; this unavoidably cooperative creation of theories is what we are best at, even if they sometimes take outlandish, contestatory, and even painful forms. Not only because we make them for each other, but because we cannot make them without each other, our narratives in the last resort force on us a few unlikely lessons in tolerance and solidarity. One of the more paradoxical traits of narrative, as I emphasized in connection with the Indian rope trick, seems to be that it facilitates a reconciliation of conflicting sets of beliefs in our minds. It enables an audience to accept the ‘neither-dead-nor-aliveness’ of a magician’s victim, until such time as the performance comes to an end. And at another level narrative rests on a presumption of listeners’ or readers’ charity. Take, for example, the frequent changes of gender pronominals (sometimes my listener has been a ‘he’, sometimes a ‘she’, likewise my story-teller), with which I have burdened the reader throughout this chapter. Such licence comes from my belief that there is an astounding sense-making ability which all sophisticated interpreters of texts bring to a ‘telling’. From multiple settings and complex character changes, even contradictions and incongruities, adept listeners can extract a main logical thread, and may indeed enjoy such inferencing in proportion, the more knots you deliberately introduce. This is how they display both their skill and their cooperation as masters of narrative unravelling. Tolerance of confusions and mysteries, containment of fears and anxieties, leaps of inference and interpretation—these are what we might declare narrativity, as a species of theory, is all about. If so, it is about time to recall the enigmatic goddess Vac, now at the end of this chapter, as we did at the beginning. The beliefs we hold today would hardly allow us to give any credence at all to what poor Vac ‘said’ in her classic Rigvedic speech, because of course, not being human, she could not possibly have said anything at all! It had to be someone else, a mere mortal, one of ‘us’, speaking ‘through’ her, much as Dennett might speak in a few years’ time through his robot Cog. ‘But’, replies the goddess, ‘you’ve stolen my argument—mark my words’ : The one who eats food, who truly sees, who breathes, who hears what is said, does so through me.
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Who, then, is speaking ‘through’ whom? Well, to us in the twenty-first century, it seems indubitably the case that it is we humans who speak through, for and about, the goddess, since goddesses simply don’t exist. But did the person(s) who ‘put’ these words into the mouth of the goddess believe she did not exist? Given our beliefs about the history of early Aryanism, we would probably agree that it is quite likely that they believed in the existence of the goddess Speech, just as Dennett believes that one day Cog will have a ‘mind of his own’, and Searle believes equally vehemently that Cog will not. If we concede this much, however, we are mired in an argumentative impasse, even before this book, in struggling defiance of gravity, has got off the ground, let alone to regions ‘beyond the sky, beyond this earth’. Attributing speech to a goddess called Speech is impossible for two independent reasons—the first is our current belief that speech is restricted to humans, and the second is our conviction that goddesses are non-existent, anyway. However, not attributing speech to Vac privileges our beliefs over those people who originally ‘heard’ these words from a goddess they were sure could speak, and did exist. How may we get away from this relativistic conundrum? As we know well, there is still no solution to the primal etiological mysteries. What were the origins of speech? There can be neither a wholly logical nor empirical answer to this question since we can never ‘know’ what took place, but can at best tell stories about our origins, theorize our ancestry.17 Under the circumstances, Vac’s assertion carries the same weight and is as laden with gravity as ours, only we prefer to ‘give more weight’ to our own. The study of narrative thus prompts us to question our most privileged truths and to value the stirrings of doubt. Anything is possible in narrative, because in truth anything is possible once we are able to develop some tolerance towards theories that seemed to us a little fantastic to begin with. As communicating cogs, we are bound to exchange narratives with Vac, Dennett, Searle—however strange their stories may appear to us, unless we wish to be excluded from the human conversation altogether—surely, a fate worse than death! Death. The point has been made before that the end of a story anticipates death. The closing of the narrative sequence, its coda, marks a formal separation from all the other cogs still merrily spinning along. It metaphorically describes the final dissolution of the ‘self’. I have called 17This point about the unavailability of logical solutions to our puzzlement about our origins has often been made. See, for example, J. Hillis Miller’s article on narrative in Lentricchia and Mclaughlin Critical Terms for Literary Study, 1990, p.72, which is also discussed in Chapter 4.
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this book Narrative Gravity partly because the phonology as well as the polysemy of the second word in the title seems to resonate well with the overwhelming sense of mortality which narrative drags with it. Gravity, locked in an onomatopoeic tackle with all those other groaning English words—grief, grind, gruesome, grumble, grovel, grunt, growl, grisly, grim, but also, to keep things in proportion, grin. Then, there is the semantics of gravity; cognate with the Sanskrit word ‘guru’ or teacher, whose words carry most ‘weight’ in the culture and who attracts all wisdom unto himself or herself (Vac?); gravity, also meaning seriousness; gravity, meaning a centrifugal force which attracts; and grave, shadowy half-homonym of gravity, meaning a place of burial, that space where gravity finally holds the ‘self’ down.18 ‘The grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace’, wrote the poet Andrew Marvell once, with a fine flourish of irony. There is, however, perhaps one paradoxical instance in which the grave does turn into ‘a fine and public place’, ideally suited to ‘embraces’ of all kinds, even with death itself, because we know that, whether or not we live to tell the tale, the tale will live to tell us.19 As I hope the rest of this book will show, that vital centre is—narrative. 18Speaking of etymologies, not only is the Sanskrit word ‘guru’ cognate with ‘gravity’, as I have mentioned, but the word ‘narrative’ itself also has its origins in Sanskrit. See, for example, H. Porter Abbott: ‘Hayden White pointed out in his book The Content of the Form that the word “narrative” goes back to the ancient Sanskrit “gna”, a root that means “know” and that it comes to us through Latin words for both “knowing” (“gnarus”) as well as “telling” (“narro”). This etymology catches the two sides of narrative. It is a tool for knowing as well as telling, for absorbing knowledge as well as expressing it’ (The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2002, p. 11). Abbott’s intervention thus fits in well with my own notion of narrative as a major theoretical tool that helps organize knowledge for the human species. 19 As an interesting coincidence, the Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s much-awaited autobiography, written under the danger-of-death shadow of lymphatic cancer—the first volume of which was published in 2002—is actually called Vivir Para Contaria or To Live To Tell It. In an article on the subject, Juan Forero comments: ‘To be sure, this is a writer famously obsessed with death … it is evident in all his books; nearly all start with death or a similar theme’. Forero then goes on to quote Gustavo Tatis from Cartagena, rich in oral story-telling traditions and the city where Marquez served his apprenticeship as a writer and reporter: ‘All his motivation is contained in that title, To Live To Tell It—it is the pleasure of telling the story. It is like saying life has been worth living’ (The New York Times, October 9, 2002). My contention in Narrative Gravity is very similar. The emotional ‘pleasure of telling the story’ and thus providing a ‘theoretical explanation’ of why ‘life is worth living’ seems to be a species characteristic that motivates the cultural production of narrative in every known human society and makes it perhaps the most widespread of ‘discourse universals’.
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1
qQ STRUCTURAL SIMPLICITIES The Grammar and Context of Narrative (Guru: William Labov)
A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.) After all the pretty contrast of life and death Proves that these opposite things partake of one, At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that. The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind If one may say so. Now, A And B are not like statuary, posed For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked On the sidewalk so that the pensive man might see. The pensive man ... He sees that eagle float For which the intricate Alps are a single nest. Wallace Stevens, Connoisseur of Chaos My relation to Structuralism [is] against shutting oneself in the text. ... The resulting formalization and depersonalization: all relations are of a logical nature (in the broad sense of the term). I, on the other hand, hear voices everywhere, and dialogic relations among them. M. Bakhtin, Concerning Methodology in the Human Sciences
Structuralism spanned the early and middle decades of the twentieth century like a great cantilever bridge. Conceptually girded like an engineer’s marvel, it led the ‘pensive men’ (Ferdinand de Saussure,
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Claude Levi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson) who set it up to think that its stretch might cover all those ‘squirming facts’ which Wallace Stevens found so hard to order. In their choice of primary materials, however, most structuralists seemed to prefer to study ‘the statuary in the Louvre’ rather than ‘the things chalked on the side walk’. So, Claude Levi-Strauss’s primary materials included the Greek myths, and Vladimir Propp’s morphology analysed the Russian folk-tale; but stories as a part of casual conversation seemed to evade that ‘eagle’s eye’ analysis which made of complex intricacies the ‘single nest’ demanded by high structuralism. But today, the doctrinal pages of the ‘bishops’ books’ of structuralism have been swept aside by the viewless winds of deconstruction and postmodernism. Why bother to resurrect them? Well, for a start, every member of the human species seems born a connoisseur of chaos. An escape from the structural paradigm, cognitively rather than culturally defined, hardly appears possible for the only species on the planet caught in the perceptual trap of linear time, which ‘hears voices everywhere’ and defines its sense of community through talk and language. As a historical production, structuralism may be passé but its mental sources run deep. The biologist’s impulse to dissect and label the body of Vac, to impose an order on the squirming facts, has always driven, and will continue to motivate, both our fascination with binaries—mirroring the alternating ABABAB structures of conversation—as well as our strong intuitions about linear sequencing—reflecting the temporal ‘and then’ ABCCDE structure of narrative. That is why it seems important, even as we accept the inevitability of a cognitive bondage to structural principles, occasionally to ponder over our pre-programmed and potentially ‘violent’—an adjective implied by Vac and used by Stevens—structuralist procedures of enquiry in the human sciences across cultures. In this first chapter, I return to the seventies and early eighties—the heyday of the ‘story-grammars’. These grammars all shared the premise that there is, out there in the world, a natural, linear structure of events. Our words, for the most part, follow and secure this powerful temporal order. That is to say, in a story-grammar, as in life, it would be distinctly odd for an Outcome or Resolution to precede an Action, such as in the following inversion presented by Harvey Sacks: The mommy picked it up. The baby cried.
Sacks points to the normal structure of our inferences. We expect that: If the baby cried, it ought to have started crying before the mother picked it up, and not after. Hearing it that way, the second sentence ‘The mommy picked it
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up’ is explained by the first ‘The baby cried’. Hearing them as consecutive, or with the second preceding the first, some further explanation is needed.1
The psycholinguist J.M. Levelt makes the cognitive implications of Sacks’ remark clear: Linearization ... serves the main purpose of evoking certain inferences in the mind of the listener. Order is one determinant of implicature. ... Order of mention apparently implicates order of events ... The old principle in rhetoric corresponding to this is known as ordo naturalis. Natural order is, so to speak, the unmarked form of linearization. All other words, the so called artificial orders, are designed to create special attentional or aesthetic effects. A psycholinguistic consideration of linearization starts out most profitably with the unmarked case. ... The principle of natural order may have two related but still different, psychological sources. ... A first source is the organization of the speaker’s own pre-linguistic experience. An event-structure, for instance, is in our culture quite likely memorized in such a way that consecutive events are more closely associated than non-consecutive events. ... The other source of natural order is conversational [emphasis mine]. If the speaker intends the listener to derive certain implicatures from the order in which things are said, he should base his speech on mutual knowledge. There is general knowledge in our culture that causes precede effects, that means are sought before ends are achieved, that planning precedes execution, etc. By using unmarked order, the speaker can make sure that the listener will correctly apply such knowledge and come up with the intended implicature. ... Here the speaker’s and the listener’s interests are likely to coincide: if the speaker’s retrieval process is, in part, governed by what is stereotypic in the culture, the listener will be able to use the same stereotype to encode and store the information. The short answer, therefore, to what makes natural order so natural is that it allows for easy retrieval on the part of the speaker and for easy inference on the part of the listener, given shared general or more specific knowledge in the speech community.2
Levelt’s strategy of setting inference-making from such domains of discourse as stories within the context of a cooperative speech community means that the ‘two sources’ of ‘natural order’ with which I’m concerned in this book—the narrative and the conversation—are inevitably drawn together. Departures from this dominant combination of natural orders, as in the Sacks story, are also ‘naturally’ noticed, since they demand extra effort at sense-making. The ‘Paradox of the Indian 1H. Sacks, ‘On the Analysability of Stories by Children’ in Gumperz and Hymes (eds), 1972, pp. 330–1. 2J.M. Levelt, ‘The Speaker’s Linearization Problem’ in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 295, Number 1077, 2 October 1981, pp. 93–4.
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Rope Trick’, to which I return at the end of this chapter, focuses on these ‘so called artificial orders…designed to create special attentional or aesthetic effects’. The ordering of the world, in effect, is a cognitive process which requires us to rely on our intuitive understanding of linearization as temporal. If we were to imagine the ‘now’ universe of, say, chaffinches, or chimps, or very young babies, or even patients with Alzheimer’s, we would surely attribute to them a much fuzzier sense of time. This would imply that they are unable to process the world in narrative terms. Narrative requires, that is, a meta-theory of time. The deep illusion—if illusion it is—that we harbour about the unidirectionality of the arrow of time actually helps us to organize chaos. Because we hold fast to the belief that, despite Einstein’s equations, perceptual and physical time both flow always forwards, we are able to play narrative games with time— to cut it up, re-sequence and re-label parts of the body of Vac and then recombine them. Narrative is perhaps our most efficient way of packaging our perceptions of time, which in turn crucially promotes our sense of individual identity. Sorting events into a temporal format which enables easy storage, easy retrieval and easy cultural exchange confers a distinct evolutionary advantage. As several recent studies have shown, there is a clear time lag between the perception of an event and its recording by the brain.3 This suggests that what we ‘consciously’ see or hear is a sort of continuous ‘action replay’, split seconds after things happen. In other words, at the very moment we prove ourselves excellent narrators who can connect events with amazing facility, we are robbed of much agency or decision-making power over what we perceive. Yet this lost agency is then returned to us through another channel, since the ‘stereotypic’ expectations we have of an event invest it with structure before it takes place—allowing us to ‘predict’ how it will work out. That is why I called narrative a ‘species of natural theory’ in my Introduction; in this chapter, I shall try to show how the analysis of the structuralist story-grammarians in fact highlights this ‘theoretical’ nature of narrative. What does any theory accomplish? At its simplest, it describes observable phenomena, makes deductive generalizations about these, and creates a meta-vocabulary of statements that are in principle falsifiable and thus have non-trivial predictive power. A ‘good’ theory must also suggest replicable experiments which anybody with suitable skills can 3For a documentation of these experiments, see Chapters 12–13 of Paul Davies,
About Time, 1995.
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carry out, experiments which reinforce its claims to have ‘explained’ the phenomena in question. Furthermore, we have to assume that it is a characteristic of a good theory that it keeps up a constant struggle to maintain its place against competing theories which could provide simpler, more elegant and more exciting explanations for the same phenomena. Now narratives, I submit, paradigmatically do all these things: they describe things and events in the world, generate meta-vocabularies such as those on display in the terminology of the structuralist storygrammars (Abstract, Orientation, Action, Cause, Evaluation, Resolution, Coda, etc.), make generalizations which may be falsified by a community of skilled listeners, predict events, are reproduced in a ‘formulaic’ mode; and, finally, offer explanations of both psychological and physical phenomena. A narrative, as ‘theory’, competes with other narratives that could displace it because they offer ‘better’ and more ‘universal’ explanations of a comparable range of phenomena. Conversational narrative thus functions as ‘theory in the round’, if not exactly ‘theatre in the round’, with several opportunities for listeners to present rival narrative accounts. Of course, a great deal of tedium is involved in ‘proving’ such a hypothesis about the purpose of narrative. One wishes that the ‘pages of illustrations’ that Stevens so neatly bracketed off in his poem were unnecessary. However, since we can assume no such thing, let’s start with as unobjectionable a set of observations as possible. A Thought Experiment Story-telling is an intuitively recognizable and frequently observed phenomenon in everyday conversation. Like the sentence, it is highly amenable to structural analysis, being linear and hierarchically organized. It possesses, too, the same capacity for infinite recursive embedding. One can imagine, if not process, a very long sentence that would include all the words in a given language, some more than once, and still have room left over. Such a sentence, if we were to change over to a ‘post-structuralist’ perspective for a moment, could be said to ‘drain’ language, to blanch it of its ‘potential meanings’, and convert them into ‘narrative meanings’. Throughout this book, I shall engage with the implications of this narrative takeover over meaning. A simple prediction follows: should anyone try the Gedankenexperimente of attempting to construct that mythical Indian rope trick of a sentence, she will end up before long with a compelling narrative turn to her production. Long sentences naturally tend to metamorphose into narrative.
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I begin, then, with the premise that narrative has the same psychological validity as the sentence. It is as central in cognitive processing. While the sentence is accepted, however, as perhaps the most significant of grammatical universals, the narrative has still to win its spurs as a discourse universal—an indispensable communicative and cognitive tool for selffashioning across cultures.4 Narrative differs from the sentence in that it tends constantly to break through the ‘upper bound’ of grammatical analysis and enter a different and less well-charted realm. The realm of ‘discourse’, peopled with speakers, hearers and enriched with context. My examination of ‘story-grammars’ in this first chapter is thus committed to teasing out the notion of context in relation to the grammatical units of a story described by structuralist researchers like Labov and Waletsky and Mandler and Johnson: Steps I and II, in fact, of the mad, methodological parabola described in my Introduction. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, given their historical genesis, the psycholinguistic story-grammars of the seventies, and the more literary structural analysis presented by Barthes, also in the seventies, resemble the Labovian schema (Abstract, Orientation, Complicating Action, Resolution, Coda and Evaluation) closely. It is possible to group together these variegated readings of narrative, because they all suffer from a problem common to structural analyses of social phenomena: they leave very little place for inter-subjectivity, for the ‘squamous mind’ to spill over. In the structural picture of narrative, both the external, political state of the world and the internal, plural state of mind, are factored out. There is a notorious absence of contextualizing conventions within structuralist accounts of narrative, even when these accounts deal, as in Labov and Waletsky’s case, with ‘spontaneous’, ‘oral’ narratives. Context, signifying both the physical setting in which a story is told, as well as conversational interventions by listeners and other participants, has of necessity to be reduced to a cipher whenever a distant eagle’s-eye vision that makes of ‘the intricate Alps a single nest’ is resorted to. It is one of my main criticisms of structuralism that it distorts significantly those intimate processes of twigged reception and arboreal interaction between tale, 4But see, for example, William Odlin’s impassioned plea for narrative as a ‘discourse universal’, which emphasizes those ‘formulaic characteristics that recur in the oral literature of many communities’ (Levi-Strauss 1955; Dundes 1964; Propp 1968). On the basis of some of these formulaic characteristics, scholars (Thorndyke 1977; Mandler et al. 1980) have developed ‘story-grammars; to suggest the role that linguistic organisation plays in signalling discourse. ... [Many] of the narratives characterized in story-grammars are quite common in story-telling traditions and have a number of recurrent properties.’
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teller and audience that shape the ‘nest’ of narrative in the first place. Co-authored stories, so necessary to the resolution of the Indian Rope Trick of Narrative, because they yield the vital conversation resin (expressions of appreciation, ‘you knows’, ‘ums’, and ‘I means’) that could glue the sundered body of Vac together again, are rendered impossible. Despite the reassuringly ‘natural’ metaphor of the nested ‘tree’ that the structural paradigm makes use of, its terse, hierarchical trees in fact disallow any of the additional information that the teller has to assume the hearer contributes in order make sense of the story. This matter of how a listener construes or infers ‘additional meanings’ not present in any literal way in a teller’s narrative will occupy us for a considerable part of Narrative Gravity. Here, I discuss how some parts of the Labovian schema, such as the Abstract, Evaluation and Coda, particularly relate to the presence of an audience. Audience reactions, the twitters, chirps and trills of participation, are shown not just to influence a teller’s story but to be structurally a part of the story. Hence, the story begins to emerge not just as a teller’s show but rather as a joint production by narrators(s) and listeners(s), speaker(s) and hearer(s). Chapters 4–8 then carry this interactional approach further by showing how the shared cultural generalizations that function as premises for narrative tellings are often made explicit not by the narrator but by the listener. A more satisfactory route to an understanding of narrative coherence, or the singularity of narrative, therefore seems to place it, paradoxically, within a plural framework where ‘self’ and ‘other’ both contribute directly to the structure of narrative. This, in essence, is what I understand by a strong ‘communicative’ reading of narrative—no assumption of a prior context of conversation, no narrative activity. Pages of Illustrations I now provide some of those ‘pages of illustrations’ which might enable a reassessment of the ambitious goals of structuralist research on narrative, concentrating on one paradigmatic instance. This is a paper by William Labov and Josef Waletzky, acknowledged as a classic in sociolinguistic studies,5 which argued forcefully that stories told in spontaneous conversation could, and indeed should, be subject to formal analysis, 5William Labov and Josef Waletzky, ‘Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience’, Essays in the Verbal and Visual Arts, 1966, p.12.
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since the ‘fundamental structures of narrative are to be found in oral versions of personal experience’. Labov and Waletzky maintained that: By examining the actual narratives of large numbers of unsophisticated speakers, it will be possible to relate the formal properties of narrative to their functions. By studying the development of narrative technique from children to adults, and the range of narrative technique from lower-class to middle-class speakers, it will be possible to isolate the elements of narrative.6
The Labov and Waletzky theory of narrative could be represented thus:7 ANALYSIS OF NARRATIVE
FORMAL
FUNCTIONAL
[A formal analysis is based on ‘recurrent patterns characteristic of narrative from the clause level to the complete simple narrative’. The techniques used to establish such patterns are formal, linguistic ones, for example, the working out of a temporal sequence out of ‘displacement sets’ of clauses.]
[A functional analysis narrative is considered as ‘one verbal technique for recapitulating past experience’ which works by constructing narrative units that match the experience as it occurred.]
REFERENTIAL [The narrative refers to past experience.]
EVALUATIVE [The function of ‘personal interest is determined by a stimulus in the social context in which the narrative occurs’.]
Fig. 2.1 As the figure indicates, the ‘functions’ of narrative comprise the pragmatic aspects of story-telling. In contrast, Labov and Waletzky have in mind a specifically syntactic analysis for the ‘formal’ properties of narrative. Their formal structure of narrative is based on a definition of the ‘narrative 6See also the amendments suggested by Labov in his fuller paper of 1972, memorably entitled ‘The Tranformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax’. 7I choose to present Labov and Waletzky’s ideas schematically for two reasons: (a) they themselves adopt such a representation in their analysis of narrative; (b) a ‘treediagram’ helps when I compare their work to the psycholinguistic story-grammars. Roland Barthes’ structural schema for narrative in terms of ‘codes’ and ‘indices’, although applied mainly to literary texts, is also relevant here because of the striking representational similarity it bears to the Labovian design; see Chapter 5.
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clause’, as opposed to other relative coordinate clauses in the narrative, having an ‘unordered displacement set’. In other words, ‘it is characteristic of a narrative clause that it cannot be displaced across a temporal juncture,8 without a change in the temporal sequence of the original semantic interpretation’. Thus, ‘any sequence of clauses which contains at least one temporal juncture is a narrative’ [italics mine].9 Labov and Waletzky admit that this definition of narrative which is a formalization of their functional characterization of it as ‘one method of recapitulating past experience in the same order as past events’ remains inadequate. To begin with, it cannot disambiguate ‘ambiguous’ cases where two distinct interpretations are possible. Thus, to quote Labov, and Waletzky’s own example—‘I punched him in the head and the mouth and the chest’—is normally a list which does not imply that the object of violence was punched in the head, then in the mouth, then in the chest, but a temporal interpretation is nevertheless possible, thus cognitively turning the set of clauses into a narrative. Now consider a) and b) below, which provide more complex instances of recorded data where sets of clauses containing impeccable sequences of temporal junctures do not seem to be interpreted by participants as narratives; and conversely, instances in conversation where participants display unmistakable signs of recognition that a narrative is in progress, despite the fact that the ‘story-teller’ has not offered them a sequence of clauses containing a temporal juncture. Example a)offers an example of the former kind, and example b) of the latter. a) Sequences of clauses with ‘temporal junctures’ apparently not recognized by participants as narrative: S1—My husband can’t talk at all. When we ... got married, he used to talk then. And then, of course, it was an old-fashioned marriage. I got married at ten. He was sixteen. Contracting typhoid and pneumonia in those days meant he lost both speech and hearing…which is why we [have to/try to] manage with the [sewing-] machine somehow. As far as the children are concerned, I collect [their] books, and I now fund their teaching in this way. If they ever grow to manhood, [with this education] they [should] be able to fend for themselves. S2—How much money did you get last time? 8Two clauses which are temporally ordered so that the displacement range of the one clause does not extend past the actual location of the other following clause, and conversely, the displacement range of the following clause does not extend past the actual location of the preceding clause, are said to be separated by a temporal juncture. 9Labov and Waletzky, p. 28.
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S1—Er, I got about a hundred rupees last time. This story is the succinct recapitulation of a lifetime of tragedy. It is about the loss of Vac, of speech, in a most fundamental sense. Structurally, the temporal deixis of ‘now’ preceded by ‘in those days’ leaves us in no doubt that S1 has just engaged in an extended ‘narrative’ of survival, yet S2 does not react in a conventionally appropriate fashion at all. Not only does he not display any signs through ‘backchannel’ utterances like ‘mm’ ‘aha’ and so on that he is listening to a story, but he is brutally detached in the first turn after its completion, even though he exercises his right to that turn as the main addressee.10 Moreover, if his turn following the completion of the story is a comment on the story, it is at first glance a peculiar one. Indeed, S2 manifests no overt signs of recognition at all in the course of this conversation that a devastating story has just been narrated. Despite this, his question at the end of the story is treated, surprisingly, as perfectly coherent by the teller of the story, who promptly answers it. Within the cultural bounds of this conversation, S2 has apparently produced a ‘correct’ response. Is a story in context then the same sort of object as a story in isolation? Were this ‘story’ removed from its conversational context and treated independently as Labov and Waletzky have treated their data, it would surely qualify as an authentic story. With context as background one might pose a different set of questions about it. In the course of my exploration of the paradoxes of narrativity, I will try and suggest the sorts of questions these might be. There are, of course, many ways in which S2’s response can be rationalized so that it is seen as perfectly coherent. For example, what Dell Hymes calls ‘setting’ constrains responses to stories: S2’s response to S1’s story is acceptable in an official situation where the ‘hard luck’ story is a prelude to a handout. At this stage, however, my purpose is only to establish that S2 does not recognize S1’s story qua story. That is, a sequence of clauses with several intervening temporal junctures does not seem to be regarded as a ‘story’, if we go by the story recipient’s response. Part of the difficulty stems simply from Labov and Waletzky’s ambiguous use of the word ‘context’ for it is never quite clear whether this refers to the broad social setting of the narrative or to its particular conversational environment, meaning the turns in conversation that precede and succeed the story. If the word ‘context’ 10I was present, and S1 was aware of my presence in the room but her appeal was directed wholly at S2.
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is understood in this latter, more precise sense, then Labov and Waletzky exclude it almost entirely from their examples, in spite of their claim that the context in which a story is told is ‘a matter quite relevant to the functional analysis of the narrative’. In each of the fourteen examples presented by them, the story is abstracted from the conversation of which it must have formed an integral part. Hence, the elements postulated by Labov and Waletzky, as essential to a story do not emerge specifically and convincingly out of their enquiry into it as an oral version of events. With the possible exception of the category ‘Coda’, the other elements of Orientation, Complication, Evaluation and Resolution ironically apply more tellingly to a textual story than to a story told in conversation. Indeed, I would suggest that the structuralist approach adopted by Labov and Waletzky actually prevents a complete appreciation of the notion of ‘context’. Severe violence needs to be done to the alternating structure of conversational order in order to emphasize the linear sequence of narrative order. b) Here, participants display recognition within the conversation that a narrative is in progress, although the story-teller has not offered them a sequence of clauses containing a temporal juncture: d
921
c B 9
922 923 255 926 927 928 929 930 931 932 933 934 935 936 937 938 939
A B
A B
Tell Nancy your story about your professor. I don’t believe this at all. Are you ? Who is this Saul ? [m] he INSISTED that I and about four members of the STAFF and one senior POST GRADUATE go to his lectures on Pushtu LANGUAGES one would THINK given his AUDIENCE that he would be a LITTLE BETTER than exceedingly ELEMENTARY he came up with a gem TODAY (laughs) all about two WORDS in one of his LANGUAGES one of which began with—on a HIGH tone one of (laughs) which began with a ‘k’ on a LOW tone
STRUCTURAL SIMPLICITIES
940
c B ? All d B ? c B
c B A
B d B
941 942 943 944 945 946 947 948 950 951 952 953 954 955 956 957 958 959 960 961 962 963 964 965
966 967 968 969 970 c 971 B 972 c 973 d 974 A 975 976 977 All 978
37
it being a basic point of phonetic theory that the ‘k’ can’t be distinguished TONALLY [m] and this is [b] by the way—this is (laugh) just by the WAY you can only DISTINGUISH these of course in DAYLIGHT because at night-time you can’t SEE [m] (laughs) and there’s a certain constriction in the JAW when he says the ‘k’ with a HIGH tone which you II don’t GET when he says the (—laughs) and he’s got an international REPUTATION as a bright MAN this is TRUE he HAS YES YES you know this is TRUE and then he came out and said [ddd] just before you go any further just give—fill in his historical background which seems rather odd oh YES he took his first DEGREE IN NECROMANCY then he became a MISSIONARY (giggles) then he took his (laughs) Ph.D. in LINGUISTICS and got a PROFESSORSHIP oh god so there’s hope you see— you KNOW [?:] we’re all LAUGHING aren’t we (laugh)
38
B
N A R R AT I V E G R AV I T Y
979 980 A 981 B 982 All 983 c 984
ABSOLUTELY YES you’ll be Mrs VICE CHANCELLOR, NANCY Tom Parkhurst’s younger than YOU, isn’t he Cedric? (laugh 3 to 4 sylls interspersed) well—(sighs) [THE TRANSCRIPT ENDS AT THIS POINT]11
If story a) was all about a world of struggle following upon the tragedy of a husband rendered dumb, b) is about a successful career where highspirited play with words is paramount. The cultural setting and the tone of the conversations are entirely different. Light and chatty replaces dull and official; England displaces India in the imagination of the analyst, and high educational status substitutes the theme of a desperate appeal for a basic education. Even character and power relations may be inferred differently from the way these conversations dovetail. Yet the structural patterns that we are examining are sensitive to few of these tacit presumptions about cultural context. If our focus is narrative structure, we learn from d’s utterance in line 921 that a ‘story’ is actually requested from B, who begins this story in the turn following c’s utterance. Yet, in all B’s turns from line 932 until line 964 there is not a single example of a temporal juncture even though each of the other three participants display signs that they understand a story to be in progress; for example, by their repeated appreciative laughter in lines 933, 939, 945, 951 and 956. Line 964 does have an example of temporal juncture—‘and then he came out and said’—but long before this, participants have already shown signs of ‘story’ recognition. How, we may ask, is such recognition possible if temporal sequencing is, as Labov and Waletzky have it, a ‘defining property’ of narrative, and this defining property is absent as a feature of B’s turns from lines 932 to 963? Labov and Waletzky explain their position with reference to one of their own recorded stories: In Narrative 5 we have four independent clauses which refer to four successive events or situations: a Well, this person has a little too much to drink, b and he attacked me, c and the friend came in, d and she stopped it. 11From Svartvik and Quirk, A Corpus of Conversational Interaction, 1980. This corpus
is a crucial source of spontaneous conversational data in Narrative Gravity, but precisely because of its omnipresence, individual examples from Svartvik and Quirk will not each be separately acknowledged from this point on. For copyright reasons, I have retained the numbering and transcription system of the original.
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The temporal sequence of narrative is an important defining property which proceeds from its referential function. Narrative is not the only method for referring to a sequence of events; all recapitulation of experience is not narrative. For example, the narrative of no. 5 might have been presented in the following way: c d a d
A friend of mine came in just in time to stop this person, who had a little too much to drink, from attacking me.
Though this second version of Narrative 5 is a ‘perfectly logical, orderly and acceptable way of representing a sequence of events’, it is, in Labov and Waletzky’s view, not a narrative, since it depends on what they call ‘syntactic embedding’.12 Now, let’s rewrite B’s lines 932–63: a he came up with a gem today, b about two words in one of his languages, one of which began with a ‘k’ on a high tone, one of which began with a ‘k’ on a low tone, it being a basic point of phonetic theory that the ‘k’ cannot be distinguished tonally, c and you can only distinguish these, of course, in daylight because at night-time you can’t see, d and there’s a certain constriction in the jaw when he says the ‘k’ with a high tone, which you don’t get when he says the ‘k’ with a low tone, e and he’s got an international reputation as a bright man, f this is true. We find that i) there are several embedded clauses in b; ii) c does not follow from these clauses in b; iii) d does follow from the clauses in b, in the natural order of events as they occur, which is the order that narrative recapitulates, according to Labov and Waletzky, but d is ‘displaced’ by c, and iv) e does not follow in temporal sequence from a, b, c or d. Hence, B’s utterances don’t strictly qualify as a ‘story’ under Labov and Waletzky’s definition. Yet, it is as a response to d’s request for a ‘story’ that this ‘sequence’ of utterances, which appears to be treated by recipients as a very satisfactory ‘story’ indeed, was produced. True, there is no reason to assume that laughter or any other expression of ‘appreciation’ by participants characterizes the telling of stories. In Chapter 4, I go on to present a case for making this assumption. At the 12Labov and Waletzky, p. 20.
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moment, however, I shall rely on B’s ‘sequence’ of utterances 923–63 actually being produced in response to a request for a ‘story’, as sufficient preliminary evidence that a story is indeed being told. Let’s move on then to B’s utterances in lines 967–72, which are produced as a response to d’s request in line 965 to ‘fill in his historical background’: a b c d
he took his first degree in necromancy then he became a missionary then he took his Ph.D in linguistics and got a professorship
This sequence is marked by temporal junctures of the exact sort which Labov and Waletzky say are characteristic of narrative. It is also greeted by laughter by c in line 971, and an ‘appreciative’ remark ‘oh god’ by c in line 973. Yet the nagging question remains whether the sequence is more of a ‘story’ and less of a ‘list’ than B’s earlier lines 932–63. How are stories to be structurally separated from lists and catalogues? This is a Labovian question to which I return, but the initial evidence from ordinary conversation suggests that Labov and Waletzky’s ‘formal’ analysis, sanitized and detached from context, may not apply quite so snugly if context is included. Labov and Waletzky propose, after all, that their formal analysis captures the ‘fundamental structures’ of narrative, and yet these fundamental structures are apparently not recognized for what they are by participants in actual conversations. Labov and Waletzky recognize this themselves when they discuss a second limitation of their formal analysis, which is that ‘the upper bound of narrative is not set by this approach’. It is impossible in theory for such a formalism to decide when a narrative is completed, without involving other empirically-discovered ‘functional’ categories such as the ‘Coda’. These ‘functional’ categories constitute, in other words, a second set of criteria defining stories. Indeed, this functional arm has constantly to be called into action by Labov and Waletzky in order to fend off the criticism that their formal characterization of narrative is far too weak. There is an obvious circularity here. First, we are presented with an informal functional definition of narrative as a ‘verbal technique for recapitulating past experience’. This definition is then formalized in terms of displacement sets of clauses and the temporal junctures between these sets, but in order to explain and sustain the formal definition, subsidiary informal functional categories such as ‘Result’ and ‘Evaluation’ need again to be summoned up. It is clear that such a process of formalization can go on as long as further informal categories
STRUCTURAL SIMPLICITIES
41
are discovered. Thus it is a moot question whether it would not be more elegant simply to study the functional aspects of narrative, and then incorporate these functions themselves into a format of grammatical rewrite rules, such as for instance the ‘story-grammars’ of the psycholinguists. I shall, in a later section of this chapter, therefore discuss these grammars and also recast the functional analysis of Labov and Waletzky as a storygrammar. The functional categories listed by Labov and Waletzky are Abstract, Orientation, Complicating Action, Evaluation, Result or Resolution, and Coda, while the fully-developed, ‘normal-form’ of narrative looks like this: Evaluation Complicating Action
Result or Resolution
Orientation
Coda
Abstract
Fig. 2.2 The originating function of the narrative is applied at the base of the diamond; we proceed up and to the left with the orientation section, then up to the apex with the complication. Frequently, but not always, the evaluation suspends the action at this apex, as is represented by the circle. The resolution proceeds downwards to the right, and the coda is represented by the line which returns to the situation (point in time) at which the narrative was first elicited.13 Functional Categories of Narrativity Of the functional categories said to constitute the ‘normal form’ of narrative, three are of special interest. These are the Orientation or Abstract, Evaluation and Coda, which concern the ‘spontaneous’ aspects of storytelling in relation to: i. the nature of a reportable event in conversation, and the conversational means whereby an account of such an event can be elicited and presented. 13Labov and Waletzky, p. 41. There are also other, more sophisticated revisions of this ‘normal form’ discussed by Labov (see Labov, 1972a).
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ii. the extent to which the notion of an evaluative function helps provide a theoretical answer to the story-recipient’s always immanent question to the story-teller: why is this particular story being told at this particular point in the conversation? iii. the ways in which the notion of a ‘coda’ can contribute to a characterization of the turns immediately following the completion of a story in conversation. Both the Orientation and Evaluation sections of a narrative serve the ‘function’ of establishing ‘why the events of the narrative are reportable’.14 Drawing on the same stories for data as in the 1966 paper, Labov (1972) states that it is not uncommon for narrators to begin with one or two clauses summarizing the story or ‘encapsulating the point of the story’.15 The Orientation or Abstract does not stand in place of the story; the story-teller has ‘no intention of stopping there, but goes on to give the full account. The Abstract is not an advertisement or a warning: the narrator does not wait for the listener to say “I’ve heard about that” or “Don’t tell me that now”.’16 What then is the function of the Abstract? If it covers the same ground as the story, what does it add to it? Labov makes an important suggestion: Most of the narratives cited here concern matters that are always reportable: the danger of death or of physical injury. These matters occupy a high place on an unspoken permanent agenda. Whenever people are speaking, it is relevant to say ‘I just saw a man killed on the street’. No one will answer such a remark with ‘So what?’ If on the other hand, someone says, ‘I skidded on the bridge and nearly went off’, someone else can say, ‘So what? That happens to me nearly every time I cross it’; it is no longer a violation of an expected rule of behaviour and it is not reportable. The narrators of these stories were under social pressure to show that the events involved were truly dangerous and unusual, or that someone else really broke the normal rules in an outrageous or reportable way.17
The primary function of the Abstract is, presumably, to establish that the story about to be told is ‘reportable’. Even in danger-of-death narratives which ‘concern matters that are always reportable’ ... ‘narrators…[are] under pressure to show that the events involved [are] truly dangerous’. 14Labov, ‘The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax’, Language in the Inner
City, 1972a, pp. 370–1. In Chapter 6, I return to a fuller discussion of what is ‘storyable’ or ‘reportable’ in conversation within an ethnomethodological perspective. 15Ibid., p. 363. 16Ibid., p. 364. 17Ibid., pp. 370–1; n. 53
STRUCTURAL SIMPLICITIES
43
In other words, even ‘always reportable’ events have to be worked on by the narrator. This issue is taken up again in Chapter 6 when I consider the implications of Harvey Sacks’ comment that ‘disasters are merely things in the world’. To become the subjects of stories they have to be made into ‘something for us’ by the narrator. As Wallace Stevens reminds us, ‘the pretty contrast of life and death’ is merely an opposition beloved in theory. We cannot go back to that, despite the pressure of structuralist ‘bishops’’ doctrine. In fact, not only ‘disaster’ stories but all stories may in their ‘normal form’ have to be made into something-for-us. Stepping into the squishy puddles of emotional interaction from which the basic motives for story-telling spring but which structuralism avoids because of its obligatory messiness, thus seems an imperative. More simply, story-tellers often present Abstracts or Orientating clauses in such a way that other conversationalists do have a chance to say ‘I’ve heard about that’, or ‘Don’t tell me that now’. For instance: c) a C a
576 577 578
I’ll tell you a friend of yours I met recently… II you ‘TOLD me x oh
d) C
640 641 642 643 644 645 646
Ian was HORRIBLE ACTUALLY because I’d I’d just broken up with this BLOKE AND with this Martin YEAH (laughs) oh God don’t let’s go into that, Ann (laughs) and and and—you remember when we ‘went’ well— went (laughs)—we all went into this (laughs)—oh it’s all FORGIVEN NOW, don’t WORRY but (laughs) but you{WERE pretty}ROTTEN (laughs) actually—I know I was rotten I never heard—anything about this WELL well, you SEE we all went to this POETRY reading [+ STORY]
b C a C
a b C
647 648 649 650 651 652 653 654
Examples c) and d) are typical of Abstracts being greeted by the responses ‘I’ve heard about that’ in the first case, and ‘Don’t tell me that now’ in the second. In example c), a’s line 576 offering a potential story, followed by C’s emphatic turn in 577 ‘you told me’, effectively prevents an
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anecdotal launching forth. Participants, it appears, routinely exercise their right to forestall a story if the Abstract which structurally precedes the story provides them with some clue that they might find the story objectionable. A frequent reason for objecting to a forthcoming story is that one or more of the participants have heard it before. In Chapter 6, I elaborate on this seemingly obvious point with reference to remarks made by John Searle and Harvey Sacks that all stories must observe a rule not to tell people what they already know. But here I confine myself to a critical examination of the function of the Abstract. Examples c) and d) , indicate that Abstracts can be greeted adversely by participants and a conflict of interests may ensue if this adverse assessment is not a shared one. Thus, in line 645 of example d), a protests against the story that is to follow from C’s Abstract in lines 640–2, but his line 645 is uttered concurrently with C’s line 646, and the story goes ahead when b’s line 651 ‘I never heard anything about this’ suggests that she, at any rate, is interested. In general, even the most adept tellers seem keen to elicit from participants a positive response to their Abstracts, ‘encapsulating the point of the story’, before they embark on the story. Witness e) through g): e) A
96
b A
97 98 99 100
f) A
941 942 943 944 945 946 947 948 949 950 951 952 953
I acquired an absolutely magnificent SEWINGMACHINE by foul MEANS did I TELL you about THAT No well when I was doing freelance ADVERTISING… [+ STORY] well NOW going back to Pete BASKERDON this is ANOTHER story— Pete BASKERDON is a SAD man he is NOT a very CLEVER boy x— he’s not REALLY— he’s never ANY further PROMOTION from the job that he was in when I met him in the WAR— he GOT that JOB— because there was a MAN— who was the head of the Celtic MUSEUM—
STRUCTURAL SIMPLICITIES
b A
954 955 956 957 958 959
g) B
c c&d B
1026 1027 1028 1029 1030 1031
45
I may remember HIS name in a MINUTE who was a German SPY oh fascination go on (coughs) and what is the WONDER—most biggest {SEND UP} of IRELAND— and all our prehistoric ARCHAEOLOGY— was that in… [+ STORY] one of the most AWFUL things Arthur did to me— was when I confused—confused macrobiotics with NECROPHILIACS— (laughs) (laugh) and I carried ON with this conversation about… [+ STORY]
In example e), A’s question in line 98 ‘did I tell you about that?’ could presumably be answered with ‘Yes, you did’, in which case her forthcoming story would be rendered redundant, yet A does wait for b’s response before producing her story. Clearly, A’s Abstract-cum-confession ‘I acquired an absolutely magnificent sewing-machine by foul means’ is crucially important whether she gets to tell a story or not. The Abstract does therefore function as ‘an advertisement or a warning’ here, though Labov denies that this has its function in the passage quoted earlier. Naturally, this prompts us to ask why a prospective story-teller should docilely present other conversationalists with the structural means to scotch his story. I shall show in Chapters 4–8 that an answer to this question may have to do with the strategies adopted by story-tellers to protect what Sacks calls the ‘fragile’ aspects of their stories. Examples f) and g), for instance, seem to be deliberately fashioned to evoke a positive response from participants like b’s line 956 ‘oh fascination go on’ in f), or c and d’s laughs in lines 1028 and 1029 in g); as a consequence, the stories which follow are rendered less ‘fragile’, since participants ‘asked for’ them after the ‘advertisements’ presented in the Abstracts. What counts as a ‘reportable’ event in conversation must logically depend on the fashioning of the Abstract if story-tellers resort to this strategy to present their material. Yet, the circularity inherent in Labov’s approach to his own brilliant notion of the Abstract not only stops him from considering any problematic counter-examples to his definition, such as the common ones above, but also prevents him from providing
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satisfactory answers to the important queries he himself has about the function of the Abstract. The examples of Abstracts cited by Labov and Waletzky are of particular interest to me because of the ‘two distinct social contexts’18 in which the stories were told. The recurrent theme of ‘extreme danger’ in them could, as I show in Chapters 7 and 8, be compared profitably with my own data but I would still like to query whether these fourteen stories, at least as they are isolated and presented in the Labov and Waletzky paper, can serve as the basis for a formulation of the relationship between the formal and functional properties of narrative. When Labov and Waletzky formally define their Abstract or ‘Orientation Section’, which serves ‘the referential function of orienting, the hearer with reference to person, place, time and behavioural situation’, as ‘the group of free clauses which precede the first narrative clause’, they qualify this immediately by adding that some free clauses with these functions occur in other positions and that ‘the orientation function is often performed by phrases or lexical items contained in narrative clauses’. Hence, the formal definition of the Orientation Section is, as I have argued earlier, by no means self-supporting but needs to be propped up by the questionable assertion that ‘despite these limitations, the overall view of narrative shows that the Orientation Section is a structural feature of narrative structure’. While it is observably true that many narratives do orient their listeners with reference to person, place, time and behavioural situation, such reference need not be construed as an essential structural feature of narrative. The two enterprises of defining narrative formally and of defining it functionally seem, upon detailed examination, not to require to be ‘related’ but to be conducted separately, especially with regard to stories told in natural conversation. The formal analysis of Labov and Waletzky does not appear to be particularly suggested by the ‘spontaneous’ stories which are the object of their analysis. Their functional analysis, on the other hand, while generally appropriate, suffers from not being ‘functional’ to the extent of concerning itself with the origins and effects 18See p. 13, Labov and Waletzky’s statement: ‘We will be dealing with tape-recorded interviews taken from two distinct social contexts. One is a face-to-face interview where the narrator is speaking only to the interviewer; a person who is not a member of the narrator’s primary group. In the second situation, the narrator is recorded in interaction with his primary group; he is speaking in part to members of his group, and in part to an outsider on the margins of the group who provides only a part of the stimulus for the narrative’. These two social contexts outlined by Labov and Waletzky correspond closely to the contexts within which conversationalists talk, in my own data, about the disaster of floods.
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47
of the story in the conversation of which it is a part. This criticism, however, may be less valid when applied to the functional categories of Evaluation and Coda—to which I now turn. The Paradox of Evaluation Evaluative devices say to us: this was terrifying, dangerous, weird, wild, crazy or amusing, hilarious, wonderful; more generally, that it was strange, uncommon or unusual—that is, worth reporting. It was not ordinary, plain, humdrum, everyday or run-of-the-mill.19
Evaluative devices, which are ‘concentrated in the Evaluation Section but may be found in various forms throughout the narrative’20 serve the function of answering the ever present question, ‘Why are you telling me this story now?’ In the stories examined by Labov and Waletzky, the justification for telling a story is usually the intrinsic interest of the story material: ‘We find that most narratives are so designed as to emphasize the strange and unusual character of the situation.’ In Chapter 6, I contrast this observation with Sacks’ apparently diametrically opposed view that ‘it seems plain enough that people monitor the scenes they are in for their storyable characteristics. And yet the awesome overwhelming fact is that they come away with no storyable characteristics’.21 Sacks stresses that one of the most noteworthy features of story-telling in conversation is the way in which tellers strive to achieve ‘the nothing-happened sense of really catastrophic events’,22 that is to say, their ‘ordinariness’. Labov and Waletzky, however, are equally insistent that the Evaluation Section of a narrative underlines the unusualness of the events described. Without such a section, a narrative would lose its point. [We] suggested that a narrative which contains an orientation, complicating action and result is not a complete narrative. It may carry out the referential function perfectly and yet seem difficult to understand. Such a narrative lacks significance. It has no point.23
The Evaluation Section thus shares characteristics in common with the Abstract, which also ‘encapsulates the point of the story’. Like the Abstract or Orientation Section, the Evaluation Section is not sequentially 19Labov, pp. 370–1. 20Ibid. p. 369. 21Sacks, H. Lecture Notes, Spring, 1970, pagination inconsistent. 22Ibid. 23Labov and Waletzky, p. 33.
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confined, and may perform its function ‘in various forms throughout the narrative’. In what respect does the Evaluative function then differ from the Orientation function, since both functions are directed towards acquainting listeners with the ‘point’ of the story? Within the terms of Labov and Waletzky’s own analysis, the maintenance of a qualitative distinction between the function of the Orientation Section, and the function of the Evaluative Section, seems to present some difficulties. As soon as a story is studied in the context of the conversation in which it occurs, the Orientation Section may however be defined as the turn(s) by the narrator seeking participants’ permission to tell a particular story, the essence of which he sets out in the turns prior to the turn in which he actually tells the story. Examples d)–g) already cited offer instances of such ‘orientating’ turns. The Evaluation Section is more problematic, since evaluations or ‘assessments’ are typically made in turns by other participants rather than in turns by the story-teller himself. In the following ‘confession’, B is the main narrator: h) B
c B c D
B c B
D
B
1072 1073 1074 1075 1076 1077 1078 1079 1080 1081 1082 1083 1084 1085 1086 1087 1088 1089 1090 1091 1092 1093 1094 1095
YOU KNOW she was a ‘poor ‘old THING after all— and mother went WILD with ME she thought this was TERRIBLE— oh gosh and that I couldn’t ‘see her ‘point of VIEW at ALL— oh God—no—<<several sylls>> YES— siding with— the ENEMY YES— YES— YES— and of course I did see her point of VIEW— [m] oh Lord AND— but I—didn’t WANT— to ring her up and SAY— and do something FATAL— YES that’s RIGHT— and say anything AWFUL to her—
STRUCTURAL SIMPLICITIES
c B c B
c B c B
D B
c B
c B
1096 1097 1096 1098 1099 1100 1101 1102 1103 1104 1105 1106 1107 1108 1109 1110 1111 1112 1113 1114 1115 1116 1117 1118 1119 1120 1121 1122 1123 1124 1125 1126 1127 1128 1129 1130 1131 1132 1133 1134 1135
because she’s— yeah so ‘nice and’ kind and MILD— oh God SO this went on for WEEKS and— I thought I’d better ring [ ] my mother UP and pretend I’ve NEVER SAID it [m] I’d just ring up and ASK— how she’s getting ON and yeah SO on and [j ?a:] so I rang up— and my SISTER answered the PHONE— and she—really gave me a terrible HARANGUE— —SHARP YEAH— over the PHONE— going ON— and ON and ON all about how COULD I say such things oh God SAY anything— SO ANYWAY— by the time she’d finished sort of telling me OFF and me SAYING— now what’s the good of QUARRELLING it’s so TRIVIAL and— [m] . you KNOW— why make a lot of—sort of FUSS about it— it was NOTHING— I DIDN’T SAY anything— for a START— (laughs)
49
50
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c B
c B c B
c B c D B c B D B c D B
c
1136 1137 1138 1139 1140 1141 1142 1143
1144 1145 1146 1147 1148 1149 1150 1151 1152 1153 1154 1155 1156 1157 1158 1159 1160 1161 1162
(laughs) oh God she—she finally SAID don’t argue with ME— if you ARGUE with me— I shall just put this PHONE down {she SAID} [m .m]— so I thought—well, sure enough she COULD— right but I thought I—can’t—just sort of let it go on and say oh well I don’t want to speak to you if that’s your ATTITUDE— no because I THOUGHT— she really NEEDS to have somebody {ring her UP AND}— course YES YES and besides—she always comes DOWN {in the SUMMER}— your sister—or your mother [ ] my sister and my—MOTHER— BOTH of them— <<4 to 5 sylls>> YES— and I thought if they—don’t—if we {can’t ASK them}to come DOWN— —[m]— <<what will they—VERY awkward states>> YES it’s going to be—VERY ‘awkward— and my mother can’t get about on her OWN— so— <
>family feuds are horrible
Here, B makes only one ‘evaluative’ comment during the telling of her story. This is the comment ‘really awful’ in line 1119; whereas D responds with a remarkable array of ‘Yes’s, and c with evaluative exclamations in lines 1076, 1087, 1098, 1123 and 1136, and with the evaluative comments ‘trivial’ in line 1118, ‘right’ in line 1142 and ‘I know family feuds are horrible’ in line 1162. The evaluation of the ‘point’ of the story is thus evident not in the story-teller’s turns but in the repeated turns by other participants. Moreover, as I shall demonstrate in Chapter 6, the contradiction between Labov and Waletzky’s view that story-tellers stress
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the unusual nature of the events they are recounting, and Sacks’ opinion that story-tellers strive to render ordinary the event they are describing, may be resolved if the interactional context of a story is taken into account. Example f) provides some clues, pursued in Chapter 6, as to how such a resolution may be accomplished. Many of B’s utterances in her ‘story-telling’ turns, preceding c’s evaluative exclamations, it will be noticed, are not only relatively matterof-fact but still incomplete when c utters her exclamations. The fact that c’s ‘evaluations’ above often come before B has completed the story suggests that story-telling in conversation demands extremely active participation, from listeners, and that such participation is accommodated naturally within the activity of story-telling in conversation. Close cooperation can be observed between story-teller B and the participant c, to the extent that c’s comments are actually located in the interstices of B’s sentences. B tells her story by means of a series of flat statements such as ‘and of course I did see her point of view’, or ‘she’s nice and kind and mild’, and c responds with extreme deftness and sensitivity in evaluating their significance or ‘point’. And it is here that a resolution may be sought between the views of Labov and Waletzky and Sacks. It is possible for the story-teller to be deliberately ‘ordinary’ and matter-of-fact if other participants cooperate in the task of ‘evaluating’ or assigning significance to his narrative. The Evaluation section of narrative will therefore be reassessed in Chapter 6, which uses the methodology of conversational analysis to study stories told in natural conversation. Returning the Narrative Perspective to the Present: Labov on the Coda The coda can be seen as one means of solving the problem of indicating the end of a ‘turn’ at speaking. As Harvey Sacks has pointed out, a sentence is an optimal unit for utterance, in that the listener’s syntactic competence is employed in a double sense—to let him know when the sentence is complete and also when it is his turn to talk. Narrative requires other means for the narrator to signal the fact that he is beginning a long series of utterances which will form one ‘turn’, and to mark the end of that sequence. ... It can also be said that a good coda provides more than a mechanical solution for the sequencing problem: it leaves the listener with a feeling of satisfaction and completeness, that matters have been rounded off and accounted for.24
The Coda, in short, is an ‘interactional’ device, used within a conversation to end a narrative turn. Like the Abstract and Orientation, it is not an 24Labov, p. 365.
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essential feature of the story format. It is merely ‘one of the many options open to the narrator for signalling that a narrative is finished’. As usual, it turns out that participants other than the story-teller can manipulate the Coda (‘Yes. I know. Family feuds are horrible’) Once again, therefore, some of the ‘defining’, if not essential, functional features of stories appear in the turns of other conversationalists. Though Labov does introduce a caveat in the passage on the Coda to the effect that certain ‘fixed formulas’ that mark the beginnings and ends of folk-tales ‘are not available for personal narrative’, he essentially views narrative as a simpler form of literary genres like the myth and fairy-tale. This is implicit in the first paragraphs of Labov and Waletsky’s paper— Myths, folk-tales, legends, histories, epics, toasts and sagas seem to be the results of the combination and evolution of simpler elements; they contain many cycles and re-cycles of basic narrative structures; in many cases, the evolution of a particular narrative has removed it so far from its originating function that it is difficult to say what its present function is. In our opinion, it will not be possible to make very much progress in the analysis and understanding of these complex narratives until the simplest and most fundamental narrative structures are analysed in direct connection with their originating functions. We suggest that such fundamental structures are to be found in oral versions of personal experiences; not the products of expert story-tellers that have been retold many times, but the original productions of a representative sample of the population.25
But it is surely not the case that myths and legends are just more ‘expert’ versions of stories in everyday conversation. The story-teller in a faceto-face situation has to be alert from moment to moment. She has to be a ‘cog’ spinning in perfect unison with other cogs in the freewheeling conversational wheel. At each stage, she has to attend to the ‘turn-taking structure’ of talk and manoeuvre her story in so that it relates sequentially to prior talk, unless the story ‘opens’ the conversation, in which case the teller has still to make it appropriate to this ‘slot’, ward off interruptions and uncooperative commentary, and strive to produce a ‘preferred response’26 at the end. Story-telling in conversation is thus both a hazardous and skilled pastime. It cannot be treated as merely a simple version of the literary narrative. On the contrary, it offers a 25Labov and Waletzky, p. 12. 26 In this chapter, I have used words and phrases such as ‘turn-taking’, ‘slot’, ‘move’,
‘repair’, and ‘preference’ in a non-technical manner. In Chapter 6, I provide, where necessary definitions and fuller discussions of these terms as they are used by conversational analysts.
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paradigm for the ways in which we might decode ruptures and cognitive detentes within the more conventionalized structures of literary narrative. As Labov and Waletzky themselves put it: ... it is essential to preserve the context of the narrative. Because such originating context is often missing and cannot be reconstructed in traditional folk-tales it is more difficult to relate analysis to the originating functions.27
By treating the stories in their tape-recorded data as ‘essentially similar’ to myth and folk-tale, however, Labov and Waletzky are both prevented from shedding some light on what this essential similarity is, and from using an appropriate methodology such as that provided by conversational analysis. This, I think, is the crux of my critique of Labov and Waletzky’s analysis of ‘spontaneous’ narrative. The story is robbed of its very spontaneity when the context within which the story occurs is deleted. Conversational participation constitutes an integral aspect of the story itself, and it is futile to attempt to analyse the story without reference to this ‘squirming’ surround of facts. Repetition, Labov and Waletzky tell us, is a salient feature of sophisticated accounts. So, to repeat a point I have made earlier, structuralists in the classical mould like Labov and Waletzky, are forced by certain of their own assumptions to actually erase a number of well-demarcated structural features. These features relate to the conversational context of turn-taking in which any story of the sort recorded by Labov and Waletzky occurs. Since all turns by other participants are wiped out in their analysis, there is here a blatant contradiction of their own dictum that ‘narrative structures must be analysed in direct connection with their originating functions’. As we have observed, at least four—the Abstract, Orientation, Evaluation and Coda—out of the six elements of narrative named by Labov and Waletzky can be supplied by other participants. Evaluation and Coda, in particular, are typically assigned to listeners. This leaves only Complicating Action and Resolution unambiguously to the teller. But then, we are no further on methodologically or logically from Aristotle who just required a story to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Looking afresh at ‘spontaneous’ narratives in speech, which seemed so attractive an idea to begin with, has in the end left us at a standstill. The cogs do not turn, and the wheel of conversation has ground to a halt. According to Nair’s Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick, it is the ‘missing elements’—invisible to structuralists—that make the 27Labov and Waletzky, p. 32.
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magic of narrative. In the foregoing sections, some of these elements corresponding to the structural components of Abstract, Evaluation and Coda, and produced by listeners rather than story-tellers, have been identified. I shall now move on, briefly, to another kind of structuralist paradigm. These are the ‘story-grammars’ designed by psycholinguists. Story Grammars and Natural Order Stevens’ poetic conversationalists A and B, quoted at the beginning of this chapter perspicaciously comment in tandem: A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)
How may we decode the enigma of these lines? Can order and disorder be ‘rewritten’ in terms of each other? So far, I have highlighted some of the ‘missing elements’ of structure that tend to get lost in a structural analysis. Now I return to an earlier suggestion I made in passing that Labov and Waletzky’s functional description of story structure could easily be expressed as the set of rewrite rules espoused by their near contemporaries—the psycholinguistic story-grammarians.28 Eleven years after their distinguished predecessors, Mandler and Johnson (1977) claimed that the rewrite rules they proposed ‘were found to be adequate to parse a fairly large set of stories, including both single and multi-episode stories of several types’.29 But it should not be forgotten that these grammars were clearly intended to apply to textual materials. A real danger in applying them willy-nilly to conversational stories does not envisage, for example, the psychological implications of the differences between an ‘ordered’ experimental situation in which a story is read out to and listened to by ‘subjects’, and a ‘disordered’ conversational situation in which a story is heard and interacted with 28Though several psycholinguists have contributed to the notion of story-schemata,
I have made no fine distinctions between theorists like Mandler and Johnson, for example, and R.C. Schank whose interest in stories stems from his interest in artificial intelligence, since I felt that it was important for the purposes of this book to derive some general insights from psycholinguistic research on stories without dwelling too obsessively on the differences of approach among the psycholinguists themselves. 29Mandler, J.M., ‘A Code in the Node: The Use of a Story Scheme in Retrieval’, Discourse Processes, I, 1978, p. 15 and Mandler and Johnson, ‘Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall’, Cognitive Psychology. Vol. 9, 1977.
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by participants. Levelt, as we remember, related the kinds of narrative inferences which psycholinguists consider of interest to the implicatures deriving from culturally specific conversations. Indeed, what is interesting about the story-grammars is precisely that listeners’ expectations of the information in a story are a main focus of attention. I shall shortly show with a second series of ‘live’ illustrations that some valuable insights arise for the ‘Indian Rope’ paradox of narrative from this orientation towards listeners. All story-grammars consist of simple rewrite rules capable of generating well-formed stories or of breaking down a well-formed story into its constituent parts. For instance, Mandler and Johnson (1977), following work by Rumelhart (1975) and Colby (1973), characterize the underlying structure of simple stories as a set of basic nodes in a tree structure, each of which is either causally or temporally connected to other nodes in the tree. Several assumptions are made here concerning the analysis of stories. The first is that story material has some kind of internal structure much like sentences (see Rumelhart, 1975). The second assumption is that stories can be described in terms of a hierarchical network of categories and the logical relations that exist between these categories. Finally, it is assumed that this network corresponds to certain universal cognitive patterns that relate to the ways in which we all organize story-information. This assumption about organization, in particular, is directly connected to the preoccupations of the more ethnomethodologically-inclined conversational analysts. Harold Garfinkel, for example, writes: I use the term ethno-methodology to refer to various policies, methods, results ... with which to locate and accomplish the study of the rational properties. ... or organized, artful properties of everyday life.30
With their focus on the ‘rational’ inferences made by listeners during the process of a telling, story-grammars lead on, not just to the ethnomethodology and conversational analysis but also suggest that some model such as the Gricean one of conversational implicature may provide, as indeed I suggest in Chapter 4, a wider frame for analysing just how ‘order and disorder’ coexist in narrative. Indeed, it is to the structural capacity of stories to allow for a concurrence of rationality and irrationality, online belief and suspended disbelief, that my paradox of the Indian rope trick attributes the evolutionary durability of narrative as a cognitive structure among the human species. 30‘Remarks on Ethnomethodology’ in Gumperz and Hymes (eds), 1972.
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Expectations and Event Structures ‘Event-structure’ is a term used in psycholinguistic literature of storygrammars to refer to the ordering of incidents within a story. This ‘structural’ description of stories then offers a basis on which psycholinguists can found their investigations into the use people make of such structures in encoding and retrieving information in a story. The types and orders of inference which psycholinguists postulate follow from the abstract structural description which they assign to stories. Mandler and Johnson (1977) assume that the structure of a story influences comprehension— encoding and retrieving the information in a story—because of the operation of the story-schemata. That is, the grammatical rules which specify whether or not a story is well-formed are intended to represent sets of expectations, or which a listener has incorporated. ‘Story-schemata are acquired through experience with listening to stories as well as experience with typical kinds of causal and temporal event sequences in the world’ (see Mandler, 1978).31 The cognitive schemata reflected by the grammar serve several functions. They provide a limited set of frameworks within which the incoming material will be structured. They let a listener know which aspects of the material are important or relevant. They tell the listener when some part of the story is complete and can be ‘stored’, or that some proposition must be kept in memory because related material is yet to come. However, according to Mandler and Johnson (1977), ‘there are a number of places even in a well-structured story where a listener may go wrong’. It is also ‘perfectly possible for listeners to “change their minds” as the story proceeds, to decide they have gotten off on the wrong track and to revise their notions of what the story is about. Reorganization can occur even after a story is finished’ (Spiro, 1977, Mandler and Johnson, 1977). Mandler and Johnson’s characterization of stories is pertinent to conversational ‘story receipts’ because it delineates from the point of view of the listener, a set of rules which enable him to structure incoming propositions. That is, it suggests ‘how a listener knows when one [episodic] node is complete and another begun’. Similarly, Warren, Trabasso and Nicholas (1978) relate the point-of-view of the listener or story-recipient to the inferences he makes during the telling of a story. In order to model the process of a listener making inferences we place him at a moving point [italics mine] in an unfolding narrative. This point is termed the 31Mandler, 1978, p. 32.
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focal event in an event chain, at any given moment in the narrative. Definition of this focal event allows us to determine the information available to the listener for making inferences at that moment rather than assuming full retrospective knowledge. Inferences made from the focal event can be directed backward, linking it with previous events and/or forward, predicting subsequent events. These forward ... backward processes may be viewed as the listener interrogating the text on the basis of present information, asking: Who, What, When, How? etc., in order to relate/justify the focal event in relation to past events and, What next? in order to anticipate.32
Listeners’ Grammars and Rewrite Rules According to Mandler and Johnson, a typical story-schemata looks like this (with connections between nodes and details below the basic nodes omitted): STORY
SETTING
EVENT STRUCTURE Episode I
Beginning
Development
Reaction
II
..n
Ending
Goal Path
Attempt
Outcome
Fig. 2.3 A slightly more complex version of a story-grammar by Stein and Glenn (1978), with a simple story included as illustration, is reproduced below.33 Summary of Grammatical Rules 1. Story → ALLOW (Setting, Episode System) 2. Setting → State(s), Action(s) 32Warren, W.H., Nicholas, D.W. and Trabasso, T., ‘Event chains and Inferences in Understanding Narratives’, Advances in Discourse Processes, Vol. 2, 1978, pp. 23–51. 33Stein and Glenn, ‘Story Comprehension’ in Advances in Discourse Processes, Vol.2, 1978, pp. 53–119.
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3. Episode System → AND THEN [Episode(s)] CAUSE 4. Episode → INITIATE (Initiating Event, Response) 5. Initiating Event → Natural Occurrence(s), Action(s) Internal Events(s) 6. Response → MOTIVATE (Internal Response, Plan Sequence) 7. Internal Response → Goal(s), Affect(s) Cognition(s) 8. Plan Sequence → INITIATE (Internal Plan, Plan Application) 9. Internal Plan → Cognition(s), Subgoal(s) 10. Plan Application → RESULT (Attempt, Resolution) 11. Attempt → Action(s) 12. Resolution → INITIATE (Direct Consequence, Reaction) 13. Direct Consequence → Natural Occurrence(s), Action(s), End State(s) 14. Reaction → Affect(s) Cognition(s) Action(s) Intra-category connectors: AND : includes simultaneous or a temporal relation. THEN : includes temporal but no direct causal relations. CAUSE : includes temporal relations which are causal in nature. These rules define ‘the internal representation of a story’. The way in which they apply to ‘the structure of a simple episode’, is shown in the tale of: Melvin, The Skinny Mouse Setting
Initiating Event Internal Response Internal Plan Attempt Direct Consequence Reaction
1. Once upon a time, there was a skinny little mouse named Melvin 2. who lived in a big red barn. 3. One day, Melvin found a box of rice crispies underneath a stack of hay. 4. Then he saw a small hole in the side of the box. 5. Melvin knew how good the cereal tasted 6. and wanted to eat just a little bit of the cereal. 7. He decided to get some sugar first 8. so that he could sweeten the cereal. 9. Then Melvin slipped through the hole in the box 10. and quickly filled his cereal bowl. 11. Soon Melvin had eaten every bit of the rice crispies 12. and had become very fat. 13. Melvin knew he had eaten too much. 14. and felt very sad.
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How do these schema compare with a Labov and Waletzky-type grammar describing the ‘function’ of stories? Consider the following mapping: NARRATIVE
ORIENTATION [i.e. Setting]
COMPLICATING ACTION [i.e. Event Structure] ○
○
○
○
○
○
○
○
Episode I
Beginning
○
○
○
○
II
..n
Development End
EVALUATION [i.e. Reaction]
Goal Path
Attempt
RESOLUTION [i.e. Outcome]
Fig. 2.4 Like Labov and Waletzky’s narrative analysis, story-grammars stress the functional aspects of story-telling, the motivations for telling a story, and the inferences that can be made from it, although we find that a representation in terms of the Mandler and Johnson tree-diagram necessitates the omission of one of Labov and Waletzky’s functions, the Coda, which I have already argued is really an ‘interactional device’ in conversation. The other interesting feature about such a representation is that Labov and Waletzky’s ‘Evaluation’ function appears to coincide with the internalized ‘Reaction’ node which Mandler and Johnson claim ‘is central to the formation of an episode’. Ambiguities seem to arise in listeners’ understanding of a story when the ‘Reaction’ node is omitted. This is exactly similar to Labov and Waletzky’s claim that a narrative without an Evaluation Section ‘... lacks significance; it has no point’. Again, I believe that this coincidence provides us with insights into the actual telling and reception of stories in conversation, as I suggest in the discussion of ‘evaluation inferencing’ later in this chapter. Inferences, Nodes and Slots It seems clear that a variety of structural descriptions of story-telling, whether framed by sociolinguists like Labov or psycholinguists like Stein
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and Glenn, have much in common. We can therefore return to a version of Levelt’s basic question. Do the descriptions generated by the grammar correspond to the structure people perceive in stories? In order to answer this question psycholinguists have, predictably, attempted to show that the structure generated by a story-grammar is not only related but systematically related to the inferences necessary for proper story comprehension. Schank (1975) offers, for instance, what he calls a ‘functional definition of inference’.34 According to Schank’s description the listener of a narrative must, at every stage, make inferences. Such inferencing serves two main ‘functions’. First, it fills in missing ‘slots’ in the story-structure; second, it connects elementary events in the structure with other events in order to provide a higher level of organization. ‘Slot-filling’ occurs when, for example, an action is given but its motivation is unspecified and the listener attempts to fill in the missing information. ‘Story-connecting’ is done when two or more propositions in the story are linked together. The ‘structure’ of a story may be described in terms of the tree-system of ‘nodes and relationships’ suggested by Minsky (1975), in which the higher nodes are fixed and represent necessary elements in the storystructure, while ‘the lower nodes have many terminals—slots—that must be filled by specific instances of data. Each terminal can specify conditions its assignment must meet’.35 Thus ‘slot-filling’ inferences are made at the terminal or lower nodes of a hierarchical story-structure, whereas ‘connecting’ inferences are made with reference to the higher nodes of structure. The two operations are, of course, really quite similar. ‘Storyconnection’ becomes ‘slot-filling’ when alternatives are not explicitly stated in the story. Warren, Nicholas and Trabasso (1978) present another, not altogether different, classification of the inferences made during the telling of stories. This classification divides inferences into three main types of which I will consider only the last—value inferences—in some detail because they seem to correspond more or less to Schank’s ‘slotfilling’ inferences. The three types of inferences specified by Warren, Nicholas and Trabasso36 are: 1. Logical inferences: which stem from the logical relations between events in the story, and answer the questions Why? and/or How? 34Schank, R.C., ‘The Structure of Episodes in Memory’, in Bobrow and Collins (eds),
1975. 35Minsky, M., ‘Frame-system Theory’ in Johnson-Laird and Wason (eds), 1978, p. 355. 36Warren, W.H., Nicholas, D.W. and Trabasso, T. (1978).
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Obviously, logical inferences would be related to the CAUSE and AND THEN nodes in a Stein and Glenn tree and the COMPLICATING ACTION and RESOLUTION units in a Labovian diamond story structure. 2. Informational inferences: which enable the listener ‘to understand who is doing what to whom, under what circumstances at what time and place, across propositions’. They do not indicate causes or consequences. Equally obviously, informational inferences correspond to the components SETTING, ORIENTATION and ABSTRACT in Labov and Waletzky. 3. Value inferences: which are evaluative. The ‘listeners’ judgements on the actions of the characters, the intention of the story-teller and the validity of the story-events are themselves value inferences. They involve ‘judgements of morality, convention and anomaly in characters’ thoughts and actions or in story-style and construction. They draw upon the listeners’ values and world-knowledge of the situations mentioned’. In other words, they involve listeners’ expectations of the story; and they also involve story-tellers’ expectations of listeners’ expectations of the story. For example, Tannen (1978) includes the following example from a story-telling session: S4—... I’m giving you also these details, I don’t know if you want them ... um ... the ... reason I’m giving you the details is ‘cause I don’t know what the point of the movie was. ... Okay? So maybe you can see something that I didn’t. ... Okay? ... [LAUGH] Tannen comments, ‘S4 apparently feels that when telling about a movie, she should know and communicate what “the point” was. Her inability to do this creates enough discomfort for her to mention it as a reason for telling details. Her statement about the interviewer’s ability to make sense of the details (note the modal ‘can’) indicates that she is operating on a cooperative model in which she assumes her purpose is to communicate to her hearer. This is somewhat different from the expectation of a purpose of furnishing data for an unidentified researcher’.37 ‘Evaluative’ inferences, as defined by the psycholinguists, are interesting not only because they obviously connect with Labov and Waletzky’s analysis of the ‘evaluative function’ of stories but because they assume a cooperative model of speaker-hearer interaction. Like the notion of ‘slot-filling’ inferences, ‘evaluative’ inferences contribute to an understanding of the reception of stories by a community of listeners. 37Tannen, D. ‘What is a Frame? Surface Evidence for Underlying Expectations’, Advances in Discourse Processes, Vol. 2, 1978, pp. 137–79.
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Finally, psycholinguists invoke the concept of ‘relevance’ in order to constrain the number of inferences made from a story, for otherwise ‘the interrogation’ of ‘a story could conceivably continue indefinitely’. Rieger (1974) suggested that all possible inferences are made before the next proposition in the story is considered, but Warren, Nicholas and Trabasso object that ‘this clearly cannot be the case. The listener would be stuck for hours on a line such as: “Once upon a time there lived a noble king”. Introspectively, it seems we make very few of the myriad possible inferences, and often hold the process completely in check until the important links become clear many propositions later. ... A distinction thus arises—how many inferences does he actually make when encountering a story?’38 On the basis of this distinction, these researchers then postulate a ‘relevancy hypothesis’. Formally, this hypothesis states that ‘in understanding a narrative a listener makes only those inferences relevant to the progress of the narrative’.39 Considering their previous classification of logical, informational and evaluative inferences, Warren, Nicholas and Trabasso ‘propose that the relevant inferences are those which establish the information necessary to determine what happened and why’. This is knowledge that, according to these psycholinguists, is essential for a listener to comprehend a story. Four degrees of inferential constraint are defined in this regard. Firstorder inferences are the most unconstrained. They are consistent with, but undetermined by information in the text. All elaborative inferences fall in this class, as do guesses at unindicated causes and motivations. They consist of straight additions of world-knowledge, hence they cannot be story-connectors. Second-order inferences obey a tighter constraint in that they are determined but irrelevant, that is, indicated by the text but still not relevant to the progress of the story. They consist of interpreting ‘given information on the basis of world-knowledge’ but are not important for determining what happened and why. Many logical and informational inferences fulfilling a slot-filling function fall into this category. Third-order inferences are both determined by the text of the story and relevant to its progress. They consist of interpreting ‘given information on the basis of world-knowledge’ to determine what happened and why. It is these inferences that the ‘relevancy-hypothesis’ proposes are 38Warren, Nicholas and Trabasso, pp. 43–4. 39Ibid., p. 44.
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necessary for story-comprehension and suggests listeners actually make in conversation. Fourth-order inferences might be called over-constrained or redundant. They duplicate information given in the story or inferred from it that was already adequate for comprehending the story. Hence, they do not add anything new and are irrelevant to the progress of the story. The types and orders of inferences postulated by psycholinguists of the seventies and early eighties are important in this book because I believe they can be brought to bear upon the discussion of the Gricean model of cooperative interaction in Chapter 4, and Sperber and Wilson’s subsequent theory of ‘cognitive relevance’ in Chapter 5. The Gricean model, which seeks to explicate in general terms inferences deriving from particular talk exchanges, offers a suitable framework for the practice of conversational analysis. Here I agree with Stephen Levinson (1979) that ‘there may in fact be some relation between Grice’s maxims of conversation and particular expectations associated with particular activities’.40 Levinson both poses a question and provides an answer—‘What exactly is the relation betwen the structure of an activity and the inferences special to it? Presumably exactly the same kind of relation that holds between Grice’s maxims and the inferences they generate’.41 In Chapter 4, I examine the relationship between the general inferences which arise from a violation of Gricean maxims and the particular constraints on the activity of storytelling observed by conversational analysts. The present chapter anticipates some of these particular inferences which, according to psycholinguists, are also derivable from the structure of a typical story-grammar. As early as in 1962, M.B. Arnold argued in her work on the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) that the primary task of the psycholinguistic research was to infer the ‘import’ of ... each of a subject’s stories. If each story is an imaginative exploration of various problems and their possible solutions, we must try and isolate what it is the story-teller is trying to say. What he says about the picture [he is shown] will reveal his convictions: what could be called the ‘moral’ of the story. When this moral is applied to the story-teller’s subjective circumstances, we arrive at the import (the meaning or significance) of the story.42
Arnold’s purpose in proposing a set of ‘definite rules for abstracting the story import’ was the psychological one of arriving at the ‘motivational 40Levinson, S.C., ‘Activity Types and Language’, Linguistics 17, 1979, p. 374. 41Ibid., p. 376. 42M.B. Arnold, Story Sequence Analysis, 1962, p. 51.
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pattern’ of the story-teller. Yet she suggested, interestingly enough, that the best and most unbiased way for the researcher to arrive at a motivational pattern was to ‘formulate the imports before too much is known about the story-teller’. There is only a minimum of factual information that is necessary: the storyteller’s sex, age, profession, marital status, domicile. Beyond that, the only thing that is necessary is to formulate the import so that it expresses what is implied in the story from the point of view of the story-teller. This means suspending judgement, foregoing interpretations based on some personality theory, however plausible, and simply listening to what the story-teller is saying [italics mine].43
The sort of ‘imports’ formulated by Arnold’s subjects are illustrated in the example below: Record # 4 (Good teacher, age 28, F, I.Q. 120) [Card I] Last night, for the last time, Jim heard Dad play his violin. Dad died early this morning. This violin he gave Jim as one last treasure. Now music grows to be a part of his life, as it was of his Dad’s. Jim uses his music as a stepping stone to friendliness and cheer, not in a great symphonic orchestra but in his home and in neighbourly circles. Import: If you use the talent you have you can achieve success, not necessarily in a big but in a simple way. Record # 5 (Poor teacher, age 30, F. I.Q. 124) [Card I] The boy in this picture is the only son of a musician. His father has lately returned from a concert tour and he left the instrument on the table. Sudden illness followed by unexpected death has left the boy’s mother upset and confined to her room. The child has come to gaze at the instrument his father made seem almost alive. It is a link to one he loved and as he is so absorbed in his dream, his one desire is to make the instrument live again. As he dreams, his loneliness fades and he sees his mother’s happy smile as he, in years to come, steps into the vacant place of his father. The dream comes true as a result of this moment’s searching thought and resolution. Import: Love for someone you admire may make you want to continue his work and take his place in the world. Your dream comes true as a result of this thought and resolution.44
Arnold’s rather straightforward methodology of getting subjects to write out stories based on ‘card pictures’ enables some equally straightforward distinctions. First, there is the well-worn distinction between 43Ibid. 44Ibid., pp. 67–8.
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written texts as data and spoken utterances. Though Arnold urges the researcher to ‘simply listen to what a story-teller is saying’, this phrase is not an indication of her interest in conversation. On the contrary, she insists that ‘it is desirable to have the stories short and to the point without the irrelevant elaboration and disorganization that is often the result of asking someone to tell a story’45 [italics Arnold’s]. Arnold’s subjects were therefore specifically invited to ‘write a story and not a piece of conversation’. Spontaneous stories, on the other hand, appear to be deliberately organized so as to allow for a considerable degree of conversational interplay, which casts into doubt Arnold’s basic premise that ‘disorganization’ is a necessary consequence of requesting someone to tell a story. Written stories are thus privileged by Arnold over spoken ones, as are storytellers over listeners. Arnold takes it for granted that ‘imports’ always derive from the point of view of the story-teller. More recent storygrammars such as those of Warren, Trabasso and Nicholas seek to explicate the inferences made by the listener. Yet, both strictly maintain a distinction of roles. I will argue, however, that story-teller and listener cannot possibly be the neat, cognitively separable, entities that the psycholinguistic analyses indicate. As some of the conversations recorded in this chapter already show, both story-teller and listener skilfully combine to fulfil what Labov and Waletzky define as the story-teller’s essential functional task of evaluating the narrative. They behave much like ‘Nair’s communicating cogs’ in my introduction to Narrative Gravity. It is this structurally interactional aspect of story-telling as it contributes to the Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick to which I shall return at the end of this chapter, but now, on to a third distinction—between story-imports and the inferences deriving from a story-grammar. Story-imports are formulations of the intention of the story-teller. Inferences from stories are made, on the other hand, by the listener and are structurally derivable from the listeners’ knowledge of typical storyschemata. Most psycholinguistic story-grammars thus dispense even with the need for ‘minimum factual information’ about the story-teller’s age, sex and so on, since these grammars simply model the ‘universal’ structural knowledge required to interpret narrative. The person telling the story is no longer the focus of interest as ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ teachers were for Arnold. Somewhat like Labov and Waletzky, Arnold concentrates on the 45Ibid., p. 50.
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significance or ‘point’ of the narrative captured in its ‘import’, since this is the key to an understanding of the personality of the story-teller. Personal ‘questionnaire’ details are therefore not in the end irrelevant in Arnold’s analysis. Labov and Waletzky similarly state that ‘the ultimate aims of our work will require close correlations of the narrator’s social characteristics with the structure of their communication’. Story-grammars, however, render such social correlations made by Labov and Waletzky and Arnold, in their different ways, redundant. Inferences deriving from story-grammars seem to be constrained in ways which do not obviously relate back to the narrator’s sociological background at all. In this respect, they anticipate in some respects the ‘analytic mentality’ of the ethnomethodological conversation analysts for whom the story or the data is the only source to which appeal can be legitimately made. If story-grammarians do refer to any sociological ‘principle’ at all, it is the principle of salience, which guides a narrator’s choice of story or elements within a story. Events are salient to a story-schema to the extent to which they depart from the banal routine experience that makes up the greater part of people’s lives. The things worth talking about are those which represent significant deviations from the baseline.46
In Chapter 6, I discuss whether such a notion of salience has any bearing upon what Labov and Waletzky call a ‘reportable’ event and Sacks a ‘storyable’ event in conversation, and in Chapter 6, I examine its relation to Sperber and Wilson’s concept of relevance. The Salient Paradox Nietzsche’s towering superman, I have always believed, is actually a fragile construct of subs, paras, metas, transes, alters, uns and semis. Much the same analogy holds in my mind for the ‘strong’ image of structuralism. Structural definitions tend to overwhelm us because their categories are so obvious, so definite, and their combinatorial properties so wellordered. It is only when a paradigmatic structural description such as the Labovian schema for stories is examined in detail that we come to realize with something of a shock that it eliminates the very idea of ‘context’ that it began by valorizing. Part of the argument of this book is that the materials neatly left out, excised, from structural analyses of 46Chafe, W., ‘Creativity in Verbalization’ in Freedle (ed.), Discourse Production and Comprehension, 1977, p. 44.
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narrative, the Nietzsche subscripts as it were, turn out to be far more cognitively salient than one might ‘reasonably’ expect. Here is a fuller quote from Odlin, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: Appearing in most, and perhaps all, societies, narratives allow for many crosslinguistic comparisons of discourse form. ... Stories about the creation of the world, a flood, a return of a god or a hero, and so forth, have appeared in a remarkable number of communities. Moreover, traditional narratives are known to have formulaic characteristics that recur in the oral literature of many communities. ... Among such properties are chronological and causal order, as well as a sense of narrative tension. ... In many cultures, children are introduced to such stories at an early age, and adult listeners (or readers) are quite able to recognise and expect [these] patterns. ... Kintsch and Green (1978) have claimed that there are culturally specific patterns of narrative, and that cultural differences in narrative form have consequences for language comprehension.47
How might one recognize patterns of cultural salience in narrative? Structuralism tells us that the ‘point’ of a narrative can be inferred strictly from its logical connections; the core of narrative is its complicating action and resolution. Yet, as we have seen, listeners seem much more taken by precisely those aspects of narrative structure that are non-core—its evaluative and orientating functions, its coda. And herein lies the salience of the Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick with regard to structuralism. Methodologically, structuralism is committed to breaking any ‘whole’ into a hierarchy of parts; the structure of the whole consists in the ordered relationship of its parts. If a story is conceived of as such a whole—as it obviously is in a story-grammar—then it would seem that inferences by the hearers actually end up subverting the carefully workedout order of its parts. Labovian ‘displacement sets of narrative clauses’ may fail signally to distinguish between true narratives and ‘lists’. Far more cognitively salient than the core elements of narrative, it turns out, are its peripheral accoutrements. In conversational narrative, the structure of a story is further fragmented so as to perversely give away some of the best performative parts to listeners! An observation of facts such as these suggests that the complete structure of a narrative unfolds only when teller and listeners share their knowledge of cultural background. Not through structure darkly, but face-to-face, speaker-to-listener and vice versa. The aesthetic of narrative, its cultural call for attention, as Levelt reminded us at the beginning of this chapter, is about a subversion of 47Odlin,1978, pp. 58–9.
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the natural order of events. It is an often violent unsettling of the logic of expectation. It is in such piquant cases alone that there can be any ‘point’ in getting excited about inferring the ‘point’ of a narrative. In the following chapters, I consider how narrativity is handled within theories that claim to take context, culture, action and strong reaction into account. The goddess Vac, we recall, proudly declared that she spoke not directly but ‘through’ others, a host of cultural deputies. Who are these ‘selves’ that Vac deputizes, and how do they conduct their speech acts of narrative, in fiction and in fact? This is the subject of Searle’s paradox and also of the next chapter.
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2
qQ FORCE, FICTION, FIT AND FELICITY Narrative as a speech act (Gurus: J.L. Austin and John Searle)
Austin had to free the analysis of the performative from the authority of the value of truth... occasionally substituting for it the value of force, of difference of force (illocutionary or perlocutionary force). It is this, in a thought which is nothing less than Nietzschean, which seems to me to beckon towards Nietzsche, who often recognized in himself a certain affinity with a vein of English thought. Jacques Derrida It is good to express a matter in two ways simultaneously so as to give it both a right foot and a left. Truth can stand on one leg, to be sure; but with two it can walk and get about. Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth on one leg is a monument; on two, it is travelling theory. For this reason, it could be challenging to equip truth with that second leg, which is surely—fiction. Fiction has the licence to go anywhere it pleases; it is theory at its most untrammelled. In this chapter I argue that speech act theory too cursorily dismisses the revolutionary potential of fiction as a species of ‘theory’ by treating it merely as a case of ‘pretended assertion’. Classical speech act theory tells us that a fictional story is parasitic upon a more basic communicative act and can be analysed, satisfactorily and without any major snafu, in terms of the speech act of assertion (Searle, 1975). Yet anyone with the slightest predilection for those perambulatory truths we call ‘fictions’ might want to question this assertion. Why is it so crucial for speech act theory to deny narrative, and fictional narrative in particular, the status of an independent speech act? The answer to this
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query turns, in large part, on the location of speech act theory within an area of research, namely pragmatics, that accommodates many quite disparate theories of language use. Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics The area itself has been variously described, but perhaps most generally by Rudolf Carnap in 1959, when he suggested that the realm of pragmatics extended across all those regions of study in which explicit reference was made to the user of a language.1 However, as Asa Kasher has pointed out,2 Carnap’s trick is to keep language and use separate. A linguistic system is defined by rules of syntactic formation and semantic interpretation without any reference to the use of language. This results, obviously, in a conception of pragmatic rules as governing only the relationships between linguistic behaviour and some non-linguistic practices in a particular speech community. Carnap’s separation of a language ‘system’ for its ‘users’ thus deliberately limits the scope of pragmatic theory. And in time, this ‘trick’ of his turns into something like the ‘act’ of speech act theory, as I shall try to show in this chapter. More recently, following work by Grice, Searle, Sperber and Wilson and others, there is widespread agreement that pragmatic rules have to specify the conditions for successful ‘conversation’, where conversation is understood to consist of interlocking communicative acts, involving such entities as Speakers, Hearers, inferences from utterances in context, and so on. Thus, Bach and Harnish (1979) set out a SAS (speech act schema), which codifies the inferences a Hearer has to make in any conversation: H’s Inference
Basis for making Inference
L1. S is uttering e(xpression) L2. S means such-and-such by e L3. S is saying that so-and-so L4. S is doing such-and-such
Hearing S utter e L1, MCBs (mutual contextual beliefs) L2, MCBs L3, MCBs3
The SAS, neatly set out as it is, calls our attention to a worrisome glitch in 1Carnap, R., Introduction to Semantics, 1959, Compare also Morris, who produces an almost identical version when he writes that ‘pragmatics is designated the science of the relation of signs to their interpreters’, p. 9. 2Kasher, A., Foundations of Philosophical Pragmatics in Butts and Hintikka (eds), 1977, p. 225. 3‘Linguistic Communication: A Schema for speech acts’, 1979, reproduced in S. Davis’ Pragmatics: A Reader, 1991, p. 233.
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the hitherto taut wave of speech act theory. Unlike Austin, who made a three-way distinction between locutions, illocutions and perlocutions, Bach and Harnish offer L1–L4. In this new format, L1 corresponds roughly to the Austinian locutionary act, but an extra ‘saying’ stage – L3 – is introduced within the illocutionary act proper in addition to ‘meaning’ and ‘doing’. This step is justified, they say, because a Hearer must be able to calculate those intended meaning(s) of a Speaker not conventionally entailed by the use of an explicit performative. Such meanings ensue from what is putatively ‘said’ rather what is performatively ‘done’ by a speech act. These meanings, called R-intentions, are reflexive intentions on the part of the Speaker to get the Hearer to recognize her intentions. R-intentions thus include intended perlocutionary effects (humiliating, insinuating, etc.), indirect speech acts (‘would you mind not sniggering?’ for example) and ‘non-literal meanings’ (metaphor, irony and so forth). Consider, in this connection, the following expansion of the SAS. Basis—Co-presence of Speaker and Hearer exchanging (e)xpressions. L1.uttering— e.g. L2.meaning— e.g. L3.saying— e.g. L4.doing— e.g.
phonetic form i promis to tel ju a stori phonetic form + sense and reference I promise to tell you a story phonetic form + sense and reference + R-intention ‘I promise to tell you a story’ phonetic form + sense and reference + R-intent + act ‘I PROMISE to tell a story’.
If we accept Bach and Harnish’s claim that the series L1–L4 consists of acts ‘intimately related’, then such an expansion shows that one can only distinguish the ‘doing’ stage from the previous three stages by arbitrarily highlighting the performative verb. But why is ‘doing’ not conventionally implicated at the ‘meaning’ stage, given the linguistic system and supporting MCBs? Furthermore, why should the Speaker, who produces the original locution after all, only come into her own at L3., when she has been around all along anyway? Perhaps an example may make these doubts more explicit. Imagine a Speaker X uttering the words, ‘I promise to tell you a story if you promise to eat your dinner’, craftily intending to get her recalcitrant son, Hearer Y, to eat his dinner rather than just promise to eat it. Since Y is a smart brat he immediately recognizes her intention and eats up his dinner, thereby getting his bedtime story. Note that he has not actually
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fulfilled his part of the bargain, which was to promise to eat his dinner, but his non-compliance does not matter because he has demonstrated his understanding of his mother’s true intention, which was simply to get him to eat his dinner. Now, what’s interesting is that X’s intention is indicated not by her use of the performative verb ‘promise’, which gives her act the force of a promise, but by the verbal complement in the subordinate conditional clause—‘if you promise to EAT YOUR DINNER’. Surely it is this complement rather than the illocutionary PROMISE which should be the focus of L4, or at least a focus, since X is ‘doing’ getting Y to eat, which is her primary intention or goal, via this complement construction. Moreover, a crucial syntactio-semantic deletion is required at the ‘locutionary’ stages L1 and L2, namely, that the phrase ‘promise to’ be dropped from the subordinate clause, for Hearer Y to correctly compute X’s intention, which is not that he promises to, but that he actually eats his dinner. That is, his understanding (or mental representation or processing) of X’s original sentence should at some stage be modified to ‘I will read you a story if (and only if) you eat your dinner’. Forget about the promising! Given that MCBs and linguistic knowledge are already present at L2, it seems plausible that a Hearer may arrive at an R-intention before rather than, as Austin says, as a ‘consequence’, or sequential by-product, of the illocutionary act. In other words, if that famous line between ‘language’ and its ‘users’ is eliminated, by admitting ‘intimate’, not to say impossible to differentiate, connections within the SAS, then the centrality of the illocutionary act is also severely threatened. A Hearer may work out all sorts of R-intentions from a Speaker’s uttering an e, without the structure of the illocutionary act qua performative entering into his calculations at all. Instead, knowledge of ‘co-presence’ (the presence of the speaker from the perspective of the Hearer and vice-versa, including all the MCBs that mere, or sheer, presence evokes), could be the ground on which readings of R-intentions stand. It is this ground which forms a necessary though not sufficient condition for linguistic communication or ‘conversation’ to occur, whereas knowledge of illocutionary acts per se is neither necessary nor sufficient for computing R-intention, even though most R-intentions are, in fact, conventionally arrived at via our knowledge of appropriate illocutions. To my mind, the explosive charge carried by Bach and Harnish’s breakdown of the Austinian performative, tinder-dry though their commentary is, has to be attributed to the fact that their SAS allows R-intentions other than those conveyed by explicit illocutions to surface so
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readily. As we shall see, it is these R-intentions that can become thoroughly insubordinate, threatening to destroy the whole SAS set-up when they attach to such entities as narrative fiction or metaphor. In general, pragmatic theories today (Relevance theory, Gricean theory, classical speech act theory, a Davidsonian theory of metaphor, Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness, etc.) confront one crucial problem. How are R-intentions, or implicatures arising from (linguistic) communication to be restricted? What principles or norms do human beings use, socially and psychologically, to prevent an impossible proliferation of implicatures? Part of the problem arises from the assumption that the basic unit of pragmatic study is the ‘utterance’. The notion of the ‘utterance’, as it stands, seems too scattered, vague and impoverished to be analytically useful. Then add to utterances, the possible implicatures arising from each utterance, and one just has far too much on one’s plate (as the precocious Hearer Y might have said to his mother in our example). The focus on the utterance as a fundamental category results in pragmatists more or less depending on catch-all ‘lists’ to ostensively define pragmatic phenomena and principles (‘There goes something that looks like it may be pragmatic. Grab it!’). Thus Kasher (1991) concedes a little wearily that the ‘scope of what is called “pragmatics” will depend on one’s view of the nature of pragmatics’, and proceeds to detail six kinds of phenomena that are required for an ‘adequate’ pragmatic theory. They are—1) deixis; 2) lexical pragmatic presuppositions; 3) forces (of speech acts); 4) performatives; 5) conversational implicatures; and 6) politeness principles.4 But why these six and not some others like indirect speech acts, speaker reference, metaphor and irony, perlocutions and such? As Kasher tacitly grants, that’s because consensus on the issue is a distant hope, and meanwhile one gets on with it as best one can.5 Given the present state of art, therefore, it might be useful to reconsider, as much for heuristic reasons as anything else, an alternative unit which 4Kasher, in S. Davis (ed.), 1991. 5As with the phenomena, so with the principles. In the work of Leech (1983), Recanati,
etc. (1991), a variety of principles, often very suggestive, make their appearance. Recanati, for example, ‘enriches’ Grice’s super principle of cooperation by examining the claims of a Minimalist Principle, followed by an Availability Principle, followed by an Independence Principle, and then a Scope Principle. Again, the attempt is to restrict the R-implicatures that arise from the very process of enrichment. Recanati’s philosophical tools are wellhoned, but in the end the problem that Gricean theory faced, remains. There is no end to the making of principles until pragmatics is more severely defined.
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pragmaticists could consider basic. I have already suggested, outrageously, that this unit should be the narrative, constituting both the upper bound and the main structure of pragmatic analysis, just as the sentence works as the largest unit or boundary structure as well as the central object of grammatical inquiry. Like the sentence, a narrative is a cognitively salient, universal, mnemonic unit of discourse, consisting of linear, hierarchical, and recursive patterns, which give it thew and sinew. What makes the narrative vitally different from the sentence, however, is precisely its pragmatic propensity. It is a structure devised to probe into context. Further, not only are the functional parts of narrative (abstract, setting, complicating action, etc. considered in the last chapter), designed to reflect on the relations of subjects to situations, the overall problematic of narrativity concerns contextual salience or relevance, fictionality, nonliteral meanings, implicatures, intentions, conventions, truth conditions, speaker-hearer interaction, and indeed all topics which have, according to Kasher and others, been the bread-and-butter of pragmaticists for the last half a-century. Narrative sets in motion complex processes of hypothesis formation, premise correction and reasoning among Hearer/Readers, whose task it is to deduce the point of the story from the evidence that Speakers/ Tellers present to them by attributing intentional stances to them. Grice’s idea that conversationalists display a remarkable degree of rationality in efficiently recovering non-natural meanings is thus tested in both gross and graceful ways by following through hearers’ interpretations of a narrative as it unfolds in its linearity. The Illocutionary Force of Fiction Fiction, I have rashly claimed, is a variety of theory. Why? Precisely because it encourages hypothesis formation and rational deduction from a given structure of premises and evidence. At the same time, there are certain kinds of latitude permitted in the genre of fiction which provide a subtle contrast to the conventions by which factual narrative evidence is judged by conversationalists in many cultures. There are five main reasons for this. First, fiction is always ‘false’ or ‘pretended’, and therefore the prototype of the ‘parasitic’ speech act, mimicking the ‘neither true nor false’ quality of real illocutionary acts while being patently and blatantly false—the shadow of a paradox here somewhere, a version of which Searle grapples with, as we shall shortly observe. Second, fiction is the most ‘performative’ of acts since its existence is typically predicated on its announcing itself as fiction, and that’s that,
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in the same way as a promise is a promise. So, it should fall into the mould of an ‘explicit performative’ quite easily, enabling ‘felicity conditions’ to be formulated for it—an exercise duly undertaken later in this chapter. Third, fiction is conventionally associated with those leaky perlocutionary effects (curiosity, surprise, fear, wonder), which seem to indicate that the illocutionary boat is not so water-tight after all. Fourth, because fictions ‘make believe’, they are exploratory mechanisms in a way similar to scientific hypotheses. They enable us to investigate counterfactual worlds, lay out evidence, and offer plausible explanations for that evidence, without getting caught up in what Austin thought of as often tedious and irrelevant questions of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’. All the four reasons listed so far, however, hinge on our acceptance of a fifth and final one, which concerns the form of fiction. Much of the speech act theory, I’ve suggested, concerns formal types, such as the types verditives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives and expositives discussed in How to Do Things with Words. Danger signals in speech act theory always have to do with instances when a word or a deed will not fit into a class—such intransigence being punished by Austin with a slew of fastidiously disapproving adjectives (‘impure’, ‘parasitic’, ‘etiolated’). The category ‘fiction’, then, so far as formless as the alternative categories ‘literature’ and ‘language’, could also run the risk of being found too chaotic to be taken seriously by Austinian speech act theorists—were it not for a happy coincidence. Fiction does for the most part come neatly packaged. It comes in a narrative pack. For, there is no denying that the easiest, perhaps the most natural way in many cultures to think about fiction is in terms of narrative. Our commonest access, even as children, to the subtle idea of fiction seems to be through the simple activity of story-telling. And stories are typically structures, as I’ve iterated, that convert conversation into ‘text’, where a‘text’ is not necessarily understood as written, but rather a mode which especially invites interpretation or ‘readings’ from the audience. If someone innocent of the speech act theory were to address us at the dinner table with that notorious sentence of the speech act theorist, ‘can you please pass the salt?’, we’d probably pass him the salt, no questions asked. Unless the circumstances were exceedingly strange, we would not waste much time trying to ‘read meaning’ into his utterance. But were the same person to tell us a story, we’d get straight-away into the business of interpretation, of hypothesis formation, of interrogating his tale for its plausibility. As we saw in the last chapter, we’d want to know what the ‘point’ of it all was. The point of course is that form, in this case the narrative form which
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is the guise of fiction, is the primary and most reliable indicator of the ‘point’ of a speech act. Without this ‘explicit’ form it would be very difficult to endow fiction with illocutionary ‘force’. Even though, for the reasons of ancestry mentioned earlier, speech act theory has largely restricted itself to a formal classification of single sentence utterances, there are scattered assumptions throughout the literature that larger entities like stories, lectures and so on could be accommodated within the confines of the theory.6 Thus, Austin argues— At a more sophisticated level perhaps comes the use of the connecting particle; thus we may use the particle ‘still’ with the force of ‘I intend that’; we use ‘therefore’ with the force of ‘I conclude that’; we use ‘although’ with the force of ‘I concede that’. Note also the uses of ‘whereas’ and ‘hereby’ and ‘moreover’. A very similar purpose is served by the use of titles such as Manifesto, Act, Proclamation, or the sub-heading ‘A Novel’. ... [HTDTWW, 1962, 75]
Though Austin does not develop his section on ‘connecting particles’7 further, he definitely seems in this passage to envisage the possibility that the phrase ‘A Novel’ might precede a speech act of a specific kind, that of telling a story.8 That is, Austin’s suggestion appears to be that there is a conventional way in which such a phrase indicates that the utterances which follow it must be understood in connected sequence. It is therefore a connecting particle which conveys a particular illocutionary ‘force’, which is—‘I hereby narrate that’ ...9 Searle also discusses the problem raised by the consideration of fiction as a speech act. He writes: ... speaking or writing in a language consists of performing speech acts of a quite specific kind called ‘illocutionary acts’. These include making statements, 6Compare R. Bauman and J. Sherzer in Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, 1974, p. 163. One of the central concerns in the ethnography of speaking is the description of speech acts, events and situations. ... Most formal description within linguistics has been limited to units of sentence length. Within this limitation, insights have been achieved in the techniques and theory of linguistic formalization. Yet there is much more to language use than abstract, isolated sentences and such uses of language as greeting, leavetakings, conversation speeches, stories, insults, jokes, and puns also have a formal structure. 7Austin, p. 75. 8See Forster, E.M., Aspects of the Novel, 1974, where he reluctantly admits, ‘Yes, oh dear yes, the novel tells a story.’ 9Narrate, of course, is not a performative verb in English, but Searle’s arguments, alluded to later in this chapter, have shown conclusively that the lack of a particular illocutionary verb in a language does not mean that there is no corresponding illocutionary act in the language. Other illocutinary force indicating devices, such as ‘A Novel’, in this case might perform the function of the illocutionary verb.
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asking questions, giving orders, making promises, apologizing, thanking, and so on…there is also a sytematic set of relations between the meanings of the words or sentences that we utter and the illocutionary acts we perform in the utterance of these words and sentences. Now, for anybody who holds such a view, the existence of fictional discourse poses a difficult problem. We might put the question in the form of a paradox; how can it be both the case that words and elements in a fictional story have their ordinary meanings and yet the rules that attach to those words and other elements and determine their meaning are not complied with?10
I would now like to argue that this very influential definition of the crucial problem posed by thinking of fictional stories as a speech act is misleading in many ways. I therefore consider the essay on ‘the logic of fictional discourse’ at some length below.11 Here, Searle begins by setting out the quite specific semantic and pragmatic rule for an assertion, since he wishes to develop an argument to the effect that fictional stories are a special case of ‘pretended’ assertions. These rules are: 1. The essential rule: the maker of an assertion commits himself to the truth of the expressed proposition. 2. The preparatory rule: the speaker must be in a position to provide evidence or reasons for the truth of the expressed proposition. 3. The expressed proposition must not be obviously true to both the speaker and the hearer in the context of the utterance. 4. The sincerity rule: the speaker commits himself to a belief in the truth of the expressed proposition. Once the conditions on assertion are stated, Searle happily points out that the fictional story fails to meet these conditions; in fact, it exactly reverses them, as will become obvious if the words ‘falsity’ and ‘false’ are substituted for ‘truth’ and ‘true’ in all the rules above. This is the observation at the heart of Searle’s ‘paradox’, as he states it. In chapters 4–6, I consider a number of possible explanations for this characteristic ‘reversal’ in fictional discourses, but to stay with Searle’s argument for the moment, we must confront his paradox. If the meaning of the fictional sentence is determined by the linguistic rules that attach to the elements of the sentence, and if those rules determine that the 10Searle, J.R., ‘The Logical Basis of Fictional Discourse’, New Literary History, Vol. 6,
1975, p. 233. 11See also Furberg, M., Saying and Meaning: A Main Theme in J.L. Austin’s Philosophy, 1971, ‘... a story-teller “states”, “advises” and “promises” when he, in spinning out his yarn, goes through the motions of stating, advising and promising’. p. 90.
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literal utterance of the sentence is an assertion, and if there is a literal utterance of the sentence, then surely it must be an assertion: but it can’t be an assertion since it does not comply with those rules that are specific to and constitutive of assertions.12
Searle does not, in this essay, spell out the kind of rules he has in mind when he talks of the ‘linguistic’ rules’ that determine whether the literal utterance of a sentence is an assertion or not. Elsewhere,13 however, he argues that there is a typical syntactic form of the representative, namely I + verb (that) + S, or even I + verb + (NP), of which the assertion is a sub-class; so I take it that the ‘linguistic rules’ for an assertion comprise some such syntactic features. Still, something is remarkably amiss. For, while syntactic rules tell us how to identify sentences, NPs, ‘that’ clauses and so forth, they do not tell us how to identify ‘representatives’ or ‘assertions’ or ‘statements’. A grammarian is usually clueless about how these essentially pragmatic categories can be told apart on purely linguistic grounds. At the very most, grammars broadly classify sentence moods on the basis of, say, movement rules or deletions. What grammars, and on the whole, grammarians, are unable to do with conviction is to claim: ‘this sentence here asserts, while that one declares, and that other one narrates’, unless an explicit performative verb is used. In the case of narrative, as we know, no such explicit performative verb is available in English, and many other languages.14 Grammarians can, of course, tell simple from compound and complex sentences, and this may help sift narratives from assertions, but it is by no means a reliable linguistic heuristic, as I shall show in my analysis of minimal narratives in Chapter 6. Under these circumstances, therefore, it does not seem to make much sense to insist that ‘linguistic rules’ determine whether the ‘literal utterance’ is an assertion. Linguistic rules are silent on the matter. Grammar will certainly not help link assertions with ‘truthfulness’, which is essentially the fix Searle needs to make his ‘paradox’ stick. So we are left, it appears, not with a paradox engendered by the existence of a grammatical rule, but with the default pragmatic convention by which speakers in any conversational context are assumed to be speaking the 12Searle, ‘The Logical Basis of Fictional Discourse’, p. 236. 13Searle, J.R., ‘A Classification of Illocutionary Acts’, in Hymes, 1976, pp. 17,20. 14 See Dennett, 1991, on story-telling; one implication of Dennett’s view of narrative
as a basic human activity is that the need for an explicit performative verb for story-telling may be redundant.
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truth, unless there is apparent evidence to the contrary. In this situation, there are two options. The first, favoured by Searle, with or without a paradoxical aura, is to allow fictional discourse to form a sub-class of the Declarative/Assertion, because it is grammatically indistinguishable from the assertion, but at the same time treat it as a ‘parasitic’ rather than a full-fledged member of the class because it animadverts a speaker’s belief in the falsity (not the truth) of her utterance. According to Searle, fictional discourse simply comprises a series of ‘pretended’ assertions in which the teller goes ‘through the motions of making an assertion or imitating the making of an assertion’.15 Why the teller of the tale should undertake such an elaborate and laborious ‘pretence’ is not a question to which Searle addresses himself in this essay, except to state that ‘it is in part a function of the contract between author and reader’.16 Since that mysterious ‘contract’ seems to be crucial to the definition of fiction as ‘pretence’, I shall however, unlike Searle, continue to search for its terms of reference. Speech acts are not unrelated to speech pacts between listeners and hearers, I shall argue a little later, in the case of story-telling especially, but also more generally. The second solution to the ‘problem’ raised by fictional discourse Searle rejects out of hand, which is that fiction does not perform the illocutionary act of making an assertion but that of telling a story. Searle finds this view unsatisfactory because— Anyone ... who wishes to claim that fiction contains different illocutionary acts from non-fiction is committed to the view that words do not have their normal meaning in works of fiction ... in order to have the ability to read any work of fiction, a speaker of a language would have to learn the language all over again since every sentence in the language would have both a fictional and a nonfictional meaning.17
Obviously, Searle is no Davidsonian. For Donald Davidson,18 metaphors and other fictional statements which have long been considered ‘patently false’ [italics in original]19 are literally true instead. So they do not entail the kind of punishing labour Searle has in mind for those unsuspecting 15Searle, ‘ The Logical Basis of Fictional Discourse’, p. 237. 16Ibid., p. 241. 17Ibid., p. 236. 18Davidson, D., ‘What Metaphors Mean’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 1984,
p. 258. 19Kripke, S., Naming and Necessity, 1972.
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fools who believe that ‘fiction contains different illocutionary acts from non-fiction’. By this logic of Searle’s, we would have a different meaning for each individual word in ‘Can you pass the salt?’ as a request versus the same question as a genuine inquiry, since these are two distinct illocutionary acts. That it is hard to imagine a context for the second illocution should not obscure our main argument, which is that the meanings of words, or even sentences, are not at issue when we consider illocutionary acts that are grammatically equivalent or isomorphic but have distinct functions. Contextual conventions decree that ‘Can you pass the salt?’ functions holistically—just as a frozen metaphor does—as a request. We do not painfully have to work out new ‘meanings’ for each of its forms, but simply invoke such conventions of use as are relevant. As Kripke pointed out some time ago, it may take ‘expert knowledge’ to sort out ‘real’ gold from all that glitters, but this does not affect either our everyday transactions with the word or quantity ‘gold’, nor our belief that there can be different ‘kinds’ of gold ‘meant’ by speakers in different contexts. It is my argument that the ‘users’ of narrative similarly do not in general bother about ‘expert’ opinions that sift fiction from non-fiction. They know, and possibly care, as little about the ‘textual properties’ of these classes of narrative as the average person in a community which, say, values gold, and knows about the ‘chemical properties’ of this metal. Instead, speaker-hearers rely on sets of conventions that enable them to heuristically decide which senses/aspects of narrative (including the fiction/non-fiction ones) should be foregrounded in any particular discourse context. Going by Davidson’s elegant arguments, it would seem that fictions function like metaphors20 in that they have the same gross ‘meanings’ as in any other kind of talk, provided we dismiss the red herring of truth value. Following Davidson, there seems to be no good reason why any true-blue pragmatist need get into a pother about the truth or falsity of a speech act, as long as he can suggest ways in which a hearer or reader can in context gauge the use to which the speech act is being put. That, after all, is the main purpose of girding an illocution about with felicity conditions—it enables us to grasp at once that speech is, for the most part, performatively interpreted. Davidson is categorical: What makes a difference between a lie and a metaphor is not the difference in the works used, or what they mean (in any strict sense of meaning), but in how 20Davidson, D., ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 259.
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the words are used. Using a sentence to tell a lie and using it to make a metaphor are, of course, totally different uses, so different that they do not interfere with each other [italics mine]. ... What distinguishes metaphor is not meaning but use—in this it is like the assertion, hinting, lying, promising, or criticising.21
These arguments by Davidson, comparing metaphorical uses with the effects achieved by lies are obviously relevant to Searle’s ‘fiction’ versus ‘non-fiction’ division. I will argue in the following paragraphs that the two seemingly major objections raised by Searle against considering fiction as an independent speech act, are, in fact, specious because they focus on the formal distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, only to prove that there aren’t any such. Since these types can be formally identical, not much is gained from a pragmatic point of view by admitting that, as Davidson puts it, ‘it is sometimes hard to prove what intention lay behind the saying’.22 On this non-controversial yet apparently endlessly engaging point, Searle, Davidson and I are all agreed. We are also probably all agreed that in point of fact conversationalists are very seldom into the business of ‘proving’ their own or others’ intentions. I will now advance this line of enquiry by suggesting specifically that our attention should be directed, not at the fiction/non-fiction nexus at all, but at the more crucial dichotomy between the putatively intentional act of telling a story, either fictional or non-fictional, and the act of making an assertion. Otherwise, an important pattern of similarities between stories which are factual (such as the vast majority which occur in spoken conversation) and those which are fictional, is obscured. To recapitulate, Searle’s main contentions are a) that ‘it would be impossible for anyone to understand a work of fiction without learning a new set of meanings for all the words and elements of a language’,23 b) that ‘there is no textual property, syntactic or semantic, that will identify a text as a work of fiction’.24 Several reasons exist, as we have observed, including the arguments cited from Davidson, why a) is prima facie not acceptable as an argument against considering fiction as a independent speech act, with a set of uses pragmatically distinguishable from non-fiction. For, as I’ve pointed out, both fiction and non-fiction might come packaged as narratives, formally indistinguishable, but there are still likely to be several strategies 21Ibid., p. 259. 22Ibid., p. 258. 23Searle, ‘ The Logical Basis of Fictional Discourse’, pp. 236–7. 24Ibid., p. 236.
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which conversationalists use to discover which is which in any given situation. Hence, Searle’s contention b) that no strictly ‘textual property’ determines which narrative is fictional and which isn’t can readily be acceded to, without necessarily conceding that any predictive power25 is thereby lost by conversationalists. There is little doubt that the kinds of problem posed by fictional discourse differ significantly from the kind of difficulty raised by stories, both factual and fictional, within the bounds of speech act theory. Fictional discourse, Searle believes, results in an ‘abuse’ of the felicity condition on assertions ‘S believes that p’. Hence, he proposes the solution that fiction be treated as a special case of assertion in which this particular condition is ‘suspended’. Stories, on the other hand, present a problem that has to do with the question of whether speech act theory is designed to deal with ‘macro’ entities such as stories. They require a meta-critique of the limits of the theory as a whole, unlike Searle’s treatment of fiction which only necessitates a theory-internal adjustment of the felicity conditions on assertions. The passage from Austin quoted earlier demonstrates that the originator of speech act theory certainly showed some inclination towards considering even an unwieldy genre like the novel a possible speech act, where the phrase ‘A Novel’ indicates that a connected sequence is to follow. Austin’s potentially revolutionary instinct seems to have been that to treat various ‘macro’ entities as speech acts would involve pointing to some available constraints on connected sequencing, such as the illocutionary force indicating device ‘a novel’ in the case of stories. Searle, however, does not address himself to this question at all, though it is as much a problem for the fictional stories he considered in his paper as for factual stories. One reason for this, as I have already said, is that Searle concentrates exclusively on fictional discourse. A second more foundational reason, which has to do with Searle’s resistance to a meta-critique of speech act theory, is also postulated later in this chapter. In the chapters that follow, as well as this one, I propose, after Austin, that there are in fact constraints on sequencing stories and conditions on story-telling as a speech act which differ markedly from the conditions on assertions. These pragmatic conventions apply as much to fictional as to factual narration and 25Dennett’s ‘Paradox of the Authorless Narrator’ is indeed based on the insight that all our narratives ‘prepare’ us for the future, whatever the ‘intentional stances’ that we choose to adopt.
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therefore provide an alternative to Searle’s claim that ‘no textual property’ separates fiction from non-fiction. Textual properties like the phrases ‘once upon a time’, or ‘a novel’ are, I suggest, conventional, but their conventionality is governed by cultural norms rather than ‘purely linguistic’ grammatical rules. If, say, newspaper headlines or the ‘Contents’ page/cover of a volume of short fiction, or story-announcements in a conversation are understood to be part of the ‘text’, then it seems reasonable to assume that they count as ‘textual properties’, enabling readers/ listeners to assess the functional significance of the sequence they are currently processing. Competent reception of narrative entails that a hearer concentrate on semantic connections between elements in a sequence and not fritter away her energies on deciding whether each individual assertion she confronts in a fictional sequence is a ‘pretended assertion’ or not. Once in place, I argue that the ‘textual properties’ which have signalled the fictionality or factuality of a narrative work holistically work to structure listeners’ expectations and predictions about the rest of the text.26 In fact, one of the very valuable insights provided by Searle himself is that there is a whole set of such ‘extra-linguistic’ conventions which govern fictional discourse. These conventions ‘enable the speakers to use words with their literal meanings without undertaking the commitments normally required by those meanings’.27 What Searle calls ‘extra-linguistic’— meaning, presumably, ‘not linguistic at all’ rather than ‘extremely linguistic’!—I refer to as ‘textual’ conventions, meaning those cues which enable a listener to more or less reliably figure out the function of any act of speech. Thus, while I cannot not agree with Searle’s conclusion that the existence of such conventions makes ‘the language game’ of storytelling ‘parasitic’ on, by implication, more basic ‘illocutionary language games’, I do in the next chapter make a preliminary attempt to extend the work of Grice and Lewis on ‘maxims’ and ‘conventions’, to include those cultural norms associated with the act of telling a story. I also consider some of the ‘non-natural’ meaning implicatures that can be generated when certain Gricean maxims are flouted during stories told in conversation. Searle asks the pertinent questions himself, ‘What are the mechanisms 26See Dennett and Chapters 1, 5 on this issue. 27Searle, ‘The Logical Basis of Fictional Discourse’, p. 238.
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by which the author invokes; these ... conventions? What procedures does he follow?’28 In this chapter, I argue that the ‘procedures’ followed by a story-teller are typical of the speech act of story-telling, while in the next chapter on Gricean cooperative maxims, I plead that the ‘mechanisms’ whereby the teller invokes these conventions are available for use within the system of conversational implicature that Grice outlines. Felicity Conditions and Narrative Fit Austin’s theory of speech acts grew out of the seemingly simple observation that not all sensible utterances in a language could be classified as either true or false. Many utterances such as ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth are not falsifiable in the sense that the proposition ‘I named this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ on the 9th of January 1999’ is falsifiable. These utterances can, however, go wrong in which case they are ‘infelicitous’ in at least one of three ways. They can be abused, which would mean that the utterer does not have intentions appropriate to the performance of some particular speech act; they can misfire, which would mean that the listener has not understood the utterer to have performed the particular speech act which the utterer intended to perform; and they can be null and void, which would mean that circumstances render the speech act abortive. Any set of felicity conditions we construct for stories must, therefore, also enable us to determine the sorts of misfires, abuses and nullities which result from non-conformity to these conditions. Searle’s systematization of Austin also vitally affects any formulation of felicity conditions on narrative since it provides a general model of the illocutionary act in its prototypical form f(p)29 A valuable contribution by Searle to contemporary speech act theory is that he eschews Austin’s reliance on the verbs of a language to define classes of speech act. This step makes Searle’s taxonomy more consistent and comprehensive than Austin’s; and it also underlines a point that is very important in my analysis of narrative, namely, that it is possible to have illocutionary acts in a given language even in the absence of specific lexical verbs which correspond with the speech act in question. Thus, there is no verb in 28Ibid., p. 238. 29 See Searle, in Searle, Kiefer and Bierwisch, 1980, where he is responsible for
formulating the typical logical form of the speech act whereby it has a proposition content (p), and this propositional content is presented with a certain illocutionary force F, giving the total act the structure F(p), based on the premises that ‘that basic unit of human linguistic communication is the illocutionary act’.
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English, Hindi or Bengali which can be conventionally uttered with the force of ‘I narrate that ...’ in order to kick-start the telling of a story.30 In the following formulation of felicity conditions for narrative, bearing in mind that in the languages I consider there is no illocutionary verb that conventionally indicates the activity of story-telling, I will rely heavily on Searle’s table of typical conditions on speech acts. These are the essential, preparatory, sincerity and propositional-content conditions which must obtain for the felicitous performance of any speech act. My procedure will be to a) extrapolate from Searle’s classification of illocutionary acts a set of felicity conditions for stories; b) show, if possible, that these conditions accurately describe the distinctive qualities attaching of the stories in my data, and c) that violations of these conditions result in obvious misfires, abuses and nullities. Speech act theory claims categorically to be a theory which offers an explanation of the phenomena of natural language use. Therefore, it must survive the test of confrontation with actual data. The failure of the felicity conditions that I construct for stories to apply to my ‘real’ data will thus force alternative conclusions— Either a) Felicity conditions may be necessary and sufficient to capture the distinctive properties of the act of story-telling, but this particular set of felicity conditions is insufficient in major ways. Or b) Felicity conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient to capture the distinctive features of the act of story-telling, from which it follows that story-telling cannot be an illocutionary act in the sense of following ‘an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect’. But even if story-telling is not an illocutionary act it may still be a perlocutionary speech act, in which case the problem, as Austin first pointed out, is to decide whether there are in fact conventions which specially attach to perlocutionary acts.31 If a) is the conclusion reached by the failure of the felicity condition to apply to stories in my data then it may prove futile to travel on the same track until some very different notion of ‘felicity’ for speech acts comes to be invented. If b) is the conclusion reached, however, it will be equally frustrating to work further on felicity conditions for story-telling as an illocutionary act; but since it may be a complex perlocutionary act, I shall consider this possibility after presenting, and testing, the felicity conditions on story-telling below:
30See Searle’s arguments against Austin’s taxonomy in Hymes, 1976, pp. 7–1. 31Austin, How to do Things with Words, p. 118.
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Felicity Conditions on the Putative Illocutionary Act on Narration Propositional Content Condition: A story is any sequence of clauses p1 ... pn such that p1 describes an event t1 which temporally precedes events in the following clauses. Preparatory Condition: The (S)peaker has reason to believe that the sequence of clauses p1 ... pn will interest the (H)earer, resulting in at least one or more perlocutionary effects upon the H, which the H is bound to evaluate and/or articulate. p ... pn It is obvious to both S and H that t ... tn form a composite unit such that it is incumbent on S to complete the sequence once he has uttered p1, and it is incumbent on H to let him complete it.32 It is not obvious to either H or S that H has heard this particular sequence of p1 ... pn clauses 1 ... n before. t t p1 ... pn Sincerity Condition: S wants H to hear the sequence of clauses t1 ... tn through, and S desires H to assess their ‘tellability’, i.e. evaluate them in terms of perlocutionary effect.33 Essential Condition: This counts as an undertaking by S to demonstrate to H that the succession of clauses p1 ... pn is of interest to H and will t1 ... tn satisfy H in terms of perlocutionary effect. Comment:34 I take it that the essential condition for any illocutionary act states in some wise the illocutionary point of that illocutionary act. In narrative, I suggest that the illocutionary point is to show, through the medium of the story, that the general point or moral of the story could not have been made otherwise. Thus, for example, in the numerous accounts of flood disasters that I have recorded and analysed in Chapters 7-8, the general point being made was almost always the same, and could be expressed by a simple assertion such as ‘These floods have affected us disastrously!’ Yet each individual account of the flood was 32Compare Sacks, ‘An Analysis of the Course of a Joke’s Telling in Conversation’,
1974, p. 344, also quoted from at length in Chapter 8, page 330 of this book. 33See Furberg, Saying and Meaning, 1971, ‘Never say anything than cannot be expected to interest your addressee; and when you have started on a topic which interests him, don’t omit parts that are important to him.’ p. 93. 34In Speech Acts (1969) Searle allows himself some remarks on the interesting features of types of illocutionary acts in his classification of the felicity conditions for these acts, even though these features do not come under the heading of any specific felicity condition. I adopt the same procedure for my proposed conditions on story-telling.
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fashioned so as to demonstrate that it was intrinsically interesting in its own right and could not have been substituted by a simple assertion. It may be useful to recall here Searle’s insistence that fictional stories are a type of Assertion or Representative. Earlier in this chapter I’d entertained, and then rejected, the possibility that fictional stories could be analysed as pretended assertions. But there is an obvious sense in which factual stories, such as those in recorded flood disaster accounts, are not pretences. The crucial similarity between fictional and factual stories is that they are both stories and understood as such by Speakers and Hearers. Therefore, in dealing only with fictional discourse, my argument has been that Searle could be bypassing a central issue, which is whether to consider story-telling as an illocutionary act in its own right or not. Having now constructed a set of felicity conditions for stories, both fictional and factual, to be tested against data, I can at this point perhaps begin to offer some explanation for Searle’s keenness to maintain the divide between fictional and factual stories. Unlike Austin, who was ‘not content to restrict’35 himself to statements of an ‘ideal simplicity’36, Searle makes a strong claim that ‘the five basic kinds of illocutionary acts are: representatives (or assertive), directives, commissive, expressive and declarations’.37 But while the simplicity of this taxonomy has enormous appeal, it also commits Searle to analysing any more complex but intuitively recognizable speech act such as storytelling in terms of the five types of acts listed above. To analyse narrative as an illocutionary act would thus undermine the very premises on which Searle bases his classification of illocutionary acts. This is one of the primary reasons, among others that I detail briefly towards the end of this chapter, why classical speech act theory in the form that it has settled into today does not offer a suitable explanation of such phenomena as story-telling in conversation. Classical speech act theory has moved a long way, it seems, from an Austinian elucidation of ‘the total speech act in the total speech situation’. My attempt in this chapter to actually build felicity conditions for story-telling is partly meant to restore to speech act theory something of this original version of Austin’s. One other feature which may be worthy of comment about stories illocutionary acts is their direction of fit, which according to Searle is one of the most important ‘dimensions of difference between illocutionary 35Austin, ‘Performative Constative’, 1969, p. 22. 36Ibid., p. 22. 37Searle, ‘A Classification of Illocutionary Acts’, in Hymes (ed.), 1976, p. 1.
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acts’.38 ‘Fit’ could be taken to be in one direction in the case of fictional accounts and in another in the case of non-fictional or factual accounts. Thus, in a factual account words could be taken to conform to certain events and actions in the world but not in a fictional one. And it is here that one durable difference between fictional and factual stories could possibly be located. Searle states that ‘direction of fit is always a consequence of illocutionary point’.39 Nevertheless, he confesses that he is ‘unable to make it’ the basis of his taxonomy, presumably because there are cases where it is difficult to determine the direction of fit because it is ambiguous. Now, in the specific case of stories I have postulated that their illocutionary point is to sustain the interest of the H through a temporal succession of clauses, but this interest may be aroused and maintained under appropriate circumstances by either a fictional or a factual story since I hope to show that there are no other important differences between the two—the only difference being that the words of a factual story should plausibly correspond to the world, in order to sustain H’s interest in the story as a factual story, whereas in a fictional story there is no such overt requirement. An intuitive speculation is that the element of belief (B) alters according to the factual or fictional nature of the narrative. Hence, if the story is factual, the element of B must ideally = 1, whereas if the story is fictional, the element of B can be > 0. In other words the range of B in the case of any story could be represented as being between the ideal points of 0 and 1.40 Since the questions of cultural belief, memory and convention are explored at greater length in Chapters 4–8 of this book, however, I will not labour the point about degree of belief any more here, but go on to ‘test’ the conditions on story-telling I’ve just constructed against various examples, both felicitous and infelicitous, of oral narrative performance. The Preparatory Conditions for this act are illustrated with reference to actual examples from natural conversation; the Sincerity Conditions are illustrated with reference to hypothetical examples. I have chosen, however, not to illustrate the Propositional Content Condition at all, not only because it is not defined with regard to the interaction between Speaker and Hearer, but because it has in effect been discussed in detail in Chapter 1, in relation to Labov’s definition of basic narrative structure. The Propositional Content Condition suggested by me, in short, is little 38Searle, ‘A Classification of Illocutionary Acts’, p. 1. 39Ibid., p. 4. 40See Dennett, 1991, on the relationship between beliefs and the self as a centre of
narrative, pp. 452–55.
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different from Labov and Waletsky’s pioneering one. It might be illustrated by Forster’s41 brief but well-known example— The king died and then the queen died. (p1 t1) + (p2 t2) As shown in Chapter 1, such sequences of clauses separated by a ‘temporal juncture’ between them are sometimes not understood by participants in a conversation as conveying a narrative sequence, even though, taken in isolation, they would be considered a ‘story’. Thus the weakness of the propositional content condition as applicable to stories in conversation has already been exposed in Chapter 1. In terms of speech act theory, it could be said that utterances fully in accordance with the present Propositional Content Condition on stories may still be shown not to ‘count as’ the performance of the act of telling a story. Similarly, I do not consider it necessary to illustrate the Essential Condition since it is a ‘fail-safe’ rule. It simply states that a story is any utterance that counts as such for teller and hearer. Now consider illustrations of the Preparatory and Sincerity Conditions below: Checking Speech Act Conditions on Narrativity against Data i)
a
356
A
357
a A a A
361 362 363 364
a A
366 367
(—laughs) what about the doctor, guy. Jake was it. <> II YESx—358 II OOH I don’t KNOWx. 359 II we play SQUASHx 360 and—took me off to see Phaedra BRITANNICA that other NIGHTx— um? II WHICH was um? quite AMUSINGx— I don’t what’s that— II it’s ; :m?—an up’dated. RICHARD Harrison II PETER Harrison}x 365 II version of <>’s—E QUIVALENTx— oh yeah i II rib ?. oII riginally ‘done by EU RIPIDES<< or ‘somebody>>x. 368 II it’s !m? set in. the pre-Indian MUTINYx.
41E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 1974, p. 60. As a matter of interest, this example of Forster’s could well have derived from his Indian repertoire. Evidence for this comes via a very common Hindustani nursery rhyme that Forster is likely to have known. It goes ‘ek tha raja/ek tha rani/dono mar gae. khatam kahani’, meaning ‘there was a king and a queen/Both died and that’s the end of the story’. See also the ‘expansion’ of this Forsterian example as a ‘danger of death story’ in Chapter 5.
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a A A
369 370 370
a A a A
378 379 380 381
a
383
A
384
a A
388 389
a A
401 402 403 404
a A
406 407
a A
411 412
im? << im? << i:m? to II some EXTENTx>>—371 the II WIFEx 372 the II SONx—373 << 6 to 7 sylls>>. II KINGx. 374 II SHAHx . 365 II KINGx—376 well you II KNOWx 377 the British. viceroy—im?— II iku?x— what i? i? imperial India *you mean* *IIYESx* 382 IM II PERIAL ‘India’ just be’ fore << THENx>>— that’d be the. would it be the +viceroy then—yeah— yes+ +well it II OUGHT to be the VICEROYx 385 but I’m II sure that’s not what they CALLED himx + but 386 II ANYWAYx—387 II it was all rhyming COUPLETS BASICALLYx *oh yeah (—laughs)* *(—laughs)* and II some of them were .. REAL} GROANERSx II some of them were REALLY quite’ clever391 and the II rest you ‘just didn’t NOTICE’ you knowx—392 II it had. ii:?’ most—. II it was IN CREDIBLEx 393 II i. II I had cut OTx—394 II>x 395 II two of my brothers were sitting in the FLATx 396 when II I was IN VITED to itx 397 and II I de’cided it was time to find OUT a ‘bout it be’fore I WENTx—398 II ..m}x—399 they’d II brought a. Time OUTx—400 II i i:? WRITE-UP for it was. II absolutely ... utterly CON DEMNINGx— *(laughs)* *it was* II saying that you would sit THEREx youd be II yawning till you were bored STIFF andx. 405 it +was II really TERRIBLEx—+ +(—laughs) + so I IIMET ‘ Jake at the PUBx 408 and II I said OHx 409 << you II want to >> read THIS be’fore you GO <> to < x 410 * (—laughs) *(—laughs)* II all RIGHTx. 413 (. laughs)* so he Ii READ itx 414 and he II went into a PANIC and saidx. 415 II DAMMITx 416 II I’VE got the the TICKETSx 417 and the II other ‘couple’ coming are i :m?. going to meet us THEREx
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a,A A
418 419
a A
422 423
91
(—laugh) he II LOOKED at me and said x 420 I sup II pose we could ‘stand them’ UPx 421 (—laughs) *(—laughs)* * <
Example i) illustrates how the first of my preparatory conditions on story-telling works in relation to a conversational narrative: The Speaker has reason to believe that the sequence of clauses p ... pnwill interest the Hearer, resulting in one or more perlocutionary t ... tn effects upon the Hearer which the Hearer is bound to evaluate and/or articulate. Here, the story-teller A clearly has some initial reason to believe that her story will interest her hearer a, because it is this potential hearer who asks for the story (see a’s story—initiating query in line 356). But notice that the story is not told until line 407 (nearly 50 utterances later), and that all the intervening conversation is apparently not to do with ‘Jake’, the original subject of a’s curiosity, but with ‘Phaedra Britannica’, a second subject about which a requests information in line 363. What evidence is there then in this conversation that A has continued reason to believe that a will be interested in her story about Jake line 407, especially since she has already answered a’s question ‘what about the doctor guy?’, with ‘ooh, I don’t know, we play squash and—took me off to see Phaedra Britannica the other night?’ It is contextually relevant to note here that, earlier in the conversation, A and a have been discussing A’s ‘boyfriends’, hence a’s question has to be construed as ‘What is Jake’s standing as a boyfriend?’ Doubt is the dominant note that sounds in A’s reply to this implied question; she is not sure whether the activities she shares with Jake, playing squash and going to see ‘Phaedra’, constitute amorous interest. This is the small knot, the puzzle at the centre of narrative, that A and a must jointly unravel. Are the activities of seeing a play and playing squash together (one notices the subconscious wordplay) evidence of Jake’s ‘interest’ in A? The rather thin notion of ‘interest’ which sustains the first of my preparatory conditions on stories needs to be textured and strengthened at this juncture with a close reading of the ‘text’. There are several kinds of ‘interest’ that criss-cross in A’s narrative. To begin with, there is the hearer a’s overt interest in A’s relationship with Jake; then there is Jake’s interest in A, and A’s interest in Jake, which set of interests may not be symmetrical; and then there is our (the reader’s and my own) interest as analysts in this narrative about the interest which a story about romantic interest holds.
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Each of these ‘interests’ emerges from the apparently ragged performativity of a conversation full of pauses, repetitions, selfcorrections, topic change, and so on. Indeed, preamble and interruption take up most of the narrative space. The startling revelation is that it is in these tiny eddying whirlpools that the energy of the narrative is to be found—they give the story its sophistication and—yes, interest. For example, Jake and A play squash together (a habitual activity) and have seen a play together (a less frequent event). From this set of just two facts, A’s narrative, like most narratives, selects the rarer moment for its ‘tellability’—seeing a play together. Much then depends on the play ‘the play’s the thing, to catch the conscience’, to truncate slightly Hamlet’s famous utterance. Note just how complicated an understanding of plays and performance we need in order to appreciate a simple conversational narrative like A’s. We need to know about audiences and critics (see A’s references to the negative review of Phaedra in Time Out, line 400–5), about the influence of critics on potential audiences (the first time we see Jake in action is when he is galvanised by A’s reading a review of Phaedra out to him), and we need, importantly, to know that watching and evaluating a performance intricately and deeply parallels the process of hearing and evaluating a story. Speech act theory privileges first person speech—the narrative ‘I’, the primary Dennettian ‘self’. Fortunately, as I’ve said, this is the mode of telling most frequently found in conversational narratives. An analysis of this sort is thus concerned about the narrative processes by which that teller’s ‘I’ is transformed into an interpellated ‘self’, an actor who holds the interest of her conversational audience, her listener. It is here that the notion of ‘witnessing’42 a stage performance comes into its own in this particular conversation. At a faraway vanishing point is Phaedra—the play itself. And we have a problem instantaneously. It is this: the potential recipient of A’s story does not know Phaedra (see in line 363). To properly share the task of evaluating the narrative, it is important that she has an account of Phaedra; but A, the teller of the tale, is not too clear about the genesis of Phaedra herself, just as she is not too certain about the status of her relationship with Jake. Given the movement of conversation, therefore, what she sees (or does not see) in the play is arguably connected to what she sees or does not see in Jake. The performance A and Jake saw together was an adaptation, set in 42Recent literary theory has focused on ‘witnessing’, especially with respect to ‘true stories’. I return to this matter in Chapters 7 and 8 where first person disaster narratives are discussed at length.
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British India, of the original Phaedra, Racine’s rewriting of Euripides’ Hippolytus. A mentions, in that order, and with the stunning ambiguity so typical of conversational interchanges, first the players ‘Richard Harrison—Peter Harrison’ (which one? or both?), the ‘Euripides or somebody’, and finally ‘Racine’s equivalent’ (lines 364–7). She also tells her interlocutor early on that the play ‘was quite amusing’ (line 362), and later that ‘it was in rhyming couplets basically’, some of which were ‘real groaners’, some ‘really quite clever’, ‘and some you just didn’t notice’ (lines 389–91). From this medley of fact, semi-facts and reactions, her listener, who frankly confesses her ignorance of Phaedra, has the not-so-simple task of extracting the not-so-pure ‘truth’. What do A and Jake see when they see Phaedra, which disturbing fiction is sealed at the core of A’s matterof-fact narrative? I use the word ‘sealed’ here advisedly. There is only one slightly incoherent clue to the plot of Phaedra in the entire conversation, and it is unrecoverable by anyone who does not already know the plot of Phaedra (a, of course, does not; had she done so, it is quite conceivable that the conversation would have gone in a different direction!). In the event, however, two brief consecutive noun phrases ‘the wife the son’ is all we get from A (lines 371–2) as elliptical references to the devastating story of Phaedra—a woman consumed with illicit love for her stepson, whose death she is ultimately unable to prevent. This theme of unfulfilled, questing, desire never surfaces in the entire conversation. Yet, in the end, the subject of A and a’s conversation is also sexuality— specifically, the chronic ambiguity of the sexual gesture. What exactly is Jake doing when he invites A to see a play with him that goes beyond a simple speech act analysis of the illocutionary act of ‘inviting’? Much of the challenge of telling face-to-face first person stories about one’s own experiences lies in protecting43 those aspects of the ‘self’ which are vulnerable, such as one’s hopes and desires vis-à-vis other human beings, from too close a scrutiny by one’s interlocutor, while at the same time being ‘frank’, i.e., in speech act language, fulfilling the ‘sincerity condition’. Conversely, the ‘interest’ which many conversational narratives hold for listeners resides in their being able to recover that information necessary for a satisfactory interpretation which a teller may have deliberately or otherwise placed out of bounds. The interpretation of narrative thus problematizes any simple acceptance of Searle’s Principle of Expressibility, which says, roughly, that anything which can be meant can be expressed. Perhaps this is so, but for ‘maximally effective’ communication in narrative, which routinely requires tellers to attend 43See also Chapters 5–8 on the issue of ‘narrative fragility’.
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to a double goal of self revelation and self concealment, it would seem to be self-defeating to ‘tell all’. In the present instance, therefore, it may not be too far-fetched to argue that A is ‘suppressing’, quite likely unknown to herself, the sexual dimension of the drama of Phaedra. This substantive exclusion in favour of a light-hearted description of the ‘form’ of the play, ‘tells’ her hearer that in A’s own implicit estimate, the interest that she and Jake have in each other is not (yet) ‘serious’. Note that most of a’s highly appropriate evaluations consist of laughs (lines 388, 402, 406, 411, 418, 422); our evidence that these responses are ‘appropriate’ come from the fact that A also laughs through much of her telling, often in response to a’s laughter as recipient (see lines 409–13, for example). Significantly, the only place where A, as teller, sounds confused and unfunny is when she makes her abortive attempt to give her listener some idea of Phaedra’s ancient plot in its modern version. By weaving the story of her personal relationship with Jake around the story of their going to see a public performance, A has chosen a sophisticated narrative strategy, which ends up reversing the old private– public/fact–fiction divisions. For, private matters like the realities of sexual attraction are freely put on show in the staged world of Phaedra, while such topics are clearly taboo in A’s factual narrative of ‘personal’ affairs. Indeed, A’s frothy narrative is almost fictive in its presumption that, unlike Phaedra, the story in which she and Jake are involved is both open ended and innocent of ‘desire’; all chances of the brutal sexual closure that is enacted in Phaedra, are charmingly and skilfully warded off in her own account. Speaking of skilled narrative design, an interesting feature of A’s story is that it begins with the canonical end of the narrative. Consider the following sequence in terms of Labovian categories: At the start, A says that Jake ‘took me off to see Phaedra Britannica the other night’. A then describes the play in performance; Moves right back to the invitation from Jake to see the play; Mentions her checking on the review of the play; Records Jake’s consternation;
line 360—Resolution
lines 364–91—Extension of Resolution/Internal Evaluation line 396—Orientation line 407–10—Complicating Action line 413–20 continued
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And finally, reports on her own decision to go to the play after all (‘I said nah, let’s go and see it’)
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lines 423–4, Coda—taking the action back to the beginning.
As a ‘method of recapitulating past experience’, to use Labov’s famous phrase, oral narrative is shockingly complex. Not even in the simplest and most casual of narratives can listeners assume a linearity of recollection. As in the present case, a speaker often moves back and forth, varying the temporal structure of her narrative as well as the internal relationships amongst the units of her narrative. This structural flexibility makes the task of the hearer, which is to adequately evaluate the narrative, even more difficult; and yet, because every narrative introduces, through such mnemonic juggling, a certain distance between the events described and their retelling, the hearer can always be challenged and excited by her interpretive role. All narratives, not just the detective story, present hearers with a mystery to be resolved, and in most first person narratives that mystery is locked in the space between the experience of events and their subsequent narration, where the teller’s self-image is to be found. Narrative is a form which encourages reflexivity, certainly on the part of the teller, and usually on the part of the listener. From this comes its central interest. So, A’s narrative creates for herself—and by extension, her listener—an easygoing, non neurotic, sensible personality with a sense of humour. Whatever her deep-seated fears, this is the primary impression created by her narrative. When her listener responds to her, always with laughter, it is to this ‘intentional stance’ created by A’s narrative that she is reacting, with the ‘right’ sort of interest. The keyword ‘interest’ in the first Preparatory Condition that I’ve suggested for narrative is, in fact, interesting because of its very nebulousness. The loving detail of my discussion above was intended to make a start at fleshing out this nonce word. A hearer’s interest in a story, it seems to me, is not indicated simply by the fact that she articulates a perlocutionary effect upon herself when she laughs along. Even a cursory ‘reading’ of A’s oral narrative shows, on the contrary, the ramifications of a speaker’s ‘creation’ of interest go far beyond such a minimal and obvious perlocutionary range. If narrative has to be thought of as a speech act, then I think it is useful to conceptualize every teller of a tale as an ‘actor’; someone with an actor’s reflexive ability to present things so that her ‘audience’ appreciates her ‘point of view’, and can share her subjectivity. That, in
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fact, is one analytic reason why it is impossible to ignore the connections between A’s narrative and the play Phaedra. Narrative in conversation is always a spectator sport, where the speaker must show awareness of being watched, heard, and assessed. In a first person telling, the speaker has to control the structure and theme of her narrative so as to construct a plausible personality for herself and the other ‘characters’ in her story. It is the intentionality of this narrative ‘I’, reflexively displayed, that I’ve argued constitutes the immediate focus of a hearer’s interest because appropriate narrative ‘uptake’ depends on her sufficiently understanding the speaker’s ‘motives’, which in the case of narrative have always to be partially hidden until the moment of closure, the signalling of a coda. Otherwise, there could be no compelling narrative movement. It is for this reason that we cannot dismiss what seem to be ‘red herrings’ in a narrative, and simply cast our rods straight to land a catch. In A’s telling, for example, her hearer has to be attentive to all the recondite complications of Phaedra Britannicus that A describes, because this is the only information A offers as an answer to ‘what about the doctor guy Jake?’ The narrative about going to see Phaedra with Jake, far from being a non sequitur, is all the evidence a gets in the entire conversation about A’s relationship with Jake, and her listener’s ingenuity has then to extricate from this diverting story the answer to her original question. Neither she, nor we as analysts, can therefore afford to dismiss the slightest ‘clue’ that A provides, not even, for example, her subconscious association of the ‘rhyming couplets’ that are in Phaedra with Jake’s mention of the ‘other couple’ going with them to the performance of Phaedra (line 417). As I’ve insisted before, it’s this deliberate opacity, this quality of obliqueness characteristic of face-to-face narratives, and indeed all ‘successful’ story-telling, that seems in the end to ground the otherwise innocuous idea of narrative ‘interest’. A close look at an everyday sample of conversation therefore seems to go some way towards establishing that story-tellers do have reasons to believe that their stories will interest hearers. These reasons are provided by the teller’s and listener’s own construction of ‘contexts’ for the stories to be exchanged. Thus, in Chapter 6, I examine what the conversational analyst Gail Jefferson calls the ‘local occasioning’ of stories—that is, the relationship of stories to prior turns in talk. In conversation, storytellers most often recount stories which, even if not specifically ‘asked for’ by hearers have been shown to be of potential interest in previous turns. Even when stories are placed at the beginning of conversations as in the dramatic example (ii) below, note that it is the hearers’ responses
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to the announcement ‘Oh we’ve just been chased by a lorry! hhh’ before the telling of story that enables the prospective story-teller to ascertain that her story will indeed interest her hearers. ii. S P B S P B P B P
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
S
11
Hello Hello Oh we’ve just been chased by a lorry! hhh Oh a ... Goodness!} What happened was Up the road?} while it was coming up we couldn’t get out of the way we had to run up like mad to get in the gateway hhh Oh! Heavens! had to run up like mad to get in gateway hhh They go up fast those cars, don’t they
Example ii) is an unpretentious instance of the ‘danger-of-death’ story, to use a Labovian phrase again. Unlike A’s story in i), there is little room here for reflexive distancing of the narrative ‘I’, since the teller is recalling an event that has ‘just’ taken place. The interest of the narrative derives not from the relaxed presentation of a personal ‘puzzle’ but from its unselfconsciously dramatic immediacy. The impact of the event on the speaker, the ‘jolt’ that she has received, is signalled in many ways, but first and foremost through her breaking of the conventional conversational code. B’s announcement in line 3 is highly marked because it stands instead of the ‘hello’ which B ought to return to S and P’s greetings in lines 1 and 2 respectively. The norms of politeness in the cultural context of this conversation44 decree that greetings are, ceteris paribus, met with greetings. A violation of this strict turn-taking procedure means that a speaker is running the risk of being thought ‘rude’ by her listeners. However, in certain circumstances, speakers can expect that risk to be minimal. That B has placed her danger-of-death story announcement in a greeting ‘slot’ is a clear indication of her belief that this somewhat unusual procedure is warranted by the interest which that announcement will arouse in her hearers, offsetting the possible charge of anti-social behaviour. Even so—and this is the fascinating thing—it is only when this interest is appropriately shown by S and P’s utterances in lines 4 44See Brown, P. and Levinson, L., 1987 [1978], on politeness conventions across cultures.
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and 5 that B begins the story in line 6. From which we gather that it does appear to be some sort of ‘preparatory’ requirement in natural conversation that prospective story-tellers not only must have reason to believe that their stories will interest hearers but must also try to make sure this belief is justified before they actually get on with their stories. What constitutes an appropriate ‘uptake’ or show of interest in a narrative? According to my first Preparatory Condition, it is the articulation of perlocutionary effects by hearers. However, the ‘type’ of story told is obviously a key variable. In example i), A’s story about going to Phaedra with Jake was met with laughter in several turns by her listener; this was entirely appropriate, given not so much the subject matter but the ironic, distanced manner of A’s narrative. Laughter, in contrast, would simply not do as a response to B’s story in the present conversation. Despite B’s (nervous?) ‘hhh’ in line 3, her listeners do not take this as cueing a ‘funny story’. There is some humorous potential here which the teller seems to recognize, in ‘being chased by a lorry’ (line 3), because as in a children’s story, an inanimate object is suddenly invested with life and intentionality. Nevertheless, it would be very ‘risky’ for the listeners P and S to react with laughter before they have heard B out, much more risky that B’s placing her story announcement where a greeting was due. This is because a danger-of-death story in the first person, however badly told, is intimately connected with the narrator’s ‘self’. Failure to be ‘serious’ when a danger-of-death story is in the offing can be discourteous in the highest degree since the teller is at her most exposed and vulnerable at this point; physically, at least, she has been defenceless. In confiding her experience to her hearers, she relives this threat of self-annihilation; and her narrative constitutes an invitation to them to share her subjectivity. Such a narrative context forces hearers to treat a teller’s endangerment virtually as their own and, on the whole, precludes as inappropriate most reactions other than those as high-pitched as the story itself. So P (line 7) responds to B’s story with ‘Goodness!’ and again ‘Oh! Heavens’! (line 10), while S produces one half-finished utterance, presumably indicative of the shock she has had (‘Oh a ...’ line 4), and later a portentous generalization (‘They go up fast those cars, don’t they?’). In Chapter 6, I examine the complex role that generalizations play in story-telling, but our current focus is on the ‘evaluative function’ of perlocutions. Exclamations are prime perlocutions. They assure the teller that her hearers believe her story is as ‘tellable’ she believes it is, and they indicate the high levels of interest that a danger-of-death narrative requires,
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without interrupting the ‘flow’ of the narrative, as, for example, questions or comments might do. For this kind of narrative, then, they are among the most preferred of perlocutionary responses. More lengthy reactions, such as S’s generalizations, are more suitably placed at the end of the narration to round it off, accomplishing the return to ‘coda’. One of the moves that is not just unsuitable but seems, on the whole, forbidden to hearers of a first person danger-of-death story is to refuse to listen to it. Fortunately for listeners, this rule is less rigidly observed when a narrative is not in the first person, nor records a life-threatening situation. Although such behaviour may still be considered rude, there are cases on record when a hearer indicates to a potential teller that the proffered story is not of overwhelming interest. If a hearer does inform a listener that her story is likely to be uninteresting, a violation of my preparatory condition—‘S has reason to believe that her story will interest H’—is on the cards. The likelihood of Austinian ‘abuse’ arises here in a fashion generally similar to the way in which failure to fulfil a promise is abuse. For, if S embarks on a story knowing that it has no interest for H, she is going to bore H, which under speech act conditions of the Searlean type is as much an ‘abuse’ of conversational trust as not believing in the truth of his assertions an ‘abuse’ by the speaker of an assertion. This analysis, however, tells us little about what happens in conversations where a story-teller ‘abuses’ my preparatory condition. Example iii) from Sacks (1969) below comes from a much-discussed corpus. iii. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Ken
:
You wanna hear much—eh my sister told me a story last night.
Roger : Al :
I don’t wanna hear it. But if you must, What’s purple an island. Grape Britain. That’s what is sis//ter— No. To stun me she says ... [+ 24 intervening turns] Then: hh hh//hhh So, first of all, that night, they’re—i [+ STORY]
Ken
:
31. Al 32. Ken
: :
Here, Roger’s utterance 3 is unambiguous. He does not want to hear Ken’s story. His disclaimer may be accompanied by a grudging permission, but it is at least overtly the case that Ken has ‘abused’ my preparatory condition by insisting on telling a story which Roger has declared he is not interested in hearing. Given shared prior beliefs about each person’s privileged access to his/her own desires, beliefs and intentions—in short,
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subjectivity—Ken can have little reason to believe that his story will interest Roger when Roger has himself denied such an interest. What prompts him then to go on to tell the story 24 or more turns later? Analysis in terms of my Preparatory Condition does not provide an answer, though this is a clear case of ‘abuse’. All Preparatory Conditions do is to suggest that ‘abuses’ mark unhappy or infelicitous performances of speech acts, but they do not allow us to explore the motives that speakers might have in deliberately choosing to perform a speech act infelicitously. Why, and when, for example, do speakers break the felicity condition of belief in their own assertions so as to produce a lie, an insinuation or a fictional story? And how can these various ‘abuses’ be differentiated from each other if they are all uniformly analysed as ‘pretended assertions’? These are questions related to the large rag-bag of ‘indirect speech acts’ for which current versions of speech act theory have a label but little or no explanation. Any attempt to resolve the problem of speakers’ and hearers’ access to indirect meanings must involve us in the painstaking endeavour of considering not just isolated individual speech acts such as greetings, promises and assertions, but the nested contexts in which they occur. One such ‘nest’ for any individual speech act is the conversation within which it is placed. Another much larger nest could be the sets of cultural and normative beliefs that speaker/hearers bring to the telling of a story or any other speech act. The logic of my argument concerning interpretative ‘nests’ for indirect speech acts runs like this: if speakers manage to convey ‘more’ meaning to their hearers than that entailed by the literal meaning45 of the words, this additional meaning must come from somewhere. Since it doesn’t derive from the words themselves, it is economical to suppose it is garnered from the close(d) contexts in which the words are situated, that is, conversations; and from the beliefs that speaker/hearers bring to bear on those contexts, that is, sociocultural presumptions or norms. Naturally, a problem for any hearer, as I’ve contended earlier, is to exclude hundreds of ‘irrelevant’ beliefs when they compute meaning implicatures; but obviously, too, hearers do have rules of thumb that enable them, most of the time, to arrive at the correct implied meaning(s) in a matter of milli-seconds. 45The idea of ‘literal’ or conventional meaning versus conversational or ‘implied’ meaning is presented by Paul Grice in his seminal essay ‘Logic and Conversation’, 1975, and is crucial to the discussion in Chapters 3 and 4.
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Its concentration on specific speech acts being felicitously performed, I argue, currently corners the speech act theory into the unnecessarily restrictive practice of what might be called ‘speech act gerrymandering’. Cutting up conversational territory so that each one of the five ‘basic’ type speech acts gets its own constituency means: a) that indirect meanings only arise when some basic speech act is being infelicitously performed, and b) that certain kinds of indirect meaning attach specifically to certain kinds of basic speech act. So, for example, according to Searle, lies and fiction share the same ‘logical status’—they are both instances of unhappily performed assertions. But, as Grice shows (see Chapter 4), there may be more general conditions for conversational ‘happiness’ or felicity, which govern the recovery of indirect meanings without requiring that all the weight of this recovery be borne by some singularly constituted act of speech. Relying on this more relaxed and less constrained Gricean analysis of goings-on in speech, I consider in Chapters 4–5 certain strategies used by hearers to gather ‘indirect’ meanings from stories. And in Chapter 6, I explore other angles on the precise difficulties posed by telling a ‘boring’ story in conversation for the participants of that conversation. In the examples below I move on to explore violations of my second Preparatory Condition which states: S and H both understand that the story forms a composite unit. Once S has begun a story she must complete it, and it is incumbent upon H to let her finish it. Any story which ends abruptly in mid-sequence must be counted abortive. I do not have any examples here where a story-teller actually breaks off mid-story, but conversational exchanges like the one below are very common. iv. A
380
b. A
387 388
II and that was That x 381 I Wendy and I were ‘there— 382 and there was NO TROUBLE 383 and I then— 384 II NOWx. 385 I II don’t think ‘Wendy knows this part of the STORYx ... 386 II just too FRIGHTENING—MAKINGx go on —! ... the II Inspectorx 389 the II DIx. 390 the II district in spector of the Royal Ulster CONSTABULARYX—391 was II one of the cleverest Detective boys that they HADx i & etc.
In example iv), yet another narrative about danger and fear, the storyteller A pauses briefly and quite naturally at the end of a tone group (line
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386) but b immediately urges him to proceed (line 387). This quick response seems traceable to A’s leading utterance ‘and that was that’ (line 380) which gives his listener some reason to believe that A might now stop since one part of A’s story is evidently over and a new section has yet to be embarked on (see line 385 ‘I don’t think Wendy knows this part of the story’). Just as the interpretation of A’s story in example i) requires complex world knowledge of plays and performances, so in this conversation, the theoretical knowledge that stories come in an assemblage of ‘parts’ is assumed by both the story-teller and his hearer in this conversation. Furthermore, awareness of the ‘then’ and ‘now’ (see lines 383–4) relations between these story parts is explicitly shown by the narrator. Finally, both narrator and listener appear attentive to the constraint imposed by my second Preparatory Condition—a story can only be ‘closed’ when its composition is normatively judged complete. Implicitly, this last requirement, if it could be shown to be consistently acknowledged by speaker/hearers, as in the present case, would count as strong evidence that a story is not just a string of assertions, but some more holistically comprehended speech act, with its own distinctive internal organization. For ‘external’ justification of such putative organization, notice A’s long pause in line 388. There is a well-attested tendency among conversationalists to minimize ‘gaps’ like this (see the Sacks-SchegloffJefferson inventory of turn-taking rules in Chapter 5). During the process of story-telling, however, A can afford to pause a very long time in his attempt to recall details of the story, without being hurried (e.g. lines 381, 388, 391). Behaviour of this sort would seem to follow naturally from the norm imposed by my second Preparatory Condition—once having begun a story, it is incumbent upon the narrator to finish it, and it is incumbent upon the hearer to allow it to be finished. A strict violation of my second Preparatory Condition therefore seems almost impossile in casual talk. In this conversation, not only does the hearer let him continue, she urges him to, indicating her continued ‘interest’ in the narrative, thus also falling in with my first Preparatory Condition. I now continue my explication of the second Preparatory Condition with a fuller extract from the same conversation as the one above. v) b A
565 566
570
how long were you there, in fact, I know for *some time* *II I’m just* trying to THINKx 567 I would. II I would GUESS a boutx—568 <<well>> we were II there in FORTYx—Graham was born in FORTY–TWOx we II MUST have been <>x 571 !in m m? II ... MORE than } two YEARs
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b A
572 573
b A b
576 577 578
A
579
584
b A b A b A
588 589 590 591 592 593 594 596 599
b
603 605
A b A
606 607 608
103
!m? II I THINKx—574 but you’re II making me ‘think’ of ANOTHER STORYx 575 which II I’ve just !trai?. II just let me try and remember THISx (—coughs) II am I boring youx no indeed very much go on * >> not a bit—interesting ...* *! ?II Just a MOMENTx 580 I. II that ‘story I’ve just* ‘gave GIVEN’ youx 581 has II made me ‘think of ANOTHER’ onex—582 now II what WAS itx—583 II SORRYx— my II memory’s a ‘LITTLE ‘bit—and YOU SOMETIMESx—585 but II this is at least what—thirty YEARS AGOx 566 II ISN’T itx. 587 *<<2 sylls>>* never mind you are doing *very* well !? it’ll come ! ?—I II think it’s a slightly FUNNIER storyx (—pause about 15 secs) !m? II no I/m SORRYx 595 it’s II not <<2 to 4 sylls>>— NOx—. II funny THINGSx 597 the II BRAINx 598 ISN’T itx. it II sort of ACTIVATESx 600 you II start start !SA? some some train of though GOINGx. 601 and II it will II it will play its little RECORDx 602 and II there you AREx— * II YESx. 604 II YESx* never mind the brain seems *to be doing all right*— well then what happened after that because I remember Graham coming to live with us when he was quite a baby—at Enton II YESx that must have been when you went off II I went OFF THEN—609 ! ?—II I went off from THERE—610 II straight to North WALESx ![+ STORY?]
Several of the narrator’s comments in this story are about the role memory and ‘the brain’ play in narration, and I will return to both theme and example in Chapter 5 of this book. For the moment, I only need emphasize that reconstruction of a ‘tellable’ requires the parts of the ‘composite unit’ that is a narrative to be recovered sequentially. Even if presentation is not sequential (as in example i), information about the temporal
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ordering of events must be strongly implied by the narrative, so that, among other imperatives, hearers can get on with the task of processing the incoming narrative information in order to anticipate the ‘end’ of the story. Of course, hearers’ guesswork here depends on a paradigm where every story has a resolution, or at least a ‘coda’, a point of closure where what T.S. Eliot called ‘the pastness of the past’ is reaffirmed. In addition, ‘real life’ factual narratives like the present one require a hearer’s conjectures about the shape of a story and its end to rely heavily on the presumption that the teller first has a sequence of past events which he believes is ‘tellable’, in other words, a ‘story’, in mind. Now this is exactly the precondition that the potential narrator in v) thinks he is failing to meet, and until he is able to recover his story from the realm of the ‘forgotten’, he is open to ‘attack’ from the hearer; his first person self in the story is vulnerable, fragile (see Chapters 5 and 6 for an extended discussion of the ‘fragility’ of stories along these lines). In lines 574–7, for example, A shows his sensitivity to these factors— ‘but you’re making me think of another story, which I’ve just ... trai just let me try to remember this (his listener ‘b’ coughs) am I boring you?’. If A cannot remember his story, he not only runs the risk of losing face46 by boring b, he does not have a story to tell at all, which violates what seems to be a existential presupposition on the act of story-telling. One cannot felicitously order a hearer to ‘pass the salt’ when there is no salt on the table; similarly it appears one cannot (offer to) tell one’s hearers a story when what one has in mind is the memory of a story rather than that composite temporal sequence remembered (compare the case where one asks for the salt, thinking that there is salt on the table; if there is no salt on the table, this speech act is infelicitous, regardless of a speaker’s sincere belief that there is salt to be asked for). Thinking of a story is not enough, by my Second Preparatory Condition: a story has to be delivered once it is announced. This particular example shows that even announcing a story, let alone beginning it, places a teller under a strong narrative obligation. In line 594, for example, A actually apologizes for not being able to come up with his story. Moreover, b holds him to his commitment to tell a story in line 605, even though this was not the story A had ‘in mind’. If a story-teller is in the process of telling a story, the hearer equally may not interrupt except to show interest in or understanding of the story itself, in which connection I’ve drawn attention to the long pauses that are tolerated during A’s narration. Should a hearer so interrupt, a teller 46See Brown and Levinson again on ‘face-loss’ in different cultural contexts.
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can insist on his right to continue with statements like ‘I haven’t finished’ or even ‘Don’t interrupt!’ The ways in which stories turn out to be abortive in conversation, however, often consist much less obviously in the violations of a Preparatory Condition. Consider another example— vi) a A
199 200
a B
205 206
A
208
B a A
211 212 123 215
*what’s happ*ened to your finger well II I’ve TOLD a ‘lot of’ peoplex 201 that I II dropped an Anglo-Saxon CROSS on itx 202 but II what I ACTUALLY DIDx 203 was II SLAM itx 204 in a II car DOORx (laughs—*—*) *II AGO’NIZING* THATx 207 **<< II car ‘doors are ALWAYS a problem x>>** **yes it’s II HORRIBLE ACTUALLYx**—209 II YESx 210 II HORRIBLEx II <>x !m?] II NOx 214 we*II had a* *when II I* worked ‘on the RAILWAYSx 216 these II many YEARS ‘a’ gox 217 I was. II working in the CLAIMS de partmentx. 218 at Pre II tona STATION WARINGTONx 217 as II OFFICE boyx ![& STORY?]
Although vi) is a relatively short extract, it has four conversationalists, two story-tellers, and the beginnings of two stories, one of which is left bafflingly incomplete. In lines 200–4, A offers what looks like a jokey story-preface in response to a’s direct question in line 199. The sympathetic attention which this ‘story-preface’ or ‘story announcement’ (these terms will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6) receives from his hearers in lines 205–11, seems to encourage A to begin to tell his story ‘properly’. In lines 213–14, he begins ‘No, we had a ...’, but then C, who has not uttered a word in the conversation up to this point, suddenly cuts in, and begins to tell his own story instead (line 215 onwards). Now, A’s incomplete attempts at story-telling could plausibly be accounted a failure to fulfil the Preparatory Condition which stipulates that a story once begun must be completed by the teller, yet this observation is unenlightening about the interesting feature that a story does in fact get told but not by the original teller. Nor does this sort of condition offer any explanation as to why C interrupts A’s narration with an unsolicited tale, which he has no evidence will interest the other conversationalists, and yet gets to tell his story. So, while there
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appears to be a very strong constraint in the examples I’ve examined that some story must get told once a place has been made for it within a conversation, the examples show equally that the story told may not be the one originally intended by the teller (see A’s story in v) for instance), and the teller of the story that does get told may be different from the teller of the story who originally embarked on a story (see C’s story in vi)). The preparatory conditions which I have constructed for story-telling as an illocutionary act have very little insight to offer into these facts about the reception of narrative when it ‘misfires’, or is ‘abused’, or rendered ‘null’, as is so frequently the case in our everyday interactions. Using a speech act grid might tell us that an infelicitous act of narration has occurred, but it does not tell us anything about the why and how of such an act. For a theory which holds the ‘intentionality’ of speakers and hearers central to the analysis of ‘action’, this seems to be a step in the direction of failure. Before I consider any routes to recovery, however, I must briefly discuss the third and last of my Preparatory Conditions on Narrative, which is that: It should not be obvious to either S or H that H already knows the story. Chapter 1 of this book has already focused on the attention conversationalists pay to this condition. Examples, c), d) and e) in that chapter seem to indicate that both story-tellers and listeners see this as a binding condition. In e), for instance, A announces the subject of her story and follows this by ‘did I tell you about that?’; and in examples c) and d) listeners make it clear in lines 577 and 645 respectively that they already know what the prospective teller has to tell them, hence the story is redundant. In Chapters 4–8, I look at more complex examples of storytelling where tellers manage to meet this important constraint, while at the same time presenting their hearers with evidence for a general truth which they can be sure the hearers know. The strategy of implying a ‘truth’ generally acknowledged by the community (such as in vi) above (‘Car doors are always a problem’), which it is up to listeners to infer, confers a triple advantage on the story-teller. Her narrative conveys ‘new knowledge’ which, presumably, makes it more interesting for listeners, and it confirms mutual, shared ‘old’ beliefs, which presumably makes it more plausible to listeners. In addition, listeners get a chance to participatively ‘mould’ the story by articulating those inferences which seem to them the most appropriate and exciting to draw from it. The disaster narratives I discuss in Chapters 7 and 8 demonstrate another set of means by which tellers contrive with consummate skill to meet the condition that you do not tell people what it is obvious they know, for example that ‘floods are terrible disasters’ in a situation which
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limits conversation to just one topic, namely, that ‘floods are terrible disasters’. One of the most frequent ways in which this conundrum is solved is by avoiding generalizations altogether, and concentrating instead on details, which tellers can be sure are unknown to their hearers. This strategy cleverly leaves it to the hearers to suggest the ‘correct’ generalization. Since these ramifications of my third Preparatory Condition are considered at some length in the chapters mentioned, I will not multiply examples at this stage to show that tellers and listeners conform to the condition. When violations of this Preparatory Condition occur in conversation, it is often the case in the narrative I’ve studied that more than one listener is present and the story is specially addressed to the listener who has not heard the story, even though the listener who has heard the story may object, as a does in line 645 of example d) in Chapter 1. Here, a’s line 651 ‘I never heard anything about this’ allows C to go on with the story in line 652, despite a’s earlier objection. Again, a speech act Preparatory Condition which requires that storytellers should not tell stories which it is obvious to them that listeners know, does not explain at all why listeners should so readily agree to the telling of a story they know and make obvious they do know. There is an ‘abuse’ of a Preparatory Condition here, yet no ‘misfire’, judging by listeners’ responses. As I shall show in Chapters 4–6, the apparent disregard for flagrant abuses of the conditions supposed to be binding on a particular kind of act may be explained by a model like the Griceancum-Lewisian one, where listeners have certain expectations in terms of the conventional regularities which they associate with the performance of a particular activity in conversation. When these expectations are not met, they make certain inferences about the purpose of the act in question, which then carries the conversation ‘forward’. In other words, the purposes which a narrative fulfils can vary at consecutive stages in a conversation, affecting the calculation of inferences from the narrative at any given time. The constant dovetailing of speakers and hearers’ conversational intentions is what makes for judgements of ‘felicitous’ or ‘infelicitous’ narratives at different stages in a conversation. To understand narrative ‘violations’, it is not enough to operate with an abstract set of felicity conditions which we assume speaker/hearers carry in their heads, even if the constraints these conditions impose are reasonably binding. One also needs to refer to other ‘steps’ in a conversation in order to arrive at speakers’ and ‘hearers’ rationale for perpetuating particular narrative violations. If not quite unnecessary, the present set of Preparatory Conditions on story-telling are certainly insufficient to capture all these
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nuanced motives that conversationalists have in tolerating, encouraging and perpetrating the ‘infelicitous’ play of narrative. Of all the felicity conditions on narrative, perhaps the one which specifies ‘sincerity’ relates most obviously to the intentionality of the teller. The Sincerity Condition I have placed on the act of story-telling is that: S should want to tell her story and should desire it to be evaluated by H as a ‘tellable’ which effects appropriate perlocutions. As it happens, I have not come across recorded examples where a teller actually expresses unwillingness to tell a story, but we can all ‘recall’ such instances. Given this curious lacuna in my sources, the following hypothetical examples are the best I can come up with: vii) A viii) B A B A ix) A
I don’t want to tell you this but I’ve just lost my wallet ... [+ story?] Tell us about your interview I don’t want to talk about it! Go on I’d rather not. We had to get up at six in the morning and do our own washing and then breakfast was at—I don’t know why I’m telling you all this—it’s so boring—I’d rather not tell you, but anyway we ... [+ story?]
In conversation, an utterance like A’s in vii) might generate the implicature that A thinks it will be distressing to her listener to hear about the loss of her wallet. This implicature would obviously be the result of something like a sincerity condition being violated because A explicitly tells her hearer that she does not want to tell him about her lost wallet. Is the story annulled by this framing statement, does it misfire, or is its essence in some way abused by such an overt disdain for a felicity condition? My own intuition is that the concepts of nullity, misfire and abuse do not quite apply here. This seems to be because narrative as a speech act has the kind of capacious and flexible structure that typically allows for the generation of multiple meaning implicatures as it proceeds. Listeners are paradoxically prepared for the unexpected, as it were, in the telling of a story. Furthermore, this tolerance of the unexpected, which one might call an implicit recognition of the ‘jolt’ factor, does not merely extend to the ‘events’ in the story, but also includes the expectation that the norms of story-telling—i.e. its felicity conditions—might be contravened by a narrator. Coleridge’s famous phrase ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’, in this interpretation, would apply to hearers’ strategies when confronted with
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a possible violation of a felicity condition. As Derrida suggests, language may be so designed as to permit endless ‘deferrals’ of meaning. Nowhere, it seems to me, is the rhetorical practice of deferring choices of meaning so obvious as in conversational narratives, which are fraught with ‘violations’ and yet retain their character as narratives. Given the extended structure of stories, and the range of perlocutionary effects, including surprise, that they normally trade in, listeners routinely seem to prefer to adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude to violations of felicity conditions like the Sincerity Condition. Rather than dismiss the teller’s narrative act as ‘infelicitous’ right away, hearers choose instead to infer Gricean ‘nonnatural meanings’ or ‘meaning implicatures’ from any mismatch they perceive between their expectation and the teller’s discourse. Example vii) is a case in point. Here, it seems ‘normal’ for B to ‘deduce’ that A thinks that her narrative will produce an ‘unhappy’ perlocutionary effect on B since A has overtly stated that she is violating the Sincerity Condition, which would imply that A’s unwillingness to tell her story has a ‘reason’ or ‘cause’; B’s task as an active conversationalist is then to explain A’s self-confessed reluctance while taking into account the fact that this reluctance has not prevented A from telling B her story. Ergo, it is not that A has any cause to suppress the story, it is that she anticipates that B will not want to hear it; and B’s not wanting to hear A’s story can only derive from the conjecture that A’s story could distress him. Hence B is justified in believing, among other things, that A’s explicit violation of the Sincerity Condition on story-telling stems from her calculation that her story about the loss of her wallet is likely to upset B. We can fill in as many contextual details as we like to make the scenario for this conversation more plausible. We could, for instance, imagine that A is an absent-minded professor who is always losing things, and that B is her slightly censorious husband to whom she must confess her latest ‘loss’, even though she is certain he will not want to hear about yet another peccadillo. In such circumstances, it could be natural for her to begin with ‘I don’t want to tell you this’ or even ‘You don’t want to hear this’, conceding that she doesn’t exactly have good news for her longsuffering spouse, but feels constrained to tell him anyway; but whatever the context, the overt violation of the Sincerity Condition seems to spur the listener on to infer some additional ‘meaning’ rather than to prompt a dismissal of the speech act altogether. Failure to conform to my Sincerity Condition does, of course, occasionally preclude the telling of a possible story as in example viii) and this is a resource obviously available to tellers of prospective stories that are actually asked for by listeners. They can refuse to tell a story simply
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on the grounds that they do not want to, although in many cultures such behaviour could result in the imputation of rudeness because norms of politeness would be breached. Like example vii), example ix) also has a teller admitting that her story is not ‘tellable’, that it is ‘boring’, yet persisting in her narrative anyway. Here too, then, we would expect some implicatures to arise depending on the context in which the story is told. If it figures as a story which had been asked for by a prospective listener in a previous turn, the implicature would be that the teller had no reasons to want to tell the story but is doing it to oblige the listener. As a story which was volunteered by the teller in the first place, it might imply that the teller is fulfilling the requirement, albeit unwillingly, to complete a story already embarked upon (see example v) again). Thus, it seems to be the case that whenever a teller actually tells a story, while at the same time making it clear that she or he does not want to tell that story, implicatures are generated. But since examples of actual conversations are what Narrative Gravity seeks to test speech act conditions against, perhaps the foregoing hypothetical examples ultimately neither prove nor disprove that the proposed Sincerity Condition is binding on stories. But in any case, the Condition cannot account for the implicatures which arise when it is explicitly violated and a story yet told. In general, the lesson that can be drawn from all this toying with examples, actual and hypothetical, is that violations of the present felicity conditions on stories may in fact result in certain ‘misfires’ and ‘abuses’, but these are not on the whole ones that are observable in actual or imagined conversational contexts. Moreover, unsuccessful attempts at story-telling in actual conversations seem to occur for reasons other than failure to conform to felicity conditions. In short, it is not so much that the felicity conditions I’ve proposed are ‘wrong’, as that they are without much interest in any analysis of stories in actual conversations. It might almost be said that these conditions strive to meet the criterion of ‘descriptive adequacy’ required by a theory without first meeting the lesser criterion of ‘observational adequacy’. That is to say, speech act theory enumerates the formal properties which a story ought to have, without first adequately observing such relevant ‘data’ as is copiously available. In ‘Data and Data Use in an Analysis of Communicative Events’, Grimshaw proposes a conception of levels of adequacy for communicative events, deriving from Chomsky47— 47 See Chomsky, N., ‘The Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory’ in H.G. Lunt (ed.),
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference of Linguistics, 1964, pp. 914–78.
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Observational adequacy implies that all relevant data needed for adequate structural descriptions and for the discovery of rules are collected, whether those data be speech-utterances, kinesic accompaniments to speech, knowledge of social relationships, intended ends of speech events or whatever (Hymes 1967, 1972) ... and I mean to imply that this level of adequacy may be harder to attain for grammars of strategies of verbal interaction than for grammars of languages ... necessary dimensions for descriptive adequacy of grammars of social interaction are, viz., the enumeration of possible structural descriptions of those behaviours ... and specifications of functions relating the behaviours to the structural descriptions. ...48
Grimshaw’s proposal for a definition of levels of adequacy for models of communicative behaviour reveals a real difficulty encountered in the formulation of felicity conditions, which is that they ‘structurally’ describe illocutionary acts without much prior reference to ‘all the relevant data needed for adequate structural description’. This formulation would suggest that the felicity conditions I have constructed for stories bring out little of interest concerning all those stories in my ‘data’ which do not have a perfect format. The problem seems to be that no conversational narrative is perfectly felicitous, or conversely, all are. In either case, analysis in terms of felicity conditions, which should sort out the ‘bad’ narratives from the ‘good’, turns out to be pointless since all conversational stories seem to fall into the same bin one way or the other. This is certainly not the ‘result’ we want. My defensive reaction faced with such a charge is to argue that this weakness when tested against actual data is not just a failure of the particular felicity conditions I have devised for stories, but reflects a more general insufficiency within the speech act theory itself. Because almost all the stories I have considered are interesting for their nonstandard features (very seldom an outcome of their failure to meet felicity conditions) rather than for their standard qualities (that is, their conformity to felicity conditions), perhaps I need to adopt a humbler and more piecemeal observational stance. In Chapters 4–8, I therefore attempt to incorporate the methodology of conversational analysis (which concentrates on delicately detailed observations of individual stories) within a broadly Gricean-cumLewisian framework (which makes logical allowance for the non-natural or non-standard nature of utterances in most conversations). Moreover, Grice’s theory is one of conversational interaction rather than one in 48Grimshaw, A.D., in Baumann and Sherzer (eds), 1974, pp. 420–1.
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which utterances are abstracted and treated as ‘speech acts’ in isolation; it dispenses with felicity conditions for particular speech acts and considers only the implicatures generated by any and all utterances in a given talk-exchange. In the next chapter but one, I develop an argument about the significance of this aspect of Grice’s theory for stories, especially if the theory is considered to be one of perlocutionary effect. Speech Act Theory and the Appeal to Ordinary Language In the last chapter, I had begun to argue that the necessary presence of context in conversational narratives puts strict structuralist paradigms of story-telling severely to the test. This chapter then examined a more general model of communication, based on Austin’s theory of speech acts. Such a schema is potentially exciting because it allows, in theory, the incorporation of units as complex as conversational or literary stories. It also seems to permit a focus on the multiple ‘uses’ of narrative, from the immediate first-person face-to-face account to the removed third-person presentation of an absent ‘author’. The philosophical premise on which such an approach is based has been succinctly stated by Asa Kasher. According to Kasher, ‘natural languages are tools’ and ‘no tool is mastered without a thorough grasp of its standard uses’, because a theory about a tool will be explanatorily inadequate if it fails to specify the constitutive functions of the tool, and concentrates too much on the details. According to Kasher: ... the ultimate goal of any pragmatic theory, is to specify and explain the constitutive rules of human competence to use linguistic means for effecting basic purpose. ... Thus, a girl scout has not grasped the notion of a postage stamp, if she knows all about perforated edges and can even tell the side that sticks from the side that speaks but knows nothing whatsoever about letters and postage. And a scout-master does not have a thorough knowledge about his organization if he knows the ropes and can tell a jamboree from a merry rally but is unaware of the constitutive purposes of his movement. 49
Perhaps the most influential theory in contemporary philosophy of language that has attempted to specify ‘constitutive rules of language that effect basic purposes’ is speech act theory, which offered a substantive and original classification of all the standard uses to which a natural language might be put. Bernard Harrison writes: 49Kasher, ‘Foundations of Philosophical Pragmatics’, in Butts and Hintikka (eds),
1977, p. 226.
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It is widely accepted that the most plausible—perhaps the only possible— alternative to a truth conditional theory of meaning is a theory couched in terms of the beliefs and intentions of speakers and hearers in specific, concrete contexts of communication. ... Theories of this kind fall into two main classes. On the one hand there are those, such as Austin’s and Searle’s, which locate the distinguishing features of language as a species of intentional action in the fact that is rule-governed, and proceed to try and elucidate the rules in question. On the other hand, there are theories, such as those of H.P. Grice, Jonathan Bennett or David Lewis, which endeavour to avoid any reference to an unanalysed notion of rule at a fundamental level by analysing such notions as rule and convention in terms of ‘speakers’ and ‘hearers’ intentions and beliefs.50
This chapter has already dwelt on the first kind of theory; the next two chapters discusses the second. In what follows, I take a quick look at a question which connects my preoccupation with Austinian ‘rules’ or conditions binding on speech to my interest in the Gricean maxims. The question is—why should any analysis of story-telling require an appeal to speech act theory, Austinian or Gricean, in the first place? The answer, baldly stated, is that, unlike many, perhaps most, other people interested in the phenomenon of narrative, I see it as a ‘basic’ act of communication, as basic as the assertion or the greeting. The ‘complexity’ of narrative does not seem to me a decisive, or even convincing, argument against it being ‘basic’. While I do think a narrative has component ‘parts’, I do not see these parts just as successive assertions, but as possessing a more integral relation with each other, such as the ‘parts’ evaluation, complicating action, coda, etc. I also view narrative as ‘purposive’, or ‘ostensive’, as Sperber and Wilson would call it, a powerful tool which enables us to build up our mental portraits of ourselves as genuine members of our communities. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is, for me, quite a lot easier to imagine a world without, say, verbal directives (commands, orders) or greetings, than a world without stories, where assertions are strung together only for the purpose of conveying information, but shorn of perlocutionary or emotive effects. Holding the belief that the ability to process narrative is part of our basic linguistic as well as psychological ability forces me, therefore, to consider everyday instances of story-telling, as well as the theories that purport to ‘explain’ these instances. In this connection, it may be important to establish that speech act theory does indeed concern itself with the phenomena of natural language use and that it does propose to provide a classification and 50G.B. Harrison, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language, 1979, p. 165.
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explanation of these phenomena. That an explanation of the uses of ordinary language provided the inspiration for Austin’s notion of the speech act, is made clear in the following well-known passage: What we need, it seems to me, is a new doctrine, both complete and general, of what one is doing in saying something, in all the sense of that ambiguous phrase, and what I call the speech act, not this or that aspect abstracting from the rest, but taken in its totality [italics Austin’s].51
Likewise Searle, writing about his own work as well as that of Grice and Austin, states: In this ... tradition, which derives in part from the later Wittgenstein, the notion in the explanation of meaning is the use of the expression in a given language. This in turn is explained in terms of the intentions speakers conventionally have in using these utterances. Although there is a fairly clear distinction between the speakers’ (actual) meaning and the conventionalized sentence meaning, there is on this account no way of sorting out the context-free meaning of a linguistic expression, since even the strictly conventionalized usage is always related to a background of unstated assumptions and practices. From this it follows that literal meaning cannot be identified with context-free meaning.52
I have quoted this passage at length because it appears to be a clear statement by the leading expositor of speech act theory to the effect that the theory is analytically grounded in natural language, and not only does not but cannot provide an explanation of ‘meaning’ outside the context of spoken discourse.53 Elsewhere, Searle argues equally strongly that there is an ‘essential connection between language and communication, between meaning and speech acts’.54 Finally Grice, in his important William James lectures on ‘Logic and Conversation’, insists that many problems in logic and the explanation of meaning simply arise ‘from an inadequate attention to the nature and importance of the conditions governing conversation’.55 It seems therefore that there is convincing evidence to show that the major theorists of communication-intention found their explanations of meaning on the basis of something called ‘natural language’, which I prefer to call 51Austin, ‘Performative Constative’, in Searle (ed.), ‘Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, p. 22. 52J.R. Searle, ‘Introduction to Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics’, in Searle, Kiefer and Bierwisch (eds), 1980, p. x. 53J.R. Searle, Speech Acts, Chapters 1–3. 54J.R. Searle, ‘Chomsky’s Revolution in Linguistics’, in Harman (ed.), 1974, p. 29. 55H.P. Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, in Cole and Morgan (eds), 1975, p. 41.
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‘conversation’. More particularly, both Austin and Searle appear to believe that the domain of speech act theory could extend over all the various types of ‘acts’ that appear in natural spoken discourse.56 Austin’s first venture into the analysis of ‘performative’ as opposed to ‘propositional’ utterances ultimately led to his formulation of a fullfledged theory of illocutionary acts which dissolved the performative/ constative distinction in favour of a classification of utterances in a given language (English in Austin’s case) based on illocutionary verbs, including ‘stative’ verbs. Austin’s formulation of the theory of illocutionary action was based on his conviction that ordinary language enshrined important distinctions in meaning. In the tradition of English empiricism, he hoped to institute among philosophers of language a programme that would examine in detail the entire range of uses to which a particular illocutionary verb could be put in a language, so as to capture in this fine net of subtle and obvious uses, the elusive ‘meaning’ of a word. Thus, it was crucially important to study ‘the total speech act situation’. I re-emphasize these philosophical inclinations of Austin’s yet again to adduce same authoritative support for my otherwise seemingly perverse stand that an analysis of story-telling as one of the commonest uses to ‘which language is put’ is actually in keeping with the original attitudes and aims of speech act theory. ‘Real’ recorded data, of the sort that we have looked at in this and the previous chapter, forces us to attend to two rather uncomfortable ‘facts’, the first empirical, the second ethical. Empirically, most of our ‘ordinary’ everyday language consists of some form or other of the ‘indirect speech act’ that constitutes a genuine problem for speech act theory. Narrative, which proliferates in our discourse, is apparently one of these ‘indirect’ acts. Since it ‘pretends’ to assert, it is describable as an indirect assertion. But this, I’ve argued, perpetrates a questionable ‘logic’, not necessary underwritten by speech act theory. Ethically, too, we are into dubious terrain with recorded conversations because we are ‘eavesdropping’ here, as it were, on private conversations, on personal revelations, and turning them into ‘data’, which is the fodder of ‘theory’. How does one reconcile the need to consider not just the abstract attempts of philosophers at reconstituting ‘natural’ communication but conversationalists’ own finely honed skills with the need to minimize the invasion of private stories, private selves? 56See also R. Lanigan’s Preface to Speech Act Phenomenology, 1977, where he takes speech act theory to categorically offer an explanation for speech performance, that is, the structure of speech acts as ‘relationships’ and the content of speech acts as ‘meaning’. p. vii.
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To this question there is no easy answer, but different researchers have tried different tacks. A sociolinguist like Labov is clearly committed in many ways to recouping, preserving and learning from the Black English Vernacular or BEV (his terminology) that speakers of his ‘danger of death’ stories use. At the same time, he does not shy away from words like ‘data’ as I have done, nor does he explicitly address the ethics of ‘using’ recordings for research. We know that he evaluates the oral skills of his ‘subjects’ highly, but this evaluation is represented as an ‘objective’ linguist’s assessment. Labov’s personal relationship with narrators is never in evidence. In relation to Searle’s Principle of Expressibility, the question here would be: to what extent are the original ‘intentions’ of the conversationalists recoverable from conversational stories that are ‘preserved’ through processes of recording and transcription for research? A little earlier, I suggested that speech act theory is quite impersonal in some respects, given its ‘universalizing’ presumptions; therefore, as long as it can be ascertained with reasonable certainty from a transcription that the ‘speech act’ of story-telling is being performed, no further investigations of ‘motivations’ are required. However, things are not, alas, so straightforward, for the simple reason that the shared contexts of interlocking interpretation in which the ‘stories’ were first encoded cannot be recreated. True, we can guess fairly accurately, given our own knowledge of linguistic conventions, that some sequence in a transcription is a story, some other sequence an argument or a compliment. In this sense, we can determine what it means (to us); what we cannot do is to decide what it meant (to the original conversationalists). Do ‘thoughts’ then tally with ‘talk’ in exactly the same way, at different intervals of time, in different contexts, with different sets of interpreters? This vexed question brings us to Searle’s Principle of Expressibility. From the Principle of Expressibility to the Cooperative Principle Searle (1969) suggested that a theory of illocutionary acts was likely to have underlying it some fundamental premise such as the Principle of Expressibility, which presents the claim that ‘whenever the illocutionary force of an utterance is not explicit it can always be made explicit’.57 In brief, the following formulation seems to capture the essential features of the Expressibility Principle. 57Searle, Speech Acts, p. 68.
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1. Whatever is meant can be said. 2. Whatever is implied can be stated. 3. Whatever is shown (ostensively or otherwise) can be described (linguistically). The third point, separately labelled by Searle as ‘the principle of identification’, is taken to be a special case of the first, broader point. Together, it would seem that all three acts (‘meaning’, ‘implying’ and ‘showing’) are regarded by Searle as indicative of essentially unambiguous intentional states, translatable into unambiguous linguistic acts. In other words, if I mean a) A punched his brother B on the nose. I can convey this concatenation of meaning either by saying explicitly or less explicitly or by implying or by showing, i.e.
b) ‘A punched his brother B on the nose.’ c) ‘A punched B on the nose.’ d) ‘A put B’s nose out of joint—literally. Brotherly love!’ e) Pointing to A and B and physically mimicking the act of punching on the nose.
But exactly how unambiguous is the thought conveyed by a), and how unproblematic is its expression in b), c), d) and e)? Intuitively, it would seem that b) is the closest to unambiguous representation because in this case the linguistic code matches ‘thought’ word for word. Can the others also be boiled down to b), however? Or does each convey a slightly different ‘thought’? Are b)-e) translational equivalents, or are they irreducible? The answers to these questions depend on how we understand speaker ‘intention’ in relation to the ‘force’ of an utterance. With the speech act model F(p), where F stands for the conventional illocutionary force of an utterance and p for its propositional content, firmly in place, we could say that b) to e) above all have the ‘basic’ force of an assertion. However, this is unsatisfactory because it does not capture the fact that in c) I am being vague (by omitting some of the information I meant to convey), in d) I am being sarcastic or ironic (by being nonliteral), and in e) I am being ambiguous, since it might not be wholly clear from my gestures that A and B are brothers, or even who punched whom (since I am relying on a gestural system which is not codified in the way that language is). According to Searle, this is not a problem,
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because the Principle of Expressibility has the consequence that cases where the speaker does not say exactly what he means—the principal kind of cases of which are non-literalness, vagueness, ambiguity and incompleteness—are not theoretically essential to linguistic communication [italics mine].
Like Searle’s treatment of fiction,58 I would argue that this analysis begs the central question that a theory of use, and of useful communicative acts, should address. Why should conversationalists intentionally perform vague, non-literal, ambiguous acts so much of the time, especially when these acts seem to be more complex in several respects, when they could choose simpler literal alternatives? Obviously, performance factors ‘explain’ some of the facts about conversationalists not getting an exact match between ‘code’ and ‘thought’ each time. Were we to wait for the ‘perfect words in the perfect order’ to come to us, we might end up with perfect silences instead. Also, as Searle sensibly suggests, the words of any language, and especially its speech act verbs, more or less ‘accidentally’ match points along a continuum of possible speech act forces. So there are bound to be, in practice, large areas of ‘thought’ for which one does not have a vocabulary. In principle, I wholly agree with Searle on this point—any language could be extended so that it had the verbal means to express the things for which it might, at a given moment, lack a syntax and/or a semantics. Where I cannot agree with Searle is when he discounts the importance, and import, of those speech acts where speakers are being intentionally indirect. If a speaker intends to be imprecise and precisely conveys this to a hearer by adopting a non-literal mode of utterance (as, for example, in d) above), then is she not achieving the communicative goal she has set herself? It is hard to be satisfied with a theory of communicative action, which is what speech act theory claims to be, that marginalizes such a large body of deliberately ‘indirect’ effects by declaring them ‘not theoretically essential’. Only if we agree with Searle’s tacit assumption that c) to e) are all reducible to b) without significant ‘loss’ of meaning can we concede that indirect effects are unimportant in theory; but if our intuition is that these acts are ‘meant’ to elicit responses from hearers that differ 58See above, characterizing fictional stories as ‘pretended assertions’ does not help
us understand why any such complicated pretence should be undertaken, or what purposes are accomplished by the fictional versus factual narration, indifferent contextgoverned conventions.
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from the responses evoked by b), and that this is why they are phrased quite differently, then this calls the whole notion of indirectness into question, since the meanings of c) to e) are not collapsible to b). In what seems like an anachronistic mockery of the Principle of Expressibility, Nietzsche said, ‘What can be thought must certainly be a fiction.’59 Thinking is non-actualized, it is by definition an inward, mental action, and therefore ‘fictional’. When we set about expressing our thoughts to others we are into the business of sharing, of sharing fictions; and the question then becomes—why on earth should one want to share one’s fictions, and if one does, how best is this sharing accomplished? Also, if the ‘literal’ meaning of words and sentences in a language holds steady, to what extent do altered contexts of ‘sharing’ (for example, studying the transcriptions of stories versus directly enjoying them in some ‘original’ conversational context) change or leave unchanged60 the interpretations of these words and sentences? The act of sharing could be said to make a fictional thought ‘real’ since a speaker changes from an epistemic to an ontological stance when articulating her thoughts. As a witness to the act of A punching his brother B on the nose, a speaker knows or believes she knows that this event has occurred, but when she verbally communicates this knowledge to a hearer, she is reaffirming the ontic status of the things she has witnessed. The manner or style in which she conducts this reaffirmation will influence the way in which the hearer in turn thinks, or in Nietzsche’s terminology ‘fictionalizes’, the original event. So if a speaker chooses to say d) instead of b), her indirectness will mean that she wants her hearer not just to know that A punched B, but that she wants to shift the focus of the conversation from the action as it happened to her interpretation of the action as symptomatic of the relationship between the two brothers, A and B. In other words, her saying d) implies that she is more interested in the attitudinal aspects of the situation she is describing than in its ontic status per se; had she ‘just’ wanted to convey the information without influencing attitudinal orientation overmuch, she might have chosen to say b). Gricean rules of implicature, it seems to me, take into account the fact that conversationalists recognize the intrinsically ambiguous nature of ontological happenings from the human point-of-view, as it were, while Searlean conditions on speech acts do not. That is, Searle takes 59Quoted by Culler in Framing the Sign, 1988, p. 210. 60See in this connection D. Davidson’s chapter entitled ‘Thought and Talk’ in Inquiries
into Truth and Interpretation, referred to in footnote 61.
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the positivist position that there are events in the world that a speaker’s ‘thoughts’ record, and the speaker in the act of communication ‘means’ to convey these thoughts unambiguously to a hearer. When the speaker ‘fails’ to convey her thoughts unambiguously, we have non-literalness, vagueness, etc. which simply amount to performance errors, and therefore have peripheral theoretical status. Thus, fiction, which arguably consists of some true as well as false propositions, is simply treated as fake assertion—assertion gone wrong—albeit with the connivance of the teller. This fails to explain how a hearer manages to perceive each of the separate sentential strings of assertion tied together in a narrative, as a ‘whole’. Why does a competent listener assign to the statements in a narrative that she knows to be true, the value of a ‘pretended assertion’? For example, a sentence like ‘On the morning of September 23, the United Nations declared the end of hostilities between India and Pakistan’ from Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children is an historically attested fact, given that Rushdie is writing about the year 1964. But does that mean that the rest of the assertions in the novel could also be ‘true’, unbeknownst to the reader—certainly a logical possibility? Why would it be crazy to assume this? These are the kinds of questions to which Searle cannot give a satisfactory answer, since he does not have a theory of conversational purposes, although he does have a well-worked-out theory of speech acts goals. A theory of conversational ends and means is precisely what Grice provides. From the Gricean perspective, as I interpret or understand it, it seems odd for Searle to maintain that non-literalness amounts to a failed speech act, when it is in fact a characteristic of the most sophisticated linguistic discourse. It is not so much children, language learners and so forth who are guilty of intentional non-literal uses as writers, poets, and intellectuals. Unlike Searle, Grice appears to be interested not so much in defining the ‘basics’ of linguistic action, as in characterizing our highly skilled inference-making abilities on the basis of conversational responses to complexities in language use. Grice’s analysis of the ‘talk-exchange’ is both less earnest and more complex than Searle’s. He assumes that most conversationalists not only realize but exploit the fact that there are many different ways of conveying the ‘same’ information in a language. So, for example, we are able to grasp that there is much overlap in the information content of b) to e) above, without necessarily having to decide on which of these utterances is the ‘basic’ speech act; and thereby, we avoid the problem which Searle
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faces of dismissing all the ‘other’ acts as unimportant, even when they make up the bulk of our communication. It is in this context that the idea of ‘sharing’ or cooperation in the Gricean sense becomes relevant. What use is it to us to share our thoughts, and how do we best go about this process, especially when our thoughts may be quite complicated? Well, there are innumerable situations in everyday life when it is beneficial to oneself to share one’s thoughts. For example, one might want help cleaning up a mess, or tackling the plumbing, or putting the children to bed, and a simple way to do so is to use one’s linguistic resources to request help from a second party. If one’s thoughts are so complicated as to give one a headache, one might want to seek another’s help just to ‘sort oneself out’ mentally. Naturally, the trick, according to a primitive Humean model, which we will adopt here for purposes of exposition, is to persuade others that their cooperation in helping one out will benefit them as well. And the key word here is ‘persuade’, since it will not do simply to perform correctly the speech act of asking others to help one; one has to convince them, coerce them, etc.—a task very often accomplished by using the extra resources that language possesses, in other words an arsenal of ‘nonbasic’ speech acts. The idea of agreement(s) about sharing labour, resources, goods, burdens, etc. underlines the theory that Grice advances on the cooperative nature of linguistic behaviour. In my opinion, his Principle of Cooperation could, in this respect, be called an ‘Us’ principle rather than an ‘I’ or ‘You’ principle. Equally, however, such cooperation requires participants to recognize the fact that the psychological primitives in any communicative situation are indeed ‘I’ and ‘You’, while ‘Us’ is socially constructed in order to encourage/enforce mutually beneficial conduct. The Gricean Maxims of Quality (‘be truthful’), Quantity (‘be adequately informative’), Relation (‘be relevant’) and Manner (‘be appropriate in conduct and manner’) advise conversationalists on the do’s and don’ts of communal linguistic practice, but they can no more prevent multitudinous and clever cases of maxim violation than ethically motivated laws against theft or murder can foil widespread and ingenious instances of crime. Another way of putting across the same point is to say that where the Gricean maxims are violated, there is to a greater or lesser extent a sacrifice of the ‘Us’ principle in favour of the ‘I’ and ‘You’ mode of perception. That is, mutual interest is temporarily abandoned for individual intellectual gains, and this latitude is essential in order to have any notion of ‘rules
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of conduct’ at all. If acting ‘lawfully’ (according to felicity conditions on speech acts for example) always amounted to ‘success’, as Searlean theory seems to indicate, then there would be little incentive for intentional violations. But people do quite often break normative laws, linguistic and otherwise, rationally and intentionally. They do so, as I see it, because of the mental oscillation that is always taking place between the social, communal construct ‘Us’ and the psychological consciousness of an ‘I’ that is not ‘You’, and not isomorphic with ‘Us’ either. Gricean rules are of interest to researchers on narrative because of their focus on the nonnatural ‘meanings’ produced by maxim violations. I will return to this point in Chapter 5 on Sperber and Wilson’s and Dennett’s theories of communicative behaviour. Regarding the phenomenon of non-natural meaning as central rather than peripheral to an explanation of communication means that a theory must respect those processes of interpretative inferences which reconcile for a hearer the ‘conflict’ between her understanding of a speaker’s selfinterest and the rules of communication that she knows are shared so as to maximize mutual intellectual benefits. In short, at the core of the Gricean problematic stands the interpretation of interest(s)—so crucial to any account of narrative. If Searle’s Principle of Expressibility specifies the link between cognition and linguistic expression by the aphorism that ‘whatever is meant can (in principle) be said’, it might be fair to say that in Grice’s book this dictum is reversed, à la Lewis Carroll, to ‘whatever is said can (in principle) be meant’. Whereas Searle’s position is that language can be extended every which way by the speaker to suit her purposes, Grice’s standpoint seems to be that, given the Cooperative Principle, a presumption of interpretability by the hearer is built into even our most complicated utterances, justifying those painstaking attempts at inference that we apparently routinely make. Consider a real-life example involving one of Austin’s favourite scenarios—the naming of a ship. Not so long ago, a science programme on the BBC presented a ‘cheap’ submarine that had been put together from waste materials but which could function reasonably effectively as an underwater mode of travel. When the ‘submarine’ was finally ‘launched’, the compere of the programme broke a bottle of champagne across her ‘bows’ and uttered the unforgettable words ‘I name this ship the Saucy Sue!’. But several questions of interpretation remained. Had the television audience of the programme really been a witness to that almost mythical act, the naming of a ship, or was anything seen on a
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screen automatically make-believe? There was no one visible on the screen when the act of naming took place, although presumably the camera crew was in fact around. Did this mean that long-distance viewers, like myself, were the primary witnesses to the event? How valid was the ‘naming’ in these circumstances, since it was obviously filmed for ‘effect’? Did a submarine qualify as a ship, could it really be ‘launched’ and were those her ‘bows’, precisely speaking? The borderline between a felicitous performance of ship-naming and an ersatz performance (the standard other instance of which is a screen or stage ‘marriage’) was obviously very thin here, in spite of the fact that a very specific kind of institutional act was involved and there was no obvious element of playacting as in a screen marriage. So much remains negotiable and unsettled in most communicative acts that very few acts, even of the literary–institutional sort we’ve just discussed, exactly fit a prototype. This, in turn, suggests that while we have the ability to recognize speech acts such as asking, asserting, etc., just as we have the ability to grammatically process sentences of various sorts, such capacities do not explain how communication is achieved any more than, let’s say, the possession of feet, ‘explains’ the phenomenon of walking. Evidence of feathers or feet provide a quick heuristic for identifying instances of possible flight or perambulation; but there is more to flying than being equipped with feathers, and more to walking than having feet. We have only to think of flightless birds, for example, or of human beings who fly without feathers, having failed to fly with them, or of babies or handicapped people who have feet but cannot walk. Similarly, the capacity to recognize individual speech acts, far from being an explanation of communication, may not even be a necessary condition for communication, although it may be true that in the vast majority of cases this ability does, in fact, pave the way for acts of communication to take place, just as feathers are usually a prerequisite for flight, and feet for walking. So, rather than the ability to identify speech acts, the notion of (linguistic) communication seems to be predicated on the more general idea of an interchange of thoughts/speech signals. Any process of communication, even the strictest of sociolinguistically coded acts, such as the naming of a ship, is subject to some interpretation. The hearer’s task is not simply to recognize but to respond to the speaker’s meaning by extending its implications and scope. This is the process which keeps conversation going, or as they say, keeps it ‘alive’. To query, to glance off, to reflect on, a speaker’s discourse is an essential part of conversational competence, which in turn can be seen as the
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prime example of human communicative behaviour. It is, in fact, this ‘engagement with the present’ in conversation that I argued about earlier that a researcher cannot replicate when studying the transcript of a story. The teller is absent, as in a literary narrative, and this in my view structurally alters the conventions of interpretation. A researcher is as unavoidably committed to interpreting the transcript of a narrative as is the hearer of a story told in a casual conversation to processing it in in real time. However, the conventions that guide the researcher resemble those of the reader of a literary work to this extent—she can go over and over the ‘text’ (usually impossible under ‘natural’ conditions), and thus discover its ‘artfulness’, but she cannot cross examine the teller and thus ‘replace’ the original listener. From the researcher’s point-of-view, Searlian61 rules, at best enable her to identify acts of linguistic communication, but Gricean rules ambitiously attempt more. They suggest certain universal ‘moral’ imperatives which might motivate production of those myriad criss-crossing inferences by which we arrive at our final identification of what an act of communication might ‘mean’. Expressibility, simply as a capacity of language to match the resources of thought, is thus not an issue in Gricean theory; interactive notions like explicitness, explicibility and expressiveness are. Explicitness, a criterion I derive from the Quantity Maxim, would require that a hearer settles on an interpretation of a speaker’s ‘meaning’, which minimizes the incompleteness and vagueness inherent in that utterance. Explicibility, which I derive from the Maxim of Quality, would require a hearer to infer from any utterance of the speaker which she prima facie gauged metaphorical or untruthful, some additional meaning or gloss consistent with the speaker in fact having been truthful when she appeared to be lying. Here the inference-making process would enjoin the reader to be cooperative to the extent that she takes steps to render consistent and coherent any parts of a speaker’s discourse not meeting these requirements. So we have another version of the Searlian ‘sincerity’ condition, but this time as a constant presumption on the part of the hearer, rather than as an attribute of the speaker’s utterance. Expressiveness, deriving from the Maxim of Manner, involves those features which Wittgenstein charmingly christened ‘imponderables’. 61It will be recalled that, in Searlian terms, the Principle of Identification (reference) is a subset of the Principle of Expressibility. Identifying speech acts could also, broadly speaking, count as acts of reference, embedded in communicative acts but not, in any sense, explaining these acts.
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Tone, gestures, facial expressions, quality of voice, as well as appropriate choices in vocabulary and sentence patterning, would all affect a hearer’s patterns of inference in this regard. On the basis of imponderables, a hearer comes to have ‘empathy’ with a speaker or to ‘dislike’ her manner. In this connection, I would argue, as I do in detail in Chapters 4–5, for a less conservative reading of Gricean theory which deals with participants’ perception of affect (non-propositional perlocutionary effects) as well as in their derivation of additional propositional ‘meanings’ from a speaker’s discourse. To be cooperative is to reasonably fulfil, given the computational limitations that the pacing of an ongoing conversation imposes on participants, the obligation to interpret all of the speaker’s utterances as maximally relevant (i.e., maximally explicit, explicable and expressive), even when she herself seems to be violating her own obligation, under a rubric of imperatives, to be maximally relevant. According to Davidson, the ‘idea of an interpreter’ is, tautologically, ‘one who understands the utterances of another’. From this apparent truism Davidson derives a number of interesting consequences, chief among which are the following: interpretation is crucial to explaining the symbiotic relationship between thought and language; interpretation involves explaining the (linguistic) actions of others in terms of a schema of attributed desires and beliefs; in this sense, interpretation is a guarantor of ‘autonomy of meaning’ since there is always more than one ‘use’, in fact myriad uses, for any utterance. Finally: ... a good theory of interpretation maximises agreement. Or, given that sentences are infinite in number ... a better word might be optimize.62
A theory of interpretation as optimization is also important for the move I make from the perfectly acceptable Principle of Expressibility to the more exciting norms of Explicitness, Explicability and Expressiveness. It is to these I take interpretive activity to be constantly appealing. Interpretation, as a set of inference-making procedures supervenient on the Principle of Cooperation, requires in effect that a hearer be ‘charitable, that is, always presume that any instance of maxim violation that she thinks she detects is motivated by a speaker’s desire to communicate effectively rather than to deliberately mislead or confuse’.63 The speaker always gets the benefit of the doubt when her crime, so to speak, is (alleged) communicative incompetence. This is because, as 62Davidson, ‘Thought and Talk’ in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, p. 169. 63David Lewis in Pragmatics: A Reader (ed.) Steven Davis, 1992, p.417.
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I’ve contended earlier, there is always a moral risk involved in the communicative act. This is the risk of ‘over-reaching’,64 of overplaying one’s hand, of extending the conversation so that a hearer can do what she is so well trained to do, that is, pick up violations of normative behaviour. Every violation affords a hearer the excitement of honing her interpretive skills, of judging the speaker’s expressiveness, of explicating enigmatic elements in a speech, and of detecting the intent behind perceived instances of inexplicitness. The speaker, contrariwise, risks boring the hearer as well as annoying her by too many violations of the conventional norms of conversation. Such risks, and their consequences, are especially apparent in conversational sequences involving narrative, which relies so heavily for its successful reception on being ‘performed’ expressively, with sufficient inexplictness and enough in the way of inexplicable moments, to maintain the interest of the hearer. Among the many valuables that can be salvaged from the wreck of speech act theory for an analysis of narrative are Austin’s original insight into the ‘performative’ uses of language, as well as his ideas of ‘convention’ and ‘perlocutionary action’. In the next chapter, I will attempt to incorporate these ideas within a Gricean framework for dealing with narrative performance. In this context, it is especially important not to lose sight of the comment by Derrida that headed this chapter. Austin challenged with panache the Fregean notion that linguistic representation is a matter of setting up conditions which establish the truth of sentences. He did so by deflecting philosophical attention to the process of linguistic communication, where it is the force of utterances that is crucial. A further achievement was to ground the notion of force in a speaker’s putative beliefs and desires so that a direct link was made between verbal ‘force’ and its goal-directed consequences in action. This second insight seems to me to be thrown into relief by a much earlier saying of Blaise Pascal’s in the seventeenth century: Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary. 64 David Lewis might disagree with this interpretation of the significance of the
‘permissible’. His view seems to be that the more the ‘master’ reins in the boundaries of the permissible, the more difficult becomes the task of the ‘slave’. Whereas, in my reading here, I maintain the opposite—when boundaries are extended, the slave’s duties grow correspondingly greater, with increasing inter-subjective risks. This apparent contradiction is more fully dealt within Chapter 3, but is not germane to the general argument being presented at this juncture.
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Austin’s inspired variation on this Pascalian theme is to close the gap between desire as self-motivated and force as other-initiated. In Austin’s analysis, desire is force; it is the spur to action. This works four ways in the description of the speech act. Insofar as a speaker gets an addressee to act in a manner that gratifies the speaker, the speaker’s desires are being fulfilled; insofar as the addressee is compelled to do what the speaker wants, she is being ‘forced’ to act that way. Conversely, insofar as an addressee voluntarily decides to spend time and energy interpreting the utterance of the speaker, she is primarily meeting her own desires, not necessarily the speaker’s; insofar as she decides on what ‘force’ the speaker’s utterance has, she can subvert or ratify as she wishes the force of a speaker’s utterance. It is this interlocking game–theoretical situation that makes every conversation a cooperative enterprise as well as a nexus of power and a contest of wills. A similar point is made with considerable subtlety by David Lewis in his essay ‘Scorekeeping in a Language Game’. Discussing those mutual adjustments which participants in any ‘well-run conversation’ seem to make at various stages of the game, Lewis writes: For some reason—coercion, deference, common purpose—two people are both willing that one of them should be under the control of the other. (At least within certain limits, in a certain sphere of action, so long as certain conditions prevail.) Call one the slave, the other the master. The control is exercised verbally, as follows: at any stage in the enslavement, there is a boundary between some courses of action that are permissible for the slave, and others that are not. The range of permissible conduct may expand or contract. The master shifts the boundary by saying things to the slave. Since the slave does his best to see to it that his course of action is a permissible one, the master can control the slave by controlling what is permissible.
I have implicitly argued so far that the range of ‘what is permissible’ is both extremely extended and extremely variable in the case of the voluntary ‘master–slave’ relationship entered into when a story is being told. For this reason, the stakes being played for are high—the master may gain a great extension of conversational territory but she risks losing control over the slave, and the slave may gain great favours by doing what is permissible but risks severe penalties imposed if she fails. When the language game is narrative, the complexities of performativity and pleasure, fiction and fact, explicability and expressivity, desire and force, tend inevitably to overlay the more simplistic dichotomy between truth and falsity. Nietzsche recognized that the concept of truth becomes vital and
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interesting only when it is realized that there are at least two, and possibly several, ways of expressing a ‘truth’. My suggestion in this chapter has been that the form of narrative is felicitously adapted to exploring the multiple, often paradoxical, ways in which ‘truth’ is presented. On narrative legs, truth is freed from immobility, but this naturally leads to further complications. What forces, what constraints, does truth obey once it does ‘get about and walks’? What norms is it subject to? Formulating answers to these questions will occupy us as we stroll over to the next couple of chapters.
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3
qQ P E R F O R M AT I V E S , P E R L O C U T I O N S , PRETENCE Deconstruction and the Narrative Speech Act (Gurus: Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida)
See you now, Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth; And thus do we of wisdom and of reach With windlasses and with assays of bias By indirections find directions out. William Shakespeare, Polonius, Hamlet, Act II, Scene I Researchers are looking more and more at the kinds of phenomena in language that can be used for manipulation. They are less concerned with subjects and predicates and more with topics and comments—with how information is presented to lead to inferences of truth and falsity and evaluations of the important and the unimportant. After a long period of neglect they have come back to words as carriers of implications as well as meanings, and are studying contexts and speaker-to-speaker interactions with the same zeal they formerly reserved for sentences. Dwight Bolinger, Fire in a Wooden Stove: On Being Aware in Language
Speech act theory, I suggested in the last chapter, was haunted by its Carnapian ancestry. The avenging ghost of grammar showed up each time pragmatics sought independently to resolve its to-be-or-not-to-be Hamletian dilemma. For all its emphasis on ‘doing things’, pragmatics constantly looked over its shoulder at the grammatical paradigm, so that sentence ‘moods’ (imperative, interrogative, declarative) inevitably cast their long shadows over corresponding acts of speech, and grammatical forms tended to dominate speech act categories. Speaking for myself, I cannot agree more thoroughly with Sperber
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and Wilson’s proposition that apart from the fact that ‘grammar and pragmatics ... fall within the domain of cognitive psychology, and that they have to do with language ... they have virtually nothing in common’.1 However, Sperber and Wilson turn out to be almost as much in the grip of an analysis in the sentential mode as Searle, characterizing pragmatic processes as those ‘used to bridge the gap between the semantic representations of sentences [italics mine], and the interpretations of utterances in context’.2 Since there is as yet little attempt in the teeming literature on pragmatics to justify this major theoretical link, taken for granted by Sperber and Wilson, between the grammar of sentences and the interpretation of utterances, one can only presume that it is the result of a historical hangover from Carnap’s time. The hangover appears to be a very persistent one, showing up even in the research agendas of those who would not dream of calling themselves pragmaticists. In this chapter, for example, we examine how notions of ‘grammar versus rhetoric’ afflict Deconstructionist readings of speech act theory. Interestingly, the same Carnapian dichotomy is also as evident among those who study the rules of the language system rather than, as Austin did, the behaviour of its users. In the wake of the Chomskyan dictum that the proper study of grammarians is the study of grammatical ‘competence’, most current linguistics separates out ‘performance’ as belonging to a different analytic space. Linguistic philosophers like Katz argue with conviction that the central objective of a pragmatic study of language, as opposed to a grammatical theory, is to function as ‘a performance theory at the semantic level’,3 that is to say, ‘a system of rules which specifies how contextual factors interact with grammatical structure to determine an utterance meaning for each token of a sentence type’.4 On such essentially Carnapian accounts, sentence-meaning and word-meaning are non-negotiable, since the grammar of linguistic ‘types’ is already in place. Austinian illocutionary acts simply specify those rules by which users can more or less mechanically determine what token ‘performance’ has occurred where. A glance at the contemporary linguistic approaches to ‘locutions’ that form a counterpart to the pragmatic study of ‘illocutions’ thus confirms us in the belief that the ‘performative’, as 1 Sperber and Wilson in Relevance, p. 3. 2Ibid., p. 9. 3Katz J.J., and Langendoen, T.A. ‘Pragmatics and Presupposition’, Language, 52, no.
1, 1976. Quoted by Kasher. 4Ibid., p 225.
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understood in the allied disciplines of linguistics and philosophy today, is a relatively limited notion. But where does this leave the performative? ‘Cabined’, cribbed, confined by its philosophical antecedents, the Austinian performative simply cannot contain the endless supplements of meaning that Derrida wishes to stuff into it; nor can it hold all the literary baggage that Paul de Man wants it to. Clearly, the performative must be ‘freed’ from its traditional Carnapian moorings, if it is to live up to Derrida’s expectations. As Derrida himself admits, Austin takes a bold step in the right direction when he claims that many utterances make sense to us not because they are logically or contingently true, but because they are contextually appropriate. But if truth is not a issue for performativity in general, as Austin succeeds in showing, he can hardly afford to dismiss ‘fictions’ quite as casually as in the Carnapian tradition from which speech act theory both derives and makes its startling departure. So strong, in my opinion, has been the link between strict linguistic analysis (grammar) and explorations of language ‘use’ (pragmatics), that it has by now come to border on absurdity to canvass for narrative as the prime unit of pragmatics. At this point in time, I can only hope that some of my readers will have the humour to say, with Tertullian—well, I give your claim (some) credence because it is absurd. I want to argue that fiction, and more generally the form of narrative, might turn out to be speech act theory’s ticket to ‘freedom’. The main problem with this theory in the Austin–Searle mould, as Derrida and de Man seem to apprehend in their separate critiques of speech act theory, is that the central notion of the illocutionary act is far too well-defined. It leaves no room for manoeuvre, for any twists and turns of interpretation. In the sections below, I spend some time trying to tease out the differences between de Man and Derrida, because I think I stand on their side of the fence on this issue, but at yet another place. As I see it, neither de Manian ‘literature’, nor Derridean ‘language’ can serve to liberate speech act theory. Summoning up such vast, amorphous genies goes right against the bottled-up spirit of speech act theory. Austin may be gifted with a wonderful imagination that can require us to imagine the most bizarre contexts for his performatives, but he has at the same time an organizing bent of mind, which is at its best making the sort of subtle distinctions that settle into topologies and hierarchies. This is both the chief attraction and the off-putting feature of speech act theory. If we are to preserve the down-to-earth, compartmentalizing character of Austin’s theory—Derrida calls it ‘the English strain’—one cannot confront it head-on with the messianic
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zeal of Deconstruction. Au contraire, what is needed to water the admittedly large tracts of arid land in speech act theory is not the deluge Derrida and de Man think appropriate but a well-planned irrigation system. The Deconstructive Critique of the Performative Like Derrida, who has famously debated with Searle on the issue, Paul de Man also detects troubling traces of the Carnapian ‘spoor’ in Austin’s work on performative utterances. As de Man sees it, Austin does away too easily with the primary schism between ‘grammar’ (Carnap’s linguistic system) and ‘rhetoric’ (the conventional devices or tropes which a Carnapian ‘user’ would presumably deploy as a means of persuasion in particular contexts). For Austinians ‘the continuity between the illocutionary realm of grammar and the perlocutionary realm of rhetoric is self-evident’;5 but de Man himself is far from convinced. Rhetoric for de Man is not of a piece with grammar; it is at odds with grammar; and it is precisely out of this tension, or discontinuity, that ‘texts’, ‘allegories’, ‘readings’ and ‘fictions’ are made. Hence Austin’s notion of the performative, seductively promising at first sight, seems in the end to commit the crime which de Man seems to find most unforgivable of all—it sells literature short. Austin, of course, is quite unabashed in his view that the performativity of language is irreducibly ordinary, non-literary and grounded in ‘everyday language’. Even the stage, which in Austin’s own cultural context could be taken to represent the prototypical site of a ‘performance’, becomes just a place where utterances are ‘voided’ of their illocutionary or performative force. Drama, heightened narrativity, word-play, in fact all ‘poetical’ use of language are in general given short shrift by Austin, whose brutal characterization of these linguistic formats as ‘non-serious’, ‘etiolated‘ and ‘parasitic upon’ the conventions that ‘fix’ illocutionary acts in the workaday world, seems calculated to shock. If Austin’s intention was not just to provoke thought but to provoke, both aims appear to have been successfully fulfilled in the responses he has evoked from Derrida and de Man. As a philosopher who, in Derrida’s opinion at least, might have qualified as a true heir to Nietzsche, Austin disappoints by his ultimately non-Nietzschean stand. Nietzschean inheritors themselves, Derrida and de Man are united, despite other comradely disagreements, in their belief that the distinguishing feature of language, all language, is to render the world strange, unfamiliar, 5de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading, 1979, p. 8.
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unheimlich. Literary language is not a special case; it is, to borrow a phrase of Wittgenstein’s, all that is the case, at least in de Man’s and Derrida’s book. To exclude ‘parasitic’ language from the domain of performative communication, Derrida argues, is willy-nilly to exclude all language from this space, since all language is ‘coded’ and ‘iterated‘, all language feeds off previous instances of language use. Or, to put the Derridean point in another way, we could say that every performative comes with quotation marks round it. That is how we recognize it. Only because there have been previous instances of performance can we conclude that the present instance is ‘infelicitous’ in one way or another. In this respect, then, the felicitous infelicity of ‘poetic’ language is no different from ‘ordinary’ infelicity. Ergo, Derrida can come to the satisfying conclusion that, given Austin’s own premises, their exists no such item as a ‘pure’, ordinary, originary performative.6 Although my own inclination is to empathize with de Man and Derrida on this matter, I think there is some confusion between, as well as within, their positions on the Austinian performative. They seem to agree on their conclusions—Austin is right in moving away from a truth-conditional account of ordinary language towards a ‘performative’ description, but wrong in thinking of language as ‘ordinary’. Language is rough magic;7 it is, roughly, magic. So far, fine, but then the two magi point their wands in contradictory directions. While de Man suggests that the boundary between the ‘grammatical’ illocutionary act and the ‘rhetorical‘ perlocutionary act has been unfairly glossed over by Austin, Derrida argues that Austin drives a wedge between the ‘linguistic’ locution and the ‘performative’ illocution, where no such division can be justified. In a nutshell, performativity resides in different parts of the tripartite—locution, illocution, perlocution8— Austinian typology for Derrida and de Man. Paul de Man, in my opinion, misreads (he might have said, inevitably misreads) Austin in two crucial, and inter-related ways. First, he sees illocutionary acts as ‘grammatical’, presumably because they are linked to sentential moods (imperative, interrogative, optative, and so on),9 and because they are ‘conventional’. Yet, in How to do Things with Words Austin goes to considerable lengths to show that the conventionality of the speech act is, as it were, nonlinguistic, insofar as it is concerned with social ends (promising, warning, 6Derrida, Jacques, ‘Signature, Event, Context’ in Peggy Kamuf (ed.) (1990) pp. 103–5. 7Ariel’s phrase in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. 8See Austin, J.L., How to do Things with Words, Chapter 8 in particular. 9de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading, p 8.
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greeting) and institutional events (marrying, delivering a judgement, naming a ship). If the speech act, or more precisely, the illocutionary act, has a ‘grammar’, then Austin’s argument throughout his book is that the ‘conditions’ for its ‘felicitous’ performance as an ‘act’ differ in kind from the ‘rules’ which determine its ‘correctness’ as a unit of ‘grammar’. It is for this reason that Austin insists that performatives that ‘have on the face of them the look—or at least the grammatical make-up-of ‘statements’, nevertheless, are seen, when more closely inspected, to be quite plainly, not utterances which could be said to be ‘true’ or ‘false’. Yet, to be ‘true’ or ‘false’ is traditionally the characteristic mark of the statement.10ˆPlainly, the grammatical face-value of statements does not coincide with their value in the performative market, going by the truth–falsity index at any rate. So, as we know, Austin suggests abandoning, for practical purposes, that particular index altogether. While it is perfectly legitimate, that is, to speak, as de Man does, about the ‘grammar’ of the performative, it is not quite so acceptable, in interpreting Austin, to assume much correspondence between that ‘grammar’ and the grammar of (a) language. The second kind of grammar, fraught with the possibility of rhetorical aporias, may be de Man’s magnificent obsession; but it is not Austin’s. Conflating the two ‘senses’ of grammar just adumbrated then leads to the second way in which de Man perhaps misconstrues Austin, when he contends that Austin does not sufficiently emphasize the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions. As I see it, this is again because de Man and Austin mean different things by ‘meaning’, just as the word ‘grammar’ has different significations for them. Austin’s project is to revise, even perhaps reject, the old ‘sense/ reference’ characterization of meaning by showing that it is ‘reformulable’11 as an exciting new locution/ illocution dichotomy, capable of playing ‘Old Harry with two fetishes, which I admit to an inclination to play old Harry with, viz. (1) the true/ false fetish, (2) the value/ fact fetish.’12 But joyously attacking philosophical fetishes is very far from de Man’s deep distrust of language, of those rhetorical powers of language that allow it to turn its back on its own meaningfulness. De Man himself puts it more picturesquely: Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. And although it would perhaps be somewhat more remote 10Austin, J.L., How to do Things with Words, p. 12. 11Ibid., p. 151. 12de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading, p. 10.
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from common usage, I would not hesitate to equate the rhetorical, figural potential of language with literature itself.13
Austin, it appears, takes on altogether less—and less than de Man expects of him. His quarry is philosophical; de Man’s is the literary sublime. For Austin, unregenerately a-metaphysical, philosophical distinctions may prove notoriously unreliable, but language itself is neither unreliable or reliable. It has no moral repercussions; it is simply effective or ineffective. Since Austin’s main concern is to identify those ‘tests’ or criteria which could help sort out felicitous, effective speech acts from ‘unhappy’, ineffective ones, he is keen to draw the line between a possibly endless string of ‘rhetorical’ perlocutionary effects (surprise, fear, happiness, alarm, puzzlement and so on ad infinitum) and intentionally ‘meaningful’ illocutionary acts. Far from fudging the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions, Austin makes a concerted effort to exclude perlocutions from the strict purview of his analysis. Perlocutions, according to Austin, comprise the unpredictable, and in that sense non-conventional, consequences of illocutionary acts; as such, they are too intractable, and simply too many, to be analytically interesting. Rhetorical force primarily attaches, if anything, to the illocutionary act, which logically preceeds its perlocutionary effect(s). Thus, it is not that Austin does not recognize the illocutionary/perlocutionary boundary; he certainly does, exploring it in several chapters of How to do Things with Words.14 It is that, for him, no spiralling descent into meaninglessness or into linguistic indeterminacy seems signalled by his candid admission that he can’t really deal with perlocutions. He is unable, for example, to set up a schema which captures the essential performative features of perlocutions (the ways in which they might systematically come off, for example). This is because, as he points out, you cannot frighten, annoy, amuse people simply by declaring—‘I frighten/ annoy/ amuse you’. Austin seems unperturbed, however, by his failure with the class of perlocutions. His faith in the bulwark of linguistic meaning remains intact. One of his favourite methods is still to list several ‘performative’ verbs, relying almost entirely on standard dictionary entries, and then sort them into groups according to use, including perlocutionary ‘uses’.15 Meanings seem to vary quite considerably with use, in the Austinian 13Austin, J.L., How to do Things with Words. See especially Chapters 9 and 10 in this
connection. 14Ibid., p. 26. 15Ibid., pp. 72–5.
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theory of the performative, but they neither disintegrate, nor cast into doubt, the entire grammatical structure that binds them linguistically, as de Man’s reading seems to imply. Unlike de Man, Derrida, in my view, rightly reads Austin as saying that illocutionary acts, and only illocutionary acts, are by definition ‘performative’. In saying ‘I promise ...’ one is, ipso facto, performing the act of promising, regardless of bad faith, inability to keep one’s promise at a later time and so forth. In this sense, promising or any other illocutionary act, is a ‘conventional procedure having a certain convention effect’.16 Once Austin commits himself to the conventionality of illocutionary performatives in this manner, Derrida is quick to object that the conventionality of the illocution is matched by, indeed partially derives from, the conventionality of the locution (linguistic meaning and grammar). So why is Austin so bent on artificially separating illocutionary force from locutionary power? Surely, the power of language precedes, and governs, the kinds of performances that Austin describes as carrying a conventional charge, or force.17 This criticism is hard to counter except, as I suggested earlier in this chapter, by reference to the kind of Carnapian background which Austin’s work presumes. The concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ were central to the analysis of sentential meaning in this tradition even when concessions were made by Carnap and Morris to language ‘users’. Austin’s move was then to so enormously enlarge the role of these language ‘users’ that the notions ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ could safely be detached from the ‘statements’ of a language, and attached instead to ‘contexts’ of use. On reflection, however, Austin has to admit that the idea of ‘context’ as a determinant of what is ‘meant’ is almost too much of a good thing. An extremely important aid is the circumstances of the utterance. ... But in a way these resources are over-rich: they lend themselves to equivocation and inadequate discrimination, and moreover, we use them for other purposes, e.g., insinuation. The explicit performative rules out equivocation, and keeps the performance fixed, relatively.18
By focusing on the ‘explicit performative’, Austin is able to avoid coping with all the possible variables that might affect the interpretation of ‘meaning’ in a given context. One of the stated goals of his theory is to ‘rule out equivocation’. Should every word in the linguistic system be 16Austin, J.L., How to do Things with Words, p. 76. 17Ibid., pp. 72, pp. 99–100. 18Ibid., p. 76.
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negotiable in context, as the Derridean critique logically seems to demand, then ‘equivocation’ would run riot. This is just what Austin does not want; when he names his book How to Do Things with Words, he takes the notion of ‘word’ (and for that matter ‘sentence’) for granted. It is not words that are indicted for ambiguity in an Austinian framework; it is truth that is. All that Austin wishes to underscore about words is that they do not ‘simply’ say things, truthful or otherwise; they do things. Furthermore, they do these things in systematic, incontrovertible ways that no one can gainsay. That is the value of the notion of an explicit performative; it leaves absolutely no room for equivocation, for interpretative licence. A promise is a promise, a warning a warning, a greeting a greeting, by virtue of being uttered. Questions about the ‘meaning’ of the words uttered are about as inapplicable here as queries about the ‘truth value’ of the sentences which contain these words. Making illocutionary acts, in all their predictability, the centrepiece of his more general theory of speech acts confers on Austin the advantage of not having to make a complete break with the Carnap–Morris model of language. Although ‘users’ are given much more latitude by Austin, the language system remains by and large an independent domain, unchanged by the everyday trade in speech acts. Substantial as this trade is, it is so organized by Austin as to pose little threat to existing linguistic rules. So where would Austin and Derrida stand on the matter of Searle’s Paradox of Fictional Discourse? Fiction, Pretence, Plagiarism and Narration Searle’s perspective on fiction is, as we have seen in the last chapter, diametrically opposed to mine. In fiction— the illocutionary act is pretended but the utterance act is real. In Austin’s terminology, the author pretends to perform illocutionary acts by way of actually performing phonetic and phatic acts.19
This analysis refers us back to Austin, who’d said of the phatic act that it was ‘essentially mimicable, reproducible (including intonation, winks, gestures, etc).’20 But what is at stake here in Searle’s appeal to Austin? It is, in my view, the status of the assertion, which is thus left inviolate as a basic illocutionary act, with only one of its felicity conditions (‘S believes that p’) suspended. 19Searle, ‘ The Logical Basis of Fictional Discourse’, p. 238 20Austin, J.L., How to do Things with Words, p. 96.
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If we turn to Austin’s fuller essay entitled ‘Pretending’ at this juncture, however, we get quite a different picture. Here Austin declares quite straightforwardly: It is quite misleading to handle pretending in the way it is so often handled, as identical with being (or being doing), except that some special feature is left out.21
All the hilarious little cameos that Austin conjures up in ‘On Pretending’ seem to be meant to cajole the reader into arriving at this somewhat uncompromising conclusion. There is the person who ‘goes too far’ by really taking a bite out of someone’s leg while ‘merely’ pretending to be a panther at a party, there are magicians pretending to clean windows— well, actually cleaning them, it must be admitted—but ‘really’ looking out for valuables. Despite the ribaldry, Austin insists his point is serious; pretending cannot simply be dismissed as being some other act (assertion, for example), ‘except that some special feature is left out’. The implied rebuke to Searle is obvious, if anachronistic—‘it does seem that philosophers, who are fond of invoking pretending, have exaggerated its scope and distorted its meaning’.22 The primary feature of pretending, for Austin, appears to be an element of dissembling, or dissimulation. To be pretending, in the basic case, I must be trying to make others believe, or give them the impression, by means of a current personal performance in their presence, that I am (really, only, and etc.) abc, in order to disguise the fact that I am really xyz. To neglect to notice all this is to put in the bath water without the baby.23
But if ‘disguise’ is such an essential feature of pretending, can fiction which, like metaphor pace Davidson, wears its falsehood on its sleeve, really qualify as pretended assertion? What is being hidden? Very little, it appears, given a further set of modulations that Austin introduces. According to Austin, in any case of pretending ‘there will typically be’: (PB) The pretence-behaviour, the actual public performance gone through in pretending, indulged in, as of course it is, for the sake of dissembling. (Rd) The reality-dissembled, about which the public is to be hoodwinked. This may, on occasion, include in part, or be wholly identical with. 21Austin, J.L., Philosophical Papers (Third Edition, 1979), ‘Pretending’, p. 267. 22Ibid., p. 260. 23Ibid., p. 263.
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(RBd) Some real-behaviour dissembled, when I am really engaged in biting the carpet but disguise this fact by pretending to be kissing it.24 Discussing these finer points leads Austin to conclude that, since the ‘presence of pretending’ is ‘to disguise some reality’, it ‘obviously follows, not only that PB must not coincide with RBd, in which case there would be no disguise, but that PB must not coincide with notRBd, in which case there would be nothing to be being disguised’.25 Assume now that fiction is, as in Searle’s analysis PB, while assertion is Rd/RBd, as when a speaker is ‘really’ producing fiction, while ‘pretending’ to genuinely ‘assert’. Then, in this case, PB = RBd exactly, since on Searle’s own account there is no formal means that allows us to tell fictional discourse apart from assertion. Furthermore, PB=not RBd exactly, since not RBd corresponds to the ‘real’ phatic act, which is the same for fictional discourse and assertion. A paradox? To explain briefly why I take the phatic act to equal not RBd in this case, it is useful to return to one of Austin’s own examples of not RBd. Those magicians pretending to saw a girl in half, argues Austin, must precisely not get too close to really doing what they are only pretending to do—i.e. they must at all costs avoid the macabre action of actually sawing the girl through. Thus, they have to achieve not RBd, if their act is to count as successful, or felicitous. Now, if the phatic act, as Searle has it, is ‘real’, while the illocutionary act is merely ‘pretended’, then it has to parallel the not RBd state of the ‘really’ sawn-up girl in Austin’s example; but in the vexed case of fiction, as we know, this not RBd ‘phatic act’ also turns out to exactly coincide with PB, being formally indistinguishable from it—a situation absolutely ruled out by Austin as constituting genuine pretence. Hence, fiction definitively fails both Austin’s tests for ‘pretended’ acts (here, read ‘pretended assertion’). Which means that we are one step nearer to thinking of fictional narratives as speech acts in their own right. But only one step, because ‘pretence’ is just one form of the ‘parasitic’ aspects of language; fiction may not be pretended, but it could, alas, still 24Compare Searle’s account of ‘fictional discourse’ as ‘pretended assertion’ in ‘ The
Logical Basis of Fictional Discourse’; and see Chapter 2. 25Compare my essay on ‘Translation as a Speech Act’ in Translation, Text and Theory: The Paradigm of India (2002) which discusses, with reference to historically attested instances, whether translation can ‘count as’ a speech act, proposes a set of felicity conditions on it, and debates the question of how speech act theory would deal with the ‘infelicitous’ speech act of a forged translation.
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be ‘parasitic’ (a favourite maggoty—and quite infectious!—metaphor of both Austin’s and Searle’s!). This uncomfortable thought then produces two further questions. One, if the assertion is not an option, are there other structure(s) off which fiction could possibly feed? Two, what other forms of ‘parasite’ exist in the verbal universe, apart from pretence? As far as an answer to the first question goes, my prejudice is blatant. Narrative is the typical site of fiction; those enticing fictions used by adults across cultures to socialize their children most often come encoded as narrative; and the ancient battle scars of communities, to which only fictions can do honour and justice, turn out almost always to be recorded in a narrative format. Furthermore, the store of social wisdom—what we like to think of as wisdom rather than ‘knowledge’ or ‘reason’—is also made less dreary, more palatable, more plausible, through the invention, specifically, of narrative fictions. Or so, at the present time, I boldly assert. The claim will be defended with more inductive evidence in Chapters 4–6 of this book. Nevertheless, it will not become any more ‘logical’ than it is now, for the simple reason that my intuition about the common interweave of narrative and fiction is contingently determined. It is neither true by definition (I am not claiming that fiction has to be narrative, still less that narrative has to be fictional); nor, on the same grounds, can it be syllogically proven (where there is fiction, there is narrative; here is fiction, therefore narrative). Rather, my argument is normative. That narrative and fiction usually go together constitutes part of my experience of, and beliefs about, the world. Therefore, my convictions about these entities are no more ‘logical’ or in need of a logical defence than my equally cherished belief that, a rule of thumb, wherever there is forest cover, there will be animal and insect life, although it is possible to imagine forests without fauna, and fauna minus forests. Such an analogy, roughly in the same semantic realm as ‘parasitism’, brings us to the second question I raised a little earlier, the first having been more or less unequivocally answered for the time being. Let us consider just one instance of a verbally defined ‘parasitic’ act that is not pretence, namely, plagiarism. Plagiarism is literary theft; and it involves passing off someone else’s words as one’s own. In this respect, it is related to pretence in the way that Austin suggests the acts of ‘impersonation’, ‘imposture’ and ‘posing’ are. Austin does not discuss plagiarism at all, but I suspect it would have interested him for at least four reasons:
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a) Like the model speech act, it concerns words, and words alone, while the provenance of ‘pretence’ in general is more physical (i.e., pretending to be a hyena by going down on all fours, biting the carpet and emitting hideous laughs in full view of an appalled audience). b) Unlike pretend behaviour, which can look very different from real behaviour (think of someone pretending to be the hyena of Austin’s imaginings), in plagiarism the form must be almost exactly the same as the original. That is, for a charge of plagiarism to stick, it must either be identical with GB (genuine behaviour) or not RBd (as in the magician example), both of which according to Austin, are problems for pretend behaviour or PB (compare here Austin’s puzzlement over whether one can effectively ‘pretend’ to hole a putt in golf without actually holing it). c) Focusing on plagiarism enables us to investigate the tricky issue of linguistic ‘ownership’, as well as ‘originality’, where language itself is often considered a resource that is shared, and jointly produced. d) The act of commission that is plagiarism bridges the gap between lying (analogous to fiction, pretence, imposture, etc.) and theft, which is considered a crime in many societies rather than (merely) morally reprehensible like the lie. Thus it paves the way for a discussion of the ethics of fiction, such as the never quite obsolete platonic accusation that art, and artfulness (pretending, stealing the form(s) of a dimly apprehended originary ideal, etc.), are inherently immoral. Even if it were granted, however, that the speech act of plagiarism is ‘parasitic’ insofar as it ‘pretends that’ it is producing an original26 utterance when it is actually, or intentionally, reproducing an exact copy of a previous act of speech ‘belonging to’ another, my arguments would still hang loose. This is because I need to make, or break, or at least hint at, the connection between plagiarism and the main subject that I am concerned with in this chapter—fiction and the speech act status of narrative. How is this to be done? Narratives, as I observed in Chapter 1 and shall do again in Chapter 6, record a moment of strangeness, of estrangement, when one is jolted out of oneself. Any individual narrator 26Derrida has discussed this problematic in several essays, but see especially ‘Psyche:
Inventions of the Other’ in A Derrida Reader, pp. 101–220. See also the section on ‘echoic mention’ and the discussion of the interpretive moves that may take place when ‘echoes’, or ‘repetitions’ of an utterance are involved in Relevance by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1986).
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faces this challenge of conveying to her audience some sense, however fleeting, of the dislocation of the shared conventions of everyday life. It is this ‘original’ feeling or event which constitutes the potential ‘tellability’ of narrative. Danger-of-death stories exploit our knowledge of this fact— we are in general willing to be persuaded that in a life-threatening situation almost everyone is likely to feel that something fundamental is out of joint. Thus danger-of-death tales in the first person are prima facie ‘tellables’. Other narratives may have to strive harder to be assessed as ‘tellables’ by an audience. Whatever the case, narrative characteristically trades in ‘tellables’. However, most of the narratives deemed tellable in everyday discourse, as well as most narratives communally handed down as worthy of iteration do not come tagged with an ‘author’s name’. Authorship is typically erased in the large majority of narrative that circulate in a society. For example, mothers telling their children the story of Hansel and Gretel do not attribute it to the Brothers Grimm, and if they did, they would be wrong, because the Grimms of course only ‘collected’ the tales they set down. But does the fact that the Grimms did their best to preserve the ‘original’ language and content of the fairy-tales they ‘found’, while not attributing authorship, constitute a case of ‘plagiarism’? Certainly not, we say at once. They did not pretend that they had authored the tales; furthermore, there were no authors to attribute the tales to. But what about the peasants and farmers who were the Grimms’ sources— surely they had names?27 Ah yes, but their stories did not uniquely originate from them—they were simply collectively inherited, and passed on orally for centuries, until the Grimms took things in hand and published their Kinder und Hausmärchen volumes. Because there is no ‘I’, no concept of ‘self’ in, or ‘behind’, these thirdperson tales of the Brothers Grimm, although there is plenty of ideology, it appears that they do not conventionally qualify as objects that can be plagiarized. Products of ‘illiterate’28 oral interactions, they come sans authorship. So, it turns out, even if one were to pretend, to one’s children for instance, that the strange terror of Hansel and Gretel was entirely the product of one’s own unique genius, this would not constitute an act of plagiarism. That is so because of the following reasoning—where there is oral transmission (barring ritual performances), a story does 27Kripke’s arguments in Naming and Necessity (1972) may be relevant here. 28On the issue of the ‘origins’ of the Grimm folk-tales, see Elizabeth Cook, The Ordinary
and the Fabulous, 1969, pp. 110–12.
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not strictly retain an ‘original’ linguistic format; and where no exactly replicable linguistic format exists, or claims of individual authorship, there can be no rights of ownership over a particular text/story; and where there is no ownership of words, no possibility of plagiarism exists. Unlikely as it sounds, it is these normative assumptions that seem to govern the circulation of tellable narratives in the societies that I know well. In oral story-telling, first person stories about the little or major shocks that one receives when one’s hypotheses about the world go awry, are overwhelmingly the norm. But these stories constitute tellables only when they are narrated as ‘I’ encounters, or pseudo ‘I’ encounters, by which I mean the encounters of people over whose experiences the speaker considers she has some rights. Thus it is all right to preface a tellable with—‘Something strange happened to my daughter/brother/ neighbour/ Rita here the other day’, or even ‘Something odd happened to my daughter’s neighbour’s brother yesterday’—because of the inclusive ‘my’ which extends one’s own experiential self to cover the experiences of those not present yet somehow linked to oneself, or those present and acquiescent. But it would be peculiar to say ‘Something odd happened to that man over there/the Chinese Under-Secretary of State/you the other day’, since there is, generally, no warrant for the takeover of the third person ‘self ’ in these cases.29 These conversational conventions concerning rights over third and first narratives, and narrative points-of-view, act as natural safeguards against plagiarism. The ‘I’ narrative can be said to have an ‘original’ linguistic format, but if it is reproduced by others, at least two factors intervene to fend off the charge of plagiarism. One, in reproduction it is turned from an ‘I’ narrative to a pseudo ‘I’, or ‘my’ narrative, thereby departing from the exact form of the original; two, it is delivered in an ‘I’ format either by the speaker herself a second or n-th time, or by someone who presents the speaker’s experience as his very own (coming close to stealing at this point). In both cases, unless a wholly extraordinary memory for semantics, syntax and phonological supra-segmentals is involved, there is no question of exact simulation. So in oral discourse, ‘authorship’, if any, can be said to attach only to the first articulation of a narrative, after which conversation as a medium allows for such protean yet conventionalized changes of narrative format that plagiarism, strictly speaking, is virtually impossible. And this in turn would strongly imply 29Compare Dennett, 1991, on the ‘reality of selves’, pp. 426–30.
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that each (re-) telling of a story is necessarily an ‘original’ act in and of itself. Paradoxically, it does not follow from the argument that the plagiarism of oral narratives—fictional like a fairytale from the Brothers Grimm, or factual first person narrative—is almost unworkable, given an infinitely variable and varying medium like conversation, that ‘original’ creations are impossible in oral discourse. Rather they are the rule, not the exception. In conversational contexts, then, we have to assume that narratives are always original, possessing an intrinsic immunity to plagiaristic appropriation. In Chapter 2, I showed that the version of SAT formulated by Searle was unsuited to an analysis of stories in conversation because it gave no account of the activity of story-telling except as the ‘indirect’ speech act of assertion. In its achievement of an ‘ideal simplicity’, the taxonomy proposed by Searle could not accommodate the multiplicity of activities which speakers and hearers engage in. An exclusive focus on the story as a speech act in the Searlian mould would therefore seem to force once again some fundamental deconstruction of standard speech act theory. Consider, for example, Searle’s insistence that ‘the theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimum unit of human communication is not a sentence or other expression but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts’. Such an emphasis might, on the face of it, appear to imply a rejection of the ‘sentence’ as a basic unit of analysis, but it would be wrong to infer anything about Searle’s actual processes of inquiry from his theoretical assertion. For, we find to our surprise that Searle slips, despite himself, repeatedly into an analysis in terms of sentences. He asks us for instance to Imagine a speaker and a hearer, and suppose that in appropriate circumstances the speaker utters one of the following sentences: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Sam smokes habitually. Does Sam smoke habitually? Sam, smoke habitually. Would that Sam smoked habitually.
He then goes on to ‘ask how we might characterize or describe the speaker’s utterance as one of these. What shall we say the speaker is doing when he utters one of these?’ It is my hunch that, in asking us to ‘imagine’ speakers and hearers and ‘suppose’ appropriate circumstances, Searle not only facilitates the interchangeable use of the terms ‘sentence’ and ‘utterance’, he also shifts our attention from actual spoken discourse to its ‘cleaned-up’ variant as written text. Gone are those vital bits of
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glue—those ‘ums’ and ‘you knows’, ‘I means’ and ‘wells’—which, by orienting to listeners and providing them with possible entry points into an interaction, may hold discourse, narrative, the body of the goddess Vac, together as an animated whole greater than the sum of its parts. I have already made the argument that this tendency to rely on a received and fairly traditional prescription for grammatical sentence types (imperative, interrogative, declarative, etc.) has rendered speech act theory relatively insensitive to a consideration of meta-theoretical questions about foundations, of which one of the most crucial for this book is—are the imaginings of ‘theory’. Is ‘theory’, speech act theory included, really different from the fictional imaginings of ‘narrative’? Or can greater purchase come out of thinking of narrative itself as prototheory, and theory, in turn, as no more than a kind of fiction that muses on the nature of ‘facts’? One way to approach this problematic is to re-analyse ‘speech acts’ such as stories as acts more perlocutionary than illocutionary, thereby bypassing the whole problem of setting up a strict set of ‘felicity conditions’ for them. But, one might first have to ask—what exactly are perlocutions, not to mention illocutions? An immediate answer is provided by Searle’s systematization of speech act theory, which neatly arranges all the variegated things Austin suggested that we do with words into five basic and universal classes: a. b. c. d. e.
representatives assertives directives commissives expressives30
These ‘illocutions’, or types of linguistic acts, are meant to make up the basic building blocks of intentional meaning across the languages of the world. And the formulation undoubtedly possesses most of the elements of a strong and elegant taxonomic theory. The problem, of course, quite apart from the vexed question of whether Searle’s classes of speech act build in a cognitive bias, is that an utterance may ‘do’ several things at once. Thus, an assertion might, in addition to performing the speech act of asserting, anger or please a listener; in fact, causing such 30J.R. Searle, Speech Acts, 1969. See also Searle ‘A Classification of Illocutionary Acts’ in Dell Hymes (ed.), where he explicitly states that ‘there are only four or five types of illocutionary act in human communication’ and also argues against Austin’s taxonomy, p. 1 and pp. 7–10.
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emotions in a listener might even turn out be the prime intention behind a speaker’s making a particular assertion. These extra effects on listeners, especially if intended, are known as the ‘perlocutions’ that accompany, or take place as a consequence of, a central illocutionary act. So how do we theoretically distinguish the effective performance of a perlocutionary from an illocutionary act? In classical speech act theory, this question is typically dismissed by pointing out that an illocutionary act, merely by virtue of its being uttered, guarantees its own intentionality, while a perlocutionary act does not. What this means is that, simply by uttering the words, say, ‘I promise to return your book tomorrow’—a speaker will have performed, conventionally, the commissive speech act of promising, and will be taken by the listener concerned to have undertaken to return her book, whatever his intentions might be, nefarious or otherwise. So also with the other four basic kinds of acts. On the other hand, no speaker can ‘do’ perlocutions in the same direct fashion; he cannot hope to frighten someone just by uttering the dread words ‘I frighten you’, nor, alas, can he, in general, effectively please or delight a listener by merely saying ‘I please and delight you’. It thus seems to be in the nature of linguistic action that perlocutionary acts, in contrast to illocutionary ones, must be indirect—they are of necessity performed via illocutionary acts proper, such as assertions, promises, greetings, orders or questions. A complex speech act such as narrative, if it can at all be considered a single speech act, seems particularly to invite analysis as a perlocutionary act, because hearers in most, if not all, cultures, seem regularly to articulate the perlocutionary effects (‘Oh, how horrible!’, ‘I can hardly believe it!’, ‘What did you do then?’) of a story on themselves to show that they have understood its import, the affective intentions that motivate its telling. Or, in Austin’s terminology, the ‘uptake’ of a story is generally secured only when hearers exclaim appropriately in response to it; otherwise, it ‘misfires’ or is ‘nullified’. So if every speech act is a performative, as indeed it is by Austinian definition, and story-telling is a kind of speech act, then it may be that the efficaciousness of a narrative performance derives mainly from its perlocutionary effects. In fact, any narrative within a conversation could be viewed as a miniature three-act play, with a turn-taking sequence of three parts (preface or orientation, main turn or complicating action and resolution and/or coda). And as with a play, applause is conventionally required, because the whole raison d’être of this sort of performance is gain the admiration of, audience, for pulling off an unlikely, an almost magical stunt—that
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of showing, à la the Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick, that language allows communication for communication’s sake—phatic communion— as a logical possibility. And it is at this point that Searle’s Paradox might dissolve, or resolve, itself. Logically, it may be that the cut is not, as Searle suggests, between assertions, and then fictions as ‘pretended’ assertions, but between speech acts like narrative which seem to be primarily designed as vehicles of perlocutionary intent, and speech acts such as assertions, which are not. All narratives, fictional and factual, are vehicles of perlocutionary intent, because they exist as structures whose main purpose is, as we said earlier, to convert ‘talk’ into ‘text’; and it is the characteristic property of texts that they encourage, for no good reason except communicative satisfaction, the sensual dance of the perlocutions. Narrative as a Perlocutionary Act ‘One may sometimes tell a lie’, Nietzsche reminds us, ‘but the grimace with which one accompanies it tells the truth’.31 Perlocutions could be described as the grimaces with which one accompanies the telling of a story. Ever since Aristotle defended poetic mimesis in the fourth century BC, it has been recognized that pretended assertions, fictional narratives, and even plain lies might function as enabling devices that allow ‘truth’ to get about more efficiently. On this view, as I suggested towards the beginning of the last chapter, fiction, with it aura of perlocutionary effects, extends the provenance of ‘truth’. Granted our weakness for other versions of ‘the truth’, it is not then surprising that we all, as Nietzsche almost coyly phrases it, ‘sometimes tell a lie’. Yet, even in these out and out circumstances, there appear to be all sorts of paralinguistic clues we can still offer our listeners to help them discern what Picasso in another context called ‘the truth of our lies’. Where Nietzsche suggests a grimace as one such cue, Wittgenstein produces other examples of ‘imponderable evidence’. Wittgenstein asks: The question is: ‘What does imponderable evidence accomplish? … Imponderable evidence includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone. I may recognize a genuine loving tone, distinguish it from a pretended one ... (but) why should it be that pretending is always taking place—this very special weave in the pattern of our lives?32 31Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in W.H. Auden and Louis Kronenberg The Faber Book of Aphorisms (Viking, 1962), p. 324. 32Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 228.
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Wittgenstein’s answer to his question about the ‘special’ importance of pretended language games is interesting. He finds it not ‘a matter of course’ but ‘a remarkable fact that pictures and fictitious narratives occupy our minds, give us pleasure’.33 That is, we ‘pretend’ for our pleasure, and among our most ‘remarkable’ vehicles for pleasurable pretence are narratives. Narratives and the ‘imponderable’ gestures which characterize the telling of stories, rehearse ‘truth’ for us in ways that manage to hold our attention as a species. J.L. Austin, a near contemporary but not a confrere of Wittgenstein’s, also had his own theories about those ‘imponderables’ that so frequently accompany our conversation. As we have noted, How to Do Things with Words worked out with some enthusiasm a large range of possible variations that our verbal presentations of the truth can be subject to in different contexts. Some of these contextual effects, or imponderables, Austin called ‘perlocutions’. It has frequently been observed by philosophers of language that not all utterances perform just one speech act. ‘I promise to evict you the next time you fail to pay rent’34 is simultaneously a warning, a threat, a declaration, and a promise. In addition, this multiple speech act might have the intended perlocutionary effects of being frightening, alarming, depressing, or even of giving the hearer a heart attack. And if we are to take seriously Austin’s statement that under the heading ‘truth’ what we, in fact, have is not a simple quality nor a relation, not indeed any one thing, but rather a whole dimension of criticism ... there is a whole lot of things to be considered and weighed in this dimension alone—the facts, yes, but also the situation of the speaker, his purpose in speaking, his hearer, questions of precision and etc.35
Then we have to consider all those other ‘dimensions’ of the speech act. For any analyst, including the unflappable Austin, it is this apparent ‘limitlessness’36 of contextual considerations that poses theoretical problems, not the least because every competent language user takes them so much in stride. The basic form of the illocutionary act, according 33Ibid., p. 142. 34I am indebted for this example to Ted Cohen’s ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’,
Foundations of Language, Vol. 9, (1973). 35J. L. Austin ‘Performative Constative’ in The Philosophy of Language, edited by John Searle, p. 21–2. 36Compare Culler, 1987, on ‘limitless’ interpretation in Framing the Sign. See also, Eco et al., 1992, in S. Collini (ed.), Interpretation and Overinterpretation.
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to Searle is the simple F(p). However, since he also says that ‘one and the same utterance may constitute the performance of several different illocutionary acts’, this raises the difficult question of the relationship between the various ‘forces’ that could attach to one and the same proposition. Theoretically, a single illocutionary act could be analysed as F1(p), F2(p), F(p), F3(p), Fn(P), etc., where the proposition remains constant but various forces simultaneously coexist. But would not a hearer need ‘rules’ to decide which of these ‘forces’ is more relevant, which less so, and whether some of the forces are ‘indirect’?37 How would she go about making all the decisions needed for successful uptake? Most intriguingly, what relation holds between ‘indirect speech acts’ like a warning (‘There’s a bull right behind you!’), and—threatening (‘Don’t you know what happens to little boys who tease bulls?’), and ‘perlocutionary effects’ like frightening, surprising, alarming, and so forth? Stories as conversational objects are so rich in perlocutionary effects that any attempt to analyse them without reference to these effects is bound to be without much interest. One of the reasons the Searlean analysis of fiction remains unsatisfactory is that it refuses to grant perlocutions any importance in determining the ‘logical status’ of fiction. As I see it, the ‘logic’ of fiction is more complex, and more problematic, than Searle concedes. We recognize that fiction is different from ‘lying’ or ‘pretence’ because, as I’ve argued, it declares its identity. By flaunting its narrative design, fiction works like metaphor, and it is worth quoting Davidson again at some length here: If what the metaphor makes us notice were finite in scope and propositional in nature, this would not in itself make trouble. But, in fact, there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention, and much of what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character. When we try to say what a metaphor ‘means’, we soon realise there is no end to what we want to mention. If someone draws his finger along a coastline on a map, or mention the beauty and deftness of a line in a Picasso etching, how many things are drawn to your attention? You might list a great many but you could not finish ... How many acts or propositions are conveyed by a photograph? None, an infinity, or one great unstable fact? Bad question. Seeing as is not the same as seeming that ... Since in most cases, what metaphor prompts or inspires is not entirely, or even at all, recognition of 37As Ted Cohen points out, anyone faced with an utterance like ‘I promise to evict
you ...’, etc. (cited above) in actual conversation would very likely see its primary meaning or ‘force’ as a threat rather than as a promise in any sense. ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, p. 498.
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some truth or fact, the attempt to give literal expression to the content of metaphor prompts or inspires, is simply misguided.38
These remarks of Davidson are pertinent in at least three ways to a discussion of the connections between the ‘logic’ of fiction and the perlocutionary effects associated with fiction in its typical format, which is narrative. First, the capacity to generate ‘non-propositional’ meanings like ‘perlocutions’ may be the characteristic mark of a particular speech act like narrative, by which listeners make out that it is not just a clumsy attempt at some other speech act like assertion. Second, these nonpropositional meanings are resistant to being listed as a systematic and complete set which attach predictably to a particular speech act. Third, trying to paraphrase a speech act which is special precisely because of its unlimited, non-propositional effects in terms of its clearly statable propositional content is therefore to get hold of the wrong end of the cognitive stick. Every illocutionary act, Searle would probably agree, has an internal coherence defined by its putative felicity conditions. It is this internal coherence, or distinctive character that I see as the ‘logic’ of a given speech act. Just as the ‘logic’ of metaphor demands that we pay attention to its non-propositional meanings, so does the ‘logic’ of story-telling. To miss this is to misunderstand the point of the activity of story-telling which is not simply, or at all, to present a receptive audience with an ersatz version of the ‘assertion’, but to rouse a possibly recalcitrant set of listeners to feel real emotions and to experience the frisson that comes from the apprehended or envisioned rather than the said or asserted. This is a shared, and in my view, essential, feature of both fictional and factual narrative. It is my contention that the speech act of story-telling fails or misfires most miserably when it does not effectively convey its nonpropositional effects to listeners, and thus leaves them groping for its ‘point’, the emotional logic of its development. According to Searle, fictional narrative is an ‘indirect’ speech act insofar as it has the form of assertion but not its force. The fact that the producers of narrative regularly and consistently intend their ‘fictions’ to produce perlocutionary effects is, for him, beside the point in a strict speech act analysis of fiction. My position is that fiction, like other kinds of narrative, performs an illocutionary act proper. It is not an 38Davidson, ‘ What Metaphors Mean’, in Truth and Interpretation, p. 263. Compare
Robert Frost’s intuition that ‘paraphrase’ ruins poetry—‘Poetry is what gets lost in translation’. Also see Bronislaw Malinowski, 1923, on the idea of ‘phatic communion’, mentioned on p. 147 of this chapter.
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‘indirect’ parasitic assertion because the element of masquerade or dissimulation is usually lacking in the performance of narrative; instead, several conventions of speech and action announce that a story is to be recognized by its listeners as a story. These conventional gestures include textual signals like ‘Once upon a time’ within the story, offers of a story in prior conversational turns, as well as supra-segmental clues such as changes in gaze and voice quality. Recall here Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner fixing the wedding guests with his ‘glittering eye’ so that they all ‘stood still’ adopting the listening posture so typical of those who deduce from conventional clues that a teller is about to produce a gripping ‘dangerof-death’ narrative. The power, the force, of narrative derives, not from its ‘indirect’ imitation of the speech act of assertion, but from the special feature that it conventionally secures perlocutionary effects. Its listeners expect narrative to produce perlocutionary effects and are generally prepared to indict it, at least covertly, when it does not succeed in this crucial respect. It has, in fact, been argued that, phenomenogically, ‘the illocutionaryperlocutionary distinction is one of degree rather than kind’.39 Lanigan, for example, presents the following case: The illocutionary force and the perlocutionary effect are not different kinds of ‘effect’. They are different degrees of situational involvement for the speaker and listener moving from the alteration to the completion of a situation, i.e., from ‘uptake ‘to response. ... In the perlocutionary act the result of communication is an effect on the part of the listener as a consequence of the speaker’s utterance. That effect ... is the completion of a situation. By contrast, the illocutionary act is the alteration of a situation.40
In Lanigan’s reading of the speech act, a ‘perlocution’ is to be equated with ‘uptake’. It is not an ‘accompaniment’ of speech in the sense of either the Wittgensteinian ‘imponderable’, or the Nietzschean ‘grimace’. Rather, it describes the effects these acts produce, in conjunction with the illocutionary act of story telling, on hearers. Successful speech, one might say depends on the ‘completion’ of the act of interpretation by hearers. As Davidson has suggested, however, the non-propositional load which certain acts of speech like metaphor (and, as far as I am concerned, narrative) carry is virtually inexhaustible, limitless. In principle, therefore, it could be, contra Lanigan, that the perlocutionary act is never quite ‘completed’. There is always room for further interpretation in the case of the perlocutions of narrative. In practice, though, we do tend to limit 39R. Lanigan, Speech Act Phenomenology, 1977, p. 57. 40Ibid., p. 57.
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the inferences we make from any act of speech, including the narrative illocution, if illocution it is. Furthermore, the narrative tells us that there is in almost all story-telling a drive towards an ending, a formal ‘closure’ of story time. Pragmatically, we could postulate that this is the point at which ‘uptake’ is concluded for the time being, although not necessarily for all time, since it is possible to return to the ‘text’ of a previously told story in another conversation, and/or in another context. The notion of perlocution as ‘uptake’ makes it much more central to the analysis of speech acts than I think either Austin or Searle envision, for the simple reason that then perlocution ceases to be an effect that may or may not be produced as a ‘consequence’ of an illocutionary act. It becomes instead a necessary part of every communication involving a speaker and an intended hearer. So, for example, Campbell among others has pointed out that ‘all speech acts produce some effects upon the feelings, thoughts or actions of those involved, some effects in such acts, and, therefore, all speech acts are perlocutions’.41 Placing both illocutionary and perlocutionary acts of the classical Austinian kind in the wider interactional context assumed by Grice’s Maxims of Cooperation ensures that a complete activity like story-telling which follows a conventional procedure but which characteristically has effects which are ‘unconventional’, or at any rate ‘unpredictable’, can be analysed both in terms of production and reception. Since a story is commonly articulated over several conversational turns, its ‘implicatures’ could change quite considerably across the span of conversation that it covers, forcing hearers to revise their notions of what a story is ‘about’. Also, the various ‘degrees of situational involvement for speaker and hearer’ to which Lanigan refers are continuously being reassessed in a Gricean model where implicatures derive from every conversational move that fails to comply with the Cooperative Principle and its Maxims. In Chapter 4, I therefore discuss Grice’s theory more thoroughly with regard to conversational narrative. Here, I will only briefly consider a comparison between the Gricean notion of ‘implicature’ and the Austinian one of ‘perlocution’. I wish to suggest that, if Grice’s theory is read as one of perlocutionary effect, this effectively puts narrative perlocutions in the context of a ‘talk-exchange’ where implicatures are a crucial part of conversationalists’ structure of expectations; and this in turn could bring us near to 41Campbell, P.N., ‘A Rhetorical View of Locutionary, Illocutionary and Perlocutionary Acts’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 59, Number 3, p. 290.
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examining, and conceiving of, actual examples of conversational storytelling as not so different in kind from the extraordinary artifice of the literary ‘text’. To sustain the argument that the Gricean theory of conversational implicature could be understood as one which essentially deals in perlocutionary effects, it might be useful to first recall Austin’s original definition of a perlocution. Saying something will often, or normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings thoughts and actions of the audience of the speaker, or of other persons; and it may be done with the design, intention or purpose of producing them; and we may then say, thinking of this, that the speaker has performed an act in the nomenclature of which reference is made either ... only obliquely, or even ... not at all to the performance of the locutionary or illocutionary act. We shall call the performance of this kind of act the performance of a ‘perlocutionary’ act , and the act performed a ‘perlocution’.42
On the basis of this definition, Steven Davis has proposed a set of conditions for a perlocutionary act, which I set out below, only slightly simplified in form: S’s effecting a q by uttering p is the intentional performance of a perlocutionary act if: 1. S performs an illocutionary act by uttering p, (where an ‘illocutionary’ act is ‘intended’ by S as opposed to a ‘locutionary’ act). 2. S means by p what p means in the language of which it is a part. 3. H understands what illocutionary act S means to perform by uttering p (i.e., the ‘literal’ meaning of p). 4. H understands what S means by p. 5. What H understands S to mean causes H to understand a q (i.e., by p, H understands q). 6. S intends H to understand a q because S has uttered p.43
As an illustration of these perlocutionary requirements, consider the following example of a ‘ghost story in one sentence’ (re-analysed once more in Chapter 5). A man woke up in the dark, groped for his torch and felt it put into his hand. Now suppose that, in addition to telling you this story, S intends it to have the additional effect of startling H. S can perform this act in the standard way if and only if: 42Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 101. 43S. Davis, ‘Perlocutions’ in Searle, Kiefer and Bierwisch (eds), p. 53.
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1. S tells H, that a man woke up in the dark, groped, etc., by uttering ‘A man woke up in the dark ...’, etc. 2. S means by ‘A man woke up ...’, etc. what it means in English. 3. H understands that S has told H a story by uttering ‘A man woke up ...’. 4. What H understands this utterance to mean causes H to become startled. 5. S intends that H become startled because S has uttered ‘A man woke up. ...’, etc. A number of similarities between intended perlocutionary effects and implicatures can be derived from this systematization. Both perlocutions and implicatures move back and forth between reference to the intentions of the speaker and the ‘uptake’ by the hearer. Neither perlocutions nor implicatures are directly derivable; they depend on a particular reading of some utterance over and above its literal meaning. Austin writes that: ... the perlocutionary act may include what in a way are consequences, as when we say ‘By doing X I was doing Y’, we do bring in a greater or less stretch of consequences always ...44
And Grice maintains: I include under the head of non-natural senses of ‘mean’ any senses of ‘mean’ found in sentences of the patterns ‘A means (meant) something by X’, or ‘A means (meant) by X that’45
In our example, the consequence or effect of the story ‘A man woke up in the dark ...’, etc., is that the hearer receives a jolt, is startled. By uttering ‘A man woke up in the dark ...’ etc., a speaker may mean to startle even though in uttering these words she is not conventionally performing the act of ‘startling’. By saying ‘A man woke up in the dark ...’ etc., a speaker in appropriate conversational circumstances may imply nonnaturally, in addition to the literal meaning of the utterance, that a startled response is the one she intends to evoke though her violation of the Maxim of Quantity which enjoins a speaker to be adequately informative. This is not the place to discuss the details of maxim violation, since the matter is thrashed out in Chapter 4, but the more general argument holds. Implicatures, like perlocutions, are the ‘results’ of acts of speech. If every speech act attempts to solve a conversational ‘problem’, then each speech act has to be evaluated in terms of its uptake. ‘Perlocutions’ 44Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 107. 45Grice, ‘Meaning’ in Philosophical Review in Strawson (ed.), 1964, p. 40.
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could be understood as the results a hearer gets when he ‘solves’ the emotional puzzle set by a hearer. ‘Implicatures’, deduced as they are supposed to be from conversational evidence, can be envisaged in exactly the same way. Unlike illocutionary acts, which are allegedly ‘performed’ just by virtue of being appropriately uttered, implicatures and perlocutionary acts both seem to depend crucially on the notion of ‘interpretation’. If a hearer failed to grasp that the speaker had implied a supernatural occurrence by the emphasis ‘felt it put into his hand’, he would fail to be surprised and no implicature, or perlocutionary effect, would be generated, despite a speaker’s sincerest intentions. It is this vital interpretative element in the make up of the ‘performative’, as well as the ‘implicature’, that specially concerns any study of narrativity. Speech Act Theory: Narrative, Interpretation and Ethics At this point, it could be interesting to return to the perspective of de Man as it is carried forward by the skilled latter-day deconstructionist Jonathan Culler. Culler feels that speech act theory errs on the side of being too ‘personal’. In Framing the Sign, he issues a dire warning. I think here lies a major problem for the theory of fiction today, when narrative analysis has become so resourceful and, in dubious collaboration with speech act theory, it is attempting to convince us that a narrative is the act of a person. The theory of fiction needs to be alert to the inadequacies of this orientation, which strives to convert everything in language to a mark of human personalities. There is, of course, a great deal of patterning in texts that is not a sign of personality. Much in literature is interesting and compelling precisely because it does something other than illustrate the personality of the narrator.46
It is surely not unreasonable, given what we glean about the world around us to believe that ‘a narrative is the act of a person’, but a considerable gap exists between subscribing to this belief, and ‘converting everything in language to a mark of human personality’. Speech act theory could very plausibly be accused, I think, of underwriting the first assumption, but it is probably not guilty of supporting the second. In fact, the ‘Speakers’ and ‘Hearers’ that are among the main props of speech act theory, are at first sight conspicuous for their genderlessness, their classlessness, their absolute lack of dialectal and regional specificity, and the flawlessness of their ‘performances’. What looks like almost 46Culler, ‘Problems in the Theory of Fiction’, 1987, pp. 206–7.
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complete abstraction away from the contingent ‘sources of the self ’47 seems effortlessly achieved by the theory. The principal players of speech act theory are like model figures constructed to demonstrate how speech acts ‘function’. It is risible, for example, to enquire whether the ‘speaker’ in a speech act asking for a handkerchief is suffering from a cold. Speakers in speech act examples are assumed to be in perfect health. It may be all right to write pages on ‘Iago’s motives’ for stealing Desdemona’s kerchief, although we ‘know’ that both these characters are Shakespearean ‘creations’, and the actors who play them are just ‘pretending’ to enact their roles. However, the intentionality displayed by a ‘speaker’ as she is postulated in speech act theory is of a different order. The causes that motivate a speaker to request her hearer for a handkerchief (e.g., she has a bad cold, she wants to gag someone, she wants to wipe the dust off the windscreen of her car because her wipers are faulty, etc.) are simply not regarded as important. What matters here is that she has performed an act that ‘counts as’48 requesting, and not say, asserting or promising. And just as her ‘motives’ are disregarded, even as her ‘intentionality’ is analysed, so are factors like her sex, her age, her colour, her nationality, her class, her education, her phobias, her preferences, her obsessions, her state of health, and all the other myriad details that we tacitly assume contribute to our sense of ‘self’, entirely dismissed by speech act theory. In this sense, I think it would be fair to say this theory cannot be accused of buying into the cult of ‘personality’. What then prompts Culler’s apprehensions about the ‘anthropomorphic’ thrust of speech act theory, and how is this related to the implicit ethical question raised in the last chapter about using empirical methods (i.e., using ‘real’ conversations by ‘real’ people) to assess the 47The phrase is Charles Taylor’s and occurs as the title of his book The Sources of the Self (1991). 48 Under Searle’s scheme, the ‘essential condition’ acts as a safety net, a fallback rule, should the preparatory, propositional content, and sincerity conditions fail to work. All these conditions, it turns to, might ultimately be shown to be taken care of by the essential condition or what an utterance ‘counts as’ doing. So, if an utterance ‘counts as’ a promise within what I’ve called a ‘speech pact’, that is, a mutual agreement between speaker and hearer, it is a promise no matter whether it fulfils the other conditions on promise or not. An utterance is similarly a ‘story’ if it ‘counts as’ a story. Thus any speech act might be indirectly taken to perform any other speech act if it ‘counts as’ that speech act. The difficulty is that speakers in actual conversation do not seem to use, on the whole, preparatory, propositional content or sincerity conditions to judge whether an utterance ‘counts as’ a particular speech act. Instead, they rely very largely on the essential condition alone, which is only supposed to be a safeguard rather that the mainstay of speech act theory.
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claims of speech act theory? Not surprisingly, the formulation of speech act theory can easily be shown to be ethnocentric. As Culler reminds us—‘several studies ... criticise speech act theory’s emphasis on sincerity, intentionality, and perspicuousness in language use. In other societies it may be clearer than our in own (Culler’s, that is) that disinterested exchange of information is a very minor aspect of linguistic action’.49 It is hard for me to believe that the ‘disinterested exchange of information’ is a major aspect of ‘linguistic action’, even in Culler’s society, but this is not really consequential to my argument. The real difficulty, as Culler’s reference to his ‘own’ society reveals, is that, like anyone else, Austin and Searle rely on the normative presuppositions of the societies they inhabit to formulate their ideas. From the fact that the ‘speaker’ in speech act theory is always a ‘he’, ‘we’, as skilled interpreters, also glean a great deal more—that this male speaker is white, adult, healthy, a native speaker of English, and very possibly a member of the AngloAmerican academic community. All this additional information is obviously not part of the ‘literal meaning’ of either the words ‘speaker’ or ‘he’. We nevertheless infer it from Austin or Searle’s text because we share, at least for the purposes of ‘reading’ this text, the dominant ‘western’, ‘patriarchal’ ideology of the culture that has produced it. If these other connotations were not part of broader semantic field we made use of to ‘understand’ the words ‘he’ and ‘speaker’ in Austin or Searle, then we could logically never have arrived at a ‘critique’ of their ethnocentrism. It takes two to tango, and much collusion is implied in this sort of reader-response critique of ethnocentrism. In fact, it should not strike those who stress the ‘specificity’ and ‘historicity’ of human societies as either surprising or blameworthy that Austin and Searle write the way they do since, as Culler would certainly agree, there exists no neutral value free Archimedean ground on which one can stand to make one’s theoretical pronouncements, especially when one’s theories are about the self in a social frame.50 If it is not possible to avoid ethnocentrism or the ‘middle kingdom’ mentality entirely, whatever one does, perhaps, it is dangerous to claim ‘universality’ for one’s social assumptions. This may be partly what irks Culler about speech act theory, but again, we all practise at least a weak 49Jonathan Culler, in Framing the Sign, 1987, p. 189 50The famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis concerning linguistic relativism may be referred
to here. A summary of the various sub-theses of this conjecture and a discussion of how they might apply in the context of contemporary India is to be found in my book Technobrat: Culture in a Cybernetic Classroom, 1997, pp. 215–21.
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universality when we concede that people who look, behave and speak very differently from us are still ‘human’. There is, in my view no way out of this condition. How else would we behave if we are not to cannibalize—or Calibanize—other communities? To attribute thoughts, actions, desires to others means that we must assume that their narratives of the ‘self ’, resemble ours to a substantial extent, even when their practices seem outlandish to us. If we try to think ourselves into the minds of our pets, or of animals to whom we attribute high ‘intelligence’ (vervet monkeys, chimps, dolphins, etc.) the only way we seem to succeed in this enterprise is via anthropomorphism. That is, we fall back on the same ‘logic’ that we use to decode human patterns of feeling, because we simply do not have access to any other ‘alien’ ways of thinking and emoting. Similarly, when it comes to interpreting the ‘actions’ of human beings from another community, or even from our own, we rely on our belief that, different as they are, they tell themselves some of the same stories about love and grief and suffering as we do. Were we not to make this ‘universalizing’ move every time we seek to understand the simplest act of speech, we could not hope to communicate at all. In this sense, to universalize is to ‘get personal’, and inevitably to be ethnocentric. However, in the manner of de Man and Derrida, Culler appears to feel that this basic impulse towards the ‘personal’, the first person ‘voice’, that speech act theory takes for granted obscures a trait of language that could be much more fundamental. This is the inherent strangeness of language, its ‘inhumanness’.51 The ‘patterns’ a language has formed across time cannot be changed by individual speaker’ acts of will or ‘intention’. Every speaker of a language and any analysis of ‘intentional’ linguistic acts must recognize this dominance of ex-human words over human will. As de Man famously argues, even if language is reliably at the service of the speech act as far its grammar goes, the rhetorical element of language is still untrustworthy. Rhetorically, a language can trip up a speaker any time; it is treacherous, and its treachery ultimately overwhelms the puny attempts of individual speakers at ‘sincerity’. What such a pitting of ‘speech act theory’ against ‘rhetoric language’ does is to present us with a metaphysics. In this scenario, mere human notions of the moral and the rational, such as ‘sincerity’ (honesty, truthfulness, etc.), ‘cooperativeness’ (including helpfulness, mutual trust, sharing information and so on) and ‘politeness’ (tolerance of and consideration for others’ tastes, inclinations, practices reflected in 51Compare J.F. Lyotard’s unusual extension of this idea in The Inhuman, 1996, a book
with concerns in some respect similar to my own in Technobrat. See previous footnote.
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our modes of behaviour) come up against an uncanny force that cannot be ‘read’ at all in terms of these notions. Readings of literary texts, above all, demonstrate the fundamental ‘unreadability’ of language. They reveal the aporias between the textual creation of meaning and the destruction, or at any rate undoing, of this meaning in any attempt to ‘understand’ it. Herein lies the deep connection between ethics and aesthetics—language at its most beautiful and seductive shows that it is also unstable, unreliable. I do not know whether Culler would agree with my interpretation of terms like ‘sincerity’ and ‘cooperativeness’ as carrying a stamp of (necessarily ethnocentric) moral approbation, but the view foregrounds, for me, two problems with Culler’s de Manian position. The first is the move from asserting that linguistic patterns characterize languages and not the personalized utterances of speakers to alleging that the existence of such linguistic patterns mark something basically ‘inhuman’ about Language with a capital ‘L’. The second problem concerns all the morally weighted adjectives which a characterization of languages as ‘inhuman’ brings in its wake. As I see it, these adjectives anthropomorphize language quite as thoroughly as any analysis that speech act theory imposes. It is eminently sensible for Culler to maintain that linguistic patterns are not reducible to speakers’ personal acts of linguistic commission. But it would appear that in this sense speech act theory is not concerned with language alone but with actions that just happen to involve language more than any other communicative ability that human beings have (say, those non-linguistic ‘imponderables’ of gesture and facial expression). Of course, it is true that an individual does not possess complete dominance over patterns of linguistic production, just as she might lack control over trends in the national or international economy, even when she is quite skilled at the management of her own money. But how does this amount to declaring language ‘inhuman’ except in the trivial sense that every human activity which has come to have predictable and recognizable norms largely independent of individual interference is also inhuman? On this account, there is no warrant for considering language especially ‘inhuman’, any more than a game of chess, a monetary transaction or a ballet is inhuman. It is also true that we cannot (or do not) prosecute ‘language’ for the crimes of, let’s say, plagiarism or perjury; we only indict persons A or B for these offences. That is, even given a belief in the way language habitually ‘betrays’ us, we are not able to catch hold of it and punish it. The closest we get to punishing language is when we taboo ‘bad language’, incarcerate or banish it from our thoughts, as it were. Metaphors of this
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sort remind us that we often ‘humanize’ language (other examples would include references to a ‘dying’ language or a ‘persuasive’ slogan), but underlying our language anthropomorphizing metaphors is the belief that language lacks both agency and subjecthood. We can neither punish nor reward it because it is an ‘it’, or in a word, ‘inhuman’. Now this position would be quite consistent for Culler to adopt, except that it renders language inanimate (i.e., incapable of ‘action’, inert) as well as inhuman, and this seems to me to jive somewhat uncomfortably with his descriptions, pace de Man, of the entity ‘language’. Among the de Manian adjectives that Culler endorses are characterizations of language as constantly ‘performing erasures of its own positions’,52 as ‘senseless’, as ‘resistant’ to ‘theory’, as ‘autonomous’, as ‘uncontrollable’ and as ‘inexorable’. Although literally speaking, all these terms could be applied to the mechanical structures of language that Culler wants to focus on, there is no doubt that, connotatively, epithets like ‘uncontrollable’ and autonomous’ suggest a sheer vitality that does not fit with language conceptualized as inanimate. Reading Culler, in the best post-modernist tradition, ‘against the grain’ brings out the tension between a ‘natural’ tendency, evidenced in much everyday metaphorical usage, to anthropomorphize language, investing it with a power akin to the strength of the human ‘spirit’ and the ‘ideological’ deconstructionist stand taken by Culler, which militates against that very tendency. One consequence of this tension is that it reinforces a reader’s sense of a ‘battle’ to be fought out between ‘theory’ (speech act theory in particular), and ‘language’ (especially literary language); between human ‘personality’ and linguistic ‘patterns’; between anthropomorphic ‘morality’ and ‘rationality’ and non-human ‘tropologies’ and ‘senselessness’. Since this war is a perpetual one, it seems to me to have a no-win solution. As I see it, people, i.e. persons individual and collective, are always required to unmask the ideologies which Culler rightly believes instituted in language. And the ideologies unmasked will depend on the particular points of view which people as individuals bring to this complex act of interpretation. This is where there is no getting away from ‘personalities’ and ultimately from ‘ethnocentrism’, broadly defined. Furthermore, to get involved ‘personally’ is what motivates the move from unmasking ideological structures in language to taking political or social ‘action’ against such ideologies as seem to a person pernicious. A rather obvious example would be a reading of The Tempest, say, as a text about colonialism. In India, it would require an academic teaching 52Quote from Paul de Man in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p. 119, cited by Jonathan
Culler in Framing the Sign, 1988, p. 129.
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‘English Literature’ to make a ‘wordly’ connection linking this sophisticated reading to her own political situation, before the process of unmasking ideologies in texts could be said to have begun. She would have to reconceptualize Shakespeare as a proto-colonialist, rather than as that cheerily apolitical being—‘the Bard of Avon’. Only when she got personally involved enough to consider ‘action’ against the powerful residual colonial structures that countries like India have inherited through their educational institutions (by changing syllabi, received modes of interpretation, etc.) could she paradoxically be said to have truly critiqued the ‘impersonal’ ideological charge that the exquisite language of The Tempest carries. No language and no text is independent in this sense of the personalities of narrator and narratee, who between them are often negotiating very specific moral ground. Yet Culler seems loath to accept this simple expression of `personality’ in the speech act, especially the narrative speech act. Criticizing Susan Lanser’s preoccupation with the attributed ‘sex’ of the narrators of fiction, Culler writes: The argument would be that since every person has a sex, and narrators are people, every narrator must have a sex, and to omit the discussion of the sex of narrators is to miss important aspects of novels. This argument is plausible only, it seems to me, because we have come to take for granted that we explain textual details by adducing narrators and explain narrators by adducing qualities of real people.53
What is the status of ‘real people’ within the explanatory framework of the speech act? What, position should a researcher take when she attempts to theorize the real narratives of real people as ‘speech acts’, and should she adopt a different position when she discusses the speech acts of literary fiction? As I’ve emphasized before, much of the appeal of speech act theory is that it seeks to combine abstract and logical analysis with a pragmatic study of the actual contexts in which speakers communicate. It is a matter of some irony, but also perhaps the occasion for special insight, that the same commitment to analytic philosophy that prompted Austin initially to look for abstract and logical distinctions between types of propositions (sentences), finally led him to the conviction that his object of study was ‘not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation’. In this chapter, I have tried hard to project the notion ‘speech situation’ as highly complex, centrally including units such as the narrative, and not just tied to sentential ‘patterns’. This quest to unravel the threads binding narrative speech acts also brought me to a consideration of the real narratives of real people. Now, in the prototypical ‘real’ situation, of course, conversationalists 53Ibid., p. 206.
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do have knowledge of the sex of their interlocutors, and access to the immediate concerns which motive the conversation. Why should literary readings then disallow such knowledge, as Culler seems to advocate, especially as he thinks, again correctly, that there is a parallel between the role-playing aspect of all speech acts, and the role-playing of literary narrative? To answer this question, Culler resorts to the deconstructionist view of literary language as somehow bringing out the essentially ‘depersonalized’ and ‘ inhuman’ nature of all language. I would suggest that the answer has far more to do with pragmatic conventions grounded in beliefs about the way a ‘self’ is socially exhibited through a range of speech acts. The asymmetry between ‘real’ first person, face-to-face communication and ‘unreal’ third-person authorial presentations calls up, not just different interpretive norms but, in many societies, also different moral conventions. It is possible, theoretically, to maintain that all our acts are displays of the self. As such, they all involve role-playing and ‘imitation’,54 but the here and now ephemerality of the non-literary speech act, to my mind, imposes a great urgency on conversationalists born of their shared knowledge that the present has no mnemonic significance. Since the present belongs, in general, to the realm of the private, where the debris has to be ‘personally’ cleared each day, so to speak, to make room for more accretion, conversationalists tend to perceive their everyday speech acts as hastily put together for the moment and not ‘intended’ to last. In this sense, the quotidian narratives told in private conversation are ‘fragile’ in the eyes of conversationalists. A commonly accepted cognitive picture of the non-preservability of our everyday speech acts, not excluding our narrative acts, dictates our attitudes to the ‘privacy’ of these acts. Precisely because their tellers and listeners were not aiming at public ‘display texts’,55 narratives privately exchanged can be said to reveal narrators at their most vulnerable, with their guards down and their personal preoccupations up front. This is why the ‘right to privacy’ becomes a moot moral issue when analysing ‘real’ versus ‘literary’ narratives. It is not that ‘real’ narratives are actually or intrinsically less artful 54This ‘Western’ tradition of visualizing the self in terms of imitation and role-playing
goes back at least to Aristotle’s Poetics and St. Augustine’s view of language learning by children as matching words to world in his Confessions. Wittgenstein in fact begins the Philosophical Investigations by analysing a key passage on the subject by Augustine. 55 In my own papers on the acquisition of metaphor and the development of metalinguistic skills in children, I have used Pratt’s idea of literary text as forms of display to demonstrate this theoretical feature even in children. See Bibliography.
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than generic literary offerings such as novels, plays and short stories. In fact, as the pioneering studies by Mary Louise Pratt and William Labov show, conversational narrators use strategies similar to those of novelists and other writers to construct their ‘display texts’. They also elicit perlocutionary effects (surprise, curiosity, fear, amusement), not in the least different in kind from those produced by literary works. However, conversationalists’ perception of their everyday speech acts in general, and their narrative speech acts in particular, is that they are not ‘meant’ to last, are ‘fragile’ in this respect, and therefore belong to a private and protected sphere. Is a researcher justified then in violating this right to privacy that a conversationalist might reasonably invoke, given her belief in the fragility of her privately communicated stories? I will make three seemingly unrelated observations on this matter and then try to tie these strands together—a) the concept of a ‘tellable’ as it is widely used in the literature on oral narrativity presupposes that it is content, not ‘style’, that first and foremost distinguishes the event(s) recounted; b) literary narratives, unlike conversational narratives, foreground the ‘text’, its stylistic configurations, while conventionally ‘absenting’ the author; c) speech act theory (and to an extent its warring neighbour, deconstruction) rejoices in a vocabulary which uses words like ‘violation’, ‘misfire’ ‘voiding’, making ‘null’ and ‘abusing’ without apparently the slightest trace of selfconsciousness. The three observations made above all relate to the conventions of moral behaviour that surround our speech acts, and most especially our narrative acts, conversational as well as literary. The ‘author’ of a literary text is, conventionally, not taken to be remembering and recreating, but creating and presenting (i.e., making ‘present’ to readers events not culled from the real past). Unlike the teller of a conversational story, she therefore cannot be indicted for her failure to remember the past ‘correctly’. This condition holds even of the authors of ‘historical’ novels, because they were not there as witnesses to the past they describe. They can be faulted for ‘bad research’ if they get their dates wrong, for instance, but never for bad or inaccurate mnemonic reporting. The author of a literary work can afford to ‘absent’ herself ’—i.e. not reveal any ‘personal’ details about herself—because she is not a witness. It is this quality that makes her narrative essentially public. The literary narrator by convention cuts herself adrift from personal memory. Even if personal memories are the main source she relies on to create her fictions, she is not morally bound, in most societies, to stand surety for these memories because they are not focal in the literary ‘act’. As Roland Barthes puts it in another
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context, what distinguishes a novel or a poem is that it is literally ‘about nothing’. Perhaps we could say—in literature everything is ‘represented’ and nothing is remembered. In direct contrast, a conversational narrator is primarily into the business of communicating those events which carry the ballast of memory, narrative gravity. The content of her narrative is her substantive contribution to the intersubjective world she shares with her hearers. Unlike the literary narrator she is not required, by convention again, to ‘watch her words’. This is not just because she is in company she takes on ‘trust’, it is because a narrator tends to rely on shared beliefs about the ephemerality of the oral. If anything is carried over from the recounting of an everyday narrative, as I’ve argued with respect to ‘plagiarism’, it is expected by conversationalists that the entity preserved will not be ‘style’ or a speaker’s specialized manner of delivery, but ‘content’.56 Interestingly, speakers often apologize in conversations for not being able to tell a story as well as they themselves first heard it told, implying that it is primarily ‘content’ that they are passing on. Therefore, in a sense, conversational narratives also ‘absent’ the narrator when they are passed on; but because another narrator physically ‘replaces’ the ‘original’ narrators, and someone always stands in as a witness. There is a chain of narrative reception in the conversational context, through in which personal memory is connected to personal memory, although conversational narratives may be stylistically disjunct in a way the attributed forms of literary narratives can never be. Oddly, then, because conversational stories conventionally involve (links in) personal memory, they are regarded as innately private in a way that a particular author’s narratives are not, even though such literary narratives carry a personalized ‘signature’ as it were. Right to privacy, I argue, is an issue in conversational narrative because personal memory is conventionally evoked in the telling of such stories, whereas it is not an issue in literary narrative because personal memory is beside the point, not so much in the construction, but definitely in the presentation, of literary narrative. Requesting conversationalists’ permission to record their narratives and ‘use’ them for research, omitting their names and other ‘personal’ details, showing them one’s research papers afterwards, or asking for their ‘comments’ may be considered 56I am aware, of course, that this dichotomy between ‘style’ and ‘content’ is a little
simplistic, but there is a gross sense in which I think it does apply and serve my expository purposes here. See also in this connection, my essay ‘Dissimilar Twins: Language and Literature’, 1991a, listed in the Bibliography.
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mitigating measures, but they do not address the central problem. Indeed, they cannot, because if personal memories and the fragility of quickly concocted oral tellings are part of the conditions of conversation, then the difficulties with ‘publicizing’ the private sphere go deep, and cannot be removed by effecting ‘honourable’ contracts between researchers and the conversationalists they are recording. These objections apply even when a conversational narrator is telling a fictional narrative because the need to recall this fiction and the immediacy of the present are perennial constraints on conversational contexts, affecting perceptions of the mutability of the speech acts performed. With fictional, as much as with factual stories, tellers are subject to the same overarching conditions. Speakers’ failures of memory and their belief in the fragility of the present matter in conversational narratives, as they do not in a literary presentation where these elements are almost by definition invisible. Thus, any moral conventions we adopt in research with respect to conversationalists ‘right to privacy’ are at best ad hoc and do not really get over the problems of the ‘personal’ that in Culler’s view wrongly, and in my opinion unavoidably, beset speech act theory or versions thereof. One method of reviewing the moral conventions that we follow is to see them as crystallizing around our everyday, goal-directed speech acts. Speech act or Gricean principles of veracity, honesty, politeness, etc., are thus translated into ‘rational’ conditions governing the routine performances of speech acts. Morality may appear at first to be very much of a secondary concern in Austinian speech act theory, but some of its main metaphors, as well as those of Gricean theory, tell a different story. Consider the following verbal arsenal, most of which I mentioned earlier—of these two (‘violation’ and ‘abuse’) call up images of (sexual) assault; one is a militaristic metaphor (‘misfire’); and finally, making ‘null and void’, ‘flouting’, opting out’, ‘clashing’ and ‘exploiting’, all suggest greater or lesser legal transgressions. It could be argued that these metaphors are drawn from the range the English language has to offer; they are not invented by Austin or Grice. True, but all I wish to point out is that the ‘descriptive’ rules (felicity conditions and maxims) of speech act theory are not as remote from other much more glaringly prescriptive rules and conventions regulating our ethical conduct. Grice, as we know, explicitly recognizes this when he describes his Maxims as ‘echoing Kant’.57 57Paul Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’ in Studies in the Way of Words, p. 26.
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Exploring conversational narrative thus brings to the surface the submerged moral codes and judgements that underlie our everyday speech acts. Or to use less marshy and more planetary imagery, round the edges and among the interstices of narrative, there seems to be a moral swirl, as if part of the function of story-telling were to unsettle, at least momentarily, some of our regulatory moral assumptions. It is in this connection that we have discussed at length notions such as pretence, plagiarism, parasitic speech, equivocation, and dissimulation in relation to the narrative act. We have also considered the problematic of the ‘right to privacy’ as it might apply to conversationalists whose passing narrative speech acts, indexically produced, are frozen in time, with their consent, but necessarily without the robust support of deictic indicators, for the purposes of research. Some of these moral issues—featuring Wittgensteinian giveand-take, embodied in the Gricean rules of conversational cooperation versus Humean take-aggressively-but-give-only-according-to-rule exemplified by Lewisian conventions—are foregrounded in the next chapter.
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4
qQ C O O P E R AT I V E C O N V E N T I O N S Implied Meanings in Narrative (Guru: Paul Herbert Grice)
Most Things, pursued by Men for the Happiness of publick or private Life, our Wit or Folly have so refined, that they seldom subsist but in Idea; a true Friend, a good Marriage, a perfect Form of Government. ... But in Conversation, it is, or might be otherwise; for here we are only to avoid a Multitude of Errors, which, although a Matter of some Difficulty, may be in every Man’s Power. ... Therefore it seemeth to me, that the truest Way to understand Conversation, is to know the faults and Errors to which it is subject, and from thence, every Man to form Maxims to himself whereby it may be regulated. Jonathan Swift, Hints towards an Essay on Conversation ‘After he had said this, he left her as he did the day before’—Do I understand this sentence? Do I understand it just as I should in the course of a narrative? If it were set down in isolation I should say, I don’t know what it is about. But all the same I should know how this sentence might perhaps be used; I could myself invent a context for it. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
The daunting opinion expressed by Paul Grice (1986) that Wittgenstein is ‘a relatively minor philosophical figure, such as for example Wollaston or Bosanquet’1 might discourage any but the most determined efforts 1Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, the volume edited by Grandy and Warner (1986), in which Grice makes this remark, is devoted to essays on Grice’s own contributions to current philosophy. It is, therefore, an irony Grice would surely appreciate that, notwithstanding his cavalier treatment of Wittgenstein, the index of the book shows that references to this philosopher far outnumber references to any other, with the exception of Aristotle, and Grice himself.
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at comparing the work of these two philosophers of language. Yet a large league of commentators, including Searle (1986), Baker (1986) and Dummett (1989) continue to emphasize the connections between Wittgensteinian and Gricean notions of language, context and rule. Despite the major difficulties that attach to interpretations of Wittgenstein’s work, his philosophical pronouncements are regarded as some of the most sustained meditations on the functioning of language both as code (a means of solitary expression) and as conduct (a means of social communication). It is for this reason that this chapter begins with an excursus into Wittgenstein’s philosophy, especially his later writings. Language, Mind and Social Context ‘I want to say’, stated Wittgenstein emphatically, ‘[that] it is primarily the apparatus of our ordinary language, of our word language, that we call language’,2 and again, ‘I formerly believed that there exists an everyday language in which we normally speak and a primary language which expresses what we really know, that is, the phenomena. I also spoke about a first and second system. I now believe that we have essentially only one language and that is ordinary language’.3 These views of Wittgenstein, repudiating his earlier philosophical stance, are linked to another equally strong conviction in his later work, illustrated by declarations of the following sort. ‘The concept language is contained in the concept communication’.4 Stark claims like this seem to make it clear that, for the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, linguistic understanding cannot but depend on a priori social agreements about sharing communicative needs, as well as common rules of language. And if it is our ordinary, everyday language that is of genuine philosophical interest, then the important questions of philosophy can only be raised within the context of communal interaction. In a similar tone, Grice, too, fearlessly records that he ‘continue[s] to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk , in this or that reason of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophising’.5 On this sort of basic, 2L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paragraph 494. 3McGuinness, B., (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversation recorded by
Friedrich Waismann, translated by J. Schulte and B. Guinness, 1979, p. 45. 4L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, p. 193. 5This is one of many features that Wittgenstein’s thought has in common with Austin’s. See M.A.Furberg and Stuart Hampshire for explicit comparisons between these near contemporary ‘ordinary language’ philosophers.
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if bland, premise Grice and Wittgenstein seem to agree most amicably. Language is unquestionably social in the sense that the idiolect or the individual’s language competence, can only be guaranteed an existence because a community exists which ratifies the linguistic code used by an individual. If one uses an entirely private language, then not just what one says, but that one speaks at all could be doubted. For how could the benefit of linguistic doubt be extended by a language sharing fellowship to that single, and singular, totally unintelligible individual among them, when it is denied, in general, to legions of babies, and to all the sentient species except humans? It is within, and with the help of, the community, that individuals use their codes to extend, enrich and create appropriate contexts of understanding, contexts wherein new information can be acquired, assessed and synthesized with the old. This matter of cognitive contexts was already raised in Chapter 1, and will be pursued further in the coming chapters. That ‘rational nature’ of ours which Grice insists on, exemplified by our sense-making activities within community conversations, is almost by definition part and parcel of our psychology. The mind, as Pateman (1987) has put it, is the ‘missing third term’ in the nature/nurture debate. The task for Wittgenstein and Grice, as for other philosophers is to elucidate the relationship between this hidden or missing term and the obvious terms ‘society’ and ‘communicative context’. And so, in Chapter 6, I return compulsively to this theme when I consider the neo-Gricean arguments of Sperber and Wilson (1986), on the optimal processing of linguistic information. For Sperber and Wilson, it’s all in the mind. The mind is the most exciting ampitheatre of all. Although they would probably balk at such emotive phraseology, I’d say that Sperber and Wilson perceive the mind as driven by one overriding desire. This is the desire to derive optimally relevant inferences from linguistic codes, just as the need to tell stories and to trade cultural ‘memes’ is, according to Dennett, a biological obsession with our species. To look ahead, then, we have in Chapter 6 some rather more detailed reconsideration of the relation between the cognitive principles and the social norms that, together, possibly determine that ‘rational nature’ of the human species which Grice has described as ‘the ultimate subject of all philosophy’.6 In an interesting extension of the Wittgenstein–Grice line of argument, Tyler Burge (1989), too, has claimed that not only is language social but that this is a psychological necessity. Language is minimally social in 6Grice P., ‘Reply to Richards’ in Grandy and Warner (eds), 1986, p. 65.
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that a) interaction is required to learn a language, b) different languages are identified with different social groups, and c) words for certain ‘meanings’ such as, say, ‘water’, ‘sleep’, etc., based on perceptual experience, exist in all societies. According to Burge— Perceptually fixed examples typically determine the applications of a word before conceptual explications do. Conceptual explications are typically inferences from perceptual experiences, or general epithets derived from the remarks of others, or both ... the legitimacy of the examples does not derive from one’s attempts at conceptualization.7
At first, this seems a sophisticated reformulation of Wittgenstein’s point that it is possible to ‘know’ what a game is without being able to define a game; likewise, it might be possible to identify instances of storytelling before being able to list the characteristic features of a story. However, Burge’s point is not the familiar one that ‘tacit’ knowledge of a form does not require ‘explicit’ knowledge, but rather that ‘conceptual knowledge is non-criterial’. Since our explicational abilities do not exhaust the concepts they describe, we are always subject to social correction in our use of language to describe the world. This is so because first, given that the examples of any form, whether it is a ‘bird’ or a ‘knife’ or a ‘story’, are public, no one has privileged authority over their characteristics, and second, access to examples is partly or wholly through others, hence deference to others is an essential part of learning and using a language.8 From this, Burge draws the bold but plausible conclusion that looking to others to ‘set standards’ in language is a ‘psychological necessity’ for a species that has language as its chief means of presenting premises and drawing inferences for purposes of conceptualization. Without such social reliance, language would be a code whose meaningfulness remained vastly under-utilized, an ideal tool lying idle. Divested of its enormous communicative potential, language would also be pitifully reduced as a vehicle of thought. Wittgenstein repeatedly stressed this reciprocal as well as functional psychology of language-use. 7Burge, T. ‘Wherein is language social?’ in Reflections on Chomsky, A.George (ed.), p.182. 8Kripke (1974), Putnam (1981) and Pulman (1986) have extensively debated the
question of whether in the definition of some natural kind words that have a technical as well as a perceptual usage (e.g. ‘gold’ ), ‘expert knowledge’ might be required. In such cases, society would indeed grant privileged access to certain members of the community and guarantee their authority over the identification of examples. It is not clear whether this argument has been extended to nominal kind entities like stories, but in Chapter 6, I make an attempt to do so. Here, I just note in passing that ‘professional’ tellers are in fact invested with special authority over the community’s tales in many societies.
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Without language we cannot influence other people in such and such ways; cannot build roads, machines, etc. And also, without the use of speech and writing people could not communicate ...9
In his implicit critique of the position that language can be explained as an arbitrary and formal code without reference to its uses, Wittgenstein pleads that ‘understanding’ itself is not a separate and special process which accompanies the utterance of a word or sentence. We refer by the phrase ‘understanding a word [or sentence]’ not necessarily [only] to that which happens while we are saying or hearing it, but to the whole environment of the event of saying’10 [italics mine]. The classical Saussurean model of speaker and hearers efficiently encoding and decoding ‘langue’ is, on this view, flawed because it deletes ‘understanding’ as a crucial component of language use in humans. As Searle has later shown in his Chinese-box example, it is perfectly possible to get a computer to produce acceptable English responses to English sentences, without claiming that the computer has anything remotely resembling human understanding.11 The computer may be said to be encoding and decoding just fine but it is certainly not ‘functioning rationally’ because it is not interacting with or making inferences from its environment in the fashion a human being naturally would. To extend Searle’s argument, we might concede that a programmed computer can manage to ‘tell’ a story but can it respond spontaneously and variably to listeners’ interventions, and extrapolations from its own text? Can it produce that magical binding glue of discourse required by the Indian Rope Trick? The presence of the elusive third term ‘mind’ and its rational faculties can only be gauged if a linguistic code is considered in the circumstances of its use, when understanding does not optionally accompany but rather necessarily enmeshes with the code in all the unpredictable intricacies of contingency and context. I understand the sentence by using it. Understanding is therefore not at all a special process but it is operating with the sentence. The sentence is there for the purpose of our operating with it.12 9Wittgenstein L., Philosophical Investigations, para 491. 10Wittgenstein, Blue Book, p. 157. Notice how close Wittgenstein’s phrase ‘the whole
environment of the event of saying’ appears to echo Austin’s programmatic demand, quoted before in connection with speech act theory, for ‘a new doctrine, both complete and general, of what one is doing in saying something ... taken in its totality.’ 11J. Searle, Minds, Brains and Science, 1984, pp. 32–8. See also J. Searle, Mind, Language and, Society (1998). 12McGuinness, B., (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversation recorded by Friedrich Waismann, p. 167.
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It is by this process of reasoning that we arrive at Wittgenstein’s famous slogan ‘meaning is use’. The meanings of words do not, within this philosophical perspective, correspond only to the objects which they name or signify but also to the ‘operations’ they happen to perform at different times and different places. The corollary, of course, is that ‘understanding’ linguistic meaning consists in the ability to make inferences about the not wholly predictable functions of words in communicative contexts. So here we have it: Wittgenstein as a Gricean implicaturist, a philosopher for whom language as pure code can only be insured against meaninglessness if two or more users successfully use both code and context to communicate. ‘One knows the meaning of a word when one knows how to use it’13 in a ‘language game’. But what are language-games? In The Brown Book, Wittgenstein provides an explicit definition— Systems of communication ... we shall call ‘language games’. Children are taught their native language by means of such games, and here they even have the entertaining character of games14
Philosophical Investigations then offers its famous elaboration of this thesis. ‘The word “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity or a form of life’.15 Among his list of typical language-games, Wittgenstein includes giving orders and obeying them, reporting an event, forming and testing a hypothesis, making up a story and reading it, guessing riddles, telling jokes, asking, thanking, praying, and so on. He then comments that ‘it is interesting to compare the multiplicity of tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of words and sentences, with what logicians have said about the structure of language’.16 Unlike Searle, who specifically disagrees with him on this point17, language for Wittgenstein does not consist in a few basic types of illoctionary acts, but in a myriad activities. ‘I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the ‘language-game’.18 Thus, for Wittgenstein the ‘language-game’ is woven of several language games. 13Ibid. 14Wittgenstein, The Brown Book, p. 81. 15Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 23. 16Ibid., para. 23. This sentiment seems very close to Austin’s notion of the performative
utterance, governed by felicity conditions of use. 17See, for example, Searle, Speech Acts, p. 55. 18Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 7.
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Language, Rules and Rationality There are ways in which Wittgenstein’s idea of several language games ‘woven into’ the game of language is relevant to a model which combines the theories of Grice and Lewis. Wittgenstein analyses the concept ‘rule’ in a manner that relates to both the entire game of language and particular language games, to both Grice’s overarching principles of cooperative conversation and to Lewis’ regularities of behaviour that characterize the special activities of members of a community. In the Gricean strain: The word ‘agreement’ and the word ‘rule’ are related to one another. They are cousins. If I teach anyone the use of one word he learns the use of the other with it.19
Here, rules of language in general are founded on the cooperative principle of agreement. But to agree to cooperate is also, for Wittgenstein as for Grice, to be fundamentally rational, where rationality is construed as an ability to make inferences based on knowledge of a linguistic code plus a context. Although a linguistic code is arbitrary, it does not follow that we use that code in arbitrary ways. The arbitrary code is used as a generally reliable means for making necessary deductions about the intentions of our interlocutors and inductions about the world. Neither our relationship with the world nor with our interlocutors can afford to be just as we please if we are to function effectively, achieve ends such as give or receive an order, ask or answer a question, tell or listen to a story. If in fact things were other than they are, our normal language-games would lose their point and our rules would have to be formulated differently, or perhaps not at all. The procedure of putting a lump of cheese on a balance and fixing its price would lose its point if it frequently happened for such lumps to suddenly grow or shrink for no obvious reason.20
If we lived in a world where we could read each other’s thoughts, Grice’s Maxims of Quality and Quantity, which enjoin us to be informative and truthful respectively, would similarly be rendered redundant.21 19Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 224 20Ibid., p. 142. 21Sperber and Wilson, 1986, make a related point when they write, ‘What we have
put down on paper are little dark marks, a copy of which you are now looking at. As for our thoughts, they remain where they always were, inside our brains. Suppose it were physically possible to transport thoughts from one brain to another, as programs and data stored on a magnetic disk can be transported from one computer to another: then
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More mundanely, it is a fact about human information processing that only one set of signals can be adequately processed by the brain at any time. We are unable to fully understand two simultaneously spoken sets of utterances addressed to us. It is in this sense that the Cooperative Principle, which focuses on the talk-exchange, where, by an apparently universal agreement, only one person talks at a time, is what Wittgenstein might have called a rational rule.22 It is ‘in agreement with reality ... it stands there—like our life.’23 Any particular language-game, like story-telling, has the characteristic that its rules are regularly obeyed. Here, the meaning of the term ‘rule’ in Wittgenstein, seems to slide closer to Lewis’ ‘convention’ because a rule, to be a rule of a language-game, demands repetition. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. ... To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs, institutions.’24
In conducting such language games, we in fact follow a ‘conventional procedure having a conventional effect’ in the Austinian sense. Particular language-games utilize specific and arbitrary codes , fixed only by usage. There are no a priori reasons why a ship’s naming should be accompanied by the breaking of a champagne bottle, or why stories should begin with ‘once upon a time’. Different conventions of behaviour could have been adopted by society. Yet once a rule has become customarily associated with an activity, it would be perverse not to follow it— Indeed, but is not a rule something arbitrary? Something I establish? And could I not establish that the multiplication 18 x 15 is not supposed to give 270? Why not? But then it has not just happened according to the rule I just set up, and whose use I have practised.25
It is, as Wittgenstein says, rational to observe a convention once it has been established. This point follows on from the idea that there is a communication would be unnecessary ... But thoughts do not travel and the effects of human communication cannot be achieved by other means.’ Compare also Searle‘s Chinese Room thought-experiment, mentioned earlier, on the qualitative differences between human and computer communication. 22Ochs-Keenan (1972 ) and Reisman (1974) have suggested that in certain societies, such as the Malagasy, this norm does not incontrovertibly obtain. In Chapter 4, I examine some implications of this claim that there are social situations where communicative behaviour is ratified precisely by more than one person talking at a time.. 23Wittgenstein, On Certainty, para. 559. 24Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 199. 25Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, V-31.
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grounding in reality for any convention, however arbitrary in itself. The price we put on a piece of cheese, for instance, may be arbitrary but there is a non-arbitrary, rational relationship between the price of the piece of cheese, its weight and taste, and the fact that we live in a world where lumps of cheese do suddenly grow or shrink. Similarly, there is in the language games of our ordinary communication a relationship between the ‘arbitrary’ rules attaching to particular games that we establish, and the ‘rational’ rules of behaviour that are forced upon us by the kind of world we live in, between the Lewisian concept of socially agreed conventions and the Gricean notion of naturally determined maxims. Wittgenstein’s comments enable a reconciliation of two basic categories of rules—the normative, prescriptive or, in Searlean terminology, the regulative type and the non-normative, descriptive, or, again in Searlian parlance, the constitutive type. Lewis emphasizes the first kind of rule in particular sets of communicative situations or language games, while Grice advances the hypothesis that the second kind of rule holds sway over the entire conversational domain or language game. Conventions and the Cooperative Principle Lewis’ definition of convention reads like this— A regularity R in the behaviour of members of a population P, when they are agents in a recurrent situation, S is a convention if and only if it is true that, and it is common knowledge in P that, in almost any instance of S among members of P 1. almost everyone conforms to R; 2. almost everyone expects almost everyone else to conform to R; 3. almost everyone has approximately the same preferences regarding all possible combinations of actions; 4. almost everyone prefers that any one more conform to R, on condition that almost everyone conforms to R; 5. almost everyone would prefer that any one more conform to R’, on condition that almost everyone conforms to R’ where R’ is some possible regularity of behaviour of members of P in S, such that almost no one in almost any instance of S among members of P could conform to both R’ and to R.
Before I show how this definition of convention is suited to an analysis of the regularities R attendant upon the situation S of storytelling in conversation, among members of a population P, I must make explicit some of the principles on which the theory is founded, for it is these principles that suggest a combination of Lewis’ theory with Grice’s. Lewis’ theory of convention ‘had its source in the theory of game of
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pure coordination—a neglected branch of the general theory of games of von Neumann and Morgenstern’.26 Set out briefly are the following features of this theory relevant to Lewis’ work: The mathematical theory of games is based on three assumptions. One, that the participants in a game apply a ‘rational calculus’; that is, they take cognizance in their own moves of the moves of other participants. Two, that participants in a game typically have imperfect information in that they are uncertain about the intentions of other participants and have to guess at their future moves. Three, that participants follow strategies in making moves, which strategies may be employed to obscure or to clarify information. It is with the latter that games of coordination are concerned. Further, moves have the property that they can be interpreted only in the context of a whole strategy adopted by a participant within a game and not in isolation. The strategy of any one participant inevitably involves expectations concerning the probable moves of others which are also to be regarded as part of some rationally guided strategy. Thus a game consists of interlocking moves, each participant’s moves being coordinated with those of the others in order to achieve some mutually desired outcome. ‘Use of language’ Lewis writes, ‘belongs to a class of situations with a conspicuous common character: situation I shall call coordination problems.’ Conventions, as defined by Lewis, help solve coordination problems in language games and other situations, by reducing the imperfectness of information regarding any recurrent situation S among members of a population P. They assist members of a population P rationally to interpret each others’ moves as participants in a situation S so that a mutually desired outcome results.27 Thus, Lewis’ analysis of conventions as regularities of behaviour assumes that (a) use of language consists in ‘language games’ or ‘situations’, and (b) these language games involve the cooperative rational interaction that Grice’s model of conversation makes explicit. No problem exists in principle, therefore, which might present difficulties for a model which seeks to combine Lewis’ theory with Grice’s. Indeed, in the case of Grice’s theory, presented 26Lewis, D.K., Convention, 1969, p. 78. 27Lewis himself quotes Hume to define his concept of convention. Convention,
says Lewis, turns out to be: ‘a general sense of common interest, which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. ... When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed and known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly enough be called a convention or agreement between us, since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are performed on the supposition that something is to be performed on the other part’. [Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, III ii 2]
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briefly below, there are definite advantages to be gained from such a combination. Grice’s maxims are derived from a super-maxim, called the Cooperative Principle, which states— Make your conversational contribution such as is required at the step at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk–exchange in which you are engaged.
Then follow the four Maxims denoted by the pseudo-Kantian categories of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner: 1. The Maxim of Quantity relates to the quantity of information to be provided: make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange), and do not make your contribution more informative than is required. 2. The Maxim of Quality says: try to make your contribution one that is true, specified as: do not say what you believe to be false, do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. 3. The Maxim of Relation says: be relevant (the participants’ contributions have to be appropriate to the immediate needs at each stage of the transaction). 4. The Maxim of Manner says: be perspicuous (avoid obscurity of expression, avoid ambiguity, be brief, be orderly).28
Grice concedes that the standards he sets for conversation are not invariably achieved, but they are ones it would be reasonable for everybody to aspire to. In any actual ‘talk-exchange’ conversational maxims are often violated. But, as instances story-telling in conversation show, such violations generate systematic ‘implicatures’ or non-natural ‘meanings’, which may be considered ‘perlocutionary’ effects of a sort. However, my argument is that Grice’s ‘universal’ Cooperative Principle and Maxims stand in need of more particular ‘Lewisian’ conventions attaching to specific activities in conversation, such as story-telling, if they are to be adequately explanatory. I begin by citing Searle. Searle objects that Grice’s theory of meaning, deriving from flouting of the maxims, is defective because ‘it fails to account for the extent to which meaning can be a matter of rules or conventions’.29 Meaning is more than a matter of intention, it is also at least sometimes a matter of convention. One might say that on Grice’s account it would seem that any sentence can be uttered with any meaning whatever, given that the circumstances make possible the appropriate intentions.30 28Grice H.P. ‘Logic and Conversation’, in Cole and Morgan(eds), 1975, pp. 45–6. 29Searle, Speech Acts, p.43. 30Ibid., p.45.
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Searle’s suggestion is that Grice’s account can be amended by adding to it rules that make explicit the ‘literal’ meaning of an utterance as well as its non-natural meaning. But, as I have argued in the last two chapters, the conventions of literal meaning are not the only conventions attaching to a particular activity in conversation. Thus, while it is possible to accept Searle’s general criticism of the Gricean theory of meaning, it is more difficult to come to terms with his emendation of Grice’s account via the literal meaning of utterances. Lewis’ theory of convention complements Grice’s account much more fully in that it allows for all types of convention, (including, but not restricted to conventions having to do with the literal meaning of utterances) attendant upon the performance of communicative activity. Secondly, as Levinson has pointed out, Grice’s maxims do not on their own provide the ‘knowledge that is necessary to make the appropriate inferences’ from particular activities in talk, since these maxims ‘are (implicitly) supposed to hold across different types of activity’.31 Because Grice’s maxims are too general to account for specific inferences, Levinson suggests that the maxims be treated as: specifications of a basic unmarked communication context, deviations from which, however common, are seen as special or marked. What exactly is the relationship between the structure of an activity and the inferences special to it? Presumably, exactly the same relation that holds between Grice’s maxims and the inferences they generate.32
That is, inferences generated from violations of the constraints on any particular activity in language are similar in nature to inferences generated from violations of the maxims. In Chapters 8 and 9, I examine some of the consequences that derive, in stories told by victims of a flood in Bengal, from violations of the specific constraints on story-telling of ‘local’ occasioning and ‘sequential implicativeness’, noticed by conversational analysts such as Jefferson. In the present chapter, I am interested in showing that there are some advantages to be gained from integrating the theories of Grice and Lewis. Levinson indicates one such advantage when he states that ‘there could be some quite interesting relations between Grice’s maxims and different kinds of activities, of the sort where some of the maxims are selectively relaxed to varying degrees in activities of specific types’.33 As suggested earlier in the discussion on the two senses 31Levinson, ‘Activity Types and Language’, 1979, p. 373. 32Ibid., p. 376. 33Levinson, p. 375.
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of the word ‘rule’ in Wittgenstein, there is a sense in which the specific, arbitrary rules attaching to particular language-games are flexibly connected to the general, non-arbitrary principle of cooperative agreement on which all language-games are founded. This is the operative sense in which we might interpret Levinson’s remark about Gricean maxims being ‘selectively relaxed’ in certain communicative situations. Grice’s ‘unmarked’ rules of cooperative conversation formulate the non-arbitrary ground rules of communication which must underlie all specific conventions defining all our particular arbitrary activities. At the same time, Lewis’ notion of convention is in obvious respects akin to Austin’s description of illocutionary acts that can be made explicit by some formula that has been fixed upon and hallowed by custom such as ‘with this ring I thee wed’. Whereas by Austin’s account, however, any violation of this particular formula would simply result in a misfire or non-wedding, by Lewis’ account in conjunction with Grice’s, the participant violating the formula would be judged to have a rational basis for so doing. In other words, a Lewisian account of convention based on Gricean maxims, builds in some motivation for or intentions behind—possible violations of conventions binding on particular activities. Thus Humean—and human—self-interest comes into its own. In this respect, Lewis’ is a stronger account than Austin’s, insofar as it is backed by Grice’s theory, for it is Grice’s theory that here provides the crucial notion of a rational interpretation of rule violation. A number of reasons seem to exist therefore which might encourage an integrated model of the theories of Grice and Lewis. Maxims for Narrative and Impliculture To what sort of objects would such a ‘integrated model’ apply? As we have observed, stories are complex verbal objects which tend to defeat tight attempts at definition. Both structural story-grammars and speech act felicity conditions fail to capture important communicative features of narrativity. Having previously used the complicated structure of narrative to try and sort out Searle’s Paradox of Fictional Discourse, I seem hoist with my own petard. For, I am still left in this chapter with numerous ethical and contextual, if not strictly logical quandaries. The last sections of Chapter 3, as well as Chapters 5 to 8 of the book, address some of these more general concerns about the Indian Rope Trick teleology of narrative. And it is also at this point that the second trick paradox which has helped me structure this book—Dennett’s Paradox of the ‘Authorless’ Narrative—slides provocatively into view.
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The provocation lies in the fact that this particular paradox seems nimbly to side-step most of the dire issues of taking responsibility for one’s production of, and responses to, narrative, that any intentional account such as that given by speech act or Gricean theory is necessarily committed to. It therefore affords a unique entry point into some of these fraught debates. A consideration of Dennett’s paradox leads me to place narratives within the framework of conversational interchange suggested by Grice, and latterly by Sperber and Wilson. The Gricean version of speaker-hearer communication is one of the most influential theories that linguistic philosophy has on offer. In it, the keyword is ‘rationality’; and the set-up extremely pragmatic, involving rules of ‘cooperation’ that all parties in a conversation must obey if they want to be ‘maximally effective’ as communicators. At first glance, then, Grice’s ‘Theory of Conversational Implicature’, so laconic and businesslike, seems almost deliberately set up to avoid any ‘soft’ discussion of either the moral issues or the questions of emotional or perlocutionary affect that any consideration of narrativity is plagued with. Yet, a closer reading of Grice’s rules of conversation makes it apparent that they designed self-consciously to mimic that most central of moral formulations available in modern Western philosophy—Kant’s reverberating ethical injunction(s). For Kant’s categorical command ‘Do unto others’, Grice substitutes a ‘super-maxim’ which enjoins speaker-hearers to ‘Be Cooperative’. This super-maxim is then underpinned by the four sub-maxims—‘Be Truthful’, ‘Be Adequately Informative’, ‘Be Relevant’, ‘Be Appropriate in Behaviour’. Jokey these commands might be, but what is serious about them is that they interpret rationality in terms of a supervenient morality. For Grice, the concept of rationality is itself deeply implicated in a code of social obligations. The pattern that I detect in the Gricean formula is: rationality implies cooperation; cooperation implies obedience to the reciprocal moral imperatives of the maxims; reciprocal obedience in turn implies that morality is to be understood as fundamentally social, rather than a matter of purely individual vision or choice; and, thus, finally, that the psychology of rationality, its mental status and moral hold over us, can be deduced from the social phenomenon of everyday conversation. Like Kant, Grice is particularly concerned with the consequences which non-obedience to the overarching moral imperatives bring about. How do members of a society, interacting social selves, conversationalists, handle the situation when ‘violations’ of what Grice presents as universal conversational rules occur? Grice’s answer to this question can be summed
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up in a couple of sentences, using the vocabulary of speech act theory. Perlocutionary effects proliferate in most cases where hearers believe there has been intentional maxim violation. And a concerted effort at inferencing—understanding the speaker’s implicature and articulating its ‘perlocutionary effect’—ensues until the ‘difference’34 between the literal meaning of the speaker’s utterance and its putative ‘non-natural’ meaning, or implied meaning, has been resolved for the purposes of that particular conversation. It was Searle who first astutely noted the Gricean account ‘says that saying something and meaning it is a matter of intending to perform a perlocutionary act’.35 A story, I have maintained, becomes a ‘text’ when it is accepted by listeners as a bundle of utterances particularly abundant in perlocutionary effects. The better a story is, the more text-like and meme-studded, the more cognitive labour it paradoxically requires, not only from tellers, but also from the hearers who become totally engaged in the process of drawing out its multifarious implicatures. This seems to me certainly true of the high literary texts of a culture, where not only individuals but institutions make it their business to obsessively interpret, or cull implicatures from, stories that have become canonically reified as texts. I do not think it an accident that a work as linguistically and referentially complex as James Joyce’s Ulysses appeared on the New York Times list as the ‘best novel’ of the twentieth century. My further contention is that the pleasure we take in retrieving perlocutionary effects, or ‘implicatures’ as Grice would call them, from stories, remains observable in the most ordinary of our conversational anecdotes. Consider the following tape-recorded piece of conversation from the Svartvik and Quirk corpus: 34This is not the ‘differance’ that Derrida has made so famous—the endless deferral of choices between the differences of meaning that any relational sign system offers— but it is not unrelated. Although mine may not be such a standard interpretation of Grice, I’d argue that the opposition Grice makes between ‘literal’ and ‘conversational’ meaning requires him to grant an inherent ‘instability’ to the latter. It is this instability that I characterize as Derridean because it simply demands a pursuit, a chasing after meaning and its invisible, but desirable, implicatures. The difference (and how can one use this word without irony here) between Grice and Derrida is that Grice is an AngloSaxon optimist (some would use the word ‘pragmatist’)—he thinks hearers can in the short run, if not in the long, figure out more or less what is ‘meant’ by an utterance— while Derrida is a Gallic pessimist (some would call him a ‘pure theorist’)—he believes that however long the run, there is no certainty of capturing the quarry of ‘meaning’ at the end, because in fact there can be no logical end to linguistical cognitive ‘difference’. 35Searle, Speech Acts, 1969, p. 46.
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678 <> it was incredible—you—you went in and—[a:m]—it was it cost about half a crown and and you were asked did you want— [a:m]—the nice cuddly seats at the back door—and [a:] it said specifically as you went in—nobody must change seats during the performance (—giggles) which sounded very strange (—giggles) and all the way through—the film it was. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes if I remember—[a:m] people did nothing but—you know— clatter up and down banging their seats—you [n]—and—apparently changing places 679 <>* 680 * and then * and it was absolutely jampacked when we went in and by the interval it was empty — + or half empty + 681 II so pre + sumably ‘they’d + CON{CLUDED} ‘their BUSINESS x and II gone AWAYx 683 * (—laughs) * 684 * [m] . * it really was quite something [... etc]
In this conversation, d’s story, beginning line 678 with a unequivocally evaluative Labovian ‘abstract’ (‘it was incredible’), has an implied or additional meaning seemingly not grasped by B in view of her question in line 679. Notice, however, that d makes no attempt to answer B’s question in any straightforward way, thus violating Grice’s Maxim of Manner, and possibly the Maxims of Relevance and Quantity as well. Nevertheless her decision to press on with the story in line 680 ensures that, by the end of this fragment of conversation, B does indeed grasp her ‘meaning’ (line 681)—a meaning it would not do to state explicitly. The sexual nature of the meaning to be communicated dictates that, in this genteel context, it can be expressed only through circumlocution or maxim violation. Both teller (B—‘it was quite something’—what was?) and recipient (d—‘so presumably they’d concluded their business and gone away’—what business?), mark their awareness of the taboo against direct expression of hidden ‘meaning’. Their strategy in this case is to use the vaguest of phrases. Yet, teller, recipient, and now we as eavesdropping readers, all have, I should think, a very exact idea of d’s implicated ‘meaning’. So how did we arrive at this implied meaning? Grice’s Theory of Conversational Implicature suggests that by deliberately violating the maxims which guide most conversations, speakers are able to generate certain intended implicatures. These cannot be derived merely from the literal meaning of these utterances. It is in this sense that Grice’s theory is one of perlocutionary effect. It generates extra or additional effects and
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it does so by indirectly bypassing literal meaning. In line 683, for example, C’s laughter, which registers the perlocutionary effect of amusement indicates that C has understood the implied or ‘non-natural’ meaning of d’s lines 678 and 680, and of B’s line 681. At this point, following on from the slightly risque narrative in the conversation above, let me re-establish Grice’s connection to Dennett and his position on the matter of a narrative being, or not being, ultimately traceable to a single authorial ‘self’, who takes moral and intellectual responsibility for the narrative that he has produced.36 Now, Dennett presents a paradoxical situation where it is possible for a tale to be produced without a teller who must take responsibility for it. Dennett’s clever scheme does, however, need an intelligent listener. And it is here that Grice comes in, with his emphasis on a smart listener who can ‘make sense’ of almost random information. Unlike Dennett though, Grice is influenced by moral schema such as Kant’s. Dennett’s paradox holds, after all, only because one of the parties in his exchange—namely, the people in the room—decide not to stick to the rules of the game they were supposed to have agreed on. The ‘bad faith’ implied in this transaction does not particularly concern Dennett. It would concern Grice, who dwells on the ways in which both speakers and hearers in any interchange accept, or are required to accept, responsibility, both for honouring and for violating the maxims of conversational conduct. It is exactly in this gap, where I glimpse the ethical aspects of Grice’s apparently so pragmatic ‘Theory of Conversational Implicature’, that I feel able to insert a plea for narrative. Yet Grice himself pays little attention in any of his philosophical writing to the activity of story-telling, so some may regard as especially preposterous the move I make next in this chapter of Narrative Gravity—‘narrative gravity’ itself being a phrase Dennett has coined. Corresponding to each of Grice’s four maxims, I present one that seems to me peculiar to narrative. Furthermore, I invoke a single overarching, psychologically salient super-maxim for all narrative, as there is one that, according to Grice, covers all conversation. These quasi-Gricean moral injunctions for narrative form what I like to think of as one of the chief contributions of this book. As I visualize them, these maxims bring together, within the flexible but fairly powerful Gricean paradigm of linguistic rationality, Dennett’s 36As I’ve mentioned earlier, the harrowing case of Salman Rushdie illustrates just how seriously society can take the question of an author’s responsibility for the tale that he has spun.
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idea of a ‘narrative self’ with conversational analytic observations on ‘fragile narrative’ (Chapters 3 and 4); speech act notions of perlocutionary affect with postmodern, and especially postcolonial, theories about how subaltern subjectivity is represented at a time of extreme physical as well as emotional crisis (Chapters 2, 6 and 7); and structural readings of narrative with the conjectures about ‘impliculture’ or cultural inferencing in narrative that I develop as a critique of the Sperber-Wilsonian stand on cognitive ‘relevance’ (Chapters 1 and 5). And so—here in all their tragicomic glory stand my quasi-Gricean maxims for narrative interaction. The Super-maxim for Narrative: ALWAYS PROTECT THE FRAGILITY OF YOUR NARRATIVES BECAUSE YOU ARE THEREBY PROTECTING YOUR VULNERABLE ‘SELF’. Corresponding to Grice’s Maxim of Quality or Truthfulness is the Narrative Maxim: BE PLAUSIBLE, EXPLICATE! (provide orientations, engage in ordinariness, make your stories ‘something for us’). Corresponding to Grice’s Maxim of Quantity is the Narrative Maxim: BE SUMMARY AND EXPLICIT (provide abstracts, didactic, proverbial or other generalizations as required, so that people ‘get the point’ of your story). Corresponding to Grice’s Maxim of Relevance is the Narrative Maxim: BE INTERESTING AND EXCITING (locally occasion your stories, produce tellables, and include story-internal evaluators, allow listener participation in the turn-taking sequence). Corresponding to Grice’s Maxim of Manner is the Narrative Maxim: BE MEME-CONSCIOUS AND EXPRESSIVE (produce culturally appropriate narratives, be as ironic, reflexive and ‘literary’ as required, so that your story, which is an extension of yourself, is as well adapted as you can make it for social survival and transmission). One way to conceptualize these Maxims of Narrative Exchange is to think of them in relation to a cline of judgement from most to least implausible, boring and irrelevant, along which listeners grade all narratives. These maxims for story-telling, related to my derivations from Searle’s Principle of Expressibility in Chapter 2, advise conversationalists on what makes a ‘good’ story. Such a story would be one that is durably adapted for cultural transmission, non-fragile, and sparkling with perlocutionary effects—in short, it would be one for which you might be proud, to take responsibility. Lest this begin to sound too much like a panegyric to narrative power,
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however, perhaps we should heed at this point Searle’s sharp warning against the attractions of a Gricean system: ‘One might say that on Grice’s account it would seem that any sentence can be uttered with any meaning whatever, given that the circumstances make possible the appropriate intentions’37 Even that tatty and innocuous four o’clock formula ‘Would you like some tea, dear?’ could, for example, take on some bizarre meaning such as ‘Our household pet, the panther has, just as I predicted, broken loose from the kitchen shed. Will you go at once and tie her up, before she alarms the guts out of our aged guests?’ provided we invented a context where this was a pre-arranged signal between a husband and wife who have adventurous tastes in domestic fauna, but are entertaining snobby and important guests who might conceivably disapprove of such goings-on. True, my example is crudely stagey, yet replace that Austinian panther38 with a recalcitrant and noisy child, and we might well have some version of a script familiar to many fraught parents of young children, attempting to make civilized conversation, while the threat of chaos lurks, dangerously within reach. The relative importance of intention versus convention in decisions about the possible interpretations of utterances will be a subject for debate among philosophers for a long while yet, but the extreme example above illustrates the reach that Searle’s criticism concerning the laxity of the Gricean position on ‘meaning’ might have. If an appeal to conversational ‘context’ allows any possible set of pairings of words and meanings to occur, then it is quite easy to imagine utter linguistic chaos reigning. And where would we stand then on the issue of assuming responsibility for our words, when their conventional meanings can be so absolutely altered by conversational contexts? How can we rely on our intentions, insofar as they are coded in words, ever holding steady from context to context? It is for this reason that Searle harks back to the conventional, literal, ‘guaranteed’ aspects of word-meaning. This chapter pursues precisely this crucial insight of Searle’s by introducing the Lewisian notion of convention into Gricean theory. Conventions, may be seen as a surrogate for Searlean felicity conditions on types of speech acts,39 or even for the functional analysis of Labov 37Searle, Speech Acts, 1969, p. 45. 38See Chapter 2 for more on the ‘panther’ motif in Austin’s discussion of the speech
act of ‘pretending’. 39With this proviso that, whereas Searlean felicity conditions amount to sets of criteria which differentiate between types of speech acts, Lewisian conventions simply describe ways of reciprocally engaging in various activities.
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and Waletzky. Unlike the Gricean maxims which, if obeyed unequivocally, would result in wholly rational behaviour, Lewisian conventions are arbitrary. They can be sensibly understood only within the language game of which they are a part. Sequencing a story with an orientation, followed by a resolution and coda, and only then a complicating action, for instance, might result in it not being accepted as a ‘proper’ story in a community which does not typically order stories in this manner. The player would perhaps be ‘disqualified’ in such an instance. Thus, conventions often govern ‘moves’ within a communal language game, such as story-telling, but neither a convention nor the moves it controls have meaning in isolation. Within a Gricean framework, knowledge of the appropriate conventions of story-telling would strongly influence story-recipients taking part in a conversation to draw certain implications, and not others from the story being told. The implications drawn would then result in further interlocking moves by recipients. Consider again d’s line 680 and B’s line 681. In isolation, they would not seem at all funny or amusing, but in the context of this conversation, C’s laughter in response to these utterances is absolutely appropriate. It encapsulates the right move. ‘Rules’, as Bach and Harnish (1978) put it, ‘specify things to be done, conventions, ways of doing.40 A typical Gricean maxim like ‘Be truthful’ might be cited as an example of a general conversational rule, applicable in all contexts, whereas typical Lewisian narrative conventions such as a teller’s beginning a story with an ‘orientation’ sequence such as a description of scene and setting, contingently depend upon the ways in which narrative discourse has come to be stylized in given social contexts. Lewisian conventions can also be interpreted in terms of conversational analytic observations such as the fact that in many cultures a conversational story is often preceeded by a teller’s turn ‘announcing’ the story; likewise, most stories are succeeded by recipient-turns ‘appreciating’ the story. These interactional features may be viewed as established conventions governing the telling of stories. Story announcements or prefaces, for example, often present hearers with some criterion they must use in order to judge the plausibility of the story which follows. Chapter 6 on Conversational Analysis examines some story-prefaces and storyreceipts in order to illustrate the specialized functions that turns before and after stories perform, to protect the fragile boundaries of narrative. By making explicit the cooperative and efficient nature of talk, the 40 Bach, K. and R.M. Harnish, Linguistics, Communication and Speech Acts, 1979, p. 122.
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Grice-Lewis combine seems neatly to accommodate the assumption underlying conversational analytic methodology that the management of the turn-taking system of conversation demands much specialist, culturally skilled ‘work’ from all participants.41 Because Gricean implicatures are always ‘worked out’ inside such specific ‘talk-exchanges’, or contexts of communication, I argue that a Gricean-cum-Lewisian Theory of Conversational Implicature provides scaffolding not just adequate but necessary for researchers who choose to pay special attention not to large schema but rather to the nuances of narrative activity. Grice and Lewis provide that overarching communicative schema, which Conversational Analytic micro-investigation, could do with, although it has so far stubbornly done without. Once Lewisian ‘convention’ (sometimes called ‘cultural routine’ in conversational analysis) has been admitted into the Gricean framework in this chapter, I am able to introduce another idea which could be important in arguments about the social aspects of narrative. This is my notion of Impliculture, which I amplify in the next chapter. Within the Gricean perspective, as we know, communication is achieved either directly through compliance with the ‘conversational maxims’, or indirectly through violating those same maxims. It is the second instance, where additional meanings, or what we have been loosely referring to as perlocutionary effects, are created by deliberately disobeying the ‘maxims’ that Grice is mainly interested in. For example, the ‘taboo’ meaning conveyed by the story-teller’s crucial violation of communicative maxims in the conversation analysed above classically illustrates Gricean meaning—implicature. Now, as I have indicated, I wish to add to the Gricean arsenal the idea of meaning-impliculture, where I claim that differences and similarities between cultures can be analysed in terms of the sets of conversational conventions various cultures associate with universal activities like story-telling, such as the conventions concerning story-announcements and story-receipts just mentioned. What does the idea of ‘impliculture’ buy us? Briefly, it allows us to focus on the relations between: i) cultural specificities ii) those things left unsaid within a cultural community iii) the community as a holistic, meme-sharing conversational group. 41Sacks H., E. Schegloff and J. Jefferson, ‘A Simplest Systematics for the Organization
of Turn-taking for Conversation’, Language, 50.4, 1974, p. 269.
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Because the Gricean system strongly encourages one to think in terms of universal deductive implicatures available to all and any set of conversationalists, it tends to minimize attention to social differences. My attempt at redressing this imbalance has been to develop the concept of impliculture, or cultural implicativeness, where we can theorize particular cultural communities as groups engaged in a complex polyphonic conversation. A great deal depends on conveying the unstated, or the understated, in such an ongoing group conversation, since insider status within the community would come from listeners’ picking up specific implicultural meanings, rather than simply deducing the general Gricean meaning implicatures. This homing in on cultural conventions is indeed where the ‘maxims’ I’ve set out for narrativity could come in useful. Or to put it another way, we might say that our narratives reveal a fragile ‘self’ to the extent that they fail to exploit listeners’ tacit knowledge, not only of the standard maxims of conversational implicature, but of the special conventions of narrative impliculture. This task I undertake in Chapters 5–8. Turn-taking Rules, Regularities and Implicatures It remains to be shown that the empirical observations on the workings of conversation made by researchers such as Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, accord with the Grice-Lewis framework I’ve suggested. These researchers insist that ‘to merit serious consideration, a model should be capable of accommodating the following grossly apparent facts’42 about conversation— 1. Speaker change recurs or, at least, occurs. 2. Overwhelmingly, one party talks at a time. 3. Occurrences of more than one speaker at a time are common but brief. 4. Transitions (from one turn to the next) with no gap and no overlap are common. Together with transitions characterized by slight gap or slight overlap, they make up the vast majority of transitions. 5. Turn order is not fixed, but varies. 6. Turn size is not fixed, but varies. 7. Length of conversation is not specified in advance. 8. What parties say is not specified in advance. 9. Relative distribution of time is not specified in advance. 42Ibid., pp. 696–735.
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10. Number of parties can vary. 11. Talk can be continuous or discontinuous. 12. Turn allocation techniques are obviously used. A current speaker may select a next speaker (as when he addresses a question to another party), or parties may self-select, in starting to talk. 13. Various ‘turn construction units’ are employed; e.g., turns can be projectedly one word long, or they can be sentential in length. 14. Repair mechanisms exist for dealing with turn-taking errors and violations, e.g., if two parties find themselves talking at the same time, one will stop prematurely, thus repairing the trouble. Clearly, several of these observed features of conversaton are ‘compatible with’ and ‘derivable from’ a Gricean model of cooperative interaction.43 In any talk-exchange, speaker change must occur by definition or it is not a conversation. Also, in a cooperative conversation it is essential that only one party talks at a time, given the incontrovertible fact that human beings are not able to process two streams of talk directed towards them at the same time. Thus, points 1 and 2 of the list above are derivable from the Gricean model; points 3, 4 and 14 are all compatible with it. Point 4, which has to do with the ‘transition relevant places’ that usually occur at the end of turns, is consistent with the assumption in Grice’s fundamental Cooperative Principle that each party makes clear to other parties in the conversation what his contribution is intended to convey ‘at the step at which it occurs’. Such an understanding between parties, which it is the aim of each individual participant to strive towards, must inevitably facilitate transition between turns in conversation. Point 3 reflects the fact that, owing to constant uncertainty about other speakers’ intentions (which uncertainty has to exist in conversation since it is the Wittgensteinian case that we live in a world where our thoughts are not apparent to each other except through our actions), coordination problems arise, but point 14 suggests that parties have resources for dealing with coordination ‘errors and violations’ that show up in the turn-taking system. As turn-taking itself, or the recurrence of speaker change, is derivable from the essentially rational Gricean model of a talk-exchange, it may also be assumed that ‘error and violations’ occurring in the turn-taking can be at least partially explained with reference to violations of the maxims. I say ‘at least 43See Jens Allwood, Linguistic Communication as Action and Cooperation: A Study in Pragmatics, 1976, for a similar argument. ‘Many of the points on the list provided by Sacks et al. can be seen as the result of viewing the communicators as cooperating normal rational agents’ p. 215.
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partially’ because I have already argued that Grice’s maxims need to be conjoined with Lewisian conventions binding on particular activities, such as story-telling. Points 5–13, noted by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson depend on the particular language activity being engaged in. Turn order, turn size, the length of conversations and so on are determined by the language-games which people play in context. As researchers like Sinclair and Coulthard44 have shown, classroom interaction, for instance, is characterized by a particular turn-ordering, the length of the conversation presumably being decided by the time allotted to any particular class. Then consider point 8 which states that ‘what parties say is not specified in advance’; this again is determined by the nature of the activity participants engage in. Relative distribution of time, the continuity or discontinuity of talk, turn allocation and the turn construction units used are all arguably functions of the particular language game being played by participants. Thus, points 5–13 are the features of conversation which may justly be said to be ‘context-sensitive’ in the sense that Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson use the term when they write— ... we have found reasons to take seriously the possibility that a characterization of turn-taking in conversation could be developed that has the important twinfeatures of being context-free and capable of extraordinary context-sensitivity.45
A combined model in which Grice’s overarching Cooperative Principle of conversational exchange accounts for the context-free features of conversation such as only one person talking at a time, and Lewis’ conventions describe ‘context-sensitive’ features of any particular language-game such as story-telling therefore seems to meet the requirements for a characterization of conversation demanded by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson. It must, moreover, be emphasized at this juncture that conversational analysis (CA) is essentially a methodology rather than a theory. It consists of highly specialized techniques for exhibiting that conversational materials of practically any sort are ‘orderly’, that is, ‘methodically produced by members of a society for one another’.46 Schegloff and Sacks make it clear that any problem they choose to consider in conversation ‘is proposed as a problem for conversationalists; 44Sinclair, J.M. and Coulthard, M., Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English used
by Teachers and Pupils, 1975. 45Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, p. 697. 46Schegloff, E. and H. Sacks, ‘Opening up Closings’, Semiotica, VIII, 4, 1973, p. 290.
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we are not interested in it as a problem for analysts except insofar, and in the ways, it is a problem for participants’.47 The aim of conversational analysts appears to be to develop methods analogous to those used by conversationalists themselves, as sensitive and methodical, so as to make explicit the ‘problems’ faced and tackled by conversationalists. The analysts or researchers themselves do not have—or do not admit to—any prior ‘problems’ about the workings of conversation. And this, I wish to submit, is an attitude characteristic of researchers who address themselves to the task of developing a methodology or a body of techniques, as opposed to an attitude typical of researchers who seek to construct a theory. Grice and Lewis, for example, begin with certain conceptual problems about communication that they want to explain by means of a hypothesis or a model; but when Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson require of a model that it be capable of accommodating the facts which they observe about conversation, they do not undertake to construct such a model themselves. Their concerns are wholly methodological. Sacks puts the difficulty confronting conversational analysts this way: Two kinds of things are related in a slightly obscure way; there’s a specific, substantive problem which, stated kind of generally, has to do with conversation as a vehicle for problem-solving, and there’s another, more methodological problem which has to do with collecting observables and putting them into some sort of relationship, as permits, posing and solving problems with them.48
My argument that the ‘obscure relationship’ between Sacks’ two ‘problems’ precisely consists in the relationship between a theoretical model and an appropriate methodology. The prior, conceptual issues concerning conversational interaction are specified by the Gricean-cum-Lewisian model in terms of general coordination problems; the methodology then makes explicit conversationalists’ problems as distinct from analysts’ conceptual problems. But there remains, as Sacks points out, an elusive link between the analysts’ theoretical problems and the conversationalists’, practical one. In Chapter 6, I examine this link in more detail by focusing on Lewisian ‘regularities’ associated with the language-game of storytelling, systematically relating them to violations of the Gricean maxims. In another context, Levinson demonstrates, for example, that lawyers use questions in a special way in courtroom proceedings, by their violation of the requirement, implicit in the Gricean maxims of Quantity and 47Ibid. 48Sacks, May, 1971, Lecture Notes.
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Relevance, that questions cannot be asked by parties who already know the answers to their questions.49 Stories, as I shall show in Chapter 6, observe the reverse requirement, equally implicit in the Gricean maxims, which is that no party in a conversation can normally tell other parties what they can suppose the other parties already know. But before going on to a detailed observation of the ‘context-sensitive’ conventions of story-telling and the consequences of violating these, it might be useful to consider some possible permutations and combinations of maxims and conventions which might systematically obtain over various instances of story-telling in conversation. We could start by extending Lewis’ definition of convention with reference to a particular, but as yet ad hoc, convention of story-telling in conversation— the ‘local occasioning’, so often referred to by conversational analysts for instance.50 Let’s say, after Lewis, that: A regularity, (L)ocal (O)ccasioning, in the behaviour of members of a population P, when they are agents in the recurrent situation of (S)tory(T)elling is a convention if and only if it is true that, and it is common knowledge in P that, in almost any instance of ST among members of P 1. almost everyone conforms to LO 2. almost everyone expects everyone else to conform to LO 3. ST is a situation in which coincidence of interests predominates among members of P, such that they have similar preferences regarding possible combinations of their actions (i.e., if any one member of P prefers to conform to LO, then almost all other members also prefer to conform to LO) 4. almost everyone prefers that any one more conform to LO, on condition that almost everyone conforms to LO 5. almost everyone would prefer that any one more conform to LO’ (defined as not LO), on condition that almost everyone conforms to LO’ where LO’ is some possible regularity of behaviour of members of P in ST, such that almost no one in almost any instance of ST among members of P could conform to both LO’ and LO From this definition of the convention, if convention it turns out to be, of ‘local occasioning’ in story-telling, it would seem that to qualify as a ‘convention’, LO must be shown to be a feature almost always accompanying story-telling in conversation. Except in exceptional circumstances, or in some well-defined set of cases, participants must overwhelmingly 49Levinson, ‘Activity Types and Language’, pp. 379–83. 50See for example, Jefferson, 1978, ‘Sequential Aspects of Story-telling in Conversation’.
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conform to local occasioning. In Chapter 8, I examine some instances where the convention of local occasioning is in fact not conformed to for very specific reasons. In the present chapter, I suggest some conventions in addition to ‘local occasioning’, so that instances can be discussed where maxims and possible conventions come into conflict in the activity of story-telling. Conventions, putative examples of
Maxims, already cited
In any instance of the recurrent contribution situation ST members—
Make your conversational such as is required by the Maxims. In a story—ALWAYS PROTECT THE FRAGILE ASPECTS OF YOUR NARRATIVE
1. Conform to LO.
1. Quality: Do not assert what you know to be false; do not assert that for which you lack adequate evidence. In the activity of ST (story-telling) BE PLAUSIBLE, EXPLICATE! 2. Quantity: Be adequately informative; neither more nor less. In ST, BE SUMMARY, GIVE ABSTRACTS BE EXPLICIT! 3. Relation: Be relevant. In ST, BE INTERESTING, BE EXCITING!
2. Protect the ‘fragile’ aspects of of their stories, i.e., its boring aspects and/or its implausible aspects (PFBS). 3. Obliged to complete their stories once they have embarked on them (CS). 4. Make brief ‘evaluate’ comm4. Manner: Be polite and approents and generalizations priate In ST, BE MEMEduring the telling of the story CONSCIOUS; MAKE YOUR and in the first turn after, if STORY SUCH THAT IT CAN BE they are story—recipients. (EC). PASSED ON BE EXPRESSIVE!
What is the main difference between conventions and maxims? From the pragmatic Gricean perspective, maxims are a privileged superset of the myriad conventions by which a culture lives. Conventions are convenience rules guided by mutual self-interest, whereas norms or maxims have an altruistic element. Maxims carry a moral charge; in the case of story-telling, this ethical responsibility of tellers and listeners is often discharged, as I show in Chapter 6, by embedding a generalization (love thy neighbour as thyself; there’s honour among thieves; time and
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tide wait for no man) within the narrative. The inferential language-game played between tellers and listeners, more often than not, concerns a turf-war around the presentation and recovery of these morally valuable adages. There are loads of conventions which do not, on the face of it, qualify as maxims: eating with knives and forks, wearing saris not skirts, using a white flag to signal peaceful intentions, not pointing at people, etc.; yet I would suggest that every convention always aspires to the status of a maxim, which would confer on it more meme-survival value in a culture. For example, if eating with knives and forks is a convention in some society, this could be elevated to a maxim based on an abstract ideal about it being unhygienic, primitive and barbarous to eat with one’s hands. Maxims and conventions may also clash: for instance, if one is having an affair, the Quality Maxim which requires one to tell the truth may come up against conventions of social propriety that suggest that it would be more in one’s self-interest to keep the matter hidden. In conversational narratives, this sort of conflict is very common. Some possible permutations and combinations of this array of maxims and putative conventions are: a) Violation of all conventions and all maxims obtaining in the talkexchange in which one is a conversational participant. This would result in the severest forms of moral abnegation and social alienation. b) Conformity to all conventions and all maxims obtaining in the talk-exchange in which one is a conversational participant. c) Violation of all conventions and conformity to all maxims. This would suggest that one had such a strong moral sense that it overrode any attention to what ‘others’ are thinking (or saying). d) Conformity to all conventions and violations of all maxims. This would mean one was a thorough-going conformist, but without the moral fibre of c); i.e., the most boring and possibly the most dangerous of conversationalists. There are, unsurprisingly, no examples of the combinations a), b), c) and d) in my data. Frequently, however, there is: e) Violation of some particular convention, which automatically results in the violation of some particular maxim. Thus violating the convention by which members of a population P protect implausible aspects of their stories (Convention 2) above, means a violation of the maxim which enjoins one not to say that for which one lacks adequate evidence (Maxim I). Conversely, every violation of Maxim1
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should therefore result in an implausible story, but there is an interesting asymmetry here. In the case of stories, it is perfectly possible to assert what one knows to be false as long as one ‘protects’ one’s story on this count; thus in telling a fictional story a narrator can make it quite clear through deft management of his story materials that he is telling a story which is plainly untrue, in order to convince his listener of some idea which he believes is true, and for which he believes the fictional story provides evidence. In Chapter 6, I elaborate this point about story-tellers’ management of their materials so as to render these materials less ‘fragile’ by capping them with a truism such as ‘it takes a thief to catch a thief’, ‘wonders never cease’, etc. Even when a story purports to be fact, tellers have to present their materials so that they seem plausible; if they don’t, participants might arraign the story for its violation of M.1. Consider the following: a A B a
A a
A a A B
1321 ...*three generations of Skeats* all WWS—[m] 1322 *they’are II ALL ‘Wsx*—1323 II HOW INTEREST’INGx. 1324 <> II not REVERENDSx— 1325 no only the only the original one—is a reverend and WW—scotched this story that I’ve had for years [ ] about . old Skeat . grandfather Skeat our Skeat—[:m] having—been able to read only upside down *for the first* . fifteen years of his life his grandson says this is just not true—[:m] 1326 *(laughs—)* II OHx 1327 the the story is you see that that he was the youngest of the family—and—[ ] therefore stood nearest to his father at family prayers and was right opposite the Bible, and from the time he was about three you see— he was following his [bai] his father as he read the Bible—and came—as many children do to have a very good—[ ] ability to read upside down <>* 1328 *I IIdidn’t ‘know ‘many* children HAD this a’bilityx 1329 I’m **IIsorry to ‘have to SAY <>x** 1330 **oh oh yes** lots of children you +see <>—you you+ 1331 II REALLYx 1332 +<<[^ ^ ^ ^] like II THISx>>1333 I IIthought+ you meant HE was ‘upside ‘downx 1334 Iinot the BOOKx
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A a A a
A a A a A a
A
1335 (—laughs) IIhow RI DICULOUSx 1336 (—laughs) 1337 (laughs———) it could <> that way too yes 1338 I II SEEx 1339 you know children are read to first of all—and they *they start they start—picking up* look and say and if if the child is not sitting on 1340 *I IIdidn’t know THISx 1341 I IIdidn’t ‘know THISx* 1339 your knee looking at the book but as so frequently— sitting over there looking at the book this way— 1342 II [m]x 1339 [m] they get—taught the look and say technique of Hamish Mackintyre’s daughter—[:m] 1343 oh II I can be’lieve * ANY’THING* of thisx 1344 II YES but 1345 *when* when she was seven—she could certainly read much faster—up upside down . than the right way up— [ m] 1346 IIdid you ‘also ‘scotch that other STORYx 1347 which is IIsomething ‘like—IIwas he IIwasn’t he re’fused the CHAIR in OXFORDx [and etc.]
This fantastic story is told as part of a long, gossipy and often bantering conversation, so the tone for the reception of the story has to an extent been set. The theme of the story is in fact perspective, not just the angle from which a book is read but narrative perspective. One spots immediately the scope for ‘coordination problems’ between the teller’s self-proclaimed scepticism (he is narrating a ‘scotched’ story) and the listeners’ incredulity (‘I didn’t know many children had this ability’). Both are on the same side of the fence—disbelief is the shared mental state—yet the teller’s construction of plausibility (enjoined by my ST maxim M1) is different from the listeners’ (enjoined by the convention C2 which puts the onus on tellers to protect the implausible aspects of their stories even in cases where the tellers publicly admit that they are sceptical. It is the subtlety of these ‘coordination problems’, that is interesting. Here, for example, the story-teller starts off by declaring that his story is ‘just not true’, thus forestalling criticism on this front. However, it is his premise that ‘many children do [to] have a very good [ ] ability to read upside down <> it’s just as easy as any other way’, that then comes under attack from story-recipients A and B—witness A’s lines 1328 and 1331, and B’s lines 1332–34. Although the story-teller concedes
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the implausibility of his story, the fact that he takes its premise seriously is apparent in his lines 1339–1345, when he cites an actual instance of a friend’s child ‘Hamish MacIntyre’s daughter’, who could ‘read much faster upside down’ when she was seven. This may be evidence to the effect that story-tellers are forced to defend the ‘implausible’ aspects of their stories, however limited their own commitment to the truth of conclusions they draw from their own stories, if they do not design the telling of their stories carefully enough. A story-teller might begin with the frankest of declarations such as a’s confession that a story which he long believed to be true is in fact false. Nevertheless, he ends up committing himself to a belief in the truth of the proposition on which the story is based, which is that many children can read upside down; and since participants cannot be convinced by his story, already declared to be false, they arraign him for violating M1, or asserting that for which he lacks adequate evidence, thereby generating the non-natural meaning that he intends to stand by his assertion. This a case of a story-teller’s strategy in making his moves, not being sufficient to protect his story, or the violation of C2 resulting in a violation of M1. f) Conformity to some particular convention of story-telling may automatically ensure conformity to some particular maxim. For example, conforming to the convention of LO (CI) means that you meet the requirements of the Maxim of Relevance (M.3). g) Conformity to some particular maxim, for example, that of Relevance, usually but not always in the case of story-telling, results in conformity to some particular convention, for example, that of LO. In Chapter 6, I examine some unusual data where conformity to the Maxim of Relevance results in instances of violations of LO. h) Conformity to some particular convention always results in the violation of some particular maxim. There are no examples of such regular correspondence in my data, though conformity to some conventions often results in violations of some conventions. For instance, the convention of participants’ having to make evaluative comments during and after the telling of a story might conflict with the requirement to be polite as witnessed in e) above, again generating non-natural meaning implicature as in A’s line 1328 or B’s line 1332. Also, the telling of a story might in itself involve circumlocution— that is, presenting the story in a roundabout way in order to heighten recipients’ interest, or in order to present what is known to recipients in the guise of details unknown (see examples in Chapter 6); but in these cases no particular convention is violated, resulting in the
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violations of maxims. Rather, the matter of telling a story through circumlocution may have to do with the strategies people adopt to bring home the point of their stories to participants, thus conforming to the over-arching requirement of cooperation in conversation, as I shall show in Chapters 5–8. Conformity to some particular maxim, which regularly corresponds to violations of some particular convention. Such a case would logically not occur, for the obvious reason that if a convention were regularly violated it would not be a convention, although some alternative regularity R’ might be set up by its consistent violation, as maintained by Lewis in his conditions on convention.
Naturally, the sampling of permutations and combinations of maxims and conventions a) through i) do not comprise an exhaustive list. Nor is it suggested that the conventions for story-telling suggested in this chapter are by any means a full set. My purpose above was simply to show that systematic relationships might exist between some ‘Lewisian’ conventions attaching to story-telling and the overarching Gricean maxims within the strict turn-taking structure of conversation. Taken together, Gricean maxims and Lewisian conventions could offer a model which characterizes most of the features of story-telling observed through conversational analytic methods. Violations of Gricean maxims, for instance, result in non-natural meaning implicatures which have consequences for participants, following and expecting other participants, to follow, observed conventions of story-telling in conversation. Conversational implicature is characterized by Grice in the following way: A man who, by (in, when) saying that p has implicated that q may be said to have conversationally implicated that q provided that (1) he is presumed to be observing the conversational maxims, or at least the cooperative principle; (2) the supposition [is] that he is aware that or thinks that, q is required in order to make his saying or making as if to say p (or doing so in those terms) consistent with this presumption; and (3) the speaker thinks (and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of the hearer to work out, or to grasp intuitively, that the supposition mentioned in (2) is required . . . 51 The presence of a conversational implicature must be capable of being worked out; for even if it can in fact be intuitively grasped, unless the intuition is replaceable by an argument, the implicature (if present at all) will not count as a conversational implicature; it will be a conventional implicature. 51Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, pp. 49–50.
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In the following piece of constructed conversation, for example, S2 may be said to have implicated that it is unreasonable for S1 to have expected him to have heard from X so shortly after X’s departure. S1 Have you heard from X after he left? S2 Trichurapalli is in a rather remote part of the country, you know. S2’s implicature is achieved by his violation of the Maxim of Quantity which states that you do not tell people what they already know, for this is redundant information. In Chapter 6, I show how story-tellers adopt strategies which enable them to steer clear of overtly violating this maxim while at the same time managing to generate meaning implicatures. For it is essential for story-tellers to generate conversational implicatures from their stores in order to create enough opportunities for conversational participation by readers. One important aspect of the interaction between story-tellers and story-recipients consists of recipients’ evaluative responses to a story, as the previous chapters have shown. In Chapter 1, for instance, it was demonstrated that recipients rather than tellers fulfil the evaluative functions of story-telling. As I have argued, it is for this reason that Grice’s theory may be read as one of perlocutionary effect on hearers. It will also become increasingly evident throughout the book that one of the most frequent ways in which story-tellers sustain the meme-value of stories is, strangely, by leaving some of the most important aspects of story-work to listeners. Tellers’ heighten recipients’ interest in their stories by means of effecting intended ‘perlocutions’; correspondingly, recipients frequently show their understanding and appreciation of stories by making explicit in their turns of talk the perlocutionary effects of the story on them. Grice points out that it is not enough for conversationalists to simply access the conventional meaning and reference of an utterance in order to work out an implicature or perlocutionary effect. They also need ‘(2) the Conversational Principle and its maxims; (3) the context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance; (4) other items of background knowledge’.52 It is this latitude which the Gricean maxims allow themselves that seem to go a long way towards providing a philosophico-pragmatic analysis within which subtleties of story-telling in ‘real’ recorded conversations of the sort I’ve presented in this book, can be studied. Roy Turner sets out the analytic requirements for any theory of conversation like this: 52Ibid., p.50. See also, P.N. Campbell, ‘A Rhetorical View of Locutionary, Illocutionary
and Perlocutionary Acts’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 59, Number 3, 1973, p. 290.
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The claim must be that such properties as: the sequencing of conversational units; the import of the locatability of temporal ordering in lists of activity descriptors; the possible treatment of story requests and candidate stories etc. are describable properties of conversational interaction. If such properties are indeed findable and describable, then any theory of utterance production must either come to terms with or circumscribe its claim in ways that accord them recognition.53
I hope I have shown in this chapter that the Gricean-cum-Lewisian model does ‘come to terms with ... the possible treatment of story requests, and candidate stories [which] are describable properties of conversational interaction.’ Paradoxically, it appears that a study of ordinary narratives proves that ‘undesirable’ maxim violations and ‘desirable’ perlocutionary communication are inseparable. This is what gives narrative its double power and its durable complexity. Or, to return at the end of this chapter to the Swiftian wisdom quoted at the start: ... the truest Way to understand Conversation, is to know the faults and Errors to which it is subject, and from thence, every Man to form Maxims to himself whereby it may be regulated.
53Lanigan R., Speech Act Phenomenology, 1977, p. 57.
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qQ R AT I O N A L I T Y A N D R E L E VA N C E Mental Codes and Cultural Memes in Narrative (Guru: Daniel C. Dennett)
But when the door shuts on us, all else vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses, a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. ... Is this the true self, which stands on a pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves. Circumstances compel unity; for convenience’ sake a man must be a whole. ... One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer ... give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single self, but put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. ... Still, as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting ‘All right, gentlemen’, I said, ‘I give up. What are you two talking about?’ ‘Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossible courses are given. The school’s aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.’ ‘And how many departments are there?’ ‘Four so far, but that may be enough for the whole syllabus. The Tetrapyloctomy
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Department has a preparatory function; its purpose is to inculcate a sense of irrelevance. Another important department is Adynata or Impossibilia. Like Urban Planning for Gypsies. The essence of the discipline is the comprehension of the underlying reason for a thing’s absurdity. We have courses in Morse syntax, the history of Antarctic agriculture, the history of Easter Island painting, contemporary Sumerian literature, Montessori grading, AssyrioBabylonian philately, the technology of the wheel in pre-Columbian empires, and the phonetics of the silent film.’ Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
Those interested in the quirks of language and the vagaries of wordplay will have noticed that the noun ‘narrative’ both contains, and is bounded by, the noun ‘native’. While this trivial fact about English may belong, in isolation, to Umberto Eco’s ‘School of Comparative Irrelevance’, its linguistic reflexivity helps remind us that the ability to create and comprehend stories is a species ability with enormous cultural consequences. How do stories confer identities on ‘selves’? And how do the ‘selves’ iterated in our stories contribute to the meme-status of stories, their social survival? These are the questions that will haunt us—as Virginia Woolf would probably put it—in this chapter, and through the next two, to the end of this book. The indisputable observation that selves are nativized and domesticated via stories has led researchers to argue that narrative constitutes a ‘discourse universal’. Those matters of coherence, formulaic repetition, expectations of chronology, causality and affective tension among audiences, as well as culture-specific differences in semantic interpretation to which Odlin referred to Chapter 1, could all be accommodated within the broad parameters of a ‘grammar’ of narrative. Such a grammar— structuralist or speech act—confers on stories the status of a specialized discourse. At the same time, we know that within the disciplines of the humanities (literary criticism, history, philosophy, feminism, sociology, and so forth), there is today a great resistance to the very notion of a grammar, so arid and restrictive does it appear to those who prize the rich complexities of the human imagination. In this chapter, I wish to confront this fear of, or, alternatively, contempt for, any kind of talk of grammar by presenting a substantially enriched grammar of narrative. I hope one of the happier consequences of this project, even if it turns out to be a failure, will be that it goes some way towards humanizing a concept that has, in my view, both, incorrectly and self-defeatingly, been interpreted as mechanical. To humanize grammaticality—a concept that is, post-Chomsky, human almost by defintion!—seems ironic. Yet, as
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the passage above from Foucault’s Pendulum illustrates, our capacity for perversity is apparently infinite. We tend to forget the obvious. Therefore— by allowing the notion of linguistic interpretation wide latitude within it—I wish to restore to grammar its potential for enriching human thought. That is my ambition for this chapter. Inferences, Gnomons and Memes Narrative interpretation begins with the process of inference-making by listeners armed with a story-grammar. It implies active interrogation of tellers’ narrative strategies. To remind ourselves of the structuralist goingson in Chapter 1, narrative studies have for a long time now internalized the findings of the story-grammarians that information is constantly added, jettisoned and reorganized as a story moves along. Events are linked backwards and future events hypothesized. That is why the structure of a conversational story must be understood not so much as a retrospective given as a creative challenge to both listeners and tellers. Implicatures are worked into conversations by tellers; inferences are worked out from conversations by listeners. This is a basic division of labour in all communicative activity. In thinking about the notion of inference, we could begin by referring to an etymology suggested for another key word—cognition. One reliable source informs us that ‘the word “cognition” is probably related to the [Greek] gnomon—the shadow casting rod of a sundial.’1 Reading time— whose linear structure we know to be of utmost importance in decoding any narrative—off a sundial means setting in motion a chain of inference. It means having to infer a quite abstract entity—time—from nothing more than a pole, its shadow and the positioning of the sun in the sky. From this conglomeration of tangible, perceptible objects, human beings are able to reason towards the passage of time. Such a process of rationally working out new ideas and implications from given materials is prototypical of inference-making. Although inferencing comes so naturally to us that we do not think of it as at all extraordinary, it is in fact an amazing imaginative faculty—and especially crucial in narrative which, I’ve suggested, has the form of a proto-theory in that it constantly designs and checks out hypotheses about the world and our reactions to it. Every narrative has, so to speak, a gnomon coiled within it. As the narrative unwinds in its structural linearity, this gnomon of time lets loose various sparkling implicatures which listeners must infer in order 1Richard Gregory, in The Oxford Companion to the Mind, 1987, p. 149.
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to derive pleasure and profit from the story. These inferences alter the structure of the world for us. If we are indeed ‘cogs’ genetically programmed to make our communicative moves through the interlocking machinery of conversation, we are constrained then to enquire: exactly what mental events take place after we make a correct narrative inference? Do we, for example, gain a meme or set of memes, like brownie points, for the cognitive effort we put in during the inferencing process? What exactly are memes? Dennett, basing his explanation on Richard Dawkins’ ideas, writes: The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. ... But do we have to go to different planets to find other kinds of replication and other consequent kinds of evolution? I think a new form of evolution has recently evolved on this very planet. ... It is still in its infancy, still drifting about clumsily in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new kind of replicator that Dawkins is referring to is the ‘meme’, which obeys the laws of natural selection. ‘Just as genes propagate themselves in the genepool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves by leaping from brain to brain by a process which, in a broad sense can be called imitation’2
Ten examples of memes that Dennett cites are: arch, vendetta, wheel, clothes, alphabet, calendar, the Odyssey, chess, calculus, impressionism. Memes, in short, are nominal kinds of a powerful sort. They embody a powerful semantics that vaults over cultural barriers and contributes not only to social evolution but to social integration. Tomato ketchup and the theory of relativity would in this sense both be memes that have succeeded in propagating themselves across national boundaries. Sharing memes implies sharing presuppositions about the structure of the world. These presuppositions then give us the premises on which we base our conjectures of relevance. A little later in this chapter we will have occasion to consider Sperber and Wilson’s elaboration of the Gricean maxim of relevance and violations thereof, but our initial question here must concern the relation between memes amd narrativity. Do narratives offer a natural harbour, a kind of safe house for the memes produced by a culture? At first glance, it does seem that the oddities, the magic resonances of ‘otherness’ contained in those little nuggets of cultural identity and differentiation that Dawkins felicitously calls ‘memes’ are well served by narrative. If our chances of cultural survival 2‘An Empirical Theory of Mind’, in Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, p. 202
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are increased by going in for meme-imitation, then surely our propensity for narrativization aids this survival instinct. For narratives give us our admittedly illusory but nevertheless crucial sense of ‘self’; they constitute, in Woolf’s words, that ‘shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others’. Our narratives offer the moulds for memes to ‘house themselves’. Yet we need to ask further: how exactly does Dennett’s enthusiasm for ‘memes’ connect with his central Paradox of the Authorless Narrator? Narrative, as I have argued in Chapter 3, offers a fertile breeding ground for fictions, but of all the fictions that narrativity fosters, the most persistent, according to Dennett (1985, 1991), is the fiction of ‘the intentional stance’.3 The paradox of the authorless narrative that Dennett relates is specifically directed at defusing this fallacy, as he sees it. Dennett’s claim, we recall, was that compulsive narrative activity is a characteristic of the human species. Human beings produce stories in the same way that spiders spin webs and beavers build dams. Therefore, whether we intentionally choose to tell stories or not, we end up telling them, because that is what we are genetically programmed to do. Dennett makes a cognitive argument for narratives being the kinds of structure we are ‘hard-wired’ to produce.This is the basic sense in which narratives are authorless. It is true that individuals produce individual stories but only as the pawns of a more fundamental genetic coding. Just as the spread of specific cultural memes mimic the laws of genetic behaviour, so storytelling by individuals only enacts a pre-set programme. Herein lies that essential link between the narrative grammar and the meme crammer. Unlike Chomsky on the grammar of sentences, however, Dennett stresses the activity, or performativity, of story-telling as much as its abstract structure. He sees all classes of narrative as actually performing a psychological ‘trick’, not dissimilar to my own ‘paradox’ of the Indian Rope Trick. Narratives, according to Dennett, creates the illusion that there is an authoritative ‘self ’, a ‘central meaner’ who is the ultimate producer of the strings of narrative that each of us endlessly ‘extrude’. Where Woolf poetically enquires: Is this the true self, which stands on a pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here or am I there? Dennett would deny the validity of this question. For, 3See also Steven Pinker. ‘Daniel Dennett proposes that the mind adopts a “design
stance” when dealing with artefacts, complementing its “physical stance” for objects like rocks and its “intentional stance” for minds. In the design stance, one imputes an intention to a real or hypothetical designer.’ (1997, p 328). In other words, the intentional stance provides the foundation for any interpretation of nominal kinds or memes as well.
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in his scheme of things, there is no ‘true self’; there is no real centre of ‘selfhood’. Paradoxically, though, our stories help us imagine a centre. This imaginary centre is the object we take to be, through a series of inspired inferences, an agentive human self, ‘a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye’. What do we see with that enormous illusion-making internal eye? Well, flowing, rushing, gushing into the human cognitive machine at all times are a variety of visual, linguistic, aural and somatic sensations. The task of the mind’s eye is to read narrative coherence into this jumble and to make such inferences as render this chaotic material relevant to the mind’s ‘I’—in Dennett’s words. Shiva’s third eye, we might say, organizes the wild dance of perception into a rationalizing storygrammar. It binds the whirling bits and pieces of Vac’s dismembered body into a whole once more, creating ‘selves’ for both teller and listener in the process. Indeed, as Woolf intuitively recognizes, the pragmatics of everyday living requires us, even if we know otherwise, to subscribe to the illusion of a unitary self: Circumstances compel unity; for convenience’ sake a man must be a whole. Relevance and Ostensive Inferential Communication The moves we make ‘for convenience’ sake’ involve pragmatic principles of a Gricean type, while the narrative illusions we create through ‘the mind’s eye’—the most important of these being an illusion of a self or an ‘I’—involve psychological mechanisms of a Leveltian kind. Sperber and Wilson’s post-Grice, post-Levelt ‘theory of relevance’ may be characterized as an attempt to combine these two aspects of human interaction—the pragmatic and the psychological, or, the communication and the cognitive. However, it should not be forgotten that their thorough-going book, Relevance, owes much to a recent tradition of research. The notion of relevance, as we are aware, was accorded great importance in the work on story-grammars throughout the 1970s. In Chapter 1, I mentioned that Warren, Nicholas and Trabasso had tried to formalize the concept in their ‘Relevancy Hypothesis’, which stated that, in order to constrain the number of inferences from a story ‘a listener makes only those inferences relevant to the progress of the narrative’. Otherwise, they reminded us, ‘the listener would be stuck for hours on a line such as “Once upon a time there lived a noble king” ’.4 4Warren, Nicholas and Trabasso, 1978; pp. 43–4. Imposing constraints on proliferating
inferences remains a major problem for Gricean and Sperber-Wilsonian theorists to date.
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Labov (1972) took a broader and very influential view of relevance when he linked it to the contextualization of narrative, by stressing that tellers had highly developed strategies for making their narratives ‘tellable’—that is, relevant to listeners in particular social settings (doctorpatient interactions, Black inner-city rap sessions, etc.). Mary Louise Pratt (1975) then showed how literary texts within ‘Western’ culture attended to the relevance requirements of readers. At about the same time, Sacks (1975) insisted from his ethnomethodological perspective that stories just had to be made into ‘something for us’ with immediate relevance for listeners before they gained the status of acceptable narratives. Chafe (1977), relying on his massive corpus of ‘Pear Stories’, developed a concept of ‘salience’ in which events were regarded as relevant ‘to a story-schema to the extent to which they depart from the banal routine experience that makes up the greater part of peoples lives’; while Tannen (1978) used experimental data to demonstrate that listeners always sought the ‘point’ of a story, its relevance. More recent work, for example, on relevant criteria for literary ‘performance’ by Maclean (1987); on the semantic constraints that might be placed on relevance by Blakemore (1987); and on ‘entextualization’ by Bauman and Briggs (1990) also reveals how highly suggestive linguistic research on relevance has been. There is a clear line of meme-descent to be traced from Labov’s ‘contextualization’ to Bauman and Briggs’ ‘entextualization’ in narrative research on relevance. Why is relevance so durable a concept? My own guess derives from my notion that narrativity is a post-sentential mechanism for theorizing the world that human beings developed over evolutionary and cultural time. Stories are a primitive means adapted today to sophisticated memetic/mimetic ends. Eco writes ironically of a school whose ‘aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects’, but the description could apply to the human mind. The ‘language organ’ in humans renders the world infinitely more complex, perhaps even ‘unnecessarily’ so. It follows that the linguistic mind perforce requires powerful algorithms to compute, analyse, arrange and connect the plethora of events and objects that language itself summons up. The linear structure of narrative, I would argue, provides us with one such algorithm; the alternating structure of conversation may well give us another. Both require developed faculties of implicature production by speakers and inference making by hearers—in other words, an interactive ability to manage continuous judgements of relevance. It is worth noting in this connection that it was the great Alan Turing himself who maintained that an ‘ordinary conversation’ comprised the
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best test of ‘human-like’ mental abilities for any machine. This constituted the ‘Turing Test’ which has continued to challenge researchers in artificial intelligence. Turing went on to conceptualize a ‘thinking’ machine that could in principle ‘pass’ the Turing Test. Such a machine or mechanism at its most abstract was simply an algorithm or set of rule-governed procedures to compute any given problem.5 This was the ‘Turing Machine’, still the archetype for all computational models. Combine the implications of the Turing Test and the Turing machine and the question before us becomes: can human thought really be computable, algorithmic, mechanical, i.e., calculated according to rule? The answer is in part obvious—to the extent that thought can be quantified, enumerated, tagged and sorted into mutually exclusive sets according to rule—in short, grammaticalized—human thought is indeed computable and grammar is a machine that enables—though it does not in itself offer—a display of rationality. Such ‘rationality’ is exhibited, I have contended, through further species specific mechanisms such as conversation and narrative. The function, the cognitive value, of these extremely refined devices is that they knit members of linguistic cultures together by reassuring them that they share basic inductive premises and deductive formats for ‘reasoning’. Narrative and conversation are just the most advanced routines we possess for ‘social grooming’. They nurture forms of belonging that highlight intellectual relevance. To count as a card-carrying member of any human culture6, displaying one’s facility at separating irrelevant chaff from relevant wheat is, in effect, equivalent to a display of rationality. Eco’s extended joke about university departments that ‘inculcate a sense of irrelevance’ turns upon this basic premise. Esoteric ‘irrationality’ is learnt and learnéd; it is promoted at the highest levels of a culture as an cerebral luxury indulged in by a few. After all, there is little pragmatic pay-off from solving Fermat’s Last Theorem or deciphering the Mohenjo-daro script; these are lonely and ‘useless’ activities, although most societies do promote them in small doses.7 This ‘absurdity’, yet age-old attraction of recondite pursuits is 5Compare the OED, which also defines an ‘algorithm’ as: a rule for solving a
(mathematical) problem in a definite number of steps; and ‘computation/computability’as: The action or process of computing, reckoning or counting; a method or system of counting; arithmetical or mathematical calculation. While these definitions do not give away much, they are quite consistent with Turing’s notion of a ‘rational’, ‘human’ machine. 6See also footnote 12 below on Sacks’ notion of cultural ‘membershipping devices’. 7Jonathan Swift’s portrayal of the inhabitants of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels remains one of the greatest portrayals in literature of the perils of society which has given itself over to the pursuit of such arcane irrationality. ‘He had been for eight years upon a project of extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers ...’.
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well brought out, for instance, in Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind in a section on algorithmic procedures, understanding and natural selection. It shows a cartoon of a caveman absorbedly drawing pre-Euclidean diagrams on the ground, while an attacking tiger springs behind him. Penrose’s wry query is: ‘Did the capacity for abstract thought really help in the evolutionary stakes?’ His answer is encapsulated in the caption below his cartoon: ‘For our remote ancestors, a specific ability to do sophisticated mathematics can hardly have been a selective advantage, but a general ability to understand could well have.’ And that precisely is the point. Everyday ‘rationality’, as we interpret it in our quotidian transactions, is taken to be a ‘natural’, psychologically ingrained faculty, supported by socially ratified and widespread mechanisms like narrative and conversation. There is a kind of pragmatic robustness to this idea of rationality. It is linked to the fuzzy notion of understanding and, as the Indian Rope Trick of Narrative reminds us, may even allow us to hold conflicting premises in mind through structures like that of a story unfolding within a talk-exchange. It might be unconventional to do so, but one could argue that Sperber and Wilson’s intervention in the ‘rationality’ debate via their explication of the pragmatics of relevance comes about at this juncture because they also attempt to psychologize everyday processes of reasoning. Relevance begins, predictably, with a return to Grice’s fundamental theory of conversational implicature. Grice’s view of implicature raises…basic questions. What is the rationale behind the cooperative principle and the maxims? Are there just the nine maxims Grice mentioned or might others be needed, as he himself suggested? Could the number of maxims be not expanded but reduced?8
Sperber and Wilson take the line that the Gricean maxims can in fact be drastically reduced—from nine sub-maxims to a single one. Their ‘relevance principle’, they contend, is able not only to obviate the maxims, it can substitute the cooperative principle. This is because, among other factors, Grice assumes a model which, in addition to requiring speakers and hearers to distinguish between literal and conversational meaning, demands that they must possess mutual knowledge of the maxims in order to communicate. In their own words: The principle of relevance, by contrast, is a generalization about ostensive inferential communication. Communicators and audience need no more know the principle of relevance to communicate than they need to know the principles 8Sperber and Wilson, 1986, p. 36.
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of genetics to reproduce. Communicators do not ‘follow’ the principle of relevance; and they could not violate it even if they wanted to. The principle of relevance applies without exception: every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of relevance.9
Strong words, but they seem to beg the question since the principle of relevance is equated with genetic programming. It is simply true by definition. Being hard-wired, relevance has to be attended to; it ‘ostentively’ draws attention to the communicative intention behind every utterance and thus sets off a train of inference. Now I have few quarrels with this more or less innocuous premise; my problem is simply that it does not appear to explain very much. Grice’s maxims of quality, quantity, etc.—as I shall show in the sections below—actually assist in a step-by-step explication of why, let’s say, a story ‘works’ or does not. They do this by concentrating on the how of inference making—its social or ‘cooperative’ value. Sperber and Wilson, on the other hand, shift their focus to the why of inferential processes—their psychological origins. In doing so, they lose out on the illuminating details of pragmatic reasoning that were Grice’s forte. One of the most interesting features of the Gricean maxims, in my view, is that they do seem to be socially rather that psychologically conditioned. Maxims like those which enjoin brevity, appropriate manner, truthfulness, etc. are arguably learnt rather than genetically decreed.10 In this sense, it could well be that they act as vigorous constraints on cultural meme-evolution, while at the same time, varying radically across cultures. The irony is that Grice himself, as well as most philosophicallyoriented commentators on Grice would probably see the provenance of the maxims as ‘universal’ and thus, in the final analysis, psychological. Yet Grice’s views may be legitimately modified by researchers in the area, especially those interested in cultural difference like myself. In this chapter, I urge—for reasons which I hope will become clear as the chapter proceeds—a separation between the cooperative principle which may well be psychologically motivated (or substituted by the even more psychologically rooted principle of relevance in an ‘improved’ version of Gricean theory, as Sperber and Wilson suggest), and the maxims, which seem likely be socially motivated. In general, Sperber and Wilson develop their entire theory by a method of substitution. The Gricean binaries—literal versus implied; conventional 9Ibid., p. 162. 10A number of reseachers—Ochs-Keenan (1972), Polanyi Bauman have presented
data to show that the Gricean norms are in fact culturally modulated.
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or ‘natural’ versus conversational or non-natural meaning; logical entailment versus deductive implicature—are replaced by the terminology of coded versus non-coded ‘inferential’ meaning; logical and lexical versus encyclopaedic entries and so forth. Semantic juggling apart, the main difference between their theory and Grice’s is simply that they want to eliminate the strict distinction between literal and non-natural meaning that Grice maintains. With admirable clarity, Sperber and Wilson point out that it is not only implicit but explicit communication that a model of communication has to explain. Grice relies on a ‘code’ to take care of literal meaning, but even the unambiguous coded signal is processed in a context. It is ‘only a piece of evidence about the communicator’s intention, and has to used inferentially’. As such, both coded and non-coded utterances, literal and conversational ‘meaning’ form part of a communicative continuum; they do not belong in separate inferential compartments. Sperber and Wilson therefore invent the concept ‘explicature’ to relate inferences from coded meaning to ‘implicatures’ from non-coded meaning. Making ‘enriching’ inferences within the relevance paradigm is necessitated by the search for maximally relevant ‘explicatures’ (coded information) as well as maximally relevant ‘implicatures’ (non-coded information). Hence, implied meaning, and most crucially, knowledge of intention, is not in any special sense derived by reasoning, as Grice suggests, from violations of maxims which govern the interactional circumstances of an utterance. Context is rather a notion cognitively defined in terms of virtually all the knowledge a hearer possesses and which she uses to interpret all utterances, not just those which ‘violate’ some conversational norm. Although this is an attractive and in some ways a neater view than Grice’s, I myself have doubts, as I’ve said, about the wisdom of doing away with maxims that are socially ratified and of which conversationalists have self-conscious knowledge, in order to support an abstract principle of relevance. My suggestion has been that we could garner the advantages of both perspectives by distinguishing between a basic ‘programmed’ cooperative/relevance principle and ‘learnt’ maxims; but in any case, we need first to look more closely at exactly how a context might be ‘enriched’ in the special case of storytelling, which is our subject here. Nair’s Inferential Model of Narrative Narrativity as a conversational mechanism for information exchange is crucial within human cultures because it underwrites our collective
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illusions of being unified selves with reliable social identities. Psychologically, so to speak, our propensity for narrative prevents us from cracking up. It gives us a hold on the potentially overwhelming phenomenon of ‘context’. That is why the inferential analysis of narrative presented below takes very seriously Sperber and Wilson’s notion of a context as a sort of safety-net of information that can flexibly be drawn in or expanded as the situation demands. A context is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world. ... A context in this sense is not limited to information about the immediate physical environment or immediately preceding utterances: expectations about the future, scientific hypotheses or religious beliefs, anecdotal memories, general cultural assumptions, beliefs about the mental states of the speaker, may all play a role in interpretation.11
Sperber and Wilson go on to say that ‘a central problem for any pragmatic theory is to describe how, for any given utterance, the hearer finds a context that enables him to understand it adequately’. It is this exact problem that my model of narrative inferences from the listener’s perspective addresses. In doing so, it draws freely on the early work on story-grammars but also takes cognisance of speech act and Gricean approaches that emphasize performative designs in narration, especially when oral presentations are being made. It is these patterns and designs that comprise, so to speak, Dennett’s cultural nuggets of self-propagation or ‘memes’ ensconced within narrative. The basic grammatical, or structural, questions I therefore return to in this chapter are: i) Can there be a system of inferential strategies which listeners adopt in order to recover the information required to render a narrative coherent/contextually relevant? ii) If such inferential strategies for narrative recovery may at all be said to exist, is it possible to represent them as a set of parsing/ rewrite rules? iii) How crucial is culture-specific knowledge to the process of narrative inference-making? iv) Does the conjunction of inferential strategies (mental codes) with culture-specific knowledge (memes or units of cultural information) enable listeners to recover not just a coherent, grammatical narrative, but a coherent, grammatical ‘self’ from the toils of the story? 11Sperber and Wilson, 1986, pp. 15–16.
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We may recall that three types of inferences were specified by Warren, Nicholas and Trabasso (1978) in the prototype ‘story-grammar’ they tested. Following their classification of inferences into logical, informational and evaluative types, Warren et al. proposed that the really relevant inferences in a story were ‘those which establish[ed] what happened and why’. This was knowledge that, in their view, was essential for listeners to comprehend a story. Four degrees of inferential constraint, to which I will return in this chapter, were also defined in this regard. Such great emphasis on the interconnectedness of inference-making and storystructure would seem to suggest that the important elements of most early story–grammars were a) nodes which hierarchically connect the linear sequence of narrative clauses (abstract, setting, complicating action, resolution, evaluation). b) types of inferences (temporal, causal, informational, evaluative). c) orders of inference (first-to-fourth, least to most constrained). d) salience/relevance/tellability criteria that affect listeners’ interpretations of, or inferences about, a story, such criteria apparently being both psychologically determined and culturally influenced. My move is to retain much of the terminology, and many of the insights of the story-grammarians, but locate the main nodes of the narrative heirarchy not in the segmental units of narrative such as setting, complicating action, and resolution, as has been the case from Labov onwards. Instead, I suggest a shift towards a consideration of some main types of temporal, causal, evaluative and informative inferences themselves as constituting the central nodes of an abstract, possibly universal, narrative tree. This rather radical alteration permits the incorporation of elements of cultural differences in genre and allows for cognitive shifts in perceptions of semantic/pragmatic appropriateness, while retaining the advantages of a ‘grammar’. A set of inferential rewrite-rules for narrative might read something like this: N(arrative)
-> T(emporal) S(tructure) + I(nference) S(tructure) TS -> X and then Y ... n IS -> (CI)->(II)->(EI)->(CI) ... n (recursively) C(ausal) I(nference) -> X cause Y, Y cause Z ... n I(nformational) I(nference) -> A,B,C ... n connect X,Y,Z ... n E(valuative) I(nference) -> A,B,C, and/or X,Y,Z connote P,Q,R ... n
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-> any clause or phrase within the sequence of the candidate N -> any clause or phrase outside the candidate N
I have chosen the genres of ‘the short, short story’ and ‘the tall, tall tale’ in order to illustrate how my rewrite rules work. Minimal narratives, because of their generic and tantalizing brevity, require extensive inference-making on the part of listeners. Likewise, tall tales which are deliberately implausible, provoke inferences of a special sort by listeners. Together, tall, tall tales and short, short stories thus offer a useful group of formally contrastive narratives which facilitate the construction of a grammar, narrative based, not so much on a hypothesis about invariant elements of structure as on a postulate about the continuous processes of inferencing that systematize a story. As I’ve emphasized, a crucial difference between mine and the earlier story-grammars is that my inferential model does not simply assign propositions in a given story to nodes such as orientation, complication, resolution on a set tree. It allows for, indeed depends on, fresh inputs from the listener to keep the story moving. It is this adoption of such a listener’s or hearer’s perspective that helps incorporate narrative processing within a broader Gricean framework of communicative cooperation in general. Obviously, a schema which emphasizes the listener’s role in creating and ‘gluing together’ the parts of a narrative through her active inferences is also in keeping with Dennett’s idea of ‘authorlessness’. The onus is shifted here from the intentional narrator’s shoulders to those of the inferring listener. It is she who carries the burden of establishing narrative connectivity, of proving to herself that she has ‘got the point’, and the body of Vac is reconstituted. How does she achieve this? Inferring an evaluative judgement from the story, when it is not made explicit by the teller, as in minimal narratives, enables the listener to a) actively participate in the construction of the narrative. b) display her cultural knowledge and membership-status, her memeawareness. c) cooperate with the teller in resolving inherent textual enigmas. The means by which particular inferences follow from a particular narrative ordering—a classic problem in narrative studies12—will be the 12 Levelt (1981), we recall, made a point similar to Sacks (1972) that different
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main focus of the discussion which follows the briefest of brief stories below: 1. The king died and [then] the queen died [of grief] (E.M. Forster). 2. aekta bagh, aekta shikari, aekta bagh (Bengali, traditional). a tiger, a hunter, a tiger. 3. John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone (John Donne). 4. Algy met a bear. The bear was bulgy. The bulge was Algy. 5. A GHOST STORY IN ONE SENTENCE. A man woke up in the dark, felt frightened, groped for his torch, and felt it put into his hand. 6. PI PU, PHI SHU. du jon alshi lok, agun ! aek jon bole PI PU BU BA, TU OV. Two lazy men. Fire ! One man says BU BA onno jon uttor dae: PHI SHU du jonei pure more. The other replies: TU OV. Both burn to death (Bengali, traditional). 7. A tree, a nest, two birds, three eggs, three fledglings, two birds again. 8. I’ll you a story, said Jack-a-Nory And now my story’s begun I’ll tell you another Of Jack and his brother And now my story is done. 9. It was a dark and stormy night The rain, it fell in loomps Tell me a tale the Captain said And the tale it ran as follows It was a dark and stormy night ... (and etc.). Suppose we were to expand the inferences in Story 1, taking it to be uncontroversially a narrative sequence, and not what Labov called a inferences followed from the different ordering of narrative propositions when he used ‘absurd’ sentences like ‘The Lone Rider rode off into the sunset and mounted his horse’, to demonstrate that there is a natural causal and psychological, as well as cultural, ordering of narrative. 13See in this connection Grice on ‘Indicative Conditionals’ in his 1967 William James Lectures in which he discusses possible ‘expansions’ of expressions like ‘and’ disallowed in formal logic but not uncommon in everyday talk. Sperber and Wilson also comment: ‘in his William James Lectures, Grice put forward an idea of fundamental importance: that the very act of communicating creates expectations which it then exploits. Grice himself first applied this idea and its elaboration in terms of the maxims to a rather limited problem of linguistic philosophy: do logical connectives (‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if ... then’) have the same meaning in natural languages as they do in logic? He argued that the richer meaning these connectives seem to have in natural languages can be explained in terms not of word meaning but of implicature.
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‘list’, i.e., clauses simultaneously rather than temporally ordered with respect to one another, we would get: i. The king died and the queen died. ii. The king died and then the queen died.13 By Rule I: If there is no evidence to the contrary, assume all linear sequences are temporal sequences. iii. The king died and then, as a result, the queen died. By Rule II: If there is no evidence to the contrary, assume all temporal sequences are causal sequences. iv. The king died and then, as a result, the queen of grief. of loneliness. of merry-making(?!). of palace intrigues. of the same infection. By Rule III: If there is no evidence to the contrary, assume that a causal sequence can be reinforced by suitable informational evidence either from within the text, or from world knowledge. Thus, if Rule III holds, the addition of first and second order inferences (see feature c) of story-grammars, listed above, turn out not to be arbitrary but directed by a narrative rule that requires causal inferences to be supplemented/reinforced by informative ones. It is an interesting speculation that these choices of what Sperber and Wilson (1986) call ‘enriching’ inferences are constrained by their most information/least effort principle. This cognitive principle of relevance would decree, for example, that the inference ‘the queen died of grief’ is more plausible a conjecture than that ‘the queen died of over-indulgence, celebrating the king’s death’, an entirely possible but less likely event, given our real-world, encyclopaedic, knowledge of the conventional correlation of death and grief. In other words, Sperber and Wilson would argue that this inference is prima facie ruled out because it involves much more processing effort, many more inferential steps—a position which will be considered later in my discussuion of Story 2 or the ‘tiger’ story. At present, however, a final step in the development/ expansion of Story 1 follows from Rule IV, yielding something like: iv. The king died and [then, as a result] the queen died [of grief]: ubi sunt, sic transit gloria mundi.
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By Rule IV: If there is no evidence to the contrary, assume that the choice of the most plausible informational inference(s) leads to some evaluative generalization that gives ‘point’ to the story. The generalizations ‘everything passes’ and/or ‘so passes the glory of the world’ reflect a recurrent theme in ‘Western’ ‘Christian’ culture relating to mortality and the impermanence of the earthly state. On the other hand, this sort of generalization may not be entirely appropriate in a culture where, for example, the idea of rebirth or re-incarnation was widely accepted. It is here that my additional idea of impliculture seeks to play a vital theoretical role (see next section). In all cases, however, implicit references to deep and ‘weighty’ cultural themes seem to help ward off the ‘so what?’ question which Labov claims every listener implicitly asks of every narrator. Almost every researcher on narrative from Aristotle through Labov to Bakhtin has noted that a narrative must have a ‘point’. Although it is not clear whether this is a culture-specific requirement or not, there seems to be a widespread norm that a story amounts to more than just a sequential enumeration of events. Particular evaluations and generalizations might, of course, differ from culture to culture. For instance, the anthropologist Edmund Leach recalls that the powerful biblical story of the Fall, when Adam and Eve felt shame for the first time at their nakedness, made no sense at all in the Nuer culture where people habitually went unclothed, until Adam and Eve were redescribed as brother and sister, and the theme of incest thus once again invested the motif of shame with point.14 In exploring the Bengali minimal narratives in Story 2, the ‘pointless’ Story 7 and Bauman’s ‘coon’ stories below, I return to this issue of cultural ballast, but at this juncture will merely reiterate that the normative needs of Rule 4, requiring evaluation, seem to hold very generally, despite the evaluations themselves requiring significantly different presuppositions in different cultures. Inferring an evaluation or ‘moral’ from the story appears to serve the pragmatic function of a Labovian coda by definitively resolving inherent textual enigmas and thus barricading the narrative for the time-being. At the point of the final listener’s evaluation the gnomon of narrative time closes in upon itself again. Application of the Inferential Model to Minimal Narratives The following assignment of nodes and terminals to Stories 1 through 5, as well as stories 8 and 9, on the inferential tree-structure I have suggested, 14Edmund Leach, Mythology, 1974, p. 9.
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N
TS
x and then y...n. DOMAIN OF RULE I.
IS
CI x cause y (x) + y cause...n. DOMAIN OF RULE II.
II a, b...n connect x, y...n DOMAIN OF RULE III.
II
EI x, y...n; a, b...n connote p, q...n. DOMAIN OF RULE IV.
(... and so on, in theory, ad infinitum). Worked out in detail, stories 1–5 would appear to be structured: 1.
N
TS
IS
x {and then} y and z and...n. BY RULE I
CI {x cause y cause x, y...n} BY RULE II
II {a, b...n. connect z....n.} *1. BY RULE III.
the king. → died and then the queen died
the king → died and then therefore the queen died.
the king died and then, therefore the queen died of grief.
EI {x, y...n; a, b...n connote p, q, r} BY RULE IV. The king died, and then therefore the queen died of grief. Sic transit gloria mundi.
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IS CI Since both king and queen were dead, an heir to the throne was was needed.
II Heirs to thrones in many cultures are sons, not daughters ...
EI Who would be heir? A mystery! *2 *1. x cause y, y cause z may be too strictly sequential since x and y can combine to cause inference z, and z can in turn combine with x and y to cause n, and so forth. Or x can cause y and z, without y having to cause z. Such minor modifications to my rewrite rules are, of course, possible to make in the analysis of a given narrative. *2. These additional inferences show how listeners can always ‘tag-on’ inferences at any stage during the narrative on the basis of information volunteered by the teller, using the categories of cause (since, therefore, because, etc.), information about the world, including cultural knowledge (as in the inference about male heirs), which they take to be relevant and evaluation (how mysterious, how sad! what will happen now? etc.). 2.
N TS ○
IS
○
○ ○
○ ○
○
○
x
y
a tiger
& then a hunter
○
z
CI & then a tiger
→
a tiger, → therefore a hunter.
II hunters shoot tigers; tigers eat hunters.
CI The story ends with → Goodness ‘a tiger’. Ergo the tiger ate the hunter, since it is economical to assume, given no evidence to the contrary, that the tiger at the end is identical to the tiger first mentioned. *3.
EI
gracious! The biter bit! A tale of irony.
*3. The appeal to a criterion of ‘economy’ is derivable from Grice’s Maxim of Quantity, as well as my own maxims of narrativity, discussed in more detail with reference to this particular story in the section on cooperative norms below:
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3.
N TS
IS
○
○
○
○ ○ ○
○
○ ○ ○
○
x Anne Donne
y & then John Donne
○
z & then Undone
II John Donne, a poet, was tutor to Anne, whom he later married, despite severe opposition.
CI John Donne is undone because of Anne Donne; or vice versa; or both are mutually undone by each other, or by some other cause.
II ‘John’ and ‘Anne’ are conventionally male and female names. When men and women are ‘undone’ by each other, the cause is, again by convention, often attributed to an emotion called ‘love’.
CI Given all the information so far, it is economical to conclude that John and Anne were undone by love for each other, and not some other cause. We can also surmise that this story is probably autobiographical.
CI John Donne was a poet; therefore it is not unlikely that he wrote these lines. Furthermore, we can assume that he wrote them after he was married, given that ‘Anne’ has the surname ‘Donne’ in the story.
II Poems have rhyming lines.
II From the fact that John Donne was a poet, and poems have rhyming lines, we can assume this story is a ‘poem’, or at least ‘literary’.
CI Causes generally precede effects.
CI
II (continued on next page)
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CI From all the information so far we can revise our original hypothesis that John and Anne Donne were mutually ‘undone’ by love for each other, to John Donne as the more likely focus of the undoing.
II ‘Undone’ means ‘smitten’, ‘conquered’, ‘left defenceless’. This imagery occurs quite often in John Donne’s poetry, which is of the seventeenth century metaphysical school, deeply intellectual and ‘ironic’.
II Poems and ‘literary texts’ usually display special qualities, like irony and rhythm. They also often have a didactic element or ‘moral’.
CI So, it is probable, that John Donne is being ironic at his own expense in this story-poem.
II There has been a tendency in many cultures, including Donne’s own, for poets to sing of the glories of love. This faith in the power of love is also evidenced in popular adages such as, for example: Amor vincit omnia!
EI Aha! Got it! Poetic devices, such as rhyme, are being humorously used by John Donne in this narrative to give us his own ironic version of a generalization like Amor vincit omnia!
4. Story 4. ‘Algy met a bear’, a traditional cautionary tale for children, is in many ways structurally similar to Donne’s more sophisticated and definitely adult tale, which may be indicative of the fact that inferential strategies can be shared across a wide spectrum of tales and tellers. ‘Algy met a bear’ requires far less recourse to encyclopaedic knowledge of a particular textual tradition than Donne’s minimal narrative. This makes it ‘suitable’ for children, but at the same time it is important not to lose sight of the quality of ‘dramatic irony’, or reversal of expectations, which pervades this story as much as it does Donne’s poem and Story 2 about the tiger eating the hunter. Like these stories, ‘Algy’ also makes use of the structural device of iteration analysed in a separate section below. One might in fact argue that it is exactly such an ‘expansion’ of a text that the whole enterprise of academic criticism undertakes when it ‘reads meanings into’ and offers new interpretations of a literary work.
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5.
N
TS x→ a man woke in the dark
IS & then y→ & then z→ & then n felt groped [and] frightfor felt ened his it torch put into his hand
CI because the man woke up in the dark, therefore he felt frightened, therefore he groped, etc., and therefore a torch was placed in his hand
II being alone in the dark often frightens people; a torch lights up the dark *4.
CI we can therefore conclude that the man was alone when the torch was put into his hand, otherwise there would be nothing remarkable about the fact. Ergo, this is the ghostly happening implied in title of the story *5.
EI Who put the matches into the man’s hand? Wow! A ghost! *6. *4. & *5. There appears little reason to insist, within the inferential model that I’ve presented, that one and only one ‘piece of information’ (roughly equivalent, I suppose, to a single proposition) can attach to a single node (CI, II, or EI) in a given tree. Many psychologists have argued that information naturally comes in rough-cut ‘chunks’ instead. Thus, under the II node marked by *4, there are two pieces of information, working in conjunction, one, that being alone in the dark frightens people, and two, that torches light up the dark. Similarly, under the CI node marked by *5, two causal inferences are made, one, the man was alone, two, the torch being put into his hand was the ghostly happening to be identified. Nor is there any good reason in this model why such concatenations of inferences should stop at two at each terminal. Pragmatically, limitations of time would act as a natural constraints or the information summoned up, while psychologically memory would provide another sort of external constraint. *6. Evaluative inferences, consisting of (mental) queries, feelings of surprise, fear, etc., in this sort of schema, often seem to repeat information already inferred at a moment in the story’s processing. This happens, for example, in this story, where the ghostly event has
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been identified at an earlier terminal. It happens in Story 3, when the final evaluative inference repeats some of the information in the adjoining information inference. Why evaluative inferences should typically repeat information is a question that will be raised in relation to Sperber and Wilson’s theory of ‘echoic mention’ in the section on repetition below: 8 & 9. N
TS I’ll tell you a story Of Jack and his brother And now my story’s begun + I’ll tell you another Of Jack and his brother And now my story is done.
IS CI 0
II 0
→
→ EI But I haven’t had a chance to infer anything!Huh, so where’s my story? I’m puzzled.
N
TS It was a dark and stormy night
IS It was a dark and stormy night
TI [when] The rain it fell in loomps [and then] Tell me a tale the Captain said [and then] The tale it ran as follows It was a dark and stormy night ... (and etc.).
CI [as result] The rain it fell in loomps
II Dark, stormy rainy nights are great occasions for story-telling
CI [as a result] Tell me a tale, the Captain said
II Someone agreed to tell the Captain a tale
CI [as a result] A tale was told The tale it ran as follows
II It was a dark and stormy night ....
EI Gosh! This sounds a lot like the beginning of our story! Are we going round in circles by any chance? That’s recursion. Funny, fun!
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represent a preliminary attempt to observe these rules in action. An abstract tree in its simplest form, without the terminal nodes filled in, might look something like: Both stories 8 and 9 contain, as it were, ‘excluded middles’. The first consists of two commisive speech acts backed by declaratives, but there is no Labovian ‘complicating action’ or ‘resolution’, which were core elements in earlier story-grammars. In terms of my inferential grammar, the shock of surprise generated by these stories would be accounted for not by pointing out that a central pre-determined part is missing, but by suggesting that listeners are deprived of a psychological necessity. There is simply very little work in these stories for the usually active right-most IS arm of the narrative grammar to do. Perhaps there is a little more scope for evaluative inferencing in the story 9, partly because of the semantics of atmosphere conjured up by the first two lines. In this ‘tale’, the Captain remains a shadowy, Ancient Mariner-like figure until the end, and depending on one’s levels of literary sophistication, one could make further nautical connections or raise questions of basic narrative identity (is the present teller the original teller, for example?), but my focus here is on operation of structures of inference-making. I contend that these, rather than any pre-specified parts of a story structure, are what are essential to the grammar of narrative. Earlier story-grammars would simply have rejected as ungrammatical garbage the ‘trick’ stories above. However, this would hardly explain the mental states of pleasure, surprise, and so forth, that they arouse in us. On the contrary, a grammar based on a recursive inference-making system that combines real-world knowledge with story information would account for perlocutionary effects because it crucially depends on the reader/listener actively trying to ‘get’ the point of the narrative. In stories 8 and 9, it is precisely when the second inference-making arm finds itself flailing that the paradoxical ‘point’ of these story communicates itself, thus actually making space for the final satisfaction of an evaluative inference (EI) at the end. The importance of evaluative inferences as ‘codas’ produced by listeners is attended to in point 3 of the comments below. The detailed analyses of seven minimal narratives attempted above have a number of implications for any cognitively oriented model of narrative such as my own, which is intimately linked to the post-Gricean notion of impliculture that I will shortly present. Briefly, these comprise: 1. A Contrast between the functions of left-hand and right-hand nodes on the inferential tree—The parsing rules I have worked out above assign a relatively ‘static’ role to the left-most TS (temporal sequencing)
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node. This first branching of the tree suggests that, apart from the conversion of all sequential ‘lists’ to ‘and then’ temporal structures, nothing much else gets done on this side of the tree. There is thus a qualitative difference between the left-most TS and subsequent rightbranching arms: the TS arm attends mainly to memory and storage, the left IS arm to ‘relevance’ requirements. An obvious metaphor would be to regard the left side as a vast mnemonic storage-bin where all and only the information directly forthcoming from the teller is stored in linear order. Hierarchical inferences from real-world knowledge added by the listener are all on the right-hand side. A possible prediction from this sort of model would then arise, for example, in the area of narrative acquisition. Young children could be expected to master the ‘and then’ TI structure on the left-hand side of the tree (i.e., the domain of Rule I), sooner than the more complex CI, II, EI structures, which are the domains of Rules II, III and IV. Skills at narrative recounting and reception would grow as children became able to add pieces of information relevant to interpretation, rather than merely memorizing the story under the right hand nodes. Anecdotal evidence indicates that very little children across cultures do, in fact, prefer simple rhythmic repetitions of a story before they grow confident enough to add to it or react to it on their own.15 Likewise, children with autism, who have difficulties with story-telling, owing to a possible problem with constructing theories of mind, seem to be able to master the repetitive or mnemonic aspects of narrative repetition without going on to a stage where they contribute their own inferences to a story.16 2. Default and contraction rules—When putative tree structures are assigned to narrative, as in Stories 1–7 above, certain corollaries to the Rules I– IV suggest themselves. It is logical, for example, to assume that narratives which can be enriched and expanded can also be contracted or closed off. A tree can be trimmed or pruned at various stages; that is, the listener can ‘decide’ (not necessarily consciously) to delete or disregard pieces of information provided by the teller as either unimportant to the progress of the narrative, inconsistent with 15 See in this connection, Bambi B. Schiefflin and Elinor Ochs (eds), Language Socialization Across Cultures, 1986. This work focuses on children’s story-telling routines. 16At present, I am working on autism and its possible socio-linguistic correlates, along with my Ph.D student, Rajesh Kumar. Kumar’s dissertation, entitled ‘A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Verbal Communication in Autism with Special Reference to Social Communication’ is the first of its kind in India.
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previous narrative information, or simply untrue. The simple default Rules V and VI, covering cases where a move to the next node is indicated if there is nothing to be attached to the currently active terminal, takes care of these possibilities: Rule V—If no CI (causal inference) is necessary at a given point, move down the tree to a II (informational inference); if no II is necessary at a given terminal in the story’s progress, move on to an EI (evaluative inference); and if no EI is judged necessary, move on again to a CI, following the cause->connect-> connote route, until the teller’s narrative sequence comes to an end. Rule VI—If the information provided by the teller seems unlikely to contribute to a causal, informational or evaluative narrative inference (CI, II, EI), delete, discount or disregard it. One of the tricks in a detective story, for example, is to pass ‘clues’ on to the reader without fore-grounding them. These clues are often disguised as irrelevant detail that a listener ‘automatically’ deletes while processing incoming information. It is only at the story’s end that the significance of the ‘deleted’ fact suddenly becomes clear. Interestingly, such a ‘oh, I’d completely forgotten that!’ response typically tends to heighten the effect of the mandatory ‘evaluation’ in the closing sequence of a ‘whodunit’. In genres like the ‘tall story’, it might be imperative for listeners to discount or delete information provided by the tellers as not really ‘true’. This move would in fact, be essential for a tall story to work as a tall story. For example, in Bauman’s ‘coon’ stories16, a teller reveals his discovery that the ‘finest coon dog’ that he has just bought will actually never pursue raccoons and will only chase deer. So the teller gives away the useless dog, but just ‘five minutes later’, a guy, drives up and asks him where he can find ‘a deer dog for sale’! To take the emphatic ‘five minutes’ here as literally true would be to miss the point; its value is simply as rhetorical stratagem which brings home to the listener the chance so very narrowly missed by the teller. Any such selfdeprecating narrative relies on its sharp contrasts being taken ‘with a pinch of salt’—that is, at least partially discounted by the listener. If the listener failed to ‘cooperate’ by taking all the teller’s claims as literally true, then the story would hardly ‘count as’ a tall tale. That is precisely why cultural knowledge—what I have called ‘impliculture’, is so crucial in the interpretative or inferential processes of narrative. 3. The intuitive connection between evaluative inferences and story endings— A final rule that suggests itself concerns neither movement by default down a narrative tree nor certain terminals coinciding with certain
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types of inference, but cognitive models themselves. Like cognitive models in general, a narrative grammar must attempt to account for speaker/hearer intuitions. And intuitively, it seems to be the case that evaluative inferences act like natural resting points in a story structure. Roland Barthes, in his structural analysis of narrative, for instance, proffers the idea that every story needs ‘areas of safety, rests, luxuries.’17 During descriptive passages in a story, the action dawdles to a standstill; it is possible relax, to meditate and evaluate ‘the story so far’. Like a park bench while taking a walk, these parts of a story enhance the overall appeal of the narrative by offering a space to the reader/listener, otherwise in danger of ‘opting out’ of the rest of the journey out of exhaustion. When a listener is persuaded to walk through a sufficient cultural repertoire of stories, she imbibes the knowledge that there is a significant correlation to be observed. The most evident ‘resting place’ in a story is its ending and there is almost always an ‘evaluation’ at this point. A rule which would take into account this phenomenon of the co-occurrence of a certain type of inference, and a certain point in a story structure would read something like the following: Rule VII—Whenever possible, a story ending should coincide with an evaluative inference (EI) rather than a causal (CI) or informational one (II); conversely, whenever an evaluative inference is made, there is the possibility of a structural ‘pause’ in the progress of the narrative, which sometimes may amount to a story(‘s) ending. 4. Listener’s perspective adopted and individual differences of interpretation represented—It hardly needs repeating that a crucial difference between this and the earlier story-grammars is that, unlike them, this model does not simply assign propositions in a story—say, ‘Melvin the Skinny Mouse’—to nodes such as orientation, or resolution on a set tree. It allows for, indeed depends on, fresh inputs from the listener to keep the story moving. Because the earlier grammars simply assigned parts of a given narrative to terminal nodes in a tree, our picture of narrative processing remained superficial. Once the last sentence or phrase of a narrative had been assigned, it was assumed that narrative processing was complete. Such models failed to show how information could be added to or deleted from a narrative, even while it was conceded listeners did in fact ‘reorganize’ narrative information continuously. This process of addition and reorganization by listeners is precisely what the current 17Barthes, 1977, p. 95.
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model focuses on. Previous models were essentially left-handed, while this one is right-handed. Without these right-hand processes, as I’ve tried to show, a story cannot be adequately processed or understood. If anything is original in this chapter, it is this grammaticalized listener or hearer perspective, which sets narrative processing within a broader Gricean framework of communicative cooperation. Sperber and Wilson (1992) point out in their critique of previous models of communication in general, and Gricean theory in particular, that: different hearers with different background knowledge and different imaginations will follow different (inferential) routes. However, they are all encouraged and guided by the text, and they all proceed by exploring its analytic and contextual implications as relevantly as they can.
I would like to add to this observation of Sperber and Wilson’s that even the same listener can at different points of time interpret the text differently and bring somewhat different pieces of contextual information to bear on the text. Different routes to an evaluation of textual relevance by one or many listeners are, in fact, exactly what the right-hand side of my model makes it possible to represent. Insofar as their representations and applications of real-world knowledge matched, the model would therefore predict that different listeners or the same listener at a different time would have similar interpretations of the story; insofar as their use of real-world information to reorganize the story varied, listeners would actually be recipients of very different stories. In the example of the Nuer narrative cited earlier, it was the application of real-world, cultural knowledge that led recipients to first ‘misread’ and then re-interpret the story, to give it evaluative point. By incorporating the text of a story but no other material, previous story-grammars were disadvantaged; they were unable to cope with the vital aspect of narrative processing that allows the representation of individual interpretations. 5. Non-propositional attitudes privileged—Sperber and Wilson (1992) also criticize Grice’s ‘logico-pragmatic approach’ for under-emphasizing the ‘non-propositional’, non-deductive aspects of utterances. ‘An ironical utterance carries suggestions of attitude—and sometimes ... of images—which cannot be made entirely explicit in propositional form’. Although Sperber and Wilson’s remark is made with ironic utterances in mind, I think they would agree that it applies more generally. In the case of narrative, I have argued, and will argue further, that
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non-propositional, emotive inferences or perlocutions play a very special role in giving a story its ‘point’ and fending off the ‘So what?’ enquiry from a listener. These attitudinal inferences are therefore assigned their own ‘evaluative’ node in my schema, but it is important to note that the re-write rules that I suggest require the evaluative node (EI) to be dominated by a causal or informational one (CI, II). This ensures that evaluations or non-propositional inferences of attitude are, in fact, deductively linked, a la Grice, to earlier propositional inferences. Narrative coherence is thereby maintained via a chain of reasoning. This brings us directly to Gricean Theory. Implicature, Explicature and Impliculture Grice’s Theory of Conversational Implicature, which has had an indelible effect on all speech act and performative models, suggests that communication is at its most cooperative, that is, rationally efficient, when it conforms to the sub-maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relevance, and Manner. As we know, Sperber and Wilson have since tried, with controversial success, to reduce these multiple commandments to the single psychological maxim of relevance, in order to eliminate Grice’s more social ‘cooperative principle’. But my argument here will be that a generalized theory of cooperative conversation is still required as background for a more particular theory of narrative inference. This is because a successful narrative seems to be one where tellers’ implicatures and listeners’ inferences dovetail; or, to express it differently, narrative competence is best attested in cases where tellers and listeners culturally cooperate—are able to cooperate—in their evaluations. This is not always possible in the absence of specific cultural knowledge, nor is it possible without recourse to specific maxims such as the Maxims of Quality and Quantity, as these appear to have a direct bearing on the manner in which narrative inferences are made, as I shall try to show below with reference to the genres of the short, short story and the tall, tall tale. The original appeal of Grice’s theory was that it showed how an apparently casual social activity like conversation, where ‘meanings’ were far from rigorously defined, was actually guided by norms of logical reasoning. The deductive apparatus used by conversationalists to retrieve implicatures from ordinary talk was little different from the ‘rational’ procedures used by philosophers to construe ‘meanings’ and construct ‘theories of meaning’. Like philosophers, conversationalists too—despite their natural disadvantages!—made reference to notions like ‘truth’, ‘economy of argument’ and ‘synthetic vs. analytic propositions’, in order
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to make inferences; only the set of premises they relied on was rather large, including as it did contextual information. Grice’s frequent references to contextual information, presumably not excluding culturally specific aspects of knowledge, as a resource for working out implicatures, make his work particularly attractive to those interested in pragmatic explanations of linguistic functioning. Useful though the maxims are as overarching inferential norms, they must be supported, in the description of particular activities such as story-telling, or joke-recounting, or apologizing, or gossiping, by the rules of inferencing peculiar to those activities. The Maxims of Narrative Implicature presented in Chapter 4 are an example. Similarly, the Inferential Model of Narrative in this chapter emphasizes that cues to the structure of a story are derived from patterns of temporality, causality and evaluation typically associated with narrative forms, as distinct from conversational conventions, in any given culture. These patterns, it is suggested, are not fixed, like the six stable elements of earlier narrative grammar (setting, resolution, etc.), but allow for the fluid interplay of contextual and linguistic information in the creation of narrative meaning. To return, for example to Story 2—‘A tiger, a hunter, a tiger.’ In this particular story, the ‘facts’ to be explained are: a) that the proposition ‘the tiger ate the hunter’ is inferred by all competent hearers from this narrative sequence. b) that some competent hearers think this narrative amusing/ironic. Now, Gricean theory can deal very well with the first of these facts. As the connections between the three NP’s are not made explicit in the ‘tiger story’, we perceive in it a violation of Grice’s Quantity Maxim, which enjoins conversationalists to be ‘adequately informative’. Implicatures then follow by rule, via the following sort of reasoned steps: i) The narrator has violated the maxim of quantity. ii) From his violation + contextual knowledge (i.e., what I know about tigers and hunters, as well as the fact that the sequence is offered as a story), the narrator intends me to infer additional meanings not made explicit in his telling. iii) Since tigers eat people, and hunters are people, I can safely infer that the tiger ate the hunter. However, it is not quite clear from Grice’s steps how the second, nonpropositional, ‘perlocutionary effect’ b) is inferred, unless we know that
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in some cultures, excessive brevity is regarded as droll, the soul of wit, etc. The fashioning of this story in its truncated form may then be seen as exploiting this cultural norm. A typical story in many cultures is typically prolix, as it has not only to narrate the ‘bare facts’ but indicate through ‘evaluative devices’ (asides, exclamations, intensifiers, etc.), and the significance of those facts. The ‘tiger’ story is slightly unusual in that it violates the maxim ‘be adequately informative’ in a way that runs counter to the usual run of narratives; it is less not more than adequately informative. But now imagine a culture where stories are standardly told through a staccato series of nominalizations. Consider, as an example from this hypothetical culture, story 7, quoted again below: A tree, a nest, two birds, three eggs, three fledglings, two birds again.
Here, it would be perfectly possible to infer the temporal->causal-> informational-> sequence of this narrative without finding it in the least funny or witty. If the ‘tiger’ story were recounted in this culture, it is reasonable to assume that it too would not be regarded as funny or witty, simply because it was in contravention of the Maxim of Quantity, as we interpret this maxim. In other words, we are now forced to ask: are the reasons for the ‘tiger’ story being regarded as ‘funny’ based on a violation of the quantity maxim alone? Or could it be that the culturespecific knowledge underlying this story—namely, that it is of the ironic ‘biter-bit’ variety—that contributes to the evaluative inference that it is funny ? Part of my thesis in Narrative Gravity is that innumerable stories across cultures are fashioned as explanations for generalizations such as ‘life is hard’ or adages such as ‘make hay while the sun shines’. Such general ‘truths’ are ‘known’ in particular societies, yet being general, they continually stand in need of supporting evidence from specific cultural products such as stories. The theoretical implications of considering stories as particularized evidence for general cultural beliefs is considered at greater length in Chapters 6 and 7. The answer to the question—why is the ‘tiger’ story funny, but not the equally laconic ‘bird’ story?—requires reference not only to Grice’s Quantity Maxim, but also to the fact that we are trained to regard ‘the biter being bitten’, agent-as-victim, subject-as-object, and other such sets of reversals as ironic in many cultures. No such reversal, ‘peripety’ in Aristotle’s idiom, falls out from the second story, and so it might be inferred that it is less rich in cultural ‘indices’ (Barthes), evaluation (Labov), dialogic imagination (Bakhtin, Todorov), and/or perlocutionary effect (Searle, Austin).
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Another cultural/pragmatic set of reasons which could influence a listener’s positive evaluation of the ‘tiger’ story is connected not with its being a kind of saturnine revenge comedy, but with its generic specification.18 This sort of story, as a genre, seems to be quite close to a riddle in its advertised uninformativeness.19 So when we ‘get’ the point of the story, as when we ‘get’ a riddle, part of the pleasure is in our our own cultural savvy. Cleverness pleases us, especially our own; conversely dullness frustrates, our own or anyone else’s. Story 7, for example, is likely in the end to be evaluated as boring and pointless, except perhaps in a diectic or learning context, because it offers so little interpretive scope to the listener, so little scope for that always agile right hand of narrative inferencing. Despite its riddle-like structure, it does not live up to its promise, thus provoking the ‘so what?’ question which Labov suggests deals a death blow to any story. Story 2, on the other hand, also shaped like a riddle, justifies this generic resemblance to a riddle; it challenges the listener to display her cultural ‘membershipping’20 by solving the puzzle in its sequencing (compare story 6 about Algy). As 18For the purposes of this chapter, I take genres to include such categories as jokes, riddles, novels, short stories, fairy tales, etc. Narrative, conversation, poetry, etc., are, in contrast, informally equated with ‘supergenres’, the intuitive idea being that they form umbrellas over the more precisely defined genres. Wittgenstein’s remarks about the difficulties of finding a satisfactory description of the word ‘game’, despite very clear rules about the constitution of particular games like chess or cricket, may be relevant here. 19I am indebted to Michael Toolan (personal communication) for the wonderful phrase ‘advertised uninformativeness’, and also for making explicit two assumptions underlying my formulation of the basic Rules 1–IV on narrative. First, that these rules embedding temporal->causal->informational->evaluative inferences work like generalized Gricean implicature for all narratives. Second, that the processing of the incoming inferences is usually done at the level of propositions. Thus, we mark boundaries, see chunk a as prior to chunk b by ‘filling out’ expressions until they are proposition-like (somewhat like Sperber and Wilson’s ‘thoughts’). In this task, each of us come up with slightly differing expansions. For example, in the tiger story: (There was) a tiger. (There was) a hunter (with the tiger?). (There was) a tiger (only?). On ‘bare’ propositions such as these, temporality, causality, more contextual information and evaluation can be—in most narratives must be—overlaid (given Rules A-D—yielding versions such as: Once there was a tiger in a forest. The tiger was pursued by a hunter, who intended to kill it. Unfortunately for the poor hunter, he got eaten by the tiger instead—end of story. 20Sacks (1972) p. 332, suggests that a ‘membership categorization device’ might resolve some of the difficulties which participants might have in making associations within the conversation. ‘Sex’, for example, is a categorization device with two members (male and female); if a concept does not clearly fit the categories imposed by the categorization device, cultural difficulties could arise. Similarly, riddles may also serve this function, and a listener’s competence be guaged by her ability at manipulating this device so that she arrives at a ‘correct’ or appropiate reponse, mediated, say, by Grice’s Maxim of Manner.
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contended earlier, much needs to be internalized about social values and beliefs (encoded, for instance, in idiom and adages), as well as about the structure of genres, before such a solution can be capably offered. These arguments, deriving from the specific nature of cultural materials, are useful insofar as they enable a critique of some of the universal, and thus essentializing, assumptions of Gricean theory. They show that Grice’s theory of conversational implicature may be deemed inadequate because it does not account for the full expansion of this sort of minimal narrative. It explains, at most, how the additional proposition ‘the tiger ate the hunter’ is computed, but not the additional non-propositional inference of irony which is what gives this story its evaluative ‘point’. Sperber and Wilson’s theory of contextual relevance could be perhaps considered an improvement because it explains in more detail than Grice’s how causal, temporal, inferences may be arrived at by ‘enriching’ the linguistic context of the story with already stored background information etc. But Sperber and Wilson’s cognitivist emphasis is at odds with the fact that the generalization implicated in the telling of the story is a piece of culturally conceived information. By simply stating that it is stored in individual memories, they underemphasize the value of ongoing socially directed reasoning.To assert that every aspect of understanding is ‘in the mind’ is to speak a truism.21 Or to put it differently, Sperber and Wilson’s insistence that the processes of inferencing are similar in the case of both explicatures and implicatures makes them miss the qualitative distinction between the propositional inference, ‘the tiger ate the hunter’, which all competent hearer in all cultures would derive (if they understood the meanings of the words in the story, were following Grice’s cooperative principle, and had access to the rules of narrative inferencing postulated by me), and the non-propositional inference22 that 21See Mey and Talbot’s review of Relevance for an extended critique along these lines.
These pragmaticists point out that Sperber and Wilson’s references to real-world contexts are noticeably stilted. Despite gestures in the direction of contextualization, they seem to prefer their own constructed examples, drawn from a narrow cultural base. Hence, the extent to which Sperber and Wilson would admit the influence of social factors on judgements about plausible inferences remains unclear. For instance, although we may ‘know’ that in the real world people, especially kings and queens (!), don’t exactly keel over and die of grief on the death of spouses, our cultural acquaintance with narrative fictionalization still promotes the ‘grief ’ inference over the ‘intrigue’ or ‘disease’ inferences in the first Forsterian story that I analysed. Few, if any, of the utterances discussed by Sperber and Wilson, are ‘enriched’, even to this degree of complexity, making it difficult to assess how their theory would be extended in such cases. 22‘Perlocutionary effects’ , we recall, are by-products of illocutionary acts, in Austinian speech act theory. Frightening, amusing, amazing, provoking, etc., are perlocutionary effects, which may fall out as a consequence of illocutionary performatives such as
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the story is funny because it belongs to the ironic ‘biter-bit’ mode, which inference can only be made if a hearer/reader has a particular set of cultural expectations to fall back on. Presumably, a hearer who did not have societal knowledge of the ‘biter-bit’ type of stories would still make the first Gricean inference, but fail to see the point of the story because she could not take that culturally-given step towards the crucial evaluative inference that would complete the story and enable her to understand its narrative tension Cultural norms of interpretation—which I refer to as Impliculture, as distinct from Implicature—thus seem not merely useful, but indispensable, during the process of narrative inferencing. For example, the mystery at the heart of Story 5 (PI PU, PHI SHU) remains impenetrable to readers from another culture, even in translation, until a Bengali speaker guides the English (or Turkish or Nuer) towards a satisfactory interpretation. But I will let the mystery stand since its very presence illustrates the importance of social factors in satisfactory narrative inferencing.23 From the Short, Short Story to the Tall, Tall Tale If we turn to the genre of the tall story now, a similar trend manifests itself. As Bauman,24 in his examination of the tall stories of coon-hunting from the American Midwest has shown, any assessment of a tall claim within a subculture, such as that of the coon-hunters, depends on a thorough knowledge of the conversational display rituals of this group. An outsider may not, with equal confidence, be able to decide which facts are ‘tall’ and which are perfectly plausible. Specialized in-group knowledge thus becomes essential to inferencing in this genre of the tall story. In my view, Bauman’s analysis of the ‘coon’ tall story is characterized by the following features: a) moral community ‘issue[s] of truthfulness and lying’ are addressed via the ‘tall’ tale. warnings, statements, promises and so on. However, there are difficulties with assimilating perlocutions to propositions, and assigning them propositional status, so that they can function as Gricean implicatures. This constitutes a genuine problem area in the inferential theory of narrative that I am proposing, since stories are verbal bundles especially rich in perlocutionary effect(s). 23Examples like this demonstrate almost perfectly the limits/limitations of translation, mired in conventions of spelling, pronunciation and, above all, cultural reception. While I would be more than happy to provide a longer gloss on the PI PU, PHI SHU Bengali story for any curious reader, there is little doubt in my mind that this procedure would almost certainly diminish the narrative text in question! 24Bauman, 1986. See Bibliography.
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b) the tall tale ‘play[s] upon ... another genre of story which is ubiquitous among hound-dog men: narratives of personal experience about the special quality and hunting prowess of particular dogs. ... The more common story of personal experience, told straightforwardly as truth contextualizes the tall tale, it contributes to the latter’s humorous effect by establishing a set of generic expectations that the tall tale can bend exaggeratedly out of shape. ... Thus tall tales are lies, insofar as what they report as having happened either did not happen or could not have happened’ [italics mine]. c) tall tales are often told in the third person, but when they are told in the first person, moving closer to generic narratives of personal experience, the teller is understood to be not simply a humorous liar but a fabricator, a ‘con man’. d) the ‘creative exaggeration’ in the tall tale is an ‘instrument for identity building, for self-aggrandizement ... a means of enhancing one’s own image ... a tendency towards‘stretching the truth’ that has been widely reported in men’s sociable encounters’ [italics mine]. e) tall tales are often marked by formulaic iterative devices and a punchline, which indicate the culmination of events. f) the ‘expressive lying’ in the coon-hunting tall tales place them in an American folk tradition ‘in unbroken continuity with the generations of hunters, traders, and storytellers’ making the tales a ‘richly textured arena for the ethnographic investigation of, ... the negotiation of truthfulness and lying as action and evaluation in the conduct of social life’ [italics mine]. g) in narratives of personal experience attempts at ‘validation’ , stressing the plausibility of the narrative, are frequent, but in the tall tale these validating moves could be subverted or discarded, since here ‘lying is overwhelmingly licensed as part of the fundamental ethos of sociability ... to call another man a liar in this context, then, is to threaten his “face”, with some risk and no possible advantage to oneself; whereas to give apparent acceptance to his accounts is to store-up interactional credit towards the unchallenged acceptance of one’s own tales’ [italics mine]. In effect, Bauman pleads for a contextualized interpretation of the tall tale that sees it in relation to the cultural tradition within which it was generated. He stresses the interactional payoffs of this genre in an allmale, macho atmosphere where the tall tale becomes a variety of performance, and hence ‘lying’ gains social sanction. Speaking of performativity, the use of the tall tale at a pivotal moment in a recent popular film on the American Midwest, entitled Fried Green
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Tomatoes (John Avnet, 1992), illustrates well a point I have stressed before. The ‘good’ story, I have argued, is distinguished by the fact that it travels through social space, passing from person to person as a durable bundle of perlocutionary effects binding the community together. Thus a tall story, embedded in the frame of another story, functions very much like the prototypical cognitive structure designed to convert ‘talk into text’, that I’ve suggested narrative is. It works as a metaphor of survival. To ask for a tall story in the face of imminent death constitutes an act of psychological self-preservation. Fried Green Tomatoes is a story told in flashback of the friendship between two feisty young women, Ruth and Idgie, who run a restaurant in remote Whistlestop, Alabama. During the course of the film, Ruth is stricken with cancer. An ominous clock ticks away in the dark interiors of the house, as the dying Ruth turns away a pastor and instead requests a story from Idgie—a tall story. Even the unconventional Idgie is embarrassed at the thought of delivering a tall story—virtually a lie, as Bauman points out—as a form of final absolution, but her love and grief overcome her inhibitions. And this is the story she tells: There was once a lake across from Ruth’s house. One day a gaggle of geese alighted on it just as the wintry lake was freezing over. When the geese then flew across to the neighbouring state of Georgia, they carried the lake with them, frozen on their webbed feet. Now, Georgia has that lake.
As the tale ends, Ruth passes on peacefully. Fiction, the Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick asserts, thus reassures us, even as it lies or deludes. By making other worlds ‘real’—excitingly and dramatically real—stories persuade us that all may not be lost. In this case, the tall story Idgie tells Ruth certainly mirrors the sociological theme of rivalry between the Midwest states of Alabama and Georgia that is a constant leit-motif in the film, but it achieves more than this simple conversion of real life into reel life. It guarantees itself an ultimate relevance, in Sperber and Wilson’s terminology. Or, one could say that it transforms itself into a form of the Dennett/Dawkins meme—part of a cultural gene-pool. In keeping with the narrative paradigm of the Indian Rope Trick, it manages this by suggesting that dying and pain could themselves be illusions that can be substituted by other more entrancing illusions. Like the geese who fly off with a fictional lake as an icy, shimmering attachment, the essential ‘self’ is freed in a narrative universe; it can wander eternally where it pleases, and thus defy the ‘reality’ of death. One recalls here Virginia Woolf’s phrase about the ‘varied and wandering’ nature of self. If the self is itself an illusion, then a condemnation
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of tall stories, or indeed any form of fiction, seems pointless. The human species as a whole may be said to answer the dread Labovian question—What’s the point of this story?—by making stories central to their being. That, at any rate, is Dennett’s idea. We spend our lives unifying our frangible selves through the cognitive activity of story-telling because constructing the illusion of a self is what we are born to do. From this anti-foundationalist perspective, then, an individual self is ‘really’ just a congeries of story. My own further suggestion in this chapter has been that such a notion of the self as a centre of narrative gravity can be further connected to Dennett and Dawkins’ other suggestion about humans as meme-generators. Since memes are culturally transmitted, narratives make ideal receptacles and/or formats for the transfer of durable memes, such as, for instance, the riddle-like short stories and tall tales examined in this chapter. Apart from their common susceptibility to cultural conditioning (implicultural constraints) are there, however, any other links between the tall tale and the minimal narrative? How are they both analytically (ob)served in terms of my grammar of narrative inferencing? And in what ways are those general issues of meme-formation, narrative coherence, iteration, tension, plausibility, chronology, causality, and relevance illuminated by this kind of data, or addressed in this sort of model? These complex questions are tackled in the penultimate and final sections of this chapter. Narrrative Fragility A possible route towards arriving at an integrated view of narrative discourse, which consists of so many sub-genres, only two of which find a place here, is via Sacks’ notion of ‘the fragility of stories’.25 Only briefly mentioned here, this notion is analysed in much greater detail in the next chapter. Stories are fragile, according to Sacks, to the extent that listeners can question their veracity and tellability. The first strategy enables listeners to arraign the implausibility of the narrative, the second strategy allows listeners to be critical of the boring qualities of the tale, its unexciting ordinariness. A psychological onus is thus automatically placed on all narrative tellers. In their production of a series of narrative clauses, it is incumbent upon tellers to ‘protect’ fragile aspects of their stories by ensuring that listeners do not make such causal, informational or evaluative inferences 25Lecture Notes, Fall 1971 (Sacks, ms. 1967–72).
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as will lead them to conclude that the story offered is ‘fragile’, either on account of its implausibility or its ordinariness. Tellers accomplish such ‘protection’ in a variety of ways: i) by citing witnesses who have seen the events described or can reliably vouch for them ii) by including everyday details to contextualize extraordinary, and therefore implausible, tales iii) by including historical and social facts within their story which ‘everyone knows’, thereby making the rest of the story more ‘real’ iv) by prefacing their stories as Labovian ‘tellables’ v) by making tellables into ‘something for us’ through conventions such as ‘local occasioning’ described in Chapter 6 vi) by inviting listeners to actively join in the construction of the story vii) by telling a ‘third-person’ story as a ‘first-person’ narrative of personal experience, or vice-versa viii) by making a story so short that a listener has no opportunity to question its details, especially as she must busy herself filling in all the missing inferential details ix) by building a story round an embedded cultural generalization x) by frankly admitting the ‘falseness’ of the story, or making obvious its fictionality xi) by using iterative structures to reinforce the causal patterns and evaluative aspects of the story xii) by explicitly ‘leading’ the listener with tags like ‘as you know’, ‘don’t you think’, ‘that’s right’, etc. I offer this list of strategies for the protection of fragile narratives as a means of focusing on the complex interactive understanding—Gricean cooperation—achieved between teller and listener during the unfolding of a story. What inferential spaces does the teller make for the listener, and how does the listener take maximum advantage of these spaces? The extent to which these protective strategies, which Bauman calls ‘validation strategies’, can be culturally identified, and the facility with which tellers use them, afford a means of answering this question. The narrative inferences of temporality, causality, information, and evaluation, could crucially depend on how a community attends to the protection of its narratives. For example, manner of telling—attention to pauses, gaze, voice quality, register, medium, and so forth—would importantly focus and constrain the valid implicultural inferences a listener can make. Different genres—personal narratives, tall stories, disaster accounts,
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riddles—would also be likely to attract different types of validation in given social contexts, being ‘fragile’ in diverse ways. Conversely, it might be possible to identify a range of similarities between superficially differing genres such as the short, short story and tall, tall tale. Since both types of story are fragile on account of their implausibility, departing as they do from the ‘generic expectations’ of truthfulness in the parallel ‘narrative of personal experience’, both arguably employ implicultural validations of a similar sort. First, both are typically told in the third person, so that the teller does not take personal, ‘moral’ responsibilty for the truth of the events he relates. Second, both are laconically told, leaving large inferential gaps, where the burden falls heavily on the teller to interpret the causal, informational and evaluative connections between the events narrated. In this way the listener becomes ‘an accessory after the fact’. She is implicated—or impliculturated—in the actual construction of the tale. Third, both make use of formal patterns of iteration (repeated phrases, e.g., a tiger; repeated syntactic patterns, or NP, NP, NP; repeated stresses, exclamatives, and even phonological repetitions—Anne Donne, John Donne, Undone). This last strategy underlines the fact that these stories have a formulaic, literary, performative orientation that relieves them from the burden of a pedestrian truthfulness. Fourth, both make use of the listener’s knowledge of cultural generalizations, and generic expectations, which structure their inferences and give ‘point’ to the narration—a strategy that may also be viewed as a special case of validating stories via social witness. Fifth, both are generally fashioned as frankly exaggerated narratives of counterfactual humour and/or ironic wit, which by their flagrant flouting of the usually prolix development of narrative, and the expectations of truthfulness in conversation, hold a heightened interest. Sixth, both offer a challenge to the listener because they unfold enigmatically, sustaining narrative tension until the very end, usually marked by a punchline. More generally, while the tall tale violates Grice’s Maxim of Quality advising truthful and the minimal narrative violates his Maxim of Quantity enjoining adequate informativeness, both deliberately subvert principles of communication, immediately setting in train processes of inferencing. It will be recalled that the Gricean Supermaxim for Narrative that I suggested in Chapter 4 is couched as the following injunction: ALWAYS PROTECT THE FRAGILITY OF YOUR NARRATIVES BECAUSE YOU ARE THEREBY PROTECTING YOUR VULNERABLE ‘SELF’. Following this imperative, any narrative can be graded by listeners along a cline of
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fragility, ranging from the weakest narrative (most implausible and boring) to the strongest, most riveting narratives (neither implausible nor boring). In my ‘inferential’ grammar of narrative, it is possible to relate this cline of ‘fragility’ with the ‘degrees’ of inference postulated by the story-grammarians. These run from first order (least constrained) to fourth order (most constrained). Can these two gradations, then, be matched up? NARRATIVE FRAGILITY
INFERENTIAL CONSTRAINTS
Weakest Story: Boring and implausible Next Weakest: Boring but not implausible
4th Order Inferences: Duplicate information, overdetermined and unimportant 2nd Order Inferences: Relevant and determined, important to the progress of the story 3rd Order Inferences: Irrelevant, determined but not logically important 1st Order Inferences: Elaborative, underdetermined by the text of the story.
Somewhat Stronger: Implausible but not boring Strongest Story: Neither implausible nor boring
My speculative hunch is that, presented with a very weak story, overdetermined or too clearly explicated, listeners simply ‘shut off’, not bothering to make any effort; in other words, ‘lazy’ 4th order inferences are all they are willing to make. If a story is boring but credible, listeners put in some processing effort, but this effort is likely to be erratic, corresponding to 2nd order inferencing. Stories like Bauman’s ‘coon’ tale, exciting but highly implausible, require listeners to invest a great deal of cognitive effort; owing to the contextual expressiveness of the narrative, they produce quite ‘good’ 3rd order narratives. Elaborative, sustained readings, involving complex evaluative and informational inferences—implicultural reasoning—is the domain of 1st order inferences. Great literary masterpieces belong to this category. In Chapter 6, which presents illustrations of Sacks’ ethnomethodological concept of ‘narrative fragility’, I quote the novelist Margaret Drabble on why a story can fail because it is ‘too interesting to be interesting’. The teller gives away too much; in terms of my extension, Searle’s Principle of Expressibility, the explication by the teller is overdone, leaving nothing to the imagination of the hearer. It follows that if, for example, 1st order inferences dominate in a story, there is little for the right-hand arm of my narrative grammar to do, the truth maxim and conventions of narrativity are over-worked and memes are in short supply. A teller’s limitations as
In early storygrammars, these would mainly comprise the type: logical inference.
2nd Order → Inferences.
1st Order → Inferences:
STORY-GRAMMARS: DEGREES & TYPES OF INFERENCE
Over explicit →
Over-explicated
→
SEARLE’S PRINCIPLE EXPRESSIBILITY
The Quantity → Maxim for Narrative says: Be summary and explicit!
The Truth → or Quality Maxim for Narrative says:. Be plausible. Explicate!
GRICEAN MAXIMS EXTENDED TO STORY-TELLING
Provide abstracts, → or proverbial or didactic generalizations as needed, so that people ‘get the point’ of your story.
Provide orientations, → engage in being culturally ordinary, membershipped; make your stories ‘something for us.’
LEWISIAN CONVENTIONS EXTENDED TO NARRATIVE
Quantum of memes → somewhat increased. More implicultural— inferences required. The ‘bird’ story above as well as ordinary neighbourly exchanges would exemplify this category of story.
Relatively few memes → and correspondingly an attenuated sense of a Dennettian ‘self ’. Limited scope for implicultural exchanges of subjectivity. See Drabble’s story in Chapter 6 for this sort of narrative.
DAWKINS’ MEMES AND DENNETT’S NARRATIVE GRAVITY
(contd...)
Given no evidence to the contrary, treat all ‘and then’ conjuncts as causal, thus making plotoriented narrative connections.
Given no evidence to the contrary, treat all conjunctions with ‘and’ as ‘and then’ conjunctions, thus privileging temporality.
NAIR’S INFERENTIAL GRAMMAR OF NARRATIVE
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In early storygrammar, these would mainly comprise the type: evaluative inference.
4th Order → Inferences
Super → Expressive
Over exciting →
3rd Order → Inference
In early storygrammars, these would mainly comprise the type: informational. inference.
SEARLE’S PRINCIPLE EXPRESSIBILITY
STORY-GRAMMARS: DEGREES & TYPES OF INFERENCE
The Manner → Maxim for Narrative says: Be expressive and Be memeconscious
The Relevance → Maxim for Narrative says: Be interesting and exciting!
GRICEAN MAXIMS EXTENDED TO STORY-TELLING
Produce culturally → appropriate stories, and attempt to use ‘literary’ and rhetorical skills at irony, metaphor etc. as self-reflexively as required for the purposes of the communicative exchange in progress.
Locally occasion → your stories; produce tellables, and include story-internal evaluations; encourage listener participation in turn-taking.
LEWISIAN CONVENTIONS EXTENDED TO NARRATIVE
Most meme-studded → narrative. Rich in possibilities for implicultural inferences. This sort of narrative is best suited to express the ‘self’ and welladapted to social survival and transfer. The Odyssey the Ramayana, and/or a modern classic would belong to this class.
Vastly improved → opportunities for meme creation, storage and transmission. These stories are told, repeated and appreciated by socially self-confident individuals who enjoy playing the implicultural game.
DAWKINS’ MEMES AND DENNETT’S NARRATIVE GRAVITY
Given no evidence to the contrary, go from an informational inference to an evaluative one and try to arrive at a strong evaluation to coincide with the end of the story.
Given no evidence to the contrary, ensure that all causal connectives are supported by realworld inferences that render the narrative culturally indexed and engaging.
NAIR’S INFERENTIAL GRAMMAR OF NARRATIVE
(contd...)
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a social agent would thus show up in such a narrative, with the eventual repercussion that bad listening strategies are followed by hearers. Likewise, a story can be unduly explicit, immoderately exciting, or unnecessarily expressive. To summarize, then, the complex set of relationships between the theories I’ve made use of so far in my analysis of narrativity: Even a cursory glance at the chart linking various perspective on narrative confirms one thesis. Not only do we seem to be narrative-extruding pastamachines in the Dennettian mould, but we appear to be incorrigible inference-making machines. My own argument in this connection has been that narrative studies sorely require a Theory of Impliculture to supplement, if not supplant, the existing scaffold of the Theory of Implicature developed by Grice. Our competence as ‘narrative speakerhearers’, as well as ‘native speaker-hearers’, is attested by the ingenuity and cultural skill with which we decode story inferences. Merely labelling narrative nodes as settings, complicating actions, resolutions, etc., although effective as description of many narratives, does not explain how we arrived at our schematic labelling in the first place. Such a post hoc method of enquiry leads inevitably to a conceptualization of narrative as inert product rather than vital process. Since it is widely realized that listeners continuously form and reject hypotheses about the coherence of a story as it is being told, not afterwards, it is this sort of ongoing competence-inperformance that must be accounted for by narratologists. Psycholinguistic models of narrative did indeed recognize that the schema they proposed had to be supported by some inferencing mechanism incorporating the types and orders of narrative implicatures that they postulated. However, they did not take the crucial theoretical step towards making inferences of temporality, causality and evaluation the pivots of narrative. This is the move that has been attempted, if not fully accomplished, in this chapter. Recursive inferences, on this view, are to be regarded not as the incidental by-products of a narrative system, but as constitutive of the system itself. In my final section below, I ask why recursion and its cousin, repetition, is such an important element in reasoning. Iteration and Narrative Tension Repetition plays an incalculable part in the inference-making process, as well as in structuring narrative. As we have observed in this chapter, iteration seems to be a feature of even the most minimal of narratives. The puzzle posed by the phenomenon of iteration is simple: since
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repetition presents redundant information, why repeat? Why waste cognitive effort, both in producing and decoding information presented for a second or third time? Why violate the Gricean Maxim of Quantity? What is implied by the fact that, despite its apparent redundancy, iteration is ubiquitous in our speech, and occurs all over the place in our most sophisticated literary productions? Grice set the ball rolling by remaking that literary effects such as irony, metaphor, hyperbole and understatement, could perhaps be explained, not so much by the Quantity Maxim, as by the Quality or Truth Maxim, since all these tropes make some sort of ‘false’ statement. He then added in a further note that ‘irony is intimately connected with the expression of a feeling, attitude or evaluation.’26 Taking yet another leaf out of the Gricean book, Sperber and Wilson then redo irony, metaphor, etc., in terms of their own preferred principle of relevance. These forms, they suggest, form a continuum with ordinary linguistic usage rather than a special ‘literary class’ distinguished by some sort of maxim violation. Like any other form of words, irony for Sperber and Wilson typically involves three factors: cultural reference, an attitudinal stance—and repetition. In their own words, ‘standards or rules of behaviour are culturally defined, commonly known and frequently invoked; they are thus always available for echoic mention.’ ‘Echoic mention’ is, of course, Sperber and Wilson’s own term for repetition. This is how Sperber and Wilson explain their position: We would like to show that irony and a lot of related tropes (eg., meiosis, litotes,) fall together within a range of cases that would not normally be regarded as figurative at all. What unites these cases is the fact that the thought of the speaker... is an interpretation of a thought of someone other than the speaker (or of the speaker in the past). When interpretations achieve relevance in this way we will say they are echoic . ... From the pragmatic point of view, what is important is that a speaker can use an echoic utterance to convey a whole range of attitudes and emotions, ranging from outright acceptance and approval to outright rejection and disapproval, and that the recognition of these attitudes and emotions may be crucial to the interpretation process.27
Immediate problems arise with this explanation of echoic effects. For one thing, there are far too many counterexamples to the theory that repetition works as irony, metaphor and so forth because ‘the thought of the speaker ... is an interpretation of a thought of someone other than the speaker (or of the speaker in the past).’ Consider, for instance, 26Grice, 1990, p. 53. 27Sperber and Wilson, 1992, pp. 237–240.
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Conrad’s famous exclamation in The Heart of Darkness: ‘the horror, the horror’, or somebody exclaiming after a winning a race, ‘I did it, I did it!’, or a person saying ‘Ha, ha!’ because he is sceptical of the claims being made by someone, or even a stammerer repeating phrases without intending to. These are all cases where the iteration does not require us to interpret the present utterance with reference to a previous occasion or another speaker. They are text-internal and refer to the present circumstances of the utterance alone. Indeed, I would maintain that most instances of repetition do not need us to go through the complicated set of manouevres that Sperber and Wilson advise. On the contrary, repetition forces us to reconsider first mention within the text rather than outside it. It thus calls for structure–internal reorganization of the conversation or ‘story’ as we have interpreted it so far, as well as, maybe, a contextual search. Sperber and Wilson go on to remark that ‘a speaker can use an echoic utterance to convey a whole range of attitudes and emotions’. They are right about this, of course, but such an obvious statement gives us no clue as to how we may distinguish irony as repetition from, for instance, metaphor or litotes as repetition. I would suggest that there are marked and unmarked cases of repetition, the distinction between these being culturally learnt, and requiring implicultural skills. Formally, we must recognize that all repetitions resemble 4th order inferences, which simply duplicate information already presented; as such, they are overdetermined and redundant. Yet many of the world languages have discovered grammatical advantages to reduplication; for example, they can be used to convey plurality (Malay), habitual action (Bengali), or continuous aspect (Hindi). These would, like an individual’s stammer, constitute unmarked repetition. Marked instances of repetition would occur most predictably in forms like narrative, which are culturally as well as cognitively designed to turn forgettable talk into memorable text. Repetition basically says ‘Look again! You may have missed something!’ It is a call to the listener to attend more closely and at once to the inferencemaking process. As such, the job it does within a text or a conversation is to force the inference-making process; it tugs at the listener or reader’s mental sleeve. For example, when in this chapter I refer to the ‘short, short story’, the repetition intensifies and draws attention to the very minimal narratives I present, but the phrase the ‘tall, tall tale’ has a different function; here the adjective is used for reasons of sheer alliterative balance, wordplay, and textuality are foregrounded, marked. By creating patterns within the text, repetition thus stimulates the
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process of pattern-recognition—an activity the human brain is good at, and take great delight in. E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel commented long ago on these motifs which occur like fugues in a narrative, giving it unity and coherence. Different literary genres use repetition in different ways to highlight their own raison d’être. A detective story might use repetition as a red herring to mislead readers about the ‘true’ identity of a murderer, for example, while a romance may associate a certain metaphor, say a white shawl, with a heroine. This is what gives repetition its complexity and power as a literary device, or in the vocabulary of story-grammars, its potential as evaluation. To return to the special case of irony at this point. Both dramatic irony and everyday irony are distinguished by a process Aristotle called ‘reversal’, which could be characterized as a special case of repetition. Here, circumstances turn out exactly opposed to an expected pattern, as in Oedipus Rex, and words turn out to have a double entendre, a contrary meaning. Now, in a narrative, there are two basic reasons why speakers might want to indicate the opposite of what is said. First, as I’ve argued, it allows listeners much greater scope for interpretive play. By deliberately complicating the conversational situation, tellers heighten the interactional stakes. Talk is thereby turned into text—a possible meme structure that can subsequently be passed on by listeners as a joke, a witticism, a story, or some other ‘tellable’. The second reason is related to the first. Structures like narrative, I have suggested, take a certain pleasure in perverseness, in imaginatively reconstituting our workaday world. By doing so, they momentarily ‘challenge’ logic and enable both tellers and listeners, for a fragment of time, to hold contradictory beliefs in mind, to be ‘in two minds’ as it were. It is this capacity to evoke the thrill of the ‘in two minds’ cognitive state that the device of repetition, so common in stories, shares with narrative as a structure. To repeat, then. Acknowledged as a universal supergenre of discourse, narrativity has invited many attempts at description. Almost all these classifications have concentrated on tellable or culturally meme-studded varieties of narrative. Stories have been labelled as either fictional or factual (Searle 1975 ; Adams 1985), casually conversational or carefully rehearsed as ‘performances’ (Bauman 1986; Maclean 1988), oral or written (Tannen 1984, Street 1984), fragile or durable, plausible or boring (Sacks 1967–72, Bhaya Nair 1982) , tellable or ordinary (Labov 1972, Pratt 1975); authorless or authoritative (Dennett, 1991, Miller 1992). Narrative Gravity tries to take as many as possible of these multifarious distinctions into account in presenting its listener-oriented view of narrative
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structure as applied to two of the simplest subgenres of narrative—the tall tale and minimal narrative. Inferential moves—evaluation implicated in informational sequences, information indicated in causal sequences, causal sequences following from temporal assumptions, and then recursively, informational sequences generating causal ones, etc.—are vital to a narrative grammar. Degree of inference may also, as we have seen, be systematically related to the perceived fragility of stories. Grice’s theory, as well as Sperber and Wilson’s more detailed, contemporary and cognitivist version of it are important here for the links I make between the classical Gricean notion of deductive implicatures and my own ideas about impliculture as an inductive mode of inferencing. The minimal narrative and the tall tale, in particular, are genres which require a great deal inferencing on the part of the listener. Hence they offer an ideal body of data against which to test an inferential theory of narrative. Moreover, much of the knowledge they presuppose is culturespecific, so that the claim that an inferential model is predisposed towards the incorporation of socio-cultural context is also put to test by such data. Evaluative inferences in particular are influenced by cultural norms, without reference to which the point of many such stories might simply be lost.28 Narrative structure can be seen as the outcome of strategies of validation, or story-protection by tellers, combining with types and orders of inferencing by listeners to yield a completed object, as well a complete subjectivity. By making repeated temporal, causal, informational and evaluative inferences, listeners endow a raw narrative with coherence, as well as resolve textual mysteries and inconsistencies. Getting to know oneself, as the graffiti on the wall says, is the beginning of a life-long love affair. Self constantly meets and merges with others in this iterative narrative dance. A ‘good’ story is one where the listener is so completely hooked that he completely identifies with the imaginary characters and imaginary worlds that the teller conjures up. This is when memes are best transferred—and the Indian Rope Trick successfully completed. The attraction of an inferential model lies in its attempt to mimic precisely this flexibility which tellers, listeners and analysts display in their meme-sensitive interpretations of narrative. It allows for changeable hypotheses about the genre and ‘point’ of a particular narrative, and yet it presents/represents a systematic hierarchy consisting 28Labov (1972) has listed and explicated such evaluative devices at considerable length in this samples of New York Black English Vernacular [BEV].
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of major nodes which consistently govern the expectations of listeners. A substantial part of my motivation in proposing such a model, not in isolation, but in conjunction with specific data, in fact, has been to show that accounts of narrative structure must be able to incorporate cultural intuitions about the relevance of narrative in context. In his essay on the tall tale, Bauman states that these narratives ... do not fall into clear-cut categories of factual and fictional, truthful and lying, believable and incredible, but rather interweave in a complex contextual web that leaves these issues constantly in doubt.29
The image of narrative projected herein is that even the most minimal of stories can be analysed with maximal complexity, given a theoretical approach that values inferential enrichment over interpretive economy, and partial indeterminacy over absolute predictability.
29Bauman, 1986, p. 32.
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6
qQ T U R N S AT TA L K Ethnomethodological Analysis of Narrative
‘The time has come’, the Walrus said, ‘To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings’ ‘Tut, tut, child’ said the Duchess. ‘Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.’ Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass If the story-tellers could ha’ got decency and good morals from true stories, who’d have troubled to invent parables? Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
Any study of story-telling, Hillis Miller has claimed, must respond to three questions. Why do we need stories at all? Why do we need the same story over and over? Why do we always need more stories? Miller’s answers to these questions are attractively brief. The first is tackled by saying that stories appeal to our innate sense of order and rhythm, and also ‘police’ our culture by telling us how we may ‘become more like our neighbours’. Stories prescribe cultural norms, while allowing space for a ‘relatively safe’ critique of the culture within which these norms operate. The second answer then reiterates the arguments of the first. We need order, and we need to read order into the meanderings of fiction— as structuralist work on narrative has decisively shown. Repeating basic
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themes and metaphors via narrative is therefore ‘perhaps the most powerful of ways to assert the basic ideology of our culture’. But it is Miller’s third query that fetches the most interesting reaction. It could be that we always need stories because in some way they do not satisfy. ... Each story and each repetition or variation of it leaves some uncertainty or contains some loose-end unravelling its effect, according to some law that is not so much psychological or social as linguistic. This necessary incompletion means that no story fulfils perfectly, once and for all, its functions of ordering and confirming. And so we need another story, and then another and yet another, without ever coming to the end of our need for stories, or ever assuaging the hunger they are meant to satisfy.1
Miller admits that the third is the most difficult of his questions and examines a number of literary examples to demonstrate their ‘essential incompleteness’. This chapter seeks to connect my own interest in mundane non-literary stories with Miller’s analysis of culturally famous, highly regarded texts.2 Its aim is to provide the sort of ‘linguistic’ explanation of a story’s intrinsic incompleteness that Miller seems to want. This incompleteness derives from three sorts of physicality. Stories are indeed food—as Miller implies—for what Dennett has called the ‘epistemic hunger’ of our species. This metaphor of ‘hunger’ however appears incompatible with the notion of ‘perfect fulfillment’. Just as we cannot be ever satisfied with a single meal, or even multiple ones, even if they are absolute gourmet delights, but have to keep eating at regular intervals all our lives, so we cannot ever be fulfilled by binges of narrative activity. As a species, we are not meant to suffer from narrative bulimia, although some of us do. In the course of our everyday existence most of us are condemned to a lifetime of fulfilling our appetite for stories. As long as we have a ‘self’ to sustain and do not move into Alzheimer’s or other similar selfdeleting conditions, our ‘selfhood’ is sustained by narrative. It is in this context that the Millerian demand for ‘morals’ from our stories—those precepts by which we may ‘live’—seems explicable. Morals in a narrative are the mental equivalent of the nutritional value of a meal. Hence, the ideological task of narrative that Miller refers to cannot be over until a culture becomes quite moribund, because sustaining vital levels of 1Miller, in Lentricchia and McLaughlin, 1990, p. 72. 2Although some of the research in Narrative Gravity was first undertaken in the
nineteen eighties, I should note that the three basic questions asked by Miller in 1990 were anticipated to an extent in my thesis of 1982, partly because one could not avoid this sort of ‘naïve’ enquiry in that proto-era of narrative studies.
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narrative interaction are the main means by which a culture made up of story-telling individuals renews itself. Or to change our metaphor slightly, we always need more stories just as, crudely speaking, we always need more babies each generation in any society if it is not to die out. Furthermore, that structural ‘open-endedness’ of all face-to-face talk, which forms the background, and often the ground, of most narrative interaction, seem designed to allow, indeed encourage, us to routinely fill our narrative stomachs—or make more babies, whichever analogy is preferable. Conversation, I had said in my Introduction, is somewhat like sex. It is an interlocking device for self-perpetuation. This structural openness—the potentially infinite ABABAB chain of conversation which any two people can open up at any time to exchange their stories—is the primary subject of this chapter. As for hunger and the life-sustaining properties of those materials we classify as ‘food for thought’, the alternating rhythm of the conversation-machine could be likened to the jaws of a perpetually famished shark—forever moving in an openshut-open-shut movement, always ready to take in more feed—‘shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings’. There is no end to our appetite for talk, indeed there can be no end, structurally speaking. Talking into Tape-recorders Ethnomethodology was the soul-child of the America of the sixties and bears all the distinguishing marks of that era. Greatly influenced by the work of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel, it turned the gaze, the ‘oyster eye’, of American sociology, inward upon the ‘self’ of ordinary Americans. By concentrating on the manner in which America, and especially California, organized its everyday life in shops, in neighbourhoods, in psychiatric clinics and in beauty parlours, the American ethnomethodologists hoped to learn more about ‘structures of social action’.3 A quick look at, let’s say, a dozen keywords in the ethnomethodological lexicon which might be of some help here. Twelve conceptuallyloaded terms in conversational analysis, an offshoot of ethnomethology, are ‘negotiation’, ‘participant’, ‘ratification’, ‘turn-taking mechanism’, ‘preference organization’, ‘repair’, ‘sequencing’, ‘pairs’, ‘trouble’, ‘strategy’, ‘observable’, and ‘transcription’. So, we could set up the ethnomethodological scenario like this. In most conversational situations, participants negotiate with each 3This is the title of a book on ethnomethodology, edited by J. Maxwell Atkinson and
John Heritage, 1984.
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other, tell their troubles, and ratify, or not, as the case may be, previous turns at talk. The analyst’s task is to transcribe in minute detail a conversational fragment from which she can retrieve observables within the turn-taking mechanism. From these she can build up a theoretical picture of the strategies participants use to repair those turns at talk that they consider faulty. She can also study the preference organization of sequencing patterns characteristic of conversational pairs such as complimenting and thanking, questioning and answering, greeting and greeting, riddling and responding, offering and accepting. From their research, conversational analysts related this ‘local’ tendency towards sequencing in set pairs to the ‘over-arching’ pairing established in the abstract by the ABABAB structure of conversation itself. Conversation, as the conversational analysts saw it, was in this sense primarily a ‘machine’ with given structural properties which had to be skillfully ‘manipulated’ to solve participants’ problems or ‘troubles’, and help them achieve communicative goals. Depending on their managerial aptitude, some did much better than others at ‘using the system’ of conversation to get what they wanted. There is an obvious analogy here with my metaphor of human beings as communicating cogs in the factory of culture, turning out all sorts of memes to serve our ‘illusions’ of selfhood. Three implications of the conversational analytic perspective should be spelt out at this stage. First, the ethnomethodologists insisted that they came to their data with few preconceived notions about conversational structure. They simply pointed out ‘observables’ that were there. But how did they know what was ‘there’ in a conversation, and what wasn’t? Simple, said the ethnomethodologists, we can point out —or ostensively define as Sperber and Wilson might put it—the conversational feature to which we refer on a tape. And here we come to a truly interesting aspect of the ethnomethodologists’ contribution to an understanding of conversational structure. It offers a striking illustration of the manner in which a method as well as an ideology of analysis can be founded on a new technology. Not only do the human species constitute inferential machines themselves, but they also perceive themselves anew through the machines they invent. Cassette tape recorders in the sixties changed the way in which one could observe a conversation; it was no longer necessary to rely on individual or collective memory in order to reconstruct what had been said. Now every conversation could be replayed exactly as many times as necessary for analytic procedure. In a way, what the ‘ordinary’ tapes of the ethnomethodologists then revealed was to my mind almost as
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theoretically shocking as Watergate was socially scandalous. For, the conversational analysts’ reams of tape showed the following—that precisely those parts of a speaker’s ‘turn at talk’ that we had naively imagined were dispensable are, in fact, crucial to sustaining its structure and momentum. The pauses, the ums and ers, wells and you knows, the lapses into silence, reformulations of utterances and the overlapping speech that we would automatically ‘erase’ from an ideal representation of our linguistic performance turn out to be really important in ‘holding a narrative together’, as well as in structuring the changeovers between speakers and hearers in a conversation. One could conjecture that these intervening bits and pieces make up that elusive and ‘invisible’ super glue with which the magician in the Indian Rope Trick of Narrative binds again the severed parts of the goddess Vac. They are the solution to that little mystery of re-incorporated structure—as I shall demonstrate in this, and the following chapters of this book. Such a solution is not as far-fetched as it would seem. Gail Jefferson, a leading ethnomethodologist, has called a story in conversation ‘an extended object’,4 meaning that it is distributed across several turns in a conversation, some of which belong to the teller and some, equally, to the listener(s). Hence, a story has to be controlled by all the participants in a conversation if it is to be properly organized. As I shall show, such organizational, and organic, control over the complex Vac ‘body’ of a narrative is indeed exercised by the small, and on the face of it irrelevant, interventions and ‘repairs’ produced by participants during the process of story-telling. A genuine problem with using conversational analytic methodology, however, is its undoubted tedium. It requires that stretches of talk be presented and studied in their entirety—yet this means the ‘data’ set out in its transcribed form is exasperatingly cumbersome. I can only hope that the surreptitious pleasures of eavesdropping, as well as the intrinsic interest of the danger-of-death, tall stories, and minimal narratives that I’ve presented here will do something to mitigate boredom. And then there is always the reader’s unilateral option of ‘skipping’ through or psychologically deleting chunks of tedious material—a choice which we have all have exercised with our texts at one time or another! Second, the ethnomethodologists did not just use a machine—namely, a tape-recorder—for their researches. They also suggested that the object of their studies—namely, conversation—was itself a machine. The properties of this mechanical turn-taking system of conversation were 4Jefferson G., ‘The Sequential Aspects of Story-telling in Conversation’, in Schenkein
(ed.), 1978, p. 219.
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listed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson in their pioneering paper of 1967 (see Chapter 4), which has since inspired a great many other papers. As far as we are concerned, that identification of conversation with a machine remains important because of Dennett’s rather more recent description of the human mind as a machine, and Searle’s arguments against Dennett’s position. Third, ethnomethodologists speak of participants as ‘doers’. Conversationalists cast in the ‘ethno’ mould do not invite, they ‘do inviting’; they do not question, they ‘do questioning’, they do not tell stories, they ‘do story-telling’. The point of this awkward terminology, apparently, is to draw attention to the labour-intensive nature of conversation. Talk does not amount merely to ‘saying’ but to ‘doing’. Obviously, such a rejection of the dichotomy between ‘mere talk’ and ‘active work’, echoes the heavy emphasis in speech act theory on language as action and performance. Conversational analytic maneouvres with tape-recorders—memorymachines—were meant to sustain their claims to manufacture a theoretical ‘apparatus’, not by ‘imagining’ it, but on the basis of recorded ‘facts’. These facts about the enjambment of sentences into a complicated conversational structure force us to reassess the manner in which we extricate theoretical concepts such as ‘sentence’ and ‘word’ from ‘evidence’. At the same time, we manage to confer very little power on parallel concepts such as ‘utterance’ and ‘turn’, although they seem to possess as much ‘factivity’—which in the conversational analytic perspective appears to mean something like brute observability. My argument is that ethnomethodological observations—reasonably serviceable as ‘facts’ about the interlocking structure of conversational communication—are difficult to accommodate within structuralist formalizations, Labovian or speech act, since each speech act is so self-contained, with its own, heavily speaker-oriented, and perhaps unavoidably ethno centric, set of ‘felicity conditions’. Conversational Generalizations Three African proverbs: ‘talking with one another is loving one another’; ‘he who begins a conversation does not foresee its end’ and ‘a proverb is the horse of conversation: when the conversation lags, a proverb revives it.’ In this section, I will concentrate on the pioneering work of Harvey Sacks. Sacks’ energetic and original but strangely disoriented writings still conspire to make him—more than twenty years after his early death
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in a car accident—perhaps the single most charismatic thinker among the aficionados of the conversational analytic school. It so happens that Sacks raised some specific problems about stories in conversation, to which I offer possible solutions here. These solutions will not be unrelated to the ideas discussed in previous chapters, nor to Hillis Miller’s insights; the shrewd observations of the Yoruba and the Ndebele that I’ve just quoted will also walk alongside my theoretical gabble, forming a counterpoint to it and guiding it when it falters. In Chapter 4, I suggested that a model such as that constituted by the theories of Grice and Lewis was one from which the features of conversation noted by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson could be deduced. Lewisian conventions, I argued, could be used to define the regularities of behaviour displayed whenever a story was relayed among members of a community. Whether such ‘regularities’ as conversational analysts notice can properly be called ‘conventions’ according to the Lewisian definition requires a more detailed attention to the methodology used to observe them. The present chapter undertakes this task. Sacks states the ends of conversational analytic methodology succinctly: What one ought to seek to build is an apparatus which will provide for how it is that any activities, which members do in such a way as to be recognizable as such to members, are done, and done recognizably.5
Now, the building of ‘an apparatus’ appears to be a mechanical task, very different from Lewis’ aims of providing an analytic definition of convention. Yet Lewis’ description of convention, below, conforms strikingly to Sacks’ requirements for a talk-machine. A convention of language, according to Lewis— ... is a regularity restricting one’s production of, and response to verbal utterances and inscriptions. Linguistic competence consists in part of a disposition to conform to that restriction with ease; and in part of an expectation that one’s neighbours will be likewise disposed with a recognition of their conformity as a reason for one’s own.6
Though Lewis is writing of ‘grammatical’ conventions, his deposition could refer equally, or even more aptly to the interdependent regularities in a conversation. Lewisian conventions would apply as restrictions on ‘members’ production of and responses to’ conversational acts. They would 5Sacks, ‘On the Analysability of Stories by Children’ in Gumperz and Hymes (eds), 1972, p. 332. 6Lewis, Convention, 1972, p. 51.
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provide ways of presenting an activity so that it was easily ‘recognizable as such to members’, and conversely, opaque to non-members. In Chapter 4, I suggested that turn-taking could itself be treated as a conventional regularity derivable from the rational principle that in cooperative talk it is, by and large, cognitively essential to observe what Schegloff calls ‘the basic rule for conversation: one party at a time [italics mine]’.7 This rule is necessary to ensure the physical processing of a speaker’s ‘meanings’ by hearers. Of course, such a physical ‘rule’ would only be the grossest of parameters, and there could be many socially sanctioned deviations from it.8 Most interesting, though, are the ways in which speakers and hearers contrive not so much to ‘violate’ as to meet the exhausting demands of conversational ‘love’ as the African proverb has it. Schegloff, drew attention to ‘the ways in which coordinated entry by two parties into an orderly sequence of conversational turns is managed ... given the convention of ABAB sequencing’.9 Who gets to speak first, without stepping clumsily on the conversational toes of the other party? How is the pact kept going, without too much damage to the concerned ‘selves’, and without too much offence? The trick, according to Schegloff, is use the pre-existing ABAB turntaking system precisely like a Lewisian convention—that is, as a pattern of behaviour so regular that it constrains the choice of ‘moves’ by conversationalists. When a ‘language-game’ such as story-telling is played out within its confines, turn-taking actually facilitates coordination. Lewis’ own definition of convention, we may recall, had as its source the theory of ‘games of coordination’. A very general convention such as turn-taking, would constrain the way in which participants coordinate every conversational activity; but then there are conventions special to the sub-games possible within the general ABAB system. Harvey Sacks kicks off the discussion by observing that in any conversation ‘certain activities can only be done at certain places in a sequence’; so, for instance, a greeting has regularly to be placed in the opening turns of a sequence, and so forth. He proposes, therefore, that a distinction be made in analysing conversation between a slot and the items which fill it ... certain activities [being] accomplished by a combination of some ‘slot’ and some ‘activity’. Engagement in particular 7Schegloff E., ‘Sequencing in Conversational Openings’, in Gumperz and Hymes
(eds), p. 350. 8For example, see Ochs, 1976. 9Schegloff, ‘Sequencing in Conversational Openings’, in Gumperz and Hymes (eds), p. 350.
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language-games is, on this account, constrained by members’ knowledge that only particular ‘slots’ are appropriate to particular activities. Conversational ‘objects’ such as answers, greetings, and the like, have conventionally to be positioned in proper ‘slots’.10
Although Sacks uses the terms ‘item’ and ‘object’ interchangeably in his work; I will refer, in this chapter and hereafter, to the story itself as an ‘object’ and to announcements, prefaces and other associated turns by the prospective or current teller of the story as ‘items’.11 Since the languagegame of story-telling requires coordination of moves across several ‘slots’12 in a conversational sequence, and control over several items, it is prototypically cooperative talk in extenso. From the conversational analytic point of view, in what does cooperation consist? One could begin with a basic insight of Sacks about conversation—one he shared with Searle. Recall Searle’s third condition on assertions, set out in Chapter 2. The expressed proposition must not be obviously true to both the speaker and the hearer in the context of the utterance.13
Similarly, Sacks notes that— ... it is a general rule about conversation that it is your business not to tell people what you can suppose they know. If the rule were relaxed there would be no shortage of things to say; you could read from a physics text, you could announce the date, the weather, the time; you could say your name over and over again; you could point things out, ‘This is a chair, today is Saturday, tomorrow is 10Sacks, ‘On the Analysability of Stories by Children’, p. 341. 11 Schegloff has, for instance, pointed out that a turn may contain more than one
‘move’ (‘Sequencing in Conversational Openings’, p. 351). See also M. Owen (1979), ‘Units of Natural Conversation’ (Chapter 2 of Ph.D. dissertation on ‘Remedial Interchanges’), where turns and moves are analysed in relation to one another and to higher order units of natural conversation. Incidentally, the terminology of ‘natural conversation’ used by Owen and others may appear puzzling, but it seems to be ‘preferred’ for two reasons. One, ‘meanings’ in a natural language are thought to be much more variable (i.e., open to interpretation), and therefore more complex than words in an ‘artificial’ language (e.g., a computer language). Two, the phrases ‘natural language’ and ‘natural conversation’ can be related in a conversational analytic framework because the corpus consists of tape-recordings of conversations as they actually occur, although there is some irony in such ‘natural’ narratives being recorded on an ‘artificial’ instrument. 12The use of ‘slot’ in conversational analysis is not to be confused with slots in a story-grammar, but it is interesting that these two approaches to communication were being developed side-by-side in the America of the seventies. 13This is also a preparatory condition in the felicity-conditions constructed for stories in Chapter 2.
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Sunday, the next day is Monday’. So if one asserts a fact one can assume the listener knows one is obviously pointing to the relevance/significance of the fact, not telling him the fact itself. The listener then inspects it for—how far does this remark bear on what we have been talking about?14
And in a second lecture Sacks raises this question with regard to stories: The kind of lessons that stories often contain can be delivered perfectly well in the form of a lesson, a proverb, an idiom, a general expression, a general truth, like, ‘make hay while the sun shines’.15
Why then are stories told at such great length? My solution to Sacks’ puzzlement is simply this—since it is a maxim governing conversation that we do not tell people things they know already, story-tellers meet this conversational criterion by presenting general truths such as those expressed in idioms and proverbs—which they know their audience knows—in the form of specific accounts—the particulars of which are unknown. This ‘manoeuvre’ enables tellers to get their recipients to respond to the story by drawing out and stating the general ‘moral’ implied by the story, rather than announcing it themselves. They thus avoid moral responsibility for an overt violation of the maxim which enjoins us to eschew ‘redundancy’. We have seen in earlier chapters that story-recipients’ responses situated at the end of stories, often consist of generalized remarks like, ‘Yes, riots are terrible’, or ‘It’s wonderful to have some leisure!’, and so on. For example: a) i
-> a) ii ->
A 75
... she was IIabsolutely you II KNOWx 76 BLOTTO a’bout himx 77 it was II all FAN’ TASTICx 78 IN II CREDIBLEx—(LAST LINE OF STORY) B 79 oh well, things can go wrong. B 1159 +it’s II going to be VERY ‘awkwardx 1160 and my II mother ‘can’t+ ‘get a’bout ’on her OWNx 1161 **so** c 1162 *<>* **family** feuds are horrible
a) i below is the paradigm case of a generalization inferred from a story, while a)ii, from a story cited at length in Chapter 1 again brings out the fact that story-tellers leave it to recipients to make generalizations from their stories. Prolific instances of this sort in our everyday conversations illustrate the wisdom of the African sayings about ‘proverbs’ serving as 14H. Sacks, Lecture Notes, Fall, 1971. Also compare Sacks’ observation on the ‘relevance’ of facts in a conversation to Sperber and Wilson’s comments on much the same issue. 15Ibid.
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the foundation of conversation, as cultural cornerstones and touchstones. To summarize, these instances show that: story-tellers tell particular stories in order to illustrate general truths which they expect their recipients to infer; story-tellers prefer to imply rather than baldly state the general truth they are illustrating since a direct violation of a conversational maxim is thereby avoided; story-tellers manoeuvre or adopt strategies so that they can get recipients to make appropriate generalizations. But what about cases in which story-tellers introduce their stories with generalizations? These narratives are conversationally challenging because they seem to go out of their way to provoke Labov’s ‘So what?’ question. Labov had argued that an important function of the ‘Abstract’ was to establish that the story the narrator was about to tell was ‘reportable’. A generalization at the beginning of a story works like an abstract, but because it presents known information, it provokes prospective recipients into asking for the significance of this information. We can establish this logically by presenting constructed data. b) i
b) ii
c) i
c) ii
c) iii
d) i
d) ii
S1. I must say, Mondays are about the worst days of the week. S2. Pretty bleak, I admit. What’s brought you to the sudden realization? S1. Well, last weekend I. ... [+ STORY] S1. I must say, Mondays are awful. S2. I know. The other days are pretty bad too! S1. But MONdays are the worst. S2. Why do you say that? S1. Well, last weekend I. ... [+ STORY] S1. Cyclists can’t be trusted on roads any more! S2. You just had an accident or something? S1. Very nearly. I was cycling along. ... [+ STORY] S1. Cyclists can’t be trusted on the roads! S2. That’s a fact of life in Cambridge. So what’s new? S1. I’m so glad you agree with me I just had the most horrid experience. I was. ... [+ STORY] S1. Cyclists positively are a menace! S2. I don’t agree with that. I’m on the side of cyclists. S2. Just wait till you hear about my experience. I was. ... [+ STORY] S1. Long live liberty! S2. Joined the SDP, have you? S2. No, but I went along to the meeting and. ... [+STORY] S1. Long live liberty!
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S2. S1. S2. S1.
Liberty’s a corpse already. No, it isn’t. Of course, it is. Can’t wake the dead, can you? Yes, you can! Listen, I went along to. ... [+STORY]
The ‘design’ of these turns demonstrates that generalizations in the slot[s] prior to the intended story ensure that the prospective story-teller does ultimately get to tell his story, provided he is persistent enough, even if the prospective recipient does not immediately ask for an account of the events which prompted the teller’s generalization. In example b)ii, for instance, S2 treats S1’s generalization as simply a comment which does not ‘project’16 for following turns, but S1’s insistence that Mondays are the worst days of weeks, must lead to a story-engendering query sooner or later. Examples c)iii and d)ii similarly present generalizations which prospective story-recipients initially do not accept as ‘facts’, but even in these cases, story-tellers are finally able to produce their stories in ‘defence’ of their earlier generalizations. Though this strategy is an aggressive one in that it openly violates a maxim, making the teller’s slot ‘fragile’, it does avoid the danger associated with particularized story-prefaces of the type ‘I skidded on the bridge, and nearly went off’. For, as I have shown in Chapter 1, story-prefaces which offer specific details of the experience of tellers, give other participants the opportunity to say, ‘I’ve heard about that’, or even as Labov suggests, ‘That’s nothing new. It happens to me everyday.’ The manouevre of presenting a generalization as a story-preface forces prospective story-recipients into guessing at the story-teller’s implied meaning in violating the Maxim of Quantity. It thus ends up inviting further explanations or elaborations of this implied meaning in the form of a story by tellers. Of course, recipients can arraign a story which begins with a generalization as inadequately justifying the initial generalization, but this can only happen after the story-teller has held the floor. The strategic problems confronting tellers who initiate their stories with generalizations are therefore different from the problems which confront tellers striving to get recipients to make the ‘correct’ generalizations from these stories. Tellers who take the risk of beginning their stories with 16See Jefferson in Schenkein (ed.) ‘story-telling can involve a story-preface in which a teller projects a forthcoming story’, that is, story-telling, unlike commenting, is not typically a single-turn utterance but is understood to occupy a sequence of ‘slots’ projected by the teller’s initial prefacing utterance (p. 219).
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generalizations must fend off possible attacks from recipients condemning the stories as unworthy of the generalization which engendered them. I support my constructed examples above with the tape-recorded instance below: e) i A
1
3 b → 4 A 5
b A
9 10
b A
12 13
but II then you see no more were<> SOLDIERS ‘wickedx 2 II seex because II they just WENT and DID it {DIDN’T theyx}x that’s a very unfashionable view I II knowx—6<> II I keep thinking of my uncle ARTHUR 7 or II rather my GREAT ‘UNCLE ARTHURx— 8 II who what <> he do <> he II [f :?] II he ‘fought in [di:] in the SUDAN11 he II fought in ‘SOUTH AFRICAx [m] [STORY introduced]
Even if recipients object to the generalization which prefaces the story (‘that’s a very unfashionable view’), it seems to be the case that the strategy adopted by the teller sooner or later results in his being able to tell his story. This is not to argue that a generalization always engenders a story, since generalizations can typically result in the language games of ‘discussion’ or ‘argument’, but if prospective tellers do wish to ensure that a particular story gets told, one of the surest ways of doing so is to ‘preface’ the story with a generalization, precisely because it evokes questions in recipients mind about the story’s ‘fragility’. Generalizations, like metaphors and proverbs, encapsulate the collective wisdom and moral apprehensions of cultures. Sometimes they represent the store of experience that a senior member of the community has to offer (‘but then you see no more were<> SOLDIERS ‘wickedx 2 II seex 3 because II they just WENT and DID it {DIDN’T theyx}x’). What’s interesting here is the tentative manner in which the generalization is ‘glued’ into its conversational turn. There’s a ‘but’ connecting with the previous turn; a ‘you see’; a tag question, ‘didn’t they?’, which seeks listener approval for the non politically correct generalization on offer; and, finally, there’s the emphasis on the evocative key-word, ‘soldier’, as well on the commonsensical idea of just ‘going and doing’ things. Not just an opinion, but a whole ideological universe of a soldier’s morality—not to mention mortality—is thus in contention. ‘Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die’. Yet, one can disagree with such
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a Tennysonian perspective, absolving soldiers of ‘wickedness’, since all’s fair in war—and the listener is obviously aware of this. That is why the hedges around the teller’s utterance are not irrelevant; they reveal an awareness that a sharp ‘unhedged’ response might follow—as indeed it does. The hedges highlight this contrast of mental attitudes; they demonstrate that the dynamics of the conversation does not just consist of wooden generalizations and prepared responses, but is extremely flexible in its sensitivity to the cognitive states of participants. As we have observed, generalizations constitute a fairly sturdy means of opening or closing narratives, but they too are subject to what Miller identified as a fundamental weakness of narrativity. Stories obey a linguistic law of ‘necessary incompleteness’. I have argued that this is so because all discourse genres, of which narrative is arguably just the most prototypical example, are embedded in the cognitive context of conversation. Language may primarily be a tool of thought, but discourse genres—jokes, riddles, lectures, novels, poems, rap, tall tales, etc.—cannot but be at least ‘two-party’. They are specifically designed to turn talk into text—that is, to call up perlocutionary inferences. No audience, no narrative completion, as I stressed when I introduced the Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick. Ethnomethodological studies of conversation, which visualize conversation as a machine for generating talk, constantly call to our attention the ‘technicalities’ of the turn-taking system and the constraints it imposes on talk. For example, there is a set order of ‘slots’ for the story as a ‘sequenced object’. If we return to Labov’s structural categories of narrative, and try to fit them into a conversational system, for example, we find that a) there exist a surprising number of slots for the insertion of generalizations, suggesting that this mode of opening and closing stories may be cognitively quite efficient or salient; and b) that ‘slots’ are more or less evenly distributed between teller and listener in terms of ‘turns’. Abstract (often consisting of a generalization): Orientation: Complicating Action: Resolution: (may involve a generalization) Evaluation: (may include generalizations and several turns) Coda: (often consisting of a generalization)
Typically a teller’s turn Often a shared turn Typically a teller’s turn Typically a teller’s turn Typically a listener’s turn Typically a listener’s turn
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However, the openness of the ABABAB turn-taking system means, just as Miller suspects, that there remains a linguistic or structural problem with ever closing a narrative tightly enough in a conversational context, which in turn stands in for the cognitive context of communication at large. Even a meme-supported generalization—often the strongest of cultural means—cannot ensure that a narrative is safely completed and invulnerable to fragility. That is the lesson of the Indian Rope Trick: the body of Vac may be glued together for the time being by the cooperative endeavours of teller and listener, but there is reason to suspect that she might fall apart at the next performance! No theory is invulnerable to reanalysis or replacement. This follows from the ethnomethodologically ‘observed’ fact that it is built into the nature of all conversational interaction that it, literally and physically, distributes, segments and cuts up speech. He who begins a conversation, as the African saying put it, does not foresee its end. Human Frailty and Narrative Fragility A story, according to Sacks, is a version of events where ‘what may be involved is that you may present to your audience in some fashion materials which are more complicated than your story says, where they could, for example, focus off the proposed business of your story or the proposed upshot of your story, to suggest that you may not have it right.’17
The fragility of stories is, paradoxically, an ‘interactional’ or cooperative feature in conversations because the logic of conversation decrees that it is recipients who must play a crucial role in determining which aspects of a story a teller ‘may not have ... right’. Tellers therefore use a number of strategies to protect their narratives. One such method, Sacks suggests, is to compress their length and detail so that recipients have fewer opportunities to challenge them. f) i C
436
B
443
<<well>> I was IIon a ‘bus ‘just ‘going ‘down to the British MU SEUM ‘not so ‘long a’gox—437 and II there—were two ‘girls just GETTING ‘on the ‘busx 438 and II flirting with the CON DUCTORx—439 and IIone of them ‘said to the OTHERx . 440 IIyou’re a ‘dirty WHOREx 441 and IIshe said no I AIN’Tx 442 I’m a II CLEAN’ whorex II AHx 444 (—laughs) that’s IIrather NICEx 445 (— laughs)
17H. Sacks, Lecture Notes, Fall, 1971.
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C
446
B
448
I II don’t know ‘whether she REALLY ‘meant itx 447 or IIwhether they were just TEASINGx— IIwhore IT SELF is a ‘euphemism ‘they SAYx
In example f)iii, C’s story in lines 436–42 is distinguished not only by its brevity. It is also unusual in that it has a clear punch-line which most everyday stories lack. This gives it the character of a joke rather than of a factual story, as B’s positive evaluation (laugh+ ‘that rather nice’ + laugh) in lines 444–5 shows. Noticeably, B does not question the authenticity of the story in any way, presumably because the story is both extremely brief and apposite (C has mentioned an interest of the word ‘whore’ before in the conversation to which remark B returns in lines 448 ). It is left to the narrator C to modify his story with an attitudinal comment (‘I don’t know if she really, meant it or whether they were just teasing’). Brevity therefore not only seems to sharpens the ‘wit’ or humour of the story, it offers a strategic advantage to the teller, who can then get to evaluate his own performance. Compressing a story, leaving out all but the most striking details, thus appears to ‘protect’ stories in that listeners are drawn away from questioning the story’s fragility. I shall now maintain, unlike Labov, that stories may be particularly ‘fragile’ when they are blatantly offered as stories about extraordinary rather than everyday events. Despite changes in cultural context, this rule seems to hold, as in the Bengali-cum-English conversation below: f) ii J H M N H N
1
He’ll never tell the story now. 2 He’ll think you’re taking ‘evidence. na: / hae/ oke ki: / 3 No.. [to N] 4 Yes, was she ...? shunte perecho / 5 Did you hear anything? she: amader/ she a:gekar/ she dorwan ashchilo na: 6 The—that old durwan of ours—the one who’d come ... hae / kon dorwan / 7 Yes, which durwan? she kedi eshechilo / kompani theke je eshechilo na / to or shonge khabar tabar nie ashto/ o:r basa / oke a:mi djigish korlam / o bollo a:mar bou a:chche/ 8 That K.D. who came—9 the one who came from the Company 10 he used to bring along his lunch from home—11 I asked him (about this)—12 he said, I have a wife ...
T U R N S A T TA L K
H 13 N 14 H 15 N 16 M 17 H 18 N
19
265
hu / oh to a:mio djani / sundaro djane / nandlal djane/ sobai dzane / So I know, Sundar knows, Nandlal knows, everybody knows ... Sobai dzane / Everybody knows? hu one:k di:n theke / Yes, [we’ve known] for a long time. achcha / Oh? tarpore ki holo / What happened then? tarpore bolchhe ki a:ge /mane taka paesa thik dichchilo / aekhuni bolche cho sa:t ma:sh dhore taka paesa ki:chu daena / [Long Pause] Then she claims that before ... 20 I mean, he used to give her money all right—now she says that for the last six or seven months he doesn’t give her anything. ... [and etc.]
To begin with, the cultural import of power relations cannot be underestimated in this story, where members of a well-to-do family are interrogating a family retainer about another employee who has taken a second ‘city wife’. Yet bigamy is only a secondary issue here; secrecy and loyalty are the primary motifs. Had the ‘wife’ not taken the bold step of coming to the employer’s house and complaining that she was no longer being supported by her ‘husband’, no one would have bothered about this fairly common private arrangement made by men who live away from their villages for long periods. As N points out, he knew about the second wife anyway because ‘K.D.’ used to bring a cooked lunch to work—a crucial clue. So ‘everybody knew’, but the matter only became a ‘tellable’ in this cultural context after the wife complained to the other ‘servants’. This means their loyalty was now divided (‘He’ll never tell the story now. He’ll think you’re taking evidence.’). N’s narrative gains its drama, its ‘extraordinariness’ from this ordinary ‘fact’ of divided loyalties, which might be completely missed by someone who foregrounds, say, bigamy, as the most scandalous ‘tellable’ in the story. The ability to deduce straightforward implicatures of the Gricean type is not enough in such a situation; implicultural ability is required. Given the ubiquitous employment of domestic servants in India, class is perhaps the most salient part of the interpretive context in this
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narrative, and it directly influences the strategy adopted by the teller. Himself an employee, N’s audience consists of several of his employers. His ‘story’ is culturally vulnerable on this count. There is an obvious payoff in N’s being ‘loyal’ to his employers and coming clean about K.D.’s wife when he is questioned by them. At the same time, both audience and teller are aware that such a ‘payoff’ might influence the ‘outcome’ of the story, and they also share the knowledge that there is a social cost to ‘snitching’. In this complex cultural situation, N has no guarantee at all that his narrative will be accepted as plausible by his audience. That is what makes his choice of strategy so brilliant. N chose to cite his fellow employees as witnesses: in line 14 he claims that ‘Sundar knows, Nandlal knows, everybody knows ...,’ and in line 16 insists that not only do these witnesses know about the incident but they have been aware of it for a long time. Through lines 14 and 16, N is thus able to demonstrate both his solidarity with the other employees, and yet be the first to loyally tell a story that ‘everyone’ has known about for a long time, to his employers. The strategy of citing witnesses classically ‘ratifies’ N’s story, as conversational analysts would say. It protects the fragile fabric of the story from sceptical attacks by his powerful listeners by stressing common, shared knowledge. As a result of this strategy, two goals are concurrently achieved: N’s own conduct is rendered exemplary, and the ‘extraordinary’ conduct of K.D.’s city wife is made plausible. The example below also shows that no matter how extraordinary the events narrated, story-tellers contrive to present their stories as ordinary and everyday. This remains perhaps the most frequent and interesting strategy tellers use to maintain the convention of protecting the fragile aspects of their unusual stories. Since this story consists of a lengthier extract from the conversation of which e)i above formed a part, I will number this example e) i (b) A
893 895 897
but IIgoing ‘back to B SPECIALS you ‘knowx 894 *these* IIarmed. these *[m]* 894 IIarmed THUGS <> 896 the II PROTESTANT ‘lotx— and II I was thinking a’bout that Bright ‘Park BAYx— 898 a II {LOVELY} {BEAUTIFUL}—[ ].AMPITHEATRE {IIfull of ‘wild FLOWERSx}x—899 the IItime. when I was DEFENDING itx 900 and II I was ‘having to CUT ‘these things <<with>> IIcut [ ] SLIP ‘trenchesx 901 II here ‘there and EVERYWHERE
T U R N S A T TA L K
b A
903 904
b A
914 915
b A
917 918
b A
922 923
c b
931 932
A
933
b A
936 937
267
x 902IIso that the—‘people could. IIcould ‘not {LIVE} upon the BEACHES as it ‘were {BE II LOWx}x [m]— IIand I. I IIhad to ‘make my—I II asked well what sup’porting TROOPS there will bex 905 IIwe are MACHINE gunn<<ers>>x 906 I must II have a ‘COUNTER-AT{TACK} FORCEx—907 I IIdon’t see any—infantry battalion within MILESx 908IINO {IIGWYNx}x909 II SORRYx 910 you II CAN’T we IIhaven’t GOT anyx—911 they’re II all ‘ready to ‘go and ‘do something ELSEx 912II you’ve got to do it YOUR SELVESx 913 with the IIhelp. ‘of. the CONSTABULARYx oh— II and—then I had to ‘go the ‘ ROUNDx—916<> the II Orange ‘lodges and the ‘local FARMSx OH —. <> II every PROTESTANT FARMx—919 IIall the ‘able-’bodied MENx 920 from II sixty to— SEVENTEEN {or II SIXTEEN}x}—921 had IIgot— a most beautifully ‘kept Lee ‘Enfield RIFLEx oh and a IIvery ‘sharp BAYONETx—924IIand I said WELLx. 925 IIcan I I [? ?] I IIall I ‘want is to be SURE 926 that IImy ‘men are not ‘going to be stabbed in the {BACK} while they’re ‘firing their GUNSx 927 we could IIcope with what ‘comes from SEAx—928 IIyou could. IIyou can be abso lutely CERTAINx—929 we will have II done <<1 syll>> what is {NECESSARY} to all the ‘people of the other FAITHx—930*(—coughs)* (*—*—giggles) ooh Jesus—well how would the people of the other faith have received Germans from the sea—you must have thought *about that* *II I’ve [w ] II I’ve* no II I’ve never THOUGHT of THATx934 that’s II not a[na: n] it’s IInow that I I II think that it is NOWx 935 II a pertinent QUESTION I ask it IIand I IIyou ASK itx 938 and II I ‘think that if they {HADN’T} got the B SPECIALS on their
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b A
940 941
b A
956 957
b A
967 968
b A
973 974
b
979
‘tailx. 939 II they would have ACCEPTED the ‘Germans [m] well II NOWx. 942IIgoing ‘back to Pete BASKERDONx 943 II this is ANOTHER ‘storyx— 944 II Pete BASKERDONx945 II is a SAD ‘manx 946 IIhe is NOT a ‘very CLEVER ‘boyx —947 he’s II not REALLYx 948IIup to his ‘PHDx—949 he’s II {NEVER had } ANY ‘further PROMOTION x 950 II from the job that ‘he was in when I ‘met him in the WARx— 951 he II GOT that JOBx—952 be II cause there was a MANx—953 who was the II head of the ‘Celtic MUSEUMx—945 I. IImay re’member HIS ‘name in a MINUTEx—955 IIwho was a German SPYx— oh fascination go on—(—coughs) and II what is the WONDER IImost II biggest {SEND-UP} of IRELAND 958 and II all ‘our prehistoric ‘ARCHAE OLOGYx—959 IIwas that in [ ] PRO {CEEDINGS of the } PREHISTORIC SOCIETYx—960 II you can READ in the II any ‘library you ‘wish to. CON SULT it ‘inx—961 be II tween nine’ teen THIRTYx 962 and II nineteen THIRTYNINEx—963 the IImost ‘ wonderfully ‘vivid ACCOUNTx. 964 of the DIS II COVERYx—965 comIIpletely {NEW} [ai] Irish ‘culture in’Northern ‘Ireland ‘called the ‘{BANN}CULTUREx 966 the II river BANNx oh. *—good God* *this is an enIItire ‘IN VENTIONx. 969II of that*. very GIFTEDx 970<> IIvery’ clever ‘German SPYx—971 who was the II HEADx 972 of the [u] IIof the’ of the Celtic ‘[mju:] of the of of the II Celtic [ m ]. ‘National Mu’seum in DUBLINx— do you mean *he created it* *and II that ‘man* <> II what is so INTERESTING isx 975 that IInot only was this the CASEx. 976 II BUTx. 977 IIthat the ‘Irish ‘government ‘KNEW a’bout itx—978 II and the British the II ARCHAE OLOGISTS did ‘NOTx—. do you mean he created it as an excuse for being around I *don’t really know*
T U R N S A T TA L K
A
980
b A
982 983
b A
986 987
b A
989 990
b
992
A b A
993 994 995
b A b A
1007 1008 1009 1010
b
1018
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*to II go into the* ‘north and. spy OUTx 981 where II all the AERODROMES ‘were and EVERYTHINGx— *good God* *IIand the* II Irish ‘[gav] IIsomebody SPLIT on himx. 984 and the II Irish ‘government kept it to them’selves and ‘didn’t ‘tell the BRITISHx. 985 and the II British ARCHAEOLOGIST—IIyou. SEEx— *idiots* *that’s II just* ‘what II just ‘shows what the academic ‘racket is ABOUTx 988 (sighs—)— *and was nobody. <<2 sylls>>* *I’ll II think I’ll I think of his NAME in a MINUTEx*. 991 it’s II there in PRINTx extraordinary. are you saying that he was a German or an Irishman <> II I’m saying ‘he was a GERMANx [m] II and. Pete BASKERDONx—996 II TOLD me ‘thisx—997 IIwhen we ‘got to KNOW each ‘otherx— 998 he [?] II HE wanted to KNOWx 999 if II anybody in ‘our—. PRO FESSIONAL ‘ranksx 1000<> IIsmelt a RATx—1001 IIand I SAIDx 1002 to II my best of my knowledge and BE LIEFx—1003 II OUR [pri] ‘prehis’torians in CAMBRIDGEx—1004 were II swallowing the whole ‘thing hook ‘line and SINKERx—. 1005 it was II CAUSED ‘byx 1006 a II geo olgical FAULTx oh. IIwhich. made <> ROCK SPLITx yeah IIkind of. SHALE of SOME ‘sortx.1011 and II if you ‘went A{LONG} poking a ‘long the ‘river. the rivers of ‘Northern IRELANDx 1012II you would FINDx 1013 at II various PLACESx. 1014IIyou’d find {BEAUTIFUL}what were ALLEGED to be ARTEFACTSx 1015 which which were II REALLYx 1016 II Dame ‘Nature of. II after a ‘little bit of FROSTx— 1017 had PRO II DUCED ‘these ‘thingsx— but if you were the first person to be told of this by Baskerdon did you spill the beans
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A
1019
b A
1021 1022
b A
1025 1026
II I DIDN’Tx—1020 (—giggles) <> II wasn’t till ‘after the WARx but Gwyn God rot you really if I may say so (—giggles) II I was too BUSYx 1023 II doing OTHER ‘thingsx 1024 (—giggles) *[ ]* *<> ri*diculous— [ ] IIwhen I was [?]. down [?] at the very ‘corner ‘of—TYRONEx—1027 we IIdid an [a:] an EXCA VATIONx [START OF NEXT STORY]
It is hard to imagine a more extraordinary concatenation of tales than the ones related above by A! Yet A begins his account of the pre-war ‘troubles’ in Ireland with a deceptively charming description of ‘Bright Park Bay, a lovely beautiful amphitheatre full of wild flowers, the time I was defending it’. Such an inclusion of natural detail not only offers a ‘poetic’ contrast to the violence of the ‘armed thugs’ who are the actual protagonists of his story, it also provides an ordinary ‘picnic’ setting which recipients unfamiliar with guns and battle can recognize—the only ominous note being struck by A’s selection of the word ‘amphitheatre’ to describe the bay. A’s next utterance moves the story dramatically on from this idyllic setting to his confrontation with the B Specials. He uses direct speech to report the encounter, which further dramatizes the scene. At the same time, direct speech seems to make the story more plausible because the interchanges are so matter of fact (‘and I, I had to make my—I asked well—what supporting troops will there be—we are machine gunners, I must have a counterattack force, I don’t see any infantry battalion within miles—No Gwyn, sorry, you can’t, we haven’t got any. They’re all ready to go and do something else, you’ve got to do it yourselves, with the help of the constabulary’ (lines 904–13). Here a desolate, halffinished sentence at the start indicating the speaker’s doubts about the whole enterprise is suddenly abandoned in favour of a much more energetic approach which ‘repairs’ it. The casualness of, ‘No, Gwyn, sorry, you can’t, we haven’t got any ... you’ve got to do it yourselves’ shows the teller taking steps early in his ‘A Special’ narrative to make it convincing. Reported speech is employed again by A in his utterance in lines 923–9, where the last line, ‘you can be absolutely certain we will have done what is necessary to all the people of the other faith’, gains its definitive effect by laconic understatement.
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Despite its startling subject matter, the first story told by A is as well planned as a war-exercise. It defends its terrain in at least two convincing ways; it is set in a scene that is pleasant and un-alarming, and it uses reported speech in a way that renders the violence A is engaged in immediate because it is so ordinary-sounding. That A ‘wins’ his ‘war’ is evident from the way in which his recipients are rendered almost speechless by the narrative of his exploits. One recipient, c, only manages a single nervous giggle during the entire conversation, while b, the main listener, is just able come up with ‘oh’ in her first three turns (lines 914, 917 and 922); then, c’s giggle appears to galvanize her and she does become quite a bit more assertive in the second half of A’s telling, but it is plain that she is mesmerized by A’s narrative skills, using her evaluative slots in the conversation to urge A to ‘go on’. At this point, ‘Gywn’ has clearly succeeded in quite disarming his listeners. Anything he does subsequently— such as forgetting the name of the main character in his second story ‘the German spy’ (see lines 945, 990), an omission he tries twice to ‘repair’ without success (lines 945, 990)—will be forgiven. The second story A tells also begins by introducing an unusual subject in a casual way. The story starts with some subdued comments about ‘Pete Baskerdon ... a sad man, he is not a very clever boy, he’s not really up to his Ph.D.’, and so forth; but these remarks lead on to the subject of ‘a man who was the head of the Celtic museum ... who was a German spy’. In the manner so typical of casual conversations, we hardly notice the subtlety of this strategy. The subject of the story is indirectly introduced through a reworking into the ‘talk-exchange’ of a known name, the name of a person who has evidently been discussed by the participants before (‘Well, now, going back to Pete Baskerdon. ...’) This prepares the ground so that the mention of ‘a German spy’ does not seem too abrupt or jarring. Similarly, A is careful in his next turn (lines 957–66) to use the by now familiar strategy of ‘ratification’. He stresses that his account of the ‘biggest send-up of Ireland and all our prehistoric archaeology’ can be read ‘in any library you wish to consult it in’. Corroborative evidence ‘in print’ is pretty convincing in the psychological context of the literate culture(s) of the twentieth century; so ‘Gwyn’ is on safe ground here, even though he cannot remember his ‘hero’s’ name. Given A’s heroic efforts to make his story both plausible and interesting, it is not therefore surprising that recipient b is entirely convinced, as well as captivated, by ‘the story so far’; b’s turns in lines 956 (‘oh fascination go on’) and 967 (‘oh ... good God’) clearly demonstrate this.
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In A’s turns in lines 968-72, however, we hit an area of landmines, of narrative fragility, because A fails to clarify a pivotal point. His assertion ‘this is an entire invention of that very gifted and very clever German spy’ refers to the ‘Bann’ culture of Ireland and not to the ‘Celtic Museum’ in Dublin. The immediate result is that speaker b becomes a doubting Thomas in successive turns (see lines 973 ‘do you mean he created it’ and 979 ‘do you mean he created it as an excuse for being around, I don’t really know’). Now, the reason for b’s scepticism may be that while A has prepared the ground in his previous turns with talk about a German spy and ‘the biggest send-up in Ireland’, for the ‘Bann’ culture to turn out to be a hoax, he has not similarly prepared b for thinking of the Celtic Museum itself as a ‘invention’. Although he has mentioned twice that the German spy was head of the Celtic Museum, the linguistic ambiguity remains. The Bann culture was certainly a hoax, but was the Celtic Museum one too? A’s comments about the Irish government’s tacit support to the German spy (line 984) do nothing to clear up this confusion. The point is that skilful story-tellers like A can make the most bizarre stories sound credible. If, however, they make a wrong move—which becomes increasingly probable, the longer a story sequence extends— ‘co-ordination problems’ are bound to arise. Recipients retain the right to demur if story-tellers ask them to accept developments in the story which have not been sufficiently prepared for in earlier turns by the teller. In the present example, A does not seem to realize the import of b’s question, and simply picks up on the word ‘excuse’ (‘[excuse] ... to go into the north and spy out where all the aerodromes were and everything’, (lines 980–1), so that b’s question is never really answered. Still, b appears to accept this unwitting failure on the part of A (see b’s lines 982, 989 and 992)—partly because A has already created sufficient interest in his story, and partly perhaps out of politeness because A is pushing ahead with the story, unaware of the significance of b’s question. Nevertheless, A’s defences have been breached at this stage. The shining hero, who not only held his audience enthralled with his first story of facing the B Specials, but earned their moral respect, is revealed as a somewhat less perfect agent—a ‘naughty boy’ almost—after this closing interchange, and yet another story is needed to repair the damage (lines 1026–7). Consider the segment: b
1018
A
1019
but if you were the first person to be told of this by Baskerdon did you spill the beans II I DIDN’Tx—1020 (—giggles) <> II wasn’t till ‘after the WARx
T U R N S A T TA L K
b A
1021 1022
b
1025
273
but Gwyn God rot you really if I may say so (—giggles) II I was too BUSYx 1023 II doing OTHER ‘thingsx 1024 (—giggles) *[ ]* *<> ri*diculous—
A’s facetiousness invites spirited objections from b in lines 1021 and 1025—the more so because he seems to have merrily implicated himself in the ‘cover-up’ of the activities of the German spy. A’s explanation of the source of the hoax ‘what were alleged to be artefacts were really Dame Nature of—after a little bit of frost—had produced these things’ (lines 1015–17), is greeted by b with the uncompromising challenge, ‘but if you were the first person to be told of this by Baskerdon, did you spill the beans’ (line 1018). The question is a serious one because it implies A had some responsibility to expose the hoax since he was the first person to be told about it; however, A’s negative answer to this loaded question defuses the charge by simply refusing to take it seriously. The answer ‘I didn’t’, accompanied by a ‘giggle’ and an excuse, ‘It wasn’t until after the war’, is not designed to do much for A’s image, but it succeeds in making light of a very unusual event and treating it as routine—‘I was too busy doing other things (giggles)’. The implication seems to be that the episode was not worth taking the trouble to expose. And while b finds this attitude ‘ridiculous’, it is worth noting that she uses such a strong expression because she takes A’s story seriously, despite the fact that A himself underplays its gravity. Semantically, the latter part of A’s second story connects the words ‘hoax’, ‘racket’ and ‘invention’.18 Line 987, for example, uttered at a possible completion point for the story—‘that’s just what, just shows what the academic racket is about’—is a generalization that finds A again using the strategy of stressing the ordinary and recognizable aspects of his story. In lines 995–1004, A continues with this strategy (‘our prehistorians in Cambridge were swallowing the whole thing hook, line and sinker’). Thus, the extraordinary story of a major hoax by a German spy, involving the collusion of the Irish government, is deliberately linked to the world of academics which A has reason to suppose is familiar to b.19 To this extent, the various tactics A summons up to 18Following Sack’s notion of member-shipping categories, the concepts ‘racket, ‘hoax’,
and ‘invention’ might be classified as members of the same ‘category device’. 19Quirk and Svartvik in the ‘Corpus’ list teller A as a ‘male businessman’, and recipient B as a younger ‘female academic’. Presumably, then, A has reason to believe that B is familiar with academia, and academic ‘rackets’.
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convert his unusual subject matter into ‘something for us’—everyday stuff—are admirably successful. He may have lost a narrative battle or two, but he emerges an undoubted winner in the conversational war. The observations made above accord well with Sacks’ comments on the ‘overwhelming banality of the stories we encounter’.20 It was his examination of a number of danger of death ‘earthquake’ stories that led Sacks to remark on a peculiarity of these stories. He noticed that one of the most frequent ways in which tellers seem to protect fragile aspects of their ‘danger-of-death’ narratives was to present their material as quite unremarkable. At first, this observation of Sacks’ seems to conflict with Labov’s claim that a narrative is always ‘tellable’ or reportable if it is constructed out of unusual materials. Yet disasters, classic ‘tellables’ in Labov’s sense, as Sacks pertinently remarks, are merely ‘things in the world’. Despite their immense potential as reportable events, they have to be worked on, fashioned into ‘something for us’, something that engages a teller’s particular audience. This means that reportable story material has to be rendered ‘ordinary’ (‘it could happen to you’) if it is not to be arraigned as ‘fragile’ on grounds of implausibility. Conversely, ordinary story material has to be made reportable if it is not to be criticized as boring (‘why are you telling me this?’). It is really remarkable to see people’s efforts to achieve the ‘nothing happened’ sense of really catastrophic events. ... It seems plain enough that people monitor the scenes they are in for their storyable characteristics. And yet the awesome, overwhelming fact is that they come away with no storyable characteristics.21
Why is this so? Sacks’ answer is that people ‘come away with no storyable characteristics’ from really amazing scenes because ordinary people work conversationally at being ordinary. ... they and the people around them may be co-ordinatively engaged in assuming that each of them are ordinary persons, and that can then be a job they undertake together, to achieve that each of them together are ordinary persons ... [this is] a specific feature [of conversations] which turns on a kind of attitude of working at being usual, which is perhaps central to the way our world is organized. There are enormous virtues in seeing the usual in a scene. It permits all kinds of ways of dealing with it.22 20Sacks, Lecture Notes, Spring, 1970. 21Ibid. 22Sacks, Lecture Notes, Spring, 1970.
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In the last chapter, I suggested in relation to Dennett’s characterization of the ‘self as a centre of narrative gravity’ that there were likely to be at least two cognitive categories of narrativity—stories to the self and stories to the other, the daily and the daylight. Ordinarily, the routines of our day-to-day activities make up stories not worth telling to others, yet central to our sense of self or ‘the way our world is organized’. These ‘hidden’ narratives, I now want to suggest, form a cognitive substrate to the narratives that we do share with others. The task of ‘being ordinary’ is in fact one we engage in at all times, whether alone or with others, while ‘doing being ordinary’ involves the additional burden of interaction. In the next section, I develop the idea ‘plausibility’, ‘boredom’ and ‘narrative fragility’ being intrinsically interactional concepts. Plausibility and Boredom as Gauges of Narrative Fragility So far, I have used the term ‘plausible’ informally to describe stories or aspects of stories that are convincing and therefore acceptable to recipients. I shall now argue, contra Searle, that it is plausibility rather than truth that recipients look for in stories. The Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.)23 derives the word ‘plausibility’ from the Latin plaudere (‘to applaud’), so that the first sense of the word is given as ‘the quality of deserving applause or approval’. Some vestige of this sense is retained in the second, more usual, modern use of the word which conveys a ‘seeming worthiness of acceptance’ or ‘appearance of reasonableness’. The significance of this connection will, I hope, become more obvious as my argument progresses. For the moment, I will concentrate on distinguishing between ‘truth’ and ‘plausibility’. The distinction, it appears from the O.E.D., was made as early as in 1745 by Swift, who wrote, ‘The last excuse was allowed indeed to have more plausibility but less truth’; and in 1838, Thirlwall wrote, ‘According even to the avowed doctrines of Protagoras and Gorgias, no truth could claim any higher value than that of a plausible opinion.’24 Earlier, in 1598, Bernard maintained, ‘Nowadays, plausibleness gains friends, and truth gets foes’.25 There is therefore some etymological sanction or historical precedent for considering ‘truth’ and ‘plausibility’ distinctly different gauges of the acceptability of an utterance. My contention is that story-recipients 23The Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. VII (N-Poy), 1970, p. 972. 24Thirlwall, Greece, IV, xxxii, 1935. 25Bernard, Terence, Andria 1.i (translation), 1598.
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in ordinary conversations standardly accept a story if it is plausible, even if they cannot verify its facts. Sacks points out: It is an interesting fact to consider that recipients can apparently decide that a story was correctly told without going out and checking the actual circumstances in which it occurred. ... That is to say, recipients do not feel at the mercy of the teller to decide what the world is about. And apparently tellers have ways, and need to employ ways, in order to produce a story that is recognizably correct or at least plausible.26
I have already analysed some of the ways in which tellers render a story ‘recognizably correct or at least plausible’; but Sacks’ opinion seems to be that producing a ‘plausible’ story is the next best thing to producing a story that is ‘recognizably correct’. My claim is a more parsimonious one. I suggest that a story that is ‘plausible’ is ‘recognizably correct’, and that recipients almost always use the gauge of ‘plausibility’ to assess tellers’ stories. A story is plausible insofar as it is credible, probable, likely, possible and/or convincing; it is true insofar as it is verifiable, factual, correct and/or demonstrable. And given that most recipients cannot ‘go out and check the actual circumstances’ in which a story occurred, it is the former set of criteria which are standardly used. Consider another extract with the same teller A as in the conversation in the previous section: e) i (c) A
828
c A
831 832
b A
837 838
b
845
->
we IIhadn’t ‘said anything. [ ] derogatory a’bout the I’rish. GOVERNMENTx 828 IIhe’s an Irish ‘civil SERVANTx . 830 and IIhe SUDDENLY. he II he SUDDENLYx (—coughs) A II DOPTED ‘usx 833 and we II found ourselves ‘going out to HIS little ‘housex—834 II in SORDSx 835 II IS itx 836 I II think it— sounds plausible— it’s II on the {SORDS} ROAD} ANYWAYx 839 I .I’m II not sure ‘which is what the ‘name of the little the II little VILLAGE ‘isx—840 II SANTRYx 841 II BEG your PARDONx 842 II SANTRYx 843 II opposite ‘Santry COURTx . 844 II Sords is just ‘further UPx yeah [A CONTINUES WITH HIS STORY]
26Sacks, Lecture Notes, Spring, 1970.
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Here, listener b accepts that the house A is talking about in his story is in the village of Sords because this ‘sounds plausible’; and even though story-teller A corrects himself in his next turn—having made a factual error in confusing Sords with Santry—recipient b accepts the correction with a simple ‘yeah’, indicating that A should continue with his story. I wish to argue from this that what recipients are really concerned with is not so much the ‘facts’ of the story, but whether it appears credible. Note that had the story-teller confused ‘Sords’ with say ‘Sandringham’ or ‘Sanchi’ or ‘Sungchi’ recipient b’s credibility would have been subject to immensely greater strain, given that the conversational setting for A’s story is Ireland. In other words, ‘degrees of plausibility’ based on tacit world-knowledge and cultural connection are implicit in all conversations. Even where a story does not occur within a conversation, listeners or readers judge it on the basis of its plausibility. Here is a column from The Times newspaper, more or less contemporaneous with the Svartvik and Quirk recordings: Those of you who didn’t believe that Patty Hearst had been ‘brainwashed’ by the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army, when she took part in those robberies after her kidnap in the mid 1970s, will be vindicated when her own account of the ordeal, Every Secret Thing, is published by Methuen next February. Miss Hearst’s own version is that she had to participate to survive. She says in the book that she always thought the SLA were crazy and that she would be killed unless she played along—even to the point where she never tried to escape and provided covering fire for other SLA members during a raid on a sporting goods store. Is all this convincing? Those who have read the entire manuscript say it is ‘plausible’, given that she spent 57 days in a closet, blindfolded. [italics mine] Miss Hearst apparently still sleeps in a room lined with weapons, such is the long-term effect of her experiences. I wonder how much money she will make out of her plausible account.27
Apparently, it is the ‘plausible’ account which sells, and which readers bestow their approval on, not necessarily the ‘truthful’ one. Extraordinary stories like Miss Hearst’s, have primarily to sound credible. Once their tellers make their tales too unlikely or out-of-the-ordinary, they are open to the charge of being ‘fictional’. And this brings my argument into direct confrontation with Searle’s claim, examined in Chapter 2, that there is a sharp ‘logical’ distinction between fictional and factual discourse, for the newspaper report above is exactly the kind of material on which 27P. Watson, ‘ The Times Diary’, The Times, 8 December 1981.
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Searle based his distinction.28 From the evidence at hand, it seems that a story offered by the teller as a ‘factual’ one, can begin to sound and be taken as ‘fictional’, if the skill of the teller is not equal to making it sound plausible. The standard criticisms that recipients make of a story have to do with their finding a story unconvincing or implausible, not with their finding it untrue. Likewise, if a teller embarks on a story which is clearly intended to be fictional, such as a fairytale, he has still to organize his materials so that recipients cooperatively agree to ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’ in Coleridge’s famous phrase. The following passage from the novelist Margaret Drabble makes this point very engagingly: At first Anthony could not work out why he found Tim boring; it was not so much that he talked too much, although he did, it was more that one could not believe anything he said. His stories were too interesting to be interesting. ... Perhaps, thought Anthony at first, this is what life is really like in that particular kind of underworld: mad landladies, beneficent old Etonians, narrow escapes from the fuzz, wild weekends in country houses, propositions from famous film stars, betrayals, and little acts of violence. But if it was really like that, why did such strange narratives arouse in him so little curiosity? Why did he have to work so hard to bring himself to say, every now and then, over the yellow paella or the Greek salad, ‘How astonishing’, ‘Goodness me’, ‘He didn’t really, did he?’ It was astonishingly hard work responding to Tim. The explanation did not occur to him for some days.29
The ‘explanation’ is simply the one noted above. Tellers must weigh down their wild, flyaway stories with the ore of everyday fact, give it ‘gravity’ as it were, otherwise their stories are in danger of being stricken by an unbearable lightness of being. They become ‘too interesting to be interesting’. Over-emphasis on the extraordinary by story-tellers often has the paradoxical consequence that recipients are bored. Since stories typically put the ‘selves’ of teller and listener into conversational contact, they offer a series of glimpses into the organization of inner landscapes. Mental territories are opened out and we get to compare how weirdly similar our minds are—how extraordinarily ordinary. Conversation works, as Sacks says, by participants ‘coordinatively engaging’ in being ordinary, in following recognizable routines of thought and action—but if the teller constantly stresses the fantastic nature of the events or experience he is recounting, recipients’ responses, 28 In ‘The Logical Basis of Fictional Discourse’, Searle considers a newspaper report by Eileen Shanahan, from The New York Times, 15 December 1972 (Searle, p. 235). 29 Drabble M., The Ice Age, 1977, pp.148–9.
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deeply dependent on presumptions of ordinariness, are hampered. They lose interest in the language-game because their moves become limited, as Drabble’s character indicates in her novel, to gasping ‘how astonishing’ or ‘goodness me’ in every turn. The whole inference-making process is thereby wrecked and listeners can no longer participate actively in the telling. Complaints to this effect are in fact quite common in everyday talk, as demonstrated by the following extract, analysed at greater length in the section after this one—in which I return to the structural ‘conventions’ of story-telling. C
763 <> get {SO} fed UP in the ENDx 764 with IIthis sort of ‘FANTASY ‘thingx—765 II AND [ ]x. 766 II I just got BOREDx 767 with II listening to the STORIES {as II WELLx}x768 and II and. and II ALSOx 769 he was II sort of desperately ‘desperately KEENx 770 and II that. that II [?]always . puts me OFFx .
In this conversation, an affair with a boyfriend comes to naught because the speaker gets ‘fed up’ of his predilection for fantasizing through his boring stories. Those who think that stories are mere fluff without a real effect on the lives of people, and that analysing story-telling is ‘soft’ research, should take heed of hard evidence from conversations like the one above! Sperber and Wilson in Relevance make the acerbic comment, ‘as we know the world is full of bores’.30 Good adaptive self-preserving behaviour would, I guess, consist in running in the opposite direction when confronted with such conversationalists. At the same time, situations routinely arise when interaction is unavoidable. Ideally, the maxims and rules of communication should equip one with the cognitive wherewithal to protect oneself if pinned against the wall by a mega-bore, or even a minor one. They should also give each individual guidelines for how she herself ranks on the scale of bores. Academics, for instance, must be able to skim through loads of books and articles that go on and on and on and say very little. This is a basic survival skill in academia. How seldom does one come across something worth reading, but this does not warrant ‘opting out’, to use Grice’s phrase, of the reading process altogether. If one wants to remain fighting fit, there is no choice but to develop techniques which allow one to cope with intellectual boredom in order not to miss the truly stimulating thoughts—the great memes that come one’s way from time to time. 30Sperber and Wilson, 1986, p. 158.
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Analogously, one can simply ‘switch off’, making only the smallest effort at 4th order inferencing when served up with the ‘most fragile’ of stories (boring and implausible), as I pointed out in the last chapter and here one would be aided by the ambiguity inherent in turn-taking behaviour. As Sacks has remarked, silence during the course of a story’s telling may indicate recipients’ absorbed interest, but it may also simply be that the recipient has ceased to pay attention to the story.31 Mere ‘[m]’s and ‘aha’s are insufficient to establish, as far as the teller is concerned, whether he still holds recipients’ interest; these can at best be read by the teller as polite signals to continue with his story. Routine evaluative comments (‘How astonishing!’, ‘goodness me!’) may also be mechanically produced. The only really foolproof preventive against boredom is to provide ample space with the turn-taking system for genuine inferences—that is, to activate in listeners’ heads’ the right-hand arm of the inferential model of narrative that I presented in the last chapter. The best, ‘least fragile’ stories (interesting and plausible) leave plenty of ‘slots’ for recipients to make ‘elaborative’ inferences. The triad of concepts, ‘fragility’, ‘plausibility’, and ‘boredom’ are interactional in the basic sense that recipients are required—by the obverse corollary of the Super Maxim of Narrative I’ve postulated (commanding tellers to protect their stories against listeners’charges of implausiblity and/or boringness)—to identify the points of fragility in a story. Being a ‘good listener’ consists of having such excellent vigilance reflexes. The same continuum of reflexes that allows a listener to go into a ‘automatic’ story-appreciation mode when hit with a boring story, also alerts her possible violations of, say, the Maxim of Quality, when an over-ambitious story is placed on the conversational counter. Sacks himself characterizes ‘plausibility’ in terms of ‘what a teller presents as descriptor being used by recipients to assess the creditability of his story’.32 For example, if stories illustrate ‘general truths’ in the shape of particularized accounts of events, then ‘plausibility’ can specifically be analysed in terms of whether recipients recognize a ‘truth’ known to them in the course of the teller’s account. In contrast, if a particular story is told to illustrate a generalization already made in a previous turn, then recipients assess the story as ‘plausible’ or ‘implausible’ in accordance with the generalization already given to them by the teller. The great pleasure that ‘good’ narratives give listeners is that they can truly ‘get into’ a story. By monitoring its points of fragility, they thus ‘get’ the non-fragile core of the narrative—its ‘point’. 31Sacks, Lecture Notes, Spring, 1970. 32 Ibid.
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Whereas a strong case can be made for the ‘truth’ of a story being independent of whether recipients believe it to be true or not, a story cannot be said to be ‘plausible’ unless recipients in particular conversational contexts judge it to be so. To return then, at the end of this section to the etymologies with which I began, one of the earliest senses of ‘plausible’ that is still retained in my interpretation of the word is that it is ultimately ‘pleasing’ or pleasurable for listeners to interrogate a narrative, and for tellers to be so interrogated. Like the cognitive state of ‘boredom’, conjectures about ‘plausibility’ are only induced when a narrative is closely attended to by listeners or readers. Such attention is in turn the reward that tellers claim. It is in this sense that all the three concepts of plausibility, boredom and fragility are, within the logic of conversation, null and void except in the cognitive context of communication between speaker and hearer. Conventions and Manoeuvres Sacks has remarked, ‘If you watch conversation at all you can see manoeuvering’.33 In the following paragraphs, I shall examine the relationship between participants’ manoeuvres in order to achieve their conversational goals and the constraints which the conventions peculiar to story-telling, place on these manoeuvres. Of the conventions I suggested in Chapter 4, I have dealt with convention 2) or PF at some length earlier in this chapter; 3) CS is treated in detail in my discussion of preparatory condition II on the speech act of story-telling in Chapter 2; and 4) or EC, is illustrated by several examples in Chapters 1 and 4. Instances of the remaining convention 1) of ‘local occasioning’ or LO are now presented below: g) i C
763
b C
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<> get {SO} fed UP in the ENDx 764 with IIthis sort of ‘FANTASY ‘thingx—765 II AND [ ]x. 766 II I just got BOREDx 767 with II listening to the STORIES {as II WELLx}x768 and II and . and II ALSOx 769 he was II sort of desperately ‘desperately KEENx 770 and II that . that II [?]always . puts me OFFx . [m] II AND [ ] . I IIjust ‘couldn’t BEAR itx 773 II in the ENDx—774 IIhe IIhe . it was II funny how I MET HIMx—775 if IIthat’s the WORDx 776 IIhe [?] IIpicked me Upx 777 in Tra IIfalgar SQUAREx 778 *(—laughs)*
33Sacks, ‘Lecture Notes’, May, 1971.
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b C
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*(—laughs)*. IIand—and II I was going to the THEATREx 781 and [+ STORY]
Margaret Drabble’s fictional character and the ‘real’ speaker C in g)i above appear to share a very common cognitive stance. Being ‘desperately desperately keen’, and showing it by shoving fantastic stories down the throat of one’s prospective audience creates ‘trouble’. It arouses in listeners an instinct for self-preservation, when a teller’s stories overwhelm them to the extent that they can no longer ‘bear it’. The inferential system is simply overloaded. In the present case, the episode with the boring boyfriend is past history, and is ripe to be converted into the former victim’s ‘own’ story— ‘something for us’. C’s first turn from line’s 763 right through to line 773 works like an abstract or ‘story-preface’, as the conversational analysts call it; and b’s back-channel ‘mm’ indicates that she is willing to listen. Hence, when C finally begins her narrative in line 774, ‘... it was funny how I met him’, we can categorize it as a clear instance of LO. This is because the story is directly occasioned by the fact that C and b have been talking about the ‘him’ of C’s forthcoming story in several previous turns. Further, C’s revelation, ‘I just couldn’t bear it in the end’ [italics mine] strongly suggest a story to come about the start of C’s acquaintance with her ‘desperately keen’ suitor. Thus, the teller’s move here is typical; she is constrained by the convention of LO to produce her story in the ‘telling’ slot after it has been well prepared for over several former turns, as well as prefaced by a long ‘orientation’ or ‘abstract’. There are cases, however, where the convention of LO is not, on the face of it, obeyed as obviously. This happens usually when, as Jefferson points out, stories are ‘triggered’ by the ongoing talk, but where the connection between the stories and the ‘triggering’ word or phrase in some previous turn may not be apparent.34 Consider example g)ii: g) ii C
1289
b
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II and these people SMILEx 1290 and you [pu]—well you II don’t know how to REACT at FIRSTx1291 because it’s IIso *STRANGEx* *yes* I felt that in Scotland **—yes (—laughs)**
34See Jefferson ‘Sequential Aspects of Story-telling’ on ‘local occasioning’. ‘In general, the occurrence of an utterance at a given moment is accountable, and a basic account is that a next utterance is produced by reference to a prior, that is, is occasioned by it’ (p. 220).
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**(—laughs)** **yes** someone gave me a very nice smile in Dillon’s [m] she was waiting for the life—I just.<> up while I was writing and she gave me a great big smile . [m] . I [h] overheard a man in Barkers today . asking for a wok—and . I apparently was the only other person there who knew what a wok *was—(—laughs)* *(—laughs)* what is a wok a wok as a **[ ] one of those big** ** II FRYING —’PANx** Chinese frying-pans with rounded bottoms you know that they [swisul] swizzle *things around* in *oh I see* . oh yes— [ ] . and I was able to . call out over several counters . <> wok (—laugh) do you want a wok I can tell you where to get it (—laughs) and all the assistants talked to me and told me about the bombs and—how bad business was… [+ STORY]
The story b tells of ‘a man in Barkers asking for a wok’ does not at first glance appear consistent with prior talk which has been about participants’ reactions to strangers smiling at them; b being ‘apparently the only other person there who knew what a wok was’, seems to be an irrelevant contribution to the subject of discussion this stage in the conversation. Yet, a closer look at participant a’s earlier turn ‘yes— someone gave me a very nice smile in Dillon’s’ shows that b’s story is in fact locally occasioned (LO), the ‘trigger’ here being the word ‘Dillon’s’. Barker’s, like Dillon’s, is a large department store in London—this is the crucial semantic ‘hook’ on which LO hangs in this conversation. Ethnomethodological scrutiny thus reveals that even stories which do not seem to obey the convention of LO turn out to have been triggered by some previous utterance. In Chapter 8, I identify a few examples where stories do not seem locally occasioned at all and examine the reasons for this unusual failure. Continuing here with my analysis of participant’s manoeuvering and its relation to the conventions of story-telling, we find that the convention
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of LO in this conversation is nicely linked with the convention of CS, namely, completing a story that has been begun.Line 1294, containing a’s utterance in ‘someone gave me a very nice smile in Dillon’s’, could very well be a story-preface, and b’s ‘[m]’ seems to indicate that as a prospective story-recipient she is prepared to listen to the story which is expected to follow. But now notice that a’s utterance 1296, which could at first be taken to be elaborately establishing the setting for the story, ‘she was waiting for the lift—I just <> up while I was writing’, ends abruptly ‘and she gave me a great big smile’. Hence, from the perspective of recipient b, it cannot but look as though the convention CS which says that there should be a completed story in this slot if a’s line 1294 was indeed intended as a story-preface, is in imminent danger of being violated. If a fails to tell a story in the slot assigned to her, b as the main story-recipient who have given the go-ahead with her listening cue ‘[m]’, has three main options open to her. She can 1. respond by treating a’s line 1296 as a brief but completed story. In other words, she can position a ‘story-appreciation’ generalization in her own slot; this, however, does not appear to be an attractive move in the context of this particular conversation, since many generalized remarks have already been made earlier by participants on the subject of strangers smiling at one. 2. continue with her previous strategy of responding simply with a ‘[m]’ in her next move as well, so that a is forced to continue and complete her story. 3. can offer an appropriate story of her own to fill this slot. Intriguingly, it is this third and last recipient b chooses. I have already pointed out how recipient b cleverly manages to locally occasion her story in this conversation by offering a story about Barkers instead of Dillon’s. I now wish to argue further than the story b finally tells is not, as might be suggested, an independent second story.35 Rather, it is a story offered in lieu of the full, completed story that a was expected to place in this slot. Hence, the story about Dillon’s is specifically replaced by a story about Barkers. Recipient b here takes over the story-teller’s responsibility as a moral agent in the language-game in order to obey the lawful constraint CS. Examples like this illustrate beautifully Sacks’ observation about manoeuvering to make sure, as far as possible, that conventions like LO and CS are obeyed, even in unusual cases where the teller does 35See A.L. Ryave ‘On the Achievement of a Series of Stories’ in Schenkein (ed.), in which he analyzes how second stories get told in conversation.
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not fulfil her obligations herself. The significance of Sacks’ remark is that the sort of ‘manoeuvering’ we see in conversation is not just driven by conversationalists’ intentional goals but by the structure of conversation itself as well as the specific ‘activities’ that are locally ‘inserted’ into this mechanical ‘slot-and-filler’ turn-taking system. The convention of LO is obviously related, as I indicated in Chapter 4, to the Maxim of Relevance. If a story is locally occasioned, it is by definition related to prior turns, and this provides the teller’s initial rationale for presenting his story as ‘relevant’ to the current talk-exchange. Consequently, non-conformity to LO always results in a violation of the Relevance Maxim and heralds the kind of ‘trouble’ that conversationalists must then take the responsibility of resolving. The convention of CS is, likewise, systematically related to the Maxim of Quantity, which requires a conversationalist to be adequately informative. As with the connection between the Maxim of Quality and the convention of protecting a fragile story, the convention which requires a story-teller to complete a story paradoxically both recognizes the Maxim of Quantity and permits subtle violation of this maxim. That is, story-tellers often include a number of details in their stories when the information they are seeking to convey can easily be more briefly stated. This involves a violation of the Maxim of Quantity; at the same time, the Maxim states that the teller must be adequately informative, and a story cannot be adequately informative unless it is completed. Following the convention CS therefore means that a violation of the Maxim of Quantity becomes implicitly possible, as long as the several ‘redundant’ details that a teller might include are skilfully deployed so that they interest recipients in knowing the ‘end’ of the story. While such details might be considered ‘redundant’ information outside the language-game of story-telling, within the language-game they are crucially important because they engage recipients in the story until it is completed. The convention of protecting the ‘fragility’ of stories or PF is related to the maxim which enjoins conversationalists to be ‘truthful’, though obliquely. The Maxim of Quality is meant to be observed by all conversationalists at all times, but in the case of stories, tellers need not be ‘truthful’ if they can make their stories ‘credible’ to recipients, as I have argued in the section above. Tellers must manoeuvre so that recipients accept their stories as truthful. The convention of protecting a ‘fragile’ story is a necessary convention precisely because if a story were not so protected, then an overt clash with the Maxim of Quality would result, and cooperative engagement in the language-game of story-telling would become impossible.
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Given that story recipients are presented with a number of particular ‘facts, which are not immediately verifiable, the quality of ‘plausibility’ on the part of tellers is the only rational alternative to the quality of truthfulness’. This particular language-game can only be played if both recipients and tellers accept that to be ‘plausible’ is to be ‘truthful’ within the conventions of the game. The convention of protecting a ‘fragile’ story both recognizes the importance of the Maxim of Quality and allows tellers to subvert this maxim by substituting a truthful account with a plausible one. Or as Thomas Hardy, most beguiling of Wessex novelists, described the ‘natural logic’ of story-telling: ‘If the story-tellers could ha’ got decency and good morals from true stories, who’d have troubled to invent parables?’ Good stories are tagged with a culturally appropriate ‘moral’ or generalization because this renders them invariably more plausible, although by the same token, not necessarily more truthful. Finally, the convention of EC always observed by recipients is connected, in a relatively straightforward way, to the Maxim of Manner, which urges conversationalists to be polite, tactful, etc. For example, should a story-recipient not position a story appreciation or evaluation in the slot immediately after a story, an implicature of intentional ‘rudeness’ would almost certainly result, though this is an assertion I cannot support with data since recipients in the conversations I have studied have never failed to comply with the convention. But why attempt to spell out such prior connections in the first place, as I have done in painful detail both in Chapter 4 and this one? Well, it has long been a shibboleth of conversational analysis that its researchers work without references to ‘prefigured hypotheses’.36 They do not resort to preconceptions about the conversational objects that they are studying. The video-taperecorder is their god. Jefferson and Schenkein for instance, state that they are ‘in the end, examining the prospects of a “non-intuitive” analytic mentality’37 for the study of conversation. Yet I hope I have shown in this chapter that, just as schematic representations of narrative can gain enormously from a detailed study of the conversational structure into which stories are typically indexed, so ethnomethodological approaches need to be underpinned by more general theories of pragmatics like the Gricean and the Lewisian or my own inferential model of narrativity, which try to link structure to intuition, and conventions to intentions. 36This inspired phrase is Schenkein’s. See ‘Sketch of an Analytic Mentality for the
Study of Conversational Interaction’ in Schenkein (ed.), 1977, p. 2. 37Jefferson and Schenkein, quoted in Schenkein (ed.), p. 2.
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The origins of ‘ethno’ from the Greek ethnos meaning ‘nation’ should also support me on this; ethnomethodology deals, in essence, with the methods which members of a culture use to work themselves into that culture from day to day, from moment to moment. Conversational analysts’ admirable emphasis on the ‘ordinariness’ of the human enterprises that they focus on should not, however, blind either them or us to the fact that the operative word in the previous sentence is the ‘selves’ in ‘themselves’. I would submit that even the most ‘non-intuitive’ of analytic mentalities requires considerable cognitive investment when their ‘object’ of study is, by definition, the linguistic formation of social selves. We cannot but depend on introspective understanding when dealing with reflexive concepts like’, ‘manoeuvre’, ‘narrative fragility’, ‘agency’, etc. However hard ethnomethodologists try, it is impossible, and perhaps undesirable to attempt to completely ‘de-cognitize’ and ‘de-moralize’ (!) these notions. Meanwhile, we can dwell upon the not altogether irrelevant wisdom of Lewis Carroll’s Duchess: ‘Tut, tut, my child. Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.’ In the next two chapters, I will look at some of the more directly ethical and even political questions that arise out of a consideration of narrative as a mode of cultural ‘manoeuvering’. Ill-founded though it might appear from the conversational analytic perspective, the search for moral explanations seems ubiquitious; it is indeed the most everyday of activities among human communities and should therefore directly interest the ethnomethodologists. I feel intuitively sure it would have interested Harvey Sacks at any rate. That is, as Dennett would insist, whether we consciously will it or not, our psychological propensity to turn our narratives into morality engines does seem to drive that troika of conversation, communication and culture, which is our subject in this book.
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7
qQ S E L F, S TAT E A N D S O L I D A R I T Y The Politics of Narrative
Narrativity constitutes ... an immanent structure of action. As H. Arendt has it, it is in stories that the ‘who of action’ can be said, i.e., has to be told. Historical narratives, in the sense of historiography and fictional narratives, are grafted on to this immanent narrativity, which equates a human life with one or many ‘life-stories’. ... The self, i.e., the ‘who of action’ does not merely consist in the self-designation of humans as the owners and authors of their deeds, it implies also self-interpretation in terms of the achievements and failures of what we call practices and plans of life ... the ethical evaluation of our actions. The phenomenon which deserves to be underscored here is that, by acting, someone exerts power over somebody else ... this asymmetry within action as interaction between agents and patients ... constitutes the basic occasion for using the other as an instrument, which is the beginning of violence, murder, and still more torture. ... My claim then is that it is violence and the process of victimization generated by violence which invite us to add a deontological dimension to the teleological dimension of ethics. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Human Being as the Subject Matter of Philosophy’ Salman Rushdie: Would you like to say something now about the codes by which Palestinians recognize each other and about the idea of repetition and excess as a way of existing?. ... Doesn’t this need to go back again and again over the same story become tiring? Edward Said: It does, but you do it anyway. The interesting thing is that there seems to be nothing in the world which sustains the story: unless you go on telling it, it will just drop and disappear. Salman Rushdie: The need to be perpetually told. Edward Said: The other narratives have a kind of permanence of institutional existence. ...
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Salman Rushdie: This is one of the things you criticize from within Palestinianness: the lack of any serious attempt to institutionalize the story, to give it objective existence. Salman Rushdie, ‘A Conversation with Edward Said’ in Imaginary Homelands
Here is dislocation now. The cool eddies of theory edge towards a storm, a flood, the wrath of the gods, and the terrible treason of the clerks. Steps III and IV of the methodological trajectory mentioned almost facetiously in my Introduction were completed—or as complete as I could make them—in the last chapter. This penultimate chapter now steps into deeper waters.1 For one thing, it flaunts a different cast of characters, as well as a change of theme. That theme is political violence. Has narrative theory any voice at all in such a fraught domain? Or is its theoretical ‘story’ too ‘fragile’ to withstand the assault of realpolitik? How do the ‘selves’ iterated in our stories gain an ‘objective existence’—to use, Salman Rushdie’s phrase—by entering the socio-political regimes of ‘institutionalization’? These are the questions to which I will address myself now. Violence, and more specifically, the violence inflicted by an alienated modern state on its powerless citizens, has been the focus of much recent sociological enquiry in India.2 On the basis of this sort of work and the research of the ‘Subaltern’ school of historians, it appears that the postcolonial Indian state has taken over intact many of the working presuppositions of its former rulers, both in its institutional discourses and its governmental praxis. A subalternist perspective on India’s colonial inheritance, when extended to a reading of the current political scenario in India, would seem to suggest that the notorious mai-bap mode of transaction between the homogenized entities, ‘the state’ and ‘the people’—in which the Government is hailed as both mother and father, an absolute donor—still persists from colonial times. Patronage figures in such a relationship, but not identification. Any dispassionate understanding of notions like ‘agency’, ‘subjectivity’ and ‘responsibility for suffering’, such as proffered by the structuralist and speech act theories discussed in my earlier chapters, is pulled up 1This chapter has appeared as an article in the Economic and Political Weekly, May 1997. 2See, for example, Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, edited by Ashis Nandy, Oxford University Press, 1988; Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, edited by Veena Das, Oxford University Press, 1990; Gyan Pandey, ‘In Defence of the Fragment’, Economic and Political Weekly, 1993.
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short when we discover that the dismemberment of the body of Vac is often gruesomely real. In the wake of an influential historiography based on the belief that a postcolonial state is designed to disinherit, and possibly assault, the very people who are its supposed protegées, theorizing from a safe distance about ‘boring’ and ‘implausible’ stories may simply be inadequate. The high-falutin narratives of ‘fiction and historiography’, as Ricoeur and Arendt remind us, are always ‘grafted onto’ the ‘immanent narrative’ of ordinary ‘life stories’. It is these life-stories, which ethnomethodologists have always claimed as one of their primary objects of study, that come to the fore in this chapter. Earlier, I have suggested that a post-Dennettian analysis would probably postulate two basic categories of narrative— stories of the self and stories to the other. Both these categories merge in the kind of narratives that this chapter examines, as do certain other fundamental semantic categories. Writing as I do from a postcolonial location demands that I begin this chapter by accepting in full the ideological imperatives that drive a politically-informed historiography. At the same time, I will contend here that perhaps schools such as the Subalternist too sharply differentiate ‘natural’ from ‘man-made’ violence, focusing almost entirely on the latter. My argument, following on from the ‘inferential grammar’ of narrativity that I built up in Chapter 5, will proceed thus: if the marginalized narratives of the people who suffer the traumas of floods, earthquakes and fires are actually compared to those of the victims of communal riots, terrorism and police brutality, both sorts of events appear to share common premises. The inferential processes they set in motion are, consequently, similar: both natural-kind and nominal-kind disasters are treated by ‘the common man’ as ‘acts of god’, breaking inexplicably and terrifyingly upon peoples’ heads. God or government, in both cases, the violence these entities inflict has an unpredictable quality. The cultural repertoire on which ‘the people’ draw to cope with the effects of both categories of violence is shared. Strikingly similar also is the post-tragedy intervention of the governmental ‘higher-ups’, the gods. In each set of cases, for example, such intervention consists in the handing out of ex-gratia payments, verification of ‘claims’ by officials, the calling in of the Central Reserve Police, Army, and so forth. For these, and other reasons which I shall shortly outline, the argument is developed here that a subalternist reading of peoples’ suffering, the political virtues of which remain substantial, should nevertheless cease to rely so heavily on the classic philosophical distinction between nominal and natural kinds that underpins many of even our most radical postmodernist insights.
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For a better historiography, it is important not only to recognize marginal discourses but also long-standing and deep cultural affinities between those discourses. In order to grasp the full force of the violence perpetrated today against large segments of the Indian people, it is crucial to concede the relationships that exist between seemingly independent categories of calamity—the ‘natural’ and the ‘denatured’. I will try to illustrate the extreme complexity of these connections by examining three levels of narrative—the official, the popular and the academic—each of which interprets an underlying nominal/natural kind of divide differently, and almost irreconcilably. Contemporary Political Stances Towards Disaster Towards the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, several newspapers the world over carried a small item which informed the public that the UN General Assembly had declared it an International Decade of Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), beginning January 1, 1990. India—never a nation to lag behind in taking politically correct action on paper—immediately responded by setting up a National Advisory Council on the IDNDR, as well as, for good measure, a Cabinet Committee on National Calamities ‘to examine, direct and control programmes for reducing the adverse impact of natural calamities, direct and implement relief measures in the wake of a calamity, and supervise implementation of programmes to give effect to the objectives of the IDNDR’. The decision of the UN and the Indian state to arrange programmes that ‘control disaster’ exemplify attitudes that enlightened modern administrations must hold towards large-scale natural calamities. They put within the purview of official governmental responsibility the damage resulting from sources that conventionally have been regarded as ‘acts of God’—floods, earthquakes, droughts, fires, cyclones. Although no human agency can be blamed for the suffering inflicted by a natural disaster, insofar as these incidences are a) increasingly predictable, and thus preventable, and b) traumatic for large numbers of people, any modern government which does not work to ameliorate their effects becomes a morally indictable agent. More obviously, elected governments are held responsible when they fail to prevent, and sometimes promote, those cases of suffering where human instigation is involved, such as communal, race and language riots. Government intervention seems therefore a normative, Gricean, expectation in a modern state, whenever suffering assumes epidemic
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proportions. However, the official management of disparate forms of violence in India today paradoxically seems to have extended, rather than eliminated, those colonial discourses which objectified calamity by homogenizing its causes. Very different kinds of agency are involved in ‘natural kind’ and ‘nominal kind’ disasters, yet the responses of a postcolonial state tend to reduce them to one narrative format, thereby strategically reaffirming its ‘impartiality’, while simultaneously absolving itself of guilt. Narrative Strands and The State of the Story-teller The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how governmental narratives often exploit the ‘nominal kind/natural kind’ of distinction in the representation of disaster, but that is only part of its purpose. More generally, I want to understand how the philosophical categories, ‘nominal and natural kind’, in relation to three inter-related levels of narrative, in order to develop what might be thought of, rather grandly, I admit, as the beginnings of a ‘feminist critique of bureaucracy’.3 It is almost superfluous to add that the mammoth superstructure of the bureaucracy in India constitutes an almost perfect token of an Althusserian ISA (ideological state apparatus) concerned with the production and maintenance of a hegemonic—i.e., in the Gramscian sense of not merely repressive but necessarily collusive, conversationally enjambed—interdependence between the government and ‘the people’. My argument is that, given the conventional pietistic or ‘moral’ stances required in ‘disaster management’, the state is all of a sudden forced into patristic confrontation with its most distant victims (see example a) Chapter 1), with women as widows and mothers, or children as unclaimed orphans—categories of the dispossessed that it would normally never come into contact with. At least three sorts of narrative agency ‘tangle’ (another Althusserian word!) at such a time, severely complicating those questions of power and its embodiment as speech; gender and its marking of a subaltern status; as well as suffering and its historical representation, that are at the heart of any discussion of ‘self-hood’. The three intersecting levels of narrativity that I have in mind are: 3It was Michael Toolan who first described, only half seriously, I suspect, my enterprise in the current essay as ‘a feminist critique of the bureaucracy’. I thank him now, not merely for the phrase, but also for other vigorous and stimulating discussions over the years. See also my ‘Gender, Genre and Generative Grammar’ in Toolan (ed.) Essays in Contextualised Stylistics (Routledge, London, 1992).
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i) The official or grand narrative of disaster, constructed in order to distance the state from the particularities of pain. Here, the main thematics spun out by the bureaucratic story-tellers concern power, and patronage and the allocation of resources. ii) The people’s own accounts, in the form of oral reports, poems, conclaves or emergency meetings, responses to the questions of activists, government officials, and so on, form counter-narratives to the received history. While such stories are often suppressed in the national context, the work of Subalternist historians has convincingly shown that they constitute a grave potential hazard to the health of official documentation. In this sort of narrative, the chief problematic, in my view, is for tellers to adapt the age-old and familiar cultural repertoires available in the community, to a description of calamities in a postcolonial context, where the idea of community itself has drastically changed. iii) The narrative of the concerned historian for whom such a period of crisis is arguably one where the ‘interpellation’ of the subaltern subject by the state, as Althusser would call it, appears most evident. At such times, that peremptory ‘Hey you!’ from a state official does not just summon the invisible subaltern onto the stage of history, giving her the mere illusion of individual agency, as Althusser implied. It does more. Disaster-time is that estranging time when history is forced to recognize the special character of those victims to whom the state is handing out its ‘aid’. Only true victims, after all, are to be granted aid; not all subalterns are in these special circumstances equally privileged. For the historian, seeking to determine the complex ways in which ‘truth’ is rendered when a community goes into crisis, the important question naturally is—how does one write history, especially the history of events as submerged in the currents of affective memory as, say, a communal riot or a flood? What counts as history, as historical material, and what can legitimately be excluded? Could some kinds of accounts, normally excised from a ‘historical’ representation, like poems written by riot victims, or fictions, be privileged when a historian seeks to describe ‘the moment of suffering’ with maximal accuracy? Is there a ‘deontology’, a robust ethics, on which a historian in his role of ‘recording angel’ can rely? Before I go on to examine how these three narrative strands: the official, the localized and the historical, plait, and then curl away from each other, a more detailed discussion of nominal and natural kinds is perhaps in order.
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Natural and Nominal Kinds, Expert Knowledge and the Story-tellers of the State Among philosophers, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, S.G. Schwartz, Stephen Pulman, and Tyler Burge, have in recent times contributed to the discussion of a pair of concepts which seem to possess a certain intuitive simplicity. Natural kinds exist in the world independent of human creativity. They are entities like mountains, tigers, cactus plants and gold, or events like storms, fires, and earthquakes. Subjects of empirical investigation and inductive generalizations, natural kinds, as a rule of thumb, are discovered rather than invented. Nominal kinds are artifacts like monuments, thermos flasks, cold cream, governments, or processes like steel-smelting, story-telling or typing. Objects of deductive reasoning, nominal kinds can apparently be analytically reduced to the sum of their parts, being human creations. However, philosophical difficulties arise because there are several areas where the categories are not clear-cut. Kripke, for example, has suggested that since it is not ordinarily possible to tell simply by looking whether something is, say, truly gold or not, we need expert knowledge within a community to appeal to in ambiguous cases. But Kripke’s ‘expert knowledge’4 is not always a-political scientific know-how, and it is here that the problem begins to get knotty, tangled. In most real-life situations in a postcolonial state,‘expert-knowledge’ is not earned but assigned. It resides with ‘the authorities’—a faceless phrase Indians recognize only too well. Charged with handling, and handing down, expertise to ‘the masses’ are these institutional representatives of the state—clerks, judges, compounders, IAS officers, politicians. Especially, when large-scale calamities such as the Bhopal gas tragedy, or the Gujarat earthquake afflict a population, the authorities make their presence felt in no uncertain terms. They decide, more or less absolutely, who is a victim and to what extent, how much state compensation is owed; they arbitrate between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ suffering, and even on whether to declare incidences calamitous or not. Thus you can have a Laloo Yadav in Bihar brushing off reports of a Kala Azar epidemic in Bihar, or a Kalyan Singh in UP hushing up riots in his state, since political power enables ‘ministers’ to assert expert status in almost every matter relating to the people with whose well-being they are charged. This misappropriation of ‘expert knowledge’ is most apparent in the totalizing narratives that the state and the media put out on the effects of 4Kripke, Saul A., Naming and Necessity, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1980.
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disaster. As the People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) and other records of, for example, the Bhagalpur riots reveal, there are many ways in which a biased press and a callous government can misrepresent ‘news’, but this chapter will concentrate on just one aspect of that wide spectrum. Whenever the Government is implicated in tragedies such as the 1990 Sura liquor poisoning, or the 1991 October fire in the Govindpuri slums, I will argue that it cunningly reduces the scope of its responsibility by representing such nominal kind of happenings where the agency is definitely human, as natural kind ‘acts of God’. For instance: GOVINDPURI JHUGGI FIRE TOLL 16. Police and fire servicemen extricated 16 bodies, mostly of children between one and ten years old. ... Sunday’s fire shook the city. Two Ministers of State, Mr M.M. Jacob (Home Affairs) and Mr Arunachalam (Urban Development), accompanied by the local M.P., Mr Sajjan Kumar, inspected the relief work personally. Mr Jacob had visited the spot last evening too, and instructed Delhi Administration officers to provide adequate relief and medical facilities to the displaced. Talking to reporters, Mr Jacob expressed concern at the deteriorating conditions of the Capital’s slums. He was non-commital on the demand of the local M.P. to provide 25-yard residential plots to each family. Mr Jacob, along with the Urban Development minister, assured the victims that adequate measures would be taken to ameliorate their condition. The Prime Minister is likely to visit the site today (Tuesday). According to reports, Mr Narasimha Rao had originally planned to visit Govindpuri on Monday afternoon, but could not due to some ‘pressing engagements’. Meanwhile, a joint team of the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Hindustan Petroleum, and Delhi Fire Service were conducting an enquiry to determine what had caused the fire. The Hindustan Petroleum experts were called in to check reports that the fire was caused by a gas cylinder explosion. (The Statesman, 1 October 1991).
Several features of this report illustrate my thesis. Note that the fire, a natural kind, is the main agent, the ‘baddie’. Foregrounded is the presence of politicians and police, the goodies. In stark contrast, we do not hear the narrative voice of a single parent, yet it is their children who have died so terribly. The jhuggi is referred to as a ‘site’, and the ‘deteriorating condition of the Capital’s slums’ appears a self-perpetuating phenomenon, a natural growth with which it would be absurd to connect either Mr Jacob or the party he represents. The use of verbs like ‘instructed’ further emphasize the distance between Mr Jacob, who is just ‘visiting’, and the ‘victims’. The fact that Jacob, despite his ‘concern’ can be nonchalantly ‘non-committal’ when it comes to a specific ‘demand’, shows how the powers of decision rest entirely with some distanced administration that belongs elsewhere and has endless non-specified ‘pressing
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engagements’. And then, of course, there is the routine presence of ‘experts’—the backbone of Kripke’s expert knowledge systems—who will act on behalf of the authorities, to trace the cause of the fire to a faulty gas-cylinder, or some such source. True, fire is a classic natural kind, but is a faulty cylinder the real cause of the Govindpuri fire? By under-playing human agency and emphasizing the physical aspects of the disaster, that is, deliberately using a bureaucratic discourse that blurs the natural/nominal kind distinction, the narrative of the state, as presented in the media, manages to erase ‘suffering’ from its text. And where suffering is so successfully deleted, questions of responsibility for this suffering no longer remain relevant. In the case of the Sura tragedy, similar reporting was actually supported by an earthquake epicentre-type map showing ‘places where Sura casualties were reported’. Again, Sura is the main agent, treated as a natural kind, which sends ‘shock-waves’ through the sensitive upper echelons of bureaucratic power. Excessive drinking of methyl alcohol was stated to be the cause of death. As doctors sought hard to save as many lives as possible, the mounting death toll sent shock waves through Raj Niwas and the Nirman Bhawan office of the Central Excise Ministry. The Excise Commissioner, Mr R. Narayanan, was reported to be huddled in a meeting with the Lieutenant Governor, Mr Markandey Singh, just as his police counterpart, Mr Arun Bhagat was. Officials at the directorate of health lamented that the Government’s policy to help, encourage and support traditional medicinal systems had paved the way for the production and sale of illicit liquor, ostensibly as sura. Officials blamed courts for taking away their enforcement rights by passing injunction orders to allow the sale of sura without a licence. (The Statesman, Friday, 8 November 1990).
Once more, disproportionate narrative attention is focused on officials who ‘lament’ that their good intentions have somehow, quite without their knowledge, been circumvented. The police and judiciary are again a felt presence on the front page, while the narratives of the bereaved are relegated to the back of the newspaper—protocols of reportage that make suffering a secondary issue, government activity primary, and sura or ‘country liqour’ the main criminal, rather than the complicity of the state agencies. And an uncanny resemblance to the subaltern historian David Arnold’s archival material on the late colonial response to the Indian Plague of 1896–1900 is accentuated when one reads in the newspaper reports of the sura deaths that: There were rows and acrimony when police moved in at the Anand Parbat and Adarsh Nagar Crematoriums to retrieve the bodies of victims from the fire as
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warranted under the law in the case of unnatural death. Mortuaries at the Hindu Rao Hospital and the nearby old Sabzi Mandi in North Delhi remained clogged with scores of bodies, as doctors tried hard to conduct post-mortems. Heartrending scenes could be witnessed as grieving relatives wailed outside the mortuaries.
Arnold’s description of colonial procedures runs: In the Bombay Presidency it was decreed that bodies could not be buried or cremated until they had been inspected by a qualified doctor to ascertain whether plague had been the cause of death. With scores of deaths occuring daily in towns and cities, this might entail a delay of many hours before funeral rites could be proceeded with. ... The carrying out of post-mortems on plague victims was widely resented. Interference with customary funeral rites ... gave rise to several demonstrations of defiance (attack on plague camp at Hardwar, etc.)5
The point of Arnold’s subalternist argument is that during the plague years the human body became a metaphoric as well as physical site of conflict between the colonial state and a subject people. If this analysis seems plausible, then similar scenes in postcolonial India may warrant a similar interpretation of the relation between oppressive state agencies and the people affected in a disaster. Grief, resentment, sorrow—it appears that the state deals with the emotional residue of tragedy by simple ‘decree’ and the adoption of an agent-deleting passive voice which reinforces the impression of ‘grand narrative’. Such linguistic ploys still leave them, to be sure, with the administrative dirty job of cleaning up after a plague or fire have unaccountably ‘struck’, but consign effectively to amnesia any embarassing pre-disaster memories of official negligence. People’s Narratives, Gender and Cultural Repertoires It was the feminist Madhu Kishwar who made the point some years ago that cold waves do not kill people, what kills is not having adequate shelter or protection. That is, not a natural cause but a ‘denatured’ society must be held responsible for such deaths. Disasters, natural and nominal, seem to affect the same segments of Indians repeatedly—the economically deprived urban lower classes, often migrants from an India-wide hinterland, and the rural poor. Their narratives are the narratives of a brave and stubborn survival against great odds, and are structured 5Arnold, David, ‘Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–1900’, in Selected Subaltern Studies edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1988, p. 402.
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entirely differently from official accounts, yet they too blur the nominal/ natural kind of dichotomy in accordance with yet another set of cultural norms. The Partition of 1947 was a man-made calamity that affected millions in Bengal; while the very severe floods of 1978 rendered thousands homeless in West Bengal. However, in archival accounts of both types of disaster, the people’s narrative seem to make use of a basic vocabulary, an arrangement of verbal structures that draws on a repertoire of stoic attitudes towards suffering, cultivated over time. These constitute a durable set of coping strategies that can, if called upon, also cleverly express resistance to external, i.e., official pressures. Another feminist, Urvashi Butalia, has extensively recorded, for example, women’s narratives of Partition.6 Her transcripts illustrate some of the strategic conversational moves possible in narrativizing memories of anguish.For example: Q: What is your memory of childhood from Barisal? Say just before you left Barisal. A: We stayed on. We meant to stay and stayed on. ... We were two poor sisters. People were asking us who was accompanying us; we told them we were with our brother who had just gone to fetch some food. We didn’t want to let them know that we were all alone. After the departure of three trains, we managed to get on to the fourth. After much trouble we arrived at Sealdah at 2 o’ clock at night. Where could we go at such an hour? We spread a blanket on the platform and waited. ... The police officer put us in a bus for Ballygunge. We went up to Ballygunge station. From the station we hired a rickshaw. We kept asking people for directions, and finally we found the place opposite the Triangular Park. And then we stayed there. It was a painful experience. We were very unwanted and they did not like our presence. There were also some ruffians who would pester us and insult us continuously. Young girls were at their mercy. A man used to follow me everyday when I got off the bus. I told my sister ... and one day she caught hold of him and accused him of following me. There was a big scuffle in the camp. Afterwards we moved to Naktala camp. It was only because we had ‘free rations’ that we managed to keep alive in that camp. I used to go to Howrah station godown in the morning to collect free rations. ... I had some special favours because the man in charge of the distribution held me in high esteem because I belonged to a high caste. I was given finer saris. I don’t know what 6I am very grateful to Urvashi Butalia for allowing me such generous access to the
conversational archive she has documented relating to survivors’ memories, and especially women’s recollections, of Partition.
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you think of such things but I regard them to be destiny. Because of this good fortune we received those fine clothes which we shared among ourselves. Life in Naktala was very hard. After my brothers and sisters had eaten their meal I would have the leftovers—that is how I survived. There weren’t any more free rations. ... The majority have suffered for the benefit of a few. This is how I see it as an ordinary person. I never participated in any party politics. But I always stood in protest to what I considered bad. Leaving aside politics and parties, I strongly believe that Partition happened for a small section of society. ... But who they are? I understand well that it is for the benefit of a few and not of all. If it was for everybody, then we would not have suffered so much. Q: From your own experience what you consider to be the best lesson for the next generation? A: I have learnt from life that no struggle is in vain and no pain is a waste. ...
From this sort of primary material, an initial feature, so obvious as to go unnoticed, that must be registered about people’s recountings of disaster, is the fact that they are usually couched in the ephemeral, oral, resistant-to-inscription conversational medium. This is a chief source both of their on-the-record meekness and their off-the-record subversive potential. A brief example from my own recordings of flood narratives in the Midnapur district of West Bengal, treated more extensively in the next chapter, might help me elaborate this point.7 A: What you—um—feel worst about is ... those who’ve grown old ... for them. A neighbour of ours ... he went ... he was working there, [and] on the Kolaghat bridge stood an old—very old person—what happened to this person was—he stood a long while in the—um—he’s standing in the water— the rain (constantly) drips down on him from the roof to the shelter ... his whole back is covered with sores ... the water keeps dripping ... there’s no way one can move ... he’s hanging on by holding on to a stake ... what suffering! Things continued like this. ... B: What suffering people have to go through! A: It was like this for two whole days—that means he stood there for five days in this condition. His hands were covered with watery, watery ... sores. That’s exactly what was happening—destruction of the hands and feet.
No academic summation could do the tellers of these stories justice, especially within the conventions of a ‘historcizing’ academic discourse 7These disaster narratives were initially documented as a student attached to a party
of Government of West Bengal officials and CPM party cadre visiting villages in the aftermath of the extremely severe floods of 1978.
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where one has perforce to select and dissect. The sheer physical suffering captured in my recordings and the great mental endurance shown by in the extract from Butalia’s corpus discourage any attempt at a glib and superior commentary. The description I offer now will focus on just a single aspect of a startlingly rich and resilient corpus. This aspect concerns the ways in which women’s narratives differ from men’s in their reconstruction of a lost world. As we know, the place of women in a subalternist history is currently contentious because while some critics like Spivak8 have critiqued the Subaltern project for a degree of insensitivity to the problematic of women, others like Chatterjee9 have optimistically contended that women’s writings, as well as their sheer presence, in (their own and others) letters, autobiographies and fictions—preserved a crucial place for traditional values during a period of embattled nationalism. Whereas Chatterjee focuses on the largely introspective struggle of middle-class Bengali women in the nineteenth century to make their hard-won literacy speak for them, however, I am concerned with the oral accounts of rural women in a postcolonial state, actors whose agency it is almost impossible to recover in the written medium because they are, and have always been, kept at a safe distance from any kind of even elementary literacy. Their subjectivity is narrativized around a thematics of survival rather than of self-expression. These voices seem to be heard only in times of dire calamity, when they are, as I have suggested earlier, ‘instantly’ historicized by a self-serving interpellation on the part of the state. In my understanding, the genderlect of women in contemporary rural Bengal confronting the kind of archetypal act of god that a flood is, exemplifies distinctive linguistic features. These characteristic linguistic markers, I argue, enable us to make connections between affect or emotivity in the causal structure of narrative and the cultural role that women’s narratives have, or may have, in controlling and conditioning others, including the state’s, attitudes towards suffering. My own extensive tape-recordings of women’s speech display, in contrast to men’s idiom, the following features: 8See, for instance, Spivak’s ‘Introduction’ to the volume mentioned in footnote 5, pp. 26–32 and several subsequent pieces, most famously in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretaion of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1988, followed by a couple of essays in Outside in the Teaching Machine, Routledge, London, 1993, and Chapters Ten and Eleven of A Spivak Reader, Routledge, 1996. 9Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1994; Chapters Six and Seven, ‘The Nation and its Women’, and ‘Women and the Nation’.
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1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
more exclamatives (ore baba, ma go, ki bhishon, bap re bap); more comparators (khub, bhishon, boddo); more silences, breaks, reformulations; more interruptions resulting in more joint tellings; more politeness forms, address and agreement markers (ki didi, boshben naki, ektu jol khan) 6. more deictics (eta, ekane, eidje) Apart from having less of everything, I noted that men’s speech in the same fraught context showed a proneness to generalizations (‘disaster seems to strike us in nine-year cycles’, ‘no one knew where the next meal was coming from’) and the use of external place-names (Calcutta, Diamond Harbour, Delhi, Birbhum). It should perhaps be emphasized here that these linguistic features do not refer directly to ‘topic’; of course, the women talked about different things from the men as well, but the characteristic speech-markers that differentiated men from women were independent of the subject being discussed, in this case, the recent floods. This ‘independence of topic’ has the consequence that the bundle of conversational features identified here, given the fact that rural women have, with rare exceptions, always been denied access to literacy codes, make up a chief means of identifying women as social agents. They are a cultural guide to woman, and and the role she plays in narrativizing her community. How do you recover a lost past? Only through words, words that recall and sometimes enrich and amplify the memories of the possessions, emotional as well as physical, that one held in the antediluvian past. In the case of a flood or fire, the physical evidence has vanished forever. All has been devoured by calamity. In this tabula-rasa world, therefore, infinite imaginative possibilities are opened up—one can, so to speak, theoretically remake oneself through one’s narratives. Yet, the situation is far from being one of painless make-believe. The calamity itself is historically attested. State, institutions, news agencies all work it into their operations. Thus, when the bureaucracy descends to ‘assess’ the situation, it is most natural that the primary narrators, men and women, use deictic references to the devastated scene around them as gestures of witness. In the specific cases that I’m reporting on, the reality of the damage wrought by the floods was painfully apparent in visual terms. It spoke for itself. The urgent business at hand thus became not so much to ‘prove’ that the floods had caused damage as to ensure that the Government would provide substantial and speedy assistance. This resulted, often, in a shift of narrative focus and theme
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from the emotional to the economic, from the personal to the pragmatic. Here is a fragment of an actual letter, written by a flood victim in Orissa, Nand Kishore Barik, to his employer in a metropolis, reproduced here with his permission: Sri sri charaneshu Respected Sir, You will take my namaskars I am very sorry due to the terrible evil. On the 26th May last a violent storm (cyclone) with showers of rain and its companions (thunder and lightening) had took place in our Area. As a result, many a house, many a tree, were destroyed by blowing of the cyclone. The roof of my house has blown away and a palm tree, a bamboo bush has broken on account of the blowing of heavy rain and wind. So, I have lost the amount of Rs.1500/- in my own wealth for the effect of the cyclone. Before it happened, I had already sown the seeds in my fields. Now, those have sunk in the flood water. I don’t know what to do. I think fifteen days I shall spend my time to repair it. ...
Although this letter is in the written rather than the spoken mode, it demonstrates aptly the shift from the almost poetic medium of personal turmoil to the hard facts of economic deprivation. Natural kind disaster (cyclone) shifts gear into nominal kind (loss of wealth). Part of the ‘poetic’ effect of this letter is no doubt because it has been translated from colloquial Oriya into a slightly archaic English (‘many a house, many a tree’, etc.) by the village scribe—English still being the language of official communication and this particular inheritance of colonial plantation having clearly ‘sown seeds’ deep. However, perhaps an even more striking aspect of the idiom employed by Nand Kishore Barik’s scribe is its derivation from a tradition of letter-writing that begins with a respectful invocation to a diety (sri sri charaneshu) and the folded-hand gesture of respect (namaskar). It is precisely because these inscriptional gestures impute to Barik’s employer not only a social but also a moral, deontological superiority, that they possess implications for a more general analysis of the relationship between disaster victims and the governmental elite who control state funds. Narrative accounts of both Partition and flood constitute a community’s fragile resources for recuperating historical agency—and they display one shared characteristic. Both ‘nominal kind’ and ‘natural kind’ narrators invariably treat the government, even when it has been elected by them, as a power as unpredictable and unknowable as God. For example, in 1978, as a student, I witnessed government officials from Calcutta being surrounded by villagers and importuned as if they had
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descended from above, in many cases they were explicitly compared to devatas (literally translated as ‘gods’). In other words, the narrative vocabulary of disaster was flexibly adapted to both flatter the god-like representatives of the government who had kindly come down to rescue the people from their plight, and at the same time strip them of a common humanity. This strategy, which I will call the trope of deification10 recalls Ricoeur’s ‘claim’, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that ‘it is violence and the process of victimization generated by violence which invite us to add a deontological dimension to the teleological dimension of ethics’. It is precisely that ‘deontological dimension’ or the call to duty, combined with other strategies of discourse where narrators loudly blame their own fate, or their sins in past lives for their current suffering, which enabled victims to launch a bitter verbal attack on a callous ‘system’, without offending those on whose whims they depended. The ‘simple’ narratives of the people thus turn out to be extremely sophisticated in their modes of subversion. They express anger, pain and frustration, while at the same time managing to contain and conceal these wrenching emotions. On this depends their precarious survival. The Wound in the Text Disasters are unpredictable, if not by definition, then at least by implication. They constitute a sudden violent disruption of the even tenor of existence. Textually, then, an event of disaster could be trivially matched in an essay like this one by some intervention that destroys the continuity of argument. In this section, there occurs such a textual event, which does not fall in docilely with what came before and will come after. First, a wrenching of style. It is a well-established convention in academic essays that they often eliminate an authorial persona, thus bolstering an impression of objectivity . The critic’s ‘who of action’, as Ricoeur puts it, is hardly ever the subject of critical ‘evaluation’, and it is this convention I begin by breaking with, not dramatically, but at least in subdued mutiny, changing initially just the background of the essay, so that academic complicity stands revealed. Scene-setting: no longer rural Bengal. Instead, I am in the University Bookstore in Seattle a few days after I have delivered a version of this 10A question by Raimonda Modiano prompted me to think of deification as a powerful trope in the conduct of conversations with officialdom. I am grateful to her for the insight.
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chapter at the Jackson School of International Studies. Meandering aimlessly through the aisles, a book, glossily red, glistening with the preternatural significance of blood, catches my eye. It is called The Writing of the Disaster by Maurice Blanchot.11 I remember the name Blanchot because I have just walked over from an ‘installation’ at the University Museum, which has enigmatic quotations from Blanchot magnified a thousand-fold and projected onto the walls as a bemused audience passes from room to room. Quotations are therefore very much on my mind. Having seen them in so gigantic a form recently, I am struck by their power to humble the reader and to speak in the authoritative deificatory voice that I have been struggling to identify as the hallmark of superior bureaucratese. Blanchot’s book is devoted to understanding the horror of the inexplicable, namely the Nazi pogroms, actions which offer perhaps the most incontrovertible evidence in modern history of the terrors which result when the state plays uncompromisingly at being God. How exactly do Blanchot’s comments fit in with my own reading of disaster narratives in a postcolonial state? I confess I do not know. What I do know is that they had a powerful effect on my earlier interpretation of disaster—for whereas I’d so far thought in terms of a plurality of disasters, nominal and natural, Blanchot condensed all disasters, past and future, to this one event in history: The Disaster. Concentrated in this fashion, disasters seemed to be entirely a nominal kind, a cultural focal point for the analysis of the power of evil, human evil, institutionalized evil. I remembered again Nand Kishore Barik’s unselfconscious sentence at the beginning of his letter, ‘I am sorry due to this terrible evil’. For Barik ‘evil’ resided without, it was a cosmic quirk of nature. Ordinary humans were never meant to comprehend it. For Blanchot, on the contrary, evil lay within, a twist of conscience, explicable with reference neither to an all-powerful God nor to the laws of Nature. In short, inexplicability was differently assigned in the two cases. It was this difference in conceptualizing disaster that seemed to give Blanchot’s ‘writing of the disaster’ its peculiar force. Furthermore, in attempting to describe the incomprehensibility of the human soul, his words themselves seemed to resist easy assimilation; they would not alter to fit in with the relatively standard format of my chapter. In the event, the best I can do is to quote directly from Blanchot, without explanation, as the walls in Seattle’s museum did. This literal 11Blanchot, Maurice L’Écriture de Désastre, translated by Ann Smock, University of
Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1986.
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‘writing on the wall’ will, I hope, enable the reader make what connections she/he will between my argument and his. Here it occurs to me, ironically, that quotations, inserted forcefully into the body of a text, as in the present instance, can themselves be regarded as repeated metaphors of violence—both violating the text, as it were, and gendering it. If Althusser’s focus was on interpellation, then Blanchot’s might be said to be interpolation; Blanchot, a cultural stranger, thus enters my postcolonial narrative brandishing, as he himself phrases it, a ‘radical unquotability’: The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact ... the gift that ... would liberate us from everything ... There is disaster only because, ceaselessly, it falls short of disaster. The end of nature, the end of culture. We are passive with respect to the disaster. ... The disaster does not allow us to entertain this question either: what have you done to gain knowledge of the disaster?. ... Not to answer is the rule—or not to receive any answer. If there is a relationship between writing and passivity, it is because both presuppose the effacement, the extenuation of the subject: both presuppose a change in time ... one can speak of an infinite passivity. ... We can evoke situations of passivity: affliction; the final crushing force of the totalitarian State, with its camps. ... In all these cases, we recognize even though it be with falsifying, approximating knowledge, common traits: anonymity, loss of self; loss of all sovereignty, but also of all subordination; utter uprootedness, exile, the impossibility of presence, dispersion (separation). Thus does the patience of the disaster lead us to expect nothing of the ‘cosmic’ ... if we succeed in disengaging it from the idea of order, of regularity guaranteed by law. For the ‘disaster’, a rip forever ripping apart, seems to say to us: there is not, to begin with, law, prohibition, and then transgression, but rather there is transgression in the absence of prohibition, which eventually freezes into Law, the Principle of Meaning. The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster describes. ... Boneyard of names, never empty. ... The disaster is related to forgetfulness, forgetfulness without memory. ... The calm, the burn of the holocaust, the annhilation of noon—the calm of the disaster. Concentration camps, annhilation camps, emblems wherein the invisible has made itself visible forever. Learn to think with pain.
Fictionality and the Historian’s Dilemma Blanchot speaks of the disaster as ‘the ultimate experience’ because it is indescribable; it is beyond poetry, beyond words, beyond the power of
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human agents to render except in tattered verbal fragments. Although his tone is vastly different from Blanchot’s, Gyan Pandey (1993) makes a similar point when he analyses the historiography of communalism in an article entitled, unsurprisingly, ‘In Defence of the Fragment’. Pandey argues that frameworks of academic analysis, such as Marxism, which show how riots, epidemics, etc., result from the play of larger economic and social forces, almost seem to rob ‘the people’ of ‘agency’, a hand in their own fate. In other words, it makes them precisely the subjects of what Blanchot calls ‘an infinite passivity’ perpetuated through writing. Yet if one were to direct Pandey’s critique of Marxism towards the role of the historian, it seems to me the academic historian cannot help but mimic in significant ways the stance of the Government official. That is, she/he is usually at a considerable distance from the pain and agony experienced by the victims of disaster and thus faces a challenge in attempting to provide an adequate representation of their suffering. In effect, can a historian in the pursuit of his profession ever manage to obey Blanchot’s italicized admonishment: Learn to think with pain? Moreover, if she/he does manage to somehow acquire such an apparently paradoxical mode of thought, will it put within the historian’s reach an ethics which logically eludes the bureaucratic scribe in the pursuit of his profession? Pandey thinks one solution to this problematic is for historians to include within their descriptions the marginalized narratives of individual victims, so as achieve a more textured ‘truth’. At least two difficulties immediately arise, however. First, the ‘people’s narratives’ are generally told to outsiders, to activists or officials, for obvious reasons. Within your own community, your suffering is already ‘known’, experienced; there is thus no explicit need to ‘tell’ shared pain. Or, to as Blanchot puts it, in their world ‘the invisible has made itself visible forever’. When a victim of disaster does tell her pain, to the activist or the official, the cultural repertoire on which she draws is intentionally fashioned, as I have tried to show, to minimize both pain and agency, and to give the personal a pragmatic ‘cover’, so that grief does not seem gratuitous but contributes to the ‘business at hand’—obtaining relief supplies expeditiously, for instance. The net effect of these strategies, inevitably, distances the teller from her tale, and the tale from the listener. Victims’ accounts, typically have the chill calm: ‘the burn ... the annihilation of noon—the calm of disaster’. No naive conception of the immediacy, and particularity of pain, will serve the historian well here. People supposedly robbed of agency by historical forces and by historians’ representations, can produce
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subtle narratives which in their turn rob their oppressors of personhood and individualism, by, for instance, the ironic device of turning them into pseudo-gods. Such complex narrative strategies require that the cultural coding of disaster in a postcolonial society, and the uses to which traditional vocabulary is re-adapted, must first be understood (for example, the ‘emblematic’ part played by references to gods, fate, kinship paradigms, etc., in the discourse of suffering obviously does a lot of cultural ‘work’), before they serve the historian’s cause. The second difficulty has to do with extending the analytical domain of history to include poetry, as Pandey has suggested, in cases where affect is obviously an important part of circumstantial ‘truth’. However, it is often held, as we know, that the historian is unable by the very terms of his profession to attempt an account of this sort of ‘truth’. For, such a procedure would surely ‘transgress’ what Blanchot calls the ‘Law’ or the conventions of prohibition—in this case the disciplinary norms binding on historians. After all, if poetry is admitted as historical evidence, why not fictionalized history? Should short stories, novels, docu-dramas about the police blindings in Bhagalpur, the mass rape of women during Partition, the terrible scenes of the Latur and Gujarat earthquakes, be admitted as authentic ‘history’ because they describe affect, in a manner the historian cannot avail of? Most historians would protest that their discipline is committed to producing narratives where causality above all is emphasized. Academic histories are motivated by explanatory concerns12; representing suffering ‘artfully’, thus comes a poor second to marshalling evidence that establishes the agencies responsible for that suffering. This may be so, but the vexed—and decidedly postmodern—question that Gyan Pandey has raised remains vexed— how is the historian to give due weight to affect in his work? In another but related context, the philosopher Richard Rorty has discussed how philosophical writing might deal with affect. Rorty’s position is that concepts like freedom, solidarity and suffering are best 12On the issue of explanatory concerns, we might refer to Paul Ricoeur’s remarks on
narrative as ‘the keeper of human time’ that preface this essay. As Maria Villela Petit points out in her article on Ricoeur in the volume mentioned in footnote 1, one of his central themes is the relationship of the fictional narrative to the historical archive. Ricoeur shows a special awareness of the work of the Annales School of historians in France, who in turn have influenced the Subalternist historiographers of the subcontinent. Ricoeur writes: ‘... historians are not simply narrators, they give reasons why they consider a particular factor rather than some other to be the sufficient cause of a given course of events. ... Placed in the real or potential situation of a dispute, they attempt to prove that one explanation is better than another.’ (Time and Narrative,Vol. I, p.186 and p. 175).
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understood not by philosophical works but by literary ones.13 With the best will in the world, the philosopher cannot ‘explain’ these notions. She/he can at best conduct a dialogue with the writers who are, so to speak, the Kripkean ‘experts’ in this field. Indeed it might be said that Rorty’s line on the matter is, ‘the statement shall wither away and be replaced by the subjunctive’. Or to put it in another way, ‘if-then’ clauses—the classic structures of causality—should yield to ‘ifs’—the classic structures of fiction when a discussion of emotion is involved. Now, this alleged ‘failure’ of the philosopher to produce satisfactory deductive generalizations about emotion, and that of the historian to produce empirical generalizations about ‘suffering’ are, in my view, comparable because they centre on the same paradox. The paradox has the following shape: fiction can and indeed must describe individual protagonists, if it is to move hearts. Dickens’ canvas is the French Revolution in his A Tale of Two Cities, Rabindranath Tagore’s subject in Gora is India’s relationship with the Empire, Bhisham Sahni’s theme the nobility and terror of Partition in Tamas, Tolstoy’s the immensity of War and Peace, but they all work through characters whom we meet face to face. Disaster assumes identity in a creative text, comes to have what Shakespeare called ‘a local habitation and a name’. History, on the other hand, necessarily involves numbers. It was E.H. Carr who said, in effect, in What is History? , that had Caesar crossed the Rubicon alone, the incident would have passed unnoticed. When he crossed it with an army of soldiers—that became a ‘fact of history’.14 Numbers make history, as every historian recognizes—so many hundred killed in an earthquake, so many murdered in a riot. But in order to render emotion, you need the individual mode, which can only be literary and artistic. That is the paradox. To be a player in the grand narrative of state, even as a lead actor, you need to be part of a larger whole. And huge numbers tend towards homogenization/hegemonies. It is for this reason that the historian can never, given the nature of his professional domain, individualize his 13Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989. 14Carr, E.H., in What is History? Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1990, pp. 11 and
49–50. ‘It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar’s crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all. ... The historian will not in ordinary circumstances need to take cognizance of a single discontented peasant or discontented village. But millions of discontented peasants in thousands of villages are a factor which no historian will ignore.’
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narrative, narrow it down to the poignant story of one or two individuals from the inside. That interior, individual account would not then be history, even if it involved historical personages. It would tend towards fiction. The tension that exists between history and literature involves generic differences of scale, and of interiority. One is centrally concerned with the description of mammoth events, and the other with representation of individual emotion. Perhaps this is too simple a turn, but it does show why the dilemma of ‘the historian with a heart’, is inherent; it can never be completely resolved. I want to emphasize, however, that this use of a vocabulary which resonates with the emotional connotations of the word ‘heart’ should not be taken to imply that we are returning to the bad old subjective/objective division of labour between literary and historical depiction. Disasters, natural and nominal, by reason of their scale, are the stuff of history. Yet, of the three kinds of narrative that I have discussed in the paper it is historians alone who strictly keep these kinds apart, privileging nominal kind calamities over natural kinds in their writings, not only because they possess analytic minds, but because agency seems much more attributable in these cases. This could be a fallacious judgement. Given the distanced nature of the postcolonial state, and its agencyerasing narratives, as well as the fragmentary narratives of the people which also avoid, often with prescient wisdom, directly condemning anyone, historians have a greater duty than ever to analyse ‘agency’ thoroughly. It is clearly the case that agency is a slippery customer, going underground in most ‘on-record’ narratives. Further, as the blurring of nominal/natural kind categories in these narratives demonstrates, neither ‘the state’ nor ‘the people’—and certainly not women narrators— are so unsophisticated as to suppose that the one involves only the victims of viciousness and the other the victims of fate. Punishment is well deserved in both these cases, and in both the capacity and willingness of ‘the state’, to identify and judge the culpable is more than a little suspect. Hence, in the postcolony, it is the especial ‘burden’ of historians to reuse a word which Kipling and, latterly, Gayatri Spivak,15 have used, to expose the trahison des clercs. They must document ‘with calm’, as many nameless women narrators have shown they can do, the ways in which the agents of the state manage to hoist them themselves into a position of godlike control over all kinds of suffering—the natural as much as, 15Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborty, ‘The Burden of English’ in The Lie of the Land: English
Literary Studies in India, edited by Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, Oxford University Press, 1992.
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maybe even more than, the nominal. In order to pursue this goal, it may be important for postcolonial historians to first concede that while suffering is a palpable phenomenon where disasters are concerned, agency is neither palpable nor singular. It is, in my view, in filling out this concept that the skill of historians is most urgently needed. Everyone with any ‘voice’ at all weeps for ‘the suffering of the people’ in India, and it is hard to differentiate between the crocodile majority and the concerned minority in this area. Therefore it is my belief that, if there is any point at all in historians taking on board the idea that it is the ‘moment of suffering’ that they are charged with recording, then that point has to come from the recognition that a supposed ‘moment’ of suffering has complex causal antecedents, requiring a more nuanced analysis of moral agency equally in nominal and in natural kind narratives. Unlike the subalternists in this matter, I see a crucial problem for the historian, not in that ‘suffering’ is so refractory a phenomenon, but in that ‘agency’ is so hard to pin down. Perhaps handing out prescriptions is the least satisfactory of deontological strategies, yet I must risk articulating one last hunch here. Since most historians agree that tracking the ‘remote’ causes of historical events is their professional business, I’d say to them: identify the agents of violence as the protagonists of narrative and the classic problem of recording emotion or ‘suffering’ within the discipline of history may well take care of itself. This is a chief lesson to be drawn from the people’s, and particularly, women’s, handling of the life-line of narrative in times of disaster. We do not need thought police but true intellectuals who can, without malice, take the initiative in analysing and identifying agency, even when the trail leads up to the godlike doors of government. Until then, it remains the tragedy of our postcolonial inheritance that so-called ‘moments of suffering’—a phrase blithely utilized by postmodern historians, even though Wittgenstein argued very plausibly a long time ago that ‘momentary grief’ worked like a linguistic oxymoron precisely because it was a psychological impossibility16—stretch so far into narrative infinity.
16 ‘Grief’ describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of our lives. If a man’s bodily expression of sorrow and of joy alternated, say with the ticking of a clock, here we should not have the characteristic formation of the pattern of sorrow or of the pattern of joy. ‘For a second he felt violent pain’,—[but] why does it sound queer to say: ‘For a second he felt deep grief’? Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1976, p. 174.
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qQ EXPLAINING ENIGMAS FROM EVIDENCE The Cause of Narrative
Certainly, those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of ... noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state ... for there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. ... Her full nature like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels that had no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you or me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in hidden tombs. George Eliot, Middlemarch For a visitor to the flood-affected areas of Balasore, Mayurbhanj and Cuttack in North Bihar and Orissa, it is a job to get at the truth. ... A villager speaks: ‘I have eleven children. Two I’ve left to the mercy of God. The rest are begging, somewhere’. ... I went to the village to find out the truth. All the houses had collapsed. Many were washed away ... but the villagers would not tell me anything until I convinced them I wasn’t a government official. Nissim Ezekiel, ‘The Truth About the Floods’
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The collection of poems in which Ezekiel’s ‘The Truth about the Floods’ appears was published in 1976, two years before the 1978 floods of West Bengal, which are the subject of this chapter. Yet, there is an uncanny resemblance between the oral narratives of the Bengal floods and Ezekiel’s poem. Some part of the explanation for this coincidence is provided by Ezekiel himself when he glosses ‘The Truth About the Floods’ as a ‘found-poem’ based on a newspaper report.1 Historical Agency and Narrative Mysteries Ezekiel’s, in other words, is a narrative that relinquishes its claim to fictional status by frankly admitting its genealogy in a kind of ‘history’. At the very least, it could be construed as a factual ‘danger-of-death’ Labovian narrative—but it is more than that. For, if it does not qualify as ‘literary history’, it is at least ‘historized literature’, that is, a kind of literature that would not have come into being without a historical precedent. ‘The Truth About the Floods’ commemorates an ill-starred time (as the etymology of ‘disaster’ reminds us) when a whole community is caught in crisis. Furthermore, this time seems to have the marked feature of occurring not once, but repeatedly (1967, 1978, 1999 ad infinitum; see also Chapter 5 on the element of repetition in narrative). When the floods will happen again may not be entirely predictable, that they will is. From this fearful iteration of tense, the past recurrently predicting the future, comes the tension of flood narratives, their ancient place in the literature of most cultures. Ezekiel’s contemporary production is simply one more addition to the genre. The narrative focus of Ezekiel’s poem is thus a well-attested, traumatic public event that has always seemed, ‘down the ages’, as the phrase goes, to demand re-telling, a natural ‘tellable’. Yet, as ‘The Truth About the Floods’ implies, there remains something secret about this event, something that resists recounting in the presence of certain hearers. ... but the villagers would not tell me anything until I convinced them I wasn’t a government official.
Under what circumstances do witnesses to a community tragedy deliberately suppress ‘the truth’ as they have shared it, and shared it perhaps more than once? Why should they choose to deny their history? Why is it so hard for a ‘visitor’ to ‘get at the truth’ about the floods? In Chapter 7, I made a start at considering some of these questions, but in doing 1See V.K. Dixit in The Indian Express, Bombay, 25 September 1967.
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so I had to veer sharply away from the concerns of the previous chapters towards a more historicized and politicized understanding of narrative ‘context’, particularly in the case of disaster narratives. This is clearly reflected in the anxious and bitter tone of my last chapter, which indicts colonialism and its lasting effect on the narrative of postcoloniality— as told by from differing points-of-view by state officials, by academic historians and by ‘the people’, when confronted with life-threatening fires and floods. The resentment I recorded is not, of course, mine alone; it is part of a widely shared perception of ‘history’ on the Indian subcontinent today. Here, for example, is the opening essay of a journal issue devoted in 1999 entirely to floods in India: It is important to underline that the transformation of the plains and deltas in the Indian subcontinent from a flood dependent to a flood vulnerable relationship needs to be examined in a historical perspective. ... The first coordinated attempt at insulating lands from inundating rivers began with colonial rule in the Bengal Delta in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The East India Company, upon drastically reordering the mode of revenue collection, property arrangements and social coordinates of administration, was compelled to jettison the far more flexible response towards deltaic inundation that had been in prior operation. This rigidity in the new practices of the colonial revenue administration soon shaped the official view on inundation. Instead of perceiving the annual and recurrent excesses of the riverine systems, hydrology as geomorphological processes intrinsic and essential to the delta’s ecology, the emphasis now veered towards treating the phenomenon as calamitous events. In other words, imperatives of rule and administration were decisive in coalescing and organizing an agenda for flood control.2
Passages like the one above shore up my argument Chapter 7 about the changes wrought in the ‘age-old’ meme-narrative of flood by a historical process such as colonization. ‘Geomorphological processes’ came under the control of government writ, with the result that they were reconstrued as ‘calamitous events’ or ‘acts of god’, which it was the duty of administrations to strenuously resist, not least because it was profitable to do so. Thus the building of embankments, etc. that made it easier for the East India Company to collect revenue in the short term turned out to have long-term tragic effects on the lives of ‘the people’. This last chapter of Narrative Gravity, structurally committed to effecting closure, seeks also to effect many kinds of reconciliation. One of these rapproachements is between the historical narrative and the ‘ordinary 2D’Souza, Rohan, in ‘Floods: A Symposium on Flood Control and Management’,
Seminar, Vol. 478, June 1999, p. 14.
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conversational narratives’, or what George Eliot calls ‘unhistoric acts’, to which most of this book has been devoted. That is why it must circle again the matters of enigmatic refusal, of deferred, or at least concealed, narrative explanation referred to so poignantly by Ezekiel. On the face of it, flood narratives afford striking examples of the ways in which tellers contrive to illustrate through their individual and particular stories a general truth (see Chapters 5 and 6). This is a truth which they can assume is quite obvious to their audience. The evidence for it lies all around; the havoc wrought speaks for itself. For this reason, the ‘plausibility’ of these stories, understood as the way in which they use particular ‘facts’ to convince sceptical listeners from ‘outside’ that their tellers ‘speak the truth’, could very easily be judged in terms of my Maxims of Narrative Exchange. Judgement, however, is not the purpose of this chapter. Here, I wish, as it were, to complicate the position I attributed a little earlier to Ezekiel—that of a literateur who fashions poems from the contingencies of history. Such literary renditions, from the epic of Gilgamesh to the legend of the god Krishna, who held up Mount Govardhan to protect the inhabitants of Braj from the flood waters, seem to have a deontic teleology, an ethical purpose. The gentle satire of Ezekiel’s poem, those ironic digs at ‘govermment officials’, only become possible if a contrary and enigmatic pattern of behaviour is first attributed to Ezekiel’s main protagonists, the villagers. Why, after all, would anyone refuse to witness his own loss (‘All the houses had collapsed. Many were washed away’), especially to the officials whose job it is to help him? An enigma. To exaggerate one’s loss is a rational, Gricean violation in these circumstances (‘I have eleven children’), but Ezekiel quickly dismisses this as a superficial strategy. He is in search of a deeper explanation for the villagers’ recalcitrance—and his poem provides one by altering a contextual presupposition. The causal account that Ezekiel comes up with is one that I would describe, for want of a more precise word, as essentially political, in absolutely the non-pejorative sense of this word. Within the world of the poem, there is indeed a ‘truth’ intentionally ‘hidden’ by the villagers, who might consent to tell it to a sympathetic poet, or even perhaps an investigative reporter (Ezekiel’s real-life ‘source’), but never to a probing official. What ‘truly happened’, the historical ‘fact’ then becomes in the poem, a secret shared between poet and villager, an expression of solidarity. It offers evidence of what George Eliot implies is the heroism of ‘a hidden life’. On Ezekiel’s account, the reason for hiding the truth is revealed as a tacit resistance to bureaucratic interference, on the part of the villagers
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and, by extension, on the part of the poet, who is on the same ‘side’. Now, such a reading of silence as resistance cannot but be attractive because it ‘makes sense’, good political sense, of the apparently perverse reactions which people often have to tragedy. There is a problem, though, because resistance may paradoxically be expressed as much through ‘keeping up’ a conversation as through silence. Conversational cooperation is not to be misread as ideological cooperation. The men and women of the Bengal villages, especially the women, whom I recorded in Chapter 7, for example, were neither inhibited, nor apparently suspicious, in their response to strangers. They, literally, produced floods of stories in response to requests for stories of floods.Their welcoming narrative gestures extended even to those like myself who had clearly gone there with a government team, crude taperecorder in hand, recognizably a type of vulture—perhaps not a particularly threatening one, but still one who appeared obviously interested in the pickings of tragedy. Why would such a despicable personage be allowed any conversational entry at all? One naive, but surely convincing response is: power and class position, the agent-patient asymmetry relation that exists between potential donors (urban, middle-class, university literate) and potential recipients of aid (rural, manual labouring, school literate or illiterate). Another slightly less naive response has to do with political process, because the ‘government officials’ in this case belonged to the Marxist state government in West Bengal, a government which had proven to a considerable extent its commitment to changing land-labour relations in West Bengal, and thus has been returned to power, on the strength of a massive rural vote, for the last thirty years. Insofar as any government official could be trusted, these officials had, in fact, won some rights to the people’s confidence. Both these ‘naive’ answers go some way towards reassuring us that the conversational cooperation of the villagers is explicable in terms of ‘care of the self ’, the motivations of self-interest and self-preservation, that pre-programmed survival instinct, so central to Dennett’s Paradox. Is that all, though? Is Ezekiel’s explanation of the villagers’ ‘refusal to speak’ as a stubborn resistance to bureaucratic invasion simply to be replaced by a pragmatic explanation of rational as well as instinctive selfinterest? I believe not. I believe that the role of the copious narrativization that surrounds disaster in all societies is not to be understood as merely instrumental—that is, as achieving straight-forward political or pragmatic ends. Rather, these narratives are primarily theoretical. What I mean by this is that meme-etic disaster-narratives are explanatory paradigms setting out the human consequences of disaster, and suggesting its causes. They
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are not so much explained by their tellers intentions as explanations for them. This might appear to be semantic quibbling, but I would like to plead not. For there is the simple relation of logical contraries between the statements X explains Y and Y explains X; so, ‘teller’s intentions and (other) circumstances explain stories’ makes a truth-claim that is quite different from ‘stories explain teller’s intentions and (other) circumstances’. In this chapter, I shall be concerned with defending and elaborating the latter Denneltian proposition. Deixis and Evidence The extreme sophistication that marks the oral narratives of flood in the villages of West Bengal—an enduring sophistication that seems to me to mimic the myths of flood that characterize many early cultural accounts of creation itself—stems, in my view, from a basic impulse towards theory built into the ‘linear’ structure of narrative and supported by the ‘argumentative’ structure of conversation. And while we may infer ‘political resistance’ too in these narratives, I’d suggest that what is truly exciting about this resistance is that it is actually a resistance to other theories about the causes and consequences of the disaster being explained—the colonial theory or ‘narrative’ about the deltaic floods in Bengal described in the passage quoted earlier, for example. The following two conversations, presented by me, offer causal ‘theories’ for the floods. These confrontations between a government official, who is the main story recipient, and the villagers who have suffered, mark the clash of explanatory paradigms that I have just mentioned. Differing world-views are in contest here, as will become increasingly apparent as these long conversations progress. a) i A
B A
B A
MIDNAPORE 1 So this flood which has now—2 Everybody agrees that the engineers didn’t know about it. 3 They assumed that the river— 4 I mean—damming the river, would solve the problem. 5 Hm. 6 But this we [knew] five hundred years ago—7 we saw for ourselves that it wasn’t so 8 The river—here—imagine, it was another twelve or fourteen feet deep. 9 Hm. 10 But what happened here [pointing] 11 there is an anicut here, just on top, where there’s the Koshai Bridge—there—12 And since there is an anicut there, the water-flow comes to a standstill here. 13 Because of this, the sand [from the river
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bed] forms a mud-flat—14 Automatically, the [quantity of] sand grows with the strength of the current—and if the river— er—if(they) dam up the water then the sandbank goes and builds up there. 15 When it falls there [the bank] grows higher. 16 And after it grows higher, obviously, both barriers break down. 17 This is how the river is filling up with mudflats. 18 There are mud-flats—er 19 However many mudflats there are, slow down the current of the river. 20 Because of this slowing down, the silt grows and deposits itself and the greater the amount of sand on the river bed the more the level of the river rises. 21 It rises because we have seen that— 22 I mean—er—the nullahs—er—made by the Government for releasing the water have closed up with sand—23 This means that—fifty-sixty years ago, those were—um—not flooded. 24 They were firm land. 25 Now they’ ve become sandy soil. 26 That’s why the overflooding. 27 However, they say that the dams—er—we will stop the floods. But we think this is not the case—28 If there is a twenty-foot flood, but we have erected only a ten-foot dam over this—[pointing] then the water will break through the dam and escape— Then, like the Hinglo dam—29 From the place where the water breaks through will stem a river. 30 That’s why we have—have held things up and if the flood is to be stopped in time, the main thing to do is to deepen the river bed—31 Not the whole— a little—the bed—32 Dig in four or five hundred feet deep— and if we pile up the sand on either bank—we can work through it and make mud-flats on either side. 33 This will deepen the river bed [Pause] 34 And the anicut is the biggest problem here these days. 35 At that time the anicut will have to be kept totally closed. 36 We will have to follow another system. 37 Only then can the flood be avoided. 38 Without these measures this land will have floods down through the ages. 39 And we will have to leave this village. 40 This—this will be the state of affairs—[Pause] 41 Here, don’t you see— 42 don’t you see that this little compression of the water has led to such a rise in the water level? 43 Almost level with the land—44 But fifty years ago all this was not s-sand—it was all firm land. 45 My house— B 46 And the river? C 47 By the river—there [pointing] 48 there were houses all along there—by the river bank. ...
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A 49 Yes, the river was much narrower—almost the half of this— a half narrower— C 50 The river was in the middle. 51 Near that sand bank. ... A 52 These were all villages. 53 The advance [of the river] has swallowed them up. 54 This is a very frightening thing. 55 That is why we have only one plan to stop the flood; there isn’t any other way. 56 And I think that the other floods have been—the fault of the engineers. 57 We have had so many floods because of their various errors. B 58 Who will cut through this? A 59 Oh the Government will have to do that—um—with Central Government money. 60 The way the Centre has spent money—61 the money that has been spent for so long—no account of that—the engineers themselves 62 I mean, they’ve just wasted the money—used it badly. 63 It hasn’t been spent according to plan. B 64 Does our Government have facilities for cutting [through beds]? 65 Of course, we have mud-cutters—66 These dredgers—they— A 67 Yes, they can cut through banks of mud. 68 But they don’t have any [machines] now. 69 If the Central Government provides the money then the [State] Government will have to cut through the river banks. 70 That is the strategy our Kapil Dev is contemplating now—71 which we’d thought of five or even seven years ago! 72 Now even the big-shots who are heads of the Flood Control Committee are advocating the same thing, 73 and everybody wants the river bed to be made deeper now! B 74 Does our Government have a dredger? 75 These things? A 76 There are some dredgers. 77 Even if there aren’t, they’ ll have to be acquired from outside. 78 And all the foreign help we’re getting from UNICEF, etc., that can buy a dredger. 79 All that money. 80 Because UNICEF is doing quite a lot now. 81 If they can do a little, deepen the river in the middle—82 if the river is deepened in the middle, then the water which flows down the centre will deepen it further and the displaced mud will form banks on either side. 83 No matter how much water flows down here, however many cu.secs., the water will remain channelled. 84 Now the water here simply floods onto the bank. 85 This is the main problem. 86 I—[think] all the floods in West Bengal must be caused by this. 87 That’s what I think.
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B 88 But dredging the river bed is quite a proposition! [Pause] 89 [if] the river bed is so high then cutting through it with a dredger will mean so much mud, where will you dump it all? A 90 They can be dumped on b-both sides of the river. B 91 You’ll get rid of it on both sides? A 92 Yes, and they’ll form mud-flats later. 93 And the deepening of the river will allow fertile flats to form mid-stream as well, without the water rising. 94 It’ll all form naturally. D 95 And if not it will have to be cemented in concrete. 96 No other way out. A 97 The sides [of the river] cannot be made concrete. D 98 Well— B 99 I will have a word about this—with the Department of Irrigation Engineer. A 100 Can a river be confined by concrete? D 101 That’s true, of course. A 102 Then the Government would spend its time doing nothing else! VAR 103 [laugh] B 104[Pause] I will discuss this [with somebody in the Government] a) ii [DIAMOND HARBOUR] S 1 Your field—um—is it—has it been submerged in salt water? H 2 Yes absolutely. 3 I mean, our circumstances this year—er— what [I don’t know] what will happen afterwards. 4 Maybe just at the moment somehow we’ll manage for these few months. 5 But what’ll happen afterwards, it pains me to think. S 6 All the land? H 7 All of it. 8 Whenever the flood goes anywhere. 9 At that moment before your eyes—10 For instance, this soil, there is so much [salt] water in it. S 11 Is there water still or has it gone down? H 12 There’s not much now of course. 13 Only then. 14 For three months we went—15 I mean—16 I mean we had to walk with our clothes lifted. 17 It was so severe some people’s houses fell down. 18 Nothing left in the fields. 19 Here, have you seen the other [fresh] soil that has been brought? S 20 But there’s no salt water now? H 21 Not now. 22 Whatever was fated to turn salt has turned salt. 23 [But] we have been unfortunate once. 24 Other places have been unlucky twice or thrice. 25 We have floods [only] once [a year]. 26 Whatever happens in this rainy season, you see.
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S 27 Why doesn’t it happen at other times? H 28 Well, how can it happen at other times? 29 We haven’t had any canal installed. 30 Other places have deep tube wells but we haven’t got anything here. S 31 Why? H 32 Shallow [wells] in our land here are—I mean, they’re useless. 33 They’ll just be no use—34 The misfortune can affect the Ragi and Mustard crops at most. 35 If canals are dug here, they can help a little [more]. S 36 Here—why can’t there be shallow tube wells here? H 37 There can’t, I mean—because it’s known that there can’t. 38 We hope, of course. 39 First of all, it’s expensive here. 40 There have been [some], 41 once or twice [in the past] there have been [some], of course, 42 but it wasn’t possible to raise the water. S 43 First of all—the water ... why wasn’t it possible [to raise it?] H 44 There was a ditch near Diamond Harbour. 45 When they raised the water, they found that the water subsides, goes down a hole—[in the] tube well, and the level of the water is low again. 46 Whenever there is a problem the water level has to be raised. S 46 Well—are there—er [a:]only—shallow tube wells that you have, or [have you a] big tube well. 47 Those ... H 48 This will cost more, but at the moment we have to limit expenditure. 49 It will cost more here than in other places. S 50 Your water here is salty, is it not? H 51 Yeah, its salty. S 52 That’s why the pipes will be ruined in no time. H 53 That’s certain. 54 These tubewells that are dug here. 55 They are ruined after perhaps just five or six months. 56 Don’t last any longer. S 57 That’s why tube wells are no use here. 58 We have to dig lots of canals. 59 There’s no way out but this. Narrative, I have argued throughout th is book, is a species of natural theory; when it is embedded in a conversation, there is the added advantage that often we witness a critique of the explanation on offer. Recipients agree, via the turn-taking mechanisms of conversation, to give a particular ‘theory’ a hearing, but they may also exercise their rights to knock it down. Sometimes, the story-tellers themselves set up an opposing theory as a foil to their own. This is the strategy A adopts in the first of conversations
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above. A’s ‘story-prefacing’ utterances in lines 1–7 make it clear that he is going to set up an opposition between the ignorance of the city engineers and the perspicacity of the villagers. The wisdom of the villagers is tried and tested (‘but this we knew five hundred years ago’), whereas by implication the engineers are city-slickers whose modern training fails the test of an actual trial. A’s superb eloquence and rhetorical gifts come through, I think, even in translation, for example in the marvellous irony of his question: ‘Can a river be confined by concrete?’ (line 100). One could draw attention to many aspects of A’s narrative, but I will focus here mainly on one methodological feature of his causal account of why the floods were so devastating—namely, deixis. My suggestion is that, in an environment where scenes of recent disaster are plainly to be seen by recipients, tellers do not always tell stories which simply outline the actual circumstances of the disaster, because this would, in Gricean terms, be redundant. Rather, they resourcefully use an unusual advantage that they happen to possess in these circumstances. They can actually point to the evidence. Deixis thus becomes an important explanatory aid. In the first example, A is a selfappointed spokesman for the village, B is a government official, and it emerges clearly from A’s story that his intention is a) to persuade B that the engineers sent by the Government have been responsible for the flood because they produced the wrong solutions to the villagers’ problems with riverine ‘overflooding’ (see A’s opening statement for the prosecution in lines 2–4, and then again one of several concluding gambits, for example, lines 56–7). b) to convince B that his own solution, which involves deepening the river bed is the correct one, a theoretical option which A supports with several arguments (see especially lines 11–44, replete with causal connectors such as ‘that’s why’, ‘because’, ‘since’, ‘this means that’, etc.). c) to get B to commit himself to doing something about the situation if he accepts A’s explanation, which it appears he is remarkably successful at because B does appear to accept his theory by the end of A’s story (see his line 99 ‘I will have a word about this—with the Department of Irrigation Engineer.’). A’s narrative, ‘but what happened here ... ’ (line 10), is fashioned as a counter-argument. His story is about the history of a river—a river which now floods regularly because of the impracticality of the Government engineers. ‘It [the river] rises because we have seen that—er—the nullah—er—made by the Government for releasing the water has closed
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up with sand. This means that fifty-sixty years ago those were—um—not flooded. Now they’ve become sandy soil’ (lines 21–25). ‘They say—the dams—we will stop the flood with these. But we think this is not the case—(and etc., line 27)’. Not only is A’s indictment strong, it is extremely courageous. He is taking his fight, his faith in his theory, right up to the Government camp. Ironically the naïve ‘theory’ that A’s develops through his narrative is in keeping with the latest thinking on ecologically sustainable flood-control. Dinesh Kumar Mishra, an engineer, writes in the 1999 Seminar issue on the floods from which I quoted earlier: It is important to realize that when the river is embanked (or dammed?) the water which could have entered the river on its own gets stuck outside ... and causes water-logging. The river water contains a lot of silt which spreads over a large area if the river is free to spill. This silt gets trapped inside the embankments, continuously raising the bed-level of the area, thereby pressing for raising the height of the embankments. There is a practical limit to which an embankment can be raised. The trouble starts when a tributary joins the main river. The embankments on the main river block the entry of the tributary into the main river and a sluice-gate (Speaker A’s ‘anicut’) becomes necessary. When constructed, this sluice gate must be kept closed during the rainy season because any sudden rise in the flood level of the main river will push the flood waters into the protected area through the sluice gate. And if the sluice-gates are closed even for a short while ... the backwaters from the tributary will submerge the protected area on the countryside of the embankments. ... Consequently, the tributary is also embanked. ... This creates another problem. ... If any of the two embankments [now] breach, whether on the main river or on the tributary, the people living [in] between will meet a watery grave. This knowledge existed with Indian engineers much before embankments (and big dams?) were okayed by them in the post-Independence era. The political compulsions of the time forced them to toe the line of the politicians, and in their enthusiasm to do so, the engineers went out of their way to negate what they had argued against for over a hundred years. ... The colonial rulers were calculating and knew that if embankments were constructed ... costs would always exceed the benefits accrued over the years ... or the revenues collected by the government as flood protection levy. Their engineers rightly spoke the language of their masters, and so did the Indian engineers of independent India. To argue that technology is neutral and apolitical is hardly teneable.
All the main points made by A’s eye-witness narrative of 1978 are repeated in the academic article of 1999—the silting up of rivers because of damming and embankment, the part played by ‘anicuts’ or sluice-gates,
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the historic guilt of the engineers, the actual and political costs of the technological changes wrought by government, and the price paid by the people for faults that are not theirs. Just as Mishra’s argument closes with a ‘coda’ politicizing technology, so A’s narrative ends with a bleak vision of the future which also contains a political ultimatum—‘We will have to follow another system. Only then can the flood be avoided. Without these measures this land will have flood down through the ages. And we will have to leave this village. This—this will be the state of affairs [Pause]’ (lines 36–40). That pause at the end is significant because this is where there could be a story-evaluation by recipient B. But B’s position is a difficult one; he is after all a representative of the Government which A is castigating; his move has therefore to be carefully planned so as to show a degree of neutrality. As I have suggested, the special environment in which these disaster stories are being told does not permit recipients to adopt a strategy whereby they question the teller’s story. B cannot and does not say, for instance, ‘I don’t accept what you’ve told me. I happen to know for a fact that the river was as prone to flooding fifty or sixty years ago as now and, anyhow, our engineers weren’t around then.’ Given that no such option exists, the problem he has to solve is that of appearing sympathetic, and at the same time, reserved. Notice that B makes no less than six moves after the story is told; each of these temporarily resolves his dilemma by the expedient of asking further ‘knowledgeable’ questions about, for example, dredgers (see lines 46–91). This places the onus back on the teller for the time being, but finally B is trapped both by the relentlessness of the turn-taking system and by A’s adroitness as a storyteller—the logic of narrative theme and of conversational structure combine to corner him. When B initially fails to come in at the end of his pause in line 40, A again resorts to the by now familiar strategy of pointing to the actual scene before him, ‘Here, don’t you see, that this little compression of water has led to such a rise in the water level? Almost level with the land. But fifty years ago all this was not sand, it was all firm land. My house ... ’ (lines 41–5) Indeed, his entire narrative is packed with ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’, ‘now’, and other deictic markers. It is also significant that B interrupts with his question at the point when A refers to his house, because if A had launched on a story about how his own house was destroyed in the floods, B would be forced to express sympathy for A and thereby forfeit his neutrality. As we have observed, B does ultimately commit himself to some action at the end, but his six questioning, questing, moves must
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not be forgotten. It would be reasonable for us as analysts to infer from them that B would have preferred not to have made his concession in lines 98–9, but he seems to be left in the ongoing conversational exchange with no alternative moves, unless he pursues a strategy of endlessly asking further questions. In this sense, it would be correct to maintain that A has been uniquely successful in utilizing deictic coordinates to magnificent effect. A powerless ‘villager’, his narrative has got an powerful inspecting official from Calcutta to agree that something must be done. What is striking about A’s narrative is the way in which it combines an apocalyptic tone and moral indignation with a cool scientific argument The political sense of self, of a local and rooted identity, is supported by a causal account how the miserable present came into being through a series of historical ‘errors’. A’s prophesy or scientific ‘prediction’ is based on a theory supported by plenty of visible evidence. It cannot be gainsaid. In the second of the stories above, it is with invisible evidence that we are concerned. Story i)b was recorded in the district of Diamond Harbour, which was much less severely affected by flooding than Midnapore district, but had the special problem that it was near the sea and so prone to being inundated by sea water. We notice, to begin with, the hesitation that accompanies S’s first utterance, ‘Your field—er—um—is it—has it— been submerged in salt water? S is again an official who has to ascertain the extent of the damage caused by the floods, but asking the question the way he does, is almost bound to evoke the response that H predictably produces: ‘Yes, absolutely’, followed by a digression into the consequences of this for H’s family. But S’s second question, ‘Is there water still or has it gone down?’, follows a strategy that becomes transparent once his third question is taken into account. ‘But there’s no salt water now?’ This is a manoeuvre to get H to admit that his situation is not as bad as all that, if the water has already subsided. But, as I have been emphasizing, the circumstances in which these conversations are conducted often permit recipients to dispense with the convention which tellers must follow of making their stories plausible, so H can take the risk of answering S with ‘There’s not much [evidence? salt?] now of course. Only then. For three months we went—I mean—I mean, we had to walk with our clothes lifted up. It was so severe some people’s houses fell down. Nothing left in the fields’ (lines 13–18). The crucial contextual information needed to make the correct inference from the information H offers in lines 13–18 is the following, Diamond Harbour was not an area where the damage to property was severe, and at the time this recording was made, the floods were certainly
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not ‘three months old’. Yet, curiously, in spite of these discrepencies, H is still using the strategy of pointing to visual evidence of disaster in a very subtle way to augment his case. This is because it is common knowledge among participants that damage caused by salt water flooding, though invisible, lasts a long time. Even minimum flooding, if the water is salt sea water, can kill crops. H exploits this particular fact to present his theory of flood damage, and then to offer his solution to it. Invisible evidence of long-term devastation can still be conversationally pointed at, and pointed up; thus there is, literally, more to H’s utterance than meets the eye. He can exaggerate about people’s houses falling down on the strength of this. The unusualness of salt water flooding thus offers H a very specialized conversational resource he can use. S’s purpose is to convince H, as A’s purpose was to convince the official B in a)i that deep and shallow tube wells are useless in his district because they tend to get contaminated with seeping salt water, and only canals that channel in fresh water are useful. He too has a premeditated solution to the logical problem posed by annual flooding in the district. That is the purpose of his brief, exaggerated story at the beginning, prefaced by line 10 ‘this soil there is so much [salt] water in it’, to which is S’s response, ‘Is there water still or has it gone down?’ The exchange makes it clear that it is not visually apparent to S whether there is still salt water in the soil or not. The rest of the conversation is concerned with establishing that canals are the logical solution and again, as in the last conversation, S concedes after a series of negotiations in line 57, ‘There’s no way out but this’. Conversations like the two we have just studied reveal how adaptable tellers are, how attuned to making the best use of environmental conditions. Rather than concentrate on the single aspect of the misery and damage caused by the floods, A and H show us how they can simply point to evident damage in order to corroborate, legitimize and sustain the logic of their narratives. Narrative, in short, helps us to survive and preserve our essential identities even at times of the gravest physical and mental danger by creating logical solutions to the problems presented by our surroundings. Thus, they conform to the contours of both Dennett’s paradox and mine in that they literally offer structural, logical and psychological lifelines to those in danger of drowning Narrative Sequencing in an Interruptive Culture The flood narratives that we have been discussing are certainly distinctive, as I hope I have demonstrated in the last section, in terms of their
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immediate context. What about cultural context? In this section, I will try to show that cultural habits also have structural repercussions both for the theoretical design and performative strategies adopted by narrators so as to prevent their ‘alien’ recipients—government officials, research students—from questioning their ‘fragile’ stories. Our stories are a measure of exactly how fragile and how tough our ‘selves’ within a culture are. Plunging in at the deep end, then, here is another conversation recorded in Midnapore District, where the floods of 1978 had their most disastrous effects. b) i A
B
C B A B D A
C A
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1 [We] made a banana boat (kolar bhaela) and got the women and children into that. 2 Think of the [people in their] houses, we had to get in each time and push people out. 3 and the others were on their own. 4 I mean—the older people all climbed onto trees. 5 All climbed up on trees. 6 They had to be rescued too—from their heights! 7 Oh, goodness! 8 Everyone had climbed up on trees! 9 They themselves had a lot. ... 10 Apart from this, a lot. ... 11 Then we had to get them down from there and get them across in the banana boats. 12 They’ve [now] been taken to places wherever the land is higher. ... 13 ... wherever there were brick houses, those place where— whoever. ... 14 Lots of people have brick houses, you see 15 They were taken to these houses. 16 You’ve had a bad time, haven’t you? 17 Terrible. 18 Our elders tell us that in five (fifty?) years we haven’t had a flood here like this one. 19 This is the only time in our lives. 20 At eleven o’clock in the night we saw no water. 21 We haven’t seen a flood like this in our lives! 22 Yeah, yeah. 23 There we were sleeping in the night—24 At one o’clock we find, I mean—water in the house! 25 Oh, you didn’t even notice—26 didn’t think that it would turn out like this! 27 No, not at all. 28 That there would be this huge flood. ...
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C 29 Yes, nobody could conceive of it! Really! A 30 It took us quite unawares! 31 And what was most frightening was that—whenever there was a current from any side, if we fell into the river there was no chance of our swimming. ... C 32 Hm, hm. A 33 ... if we got further and further away from the river bank. B 34 Many houses have floated* away on that side—[pointing] 35 Others on that side [pointing] 36 Many houses have been destroyed, people have been carried away, cows, bullocks, everything. C 37 Yes, no one could imagine it! D 38 Everything floated away down the river. A 39 The level of the river—the level of the river and the level of the dam, just notice the difference! D 40 Then the women and children started such a wailing when the flood covered Bhatra, then Lokonghat [Pause] during the day— A 41 Crying and— D 42 From about nine or ten o’clock. 43 Crying and wailing. 44 That was the problem. 45 Then we cut down the banana trees in all four directions and. ... C 46 Yeah. D 47 The houses. ... 48 The dams [broke down] like this [gesture]. A 49 It wasn’t a little flood which they could hold out against. C 50 Hm. A 51 They are still in the school [building]. 52 It is they who have suffered most. 53 We get so many floods here. C 54 Yeah, hm. A 55 This is happening all the time to the river now. 56 Every time the water increases a little, the water floods all over here. 57 This is the situation. 58 But no one was prepared for such a huge flood. D 59 Made boats. 60 Cut the tr—wood and made floats for the women, children, kids, everybody. C 61 Of course the women and children would be frightened. 62 This kind of. ... D 63 Everybody was taken across one by one. 64 There where— whenever—65 where there was [once] a brick house. ... C 66 And the women and children didn’t know how to swim? D 67 No, no, they’re quite—
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C 68 The children, the children, don’t. ... D 69 They know [swimming] well. 70 The young people in banana boats, somehow they had all to be taken to those big—big houses. 71 Took them to one or two of these houses. 72 Thousands and thousands of people were rescued, you know. 73 All this somehow—er—um—74 I mean, it took until Monday. 75 Otherwise we couldn’t have rescued them. 76 Nobody was capable of anything. C 77 Oh. 78 Yes, yeah. 79 There’s obviously been a lot of damage. One of the most noticeable features of this conversation is the way in which several tellers combine to tell the same story. I will now argue that the cooperation displayed by tellers in b)i is both a fitting strategic response to immediate context and culturally sanctioned. Generally, from insider observation of conversations in the pan-Indian cultural context it seems to me that there is a high tolerance of interruptions and joint performances. This, in my view, constitutes a typical instance of specifically implicultural knowledge concerning how conversations may be structured given the norms of a particular society. Subcontinental speakers are, ceteris paribus, far less likely to assert their right to a turn by saying, ‘Let me finish, please!’ than speakers in, say, ‘Western culture’. Interruptions are read as signs of cooperative behaviour—i.e. helping the speaker along—rather than rude attempts to cut into someone else’s conversational space. Of course, in the absence of hard statistical data, this remains a speculation, but in my examination of the ‘joint-telling’ above, I will at least make a start by placing my ‘culturally biased’ notion of interruptions within the turntaking system of conversation alongside Sacks’. So far, we implicitly made the assumption, based on ethnomethodological studies of narrative sequencing by Sacks, Jefferson et al., that a prospective teller who successfully completes a ‘preface sequence’ is rewarded by a chance to occupy the ‘telling slot’. A preface sequence is enormously influential, according to Sacks, in deciding the reading by recipients of the subsequent story.3 But where is the preface sequence in the present story, which is launched upon abruptly by A, as the party is walking towards the home of one of the tellers? A’s opening sentence 3See also Jefferson G., ‘Sequential Aspects of Story-Telling in Conversation’, p. 270. Story prefaces follow a constraint which requires participants ‘to display a relationship between the story and prior talk, and thus account for and propose the appropriateness of the story’s telling’. Obeying the convention of local occasioning when prefacing their stories, enables tellers to coordinate this turn with prior talk; furthermore, if recipients assume that convention is being obeyed, they can more easily guess at the implications arising from the
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states baldly, ‘We made a banana boat and got the women and children into that’. There is no background provided either for constructing such a ‘banana boat’, or for piling women and children into it. In discussing the convention of local occasioning in Chapter 6, it was assumed that tellers had first to work at rendering a story ‘relevant’ to other participants, but in this context, as I have suggested, it is taken for granted that the relevance of A’s utterance is self evident. No further justification is needed. Labov would argue that this is because the material out of which A’s story is produced, is durable story material, but I would maintain that these flood conversations presents us with a more subtle dilemma. If recipients have to respond to a corpus of danger-to-death stories that are as homogeneous as this one, their interest in the stories is likely to diminish exponentially if each story makes the same point over and over, however poignant. So we are back to Sacks’ insight that it is imperative that tellers use whatever resources they possess to make their stories into ‘something for us’ over and above their interest as dire firstperson narratives of disaster. My suggestion is that a study of stories such as the one above show that tellers use the structure of conversation as well as cultural resources in tandem to achieve this difficult task. To establish this claim, it might be useful to recall standard conversational analytic definitions of story-sequencing. A preface sequence ‘can take a minimum length of two turns, the first involving talk by the intending teller and the second by an intended recipient’.4 It is a slot that can only be filled by a prospective teller, and is the first part of a pair in a paired sequence that, if successfully completed, initiates the telling of a story. It usually, though not always, ‘self-selects’5 for the next but one turn; that is, if the preface sequence extends over a number of paired turns—ABAB, and so on—where the first turn ‘belongs’ to the intending teller, and the second turn in the pair to the intended recipient, then every third turn is the teller’s turn and can potentially be filled with a story if the recipient agrees in his previous turn to the telling of the story. Once the story is begun a fresh sequence is initiated. This is the ‘telling sequence’. story, since the presumption is that the story is also a contribution to ongoing talk. Sometimes, as Jefferson notes, a story preface ‘may not be topically coherent with the talk in progress’. It may simply have been ‘triggered’ by the turn-by-turn talk (see also example g) i in Chapter 6 and the subsequent discussion. 4Sacks, ‘An Analysis of the Course of a Joke’s Telling in Conversation’, p. 340. It will also be recalled that one of the Preparatory Conditions on stories I suggested in Chapter 2 was that a sequence of clauses p 1... pn should constitute a ‘completed sequence’. 5‘Self-selection’ is a term used by conversational analysts to define a move by a current speaker to choose himself as the next speaker in the next appropriate turn.
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The telling sequence may consist of a single slot, which by definition ‘belongs’ to the teller of the story. Once a teller is in possession of the ‘telling’ slot, that is, it is incumbent upon him to ‘proceed to tell [the story] directly to its completion’, as Sacks puts it below. My suggestion in this book is that tellers are bound by a convention when they engage in the language-game of story-telling to complete a story once it has been ‘appropriately prefaced’. Sacks also writes: A joke’s or a story’s telling having been appropriately prefaced, its teller should proceed to tell it directly to its completion. In contrast with the organization of the preface sequence, place for the talk of recipients within the course of telling sequence need not be provided by the teller, and the telling can then take a minimum length of one teller turn.6
Although the telling sequence may occupy just one slot, Sacks notices that recipients ‘in fact ... do talk, and talk interrruptively, within the telling sequence’.7 By ‘interrruptive talk’ Sacks means talk that does not necessarily have a place within the sequence, but which is nevertheless sanctioned because it may be essential for recipients to, for example, clarify a point if they are to understand the full implications of a story. Given the nature of interruptive talk, Sacks further points out that ‘we [should be] prepared for noticing and appreciating the orderliness of some rather fine, ... co-occurrent features of recipients’ talk within the telling sequence’.8 And indeed, it is overwhelmingly apparent from the conversations studied in Narrative Gravity that recipients not only talk during the telling sequence but use their interruptive turns to display their understanding of the progress of the story. They deftly locate their own utterances in interstices of the teller’s story, anticipating many of teller’s moves and coordinating their own interruptive moves to accord with the tellers. An interruptive turn generally consists of a single move by a recipient, rather than of several moves within the one turn; this is apparently because recipients have to manage their moves rather delicately, since a teller need not, as Sacks maintains, provide them with any place at all within the telling sequence, but can proceed directly to a story’s completion once in possession of the telling slot. Most tellers do, however, ‘allow’ recipients to talk interruptively throughout their extended turn for the obvious reason that these interruptive moves within the telling sequence 6Sacks, ‘Analysis of the Course of a Joke’s Telling’, p. 344. 7Ibid. 8Ibid.
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serve the function of demonstrating their continued participation in the conversation, and their interest in the story. Thus, interruptive moves, which function as evaluations of the story and articulate the perlocutionary effects of the story on recipients, are fairly important within the telling sequence; despite the fact that recipients often use these moves to arraign fragile aspects of a teller’s story. Yet these carefully gathered observations about story sequencing seems to be in need of a major ‘repair’ or revision, at least as far as ‘interruptive moves’ are concerned, if the flood story we have just encountered is taken as culturally typical. Not only does it dispense with a preface sequence, but its single recipient does not make any interruptive moves. There are several ‘interruptions’ within the telling sequence, but they are not by the recipient. My own hunch is that in an ‘interruptive culture’ such I have designated the ‘Indian’, the structural places in telling sequence which Sacks says story-recipients occupy, can non-problematically be reassigned to other tellers. Thus, in story b)i the telling slot is occupied not by a single teller, but by three. Sacks has suggested that if two tellers, such as a man and his wife, have both had the same experience which they wish to narrate to a third party, then one possible solution to ‘the co-ordination problem’ of conversing is for one of the partners to keep quiet while the other tells the story. In my recording, the three tellers obviously adopt a much more active strategy, belonging as they do to a putative ‘culture of interruptions’. Teller A begins the story and D completes it, with B playing a supportive role throughout. In the unusual circumstances that each teller here has a ‘valuable’ first-person account of events which Labov would label ‘always reportable’, this is a perfect example of the resourcefulness of tellers. A, B and D combine their move with such extreme skill that they achieve nearly perfect coordination, with a ‘minimum of gaps and overlaps’. B, for instance, simply carries on from A’s opening utterance by using an ‘and’ to extend A’s sentence in line 2. C’s task as the single recipient is also made less arduous by this strategy, since C need only come in after both A and B, and later A and D, have completed their combined turns. The ‘response-sequence’ rounds off the language-game of storytelling. In Labov and Waletzky’s terminology, the story-receipt fulfils the function of a ‘coda’, which signals that a narrative is completed. As the examples examined earlier illustrate, the story-receipt slot is usually filled with a generalization that recipients have derived as the implicature of the foregoing story, or with some token of story appreciation such as laughter, or the articulation of a perlocutionary effect such as ‘gosh!’,
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‘gives me the shivers’, etc. Since this is the main slot belonging to recipients in the story-telling game, it is obviously the slot most constrained by the convention that recipients must produce some sort of evaluation as a story. Even if recipients are completely silent during the telling of a story, sequentially the next slot after the story has to be filled by recipients, and there is copious evidence from conversational data to show that recipients almost always produce an evaluative comment in this slot. In this particular conversation, story-recipient C is more or less ‘silent’ during the telling sequence and nowhere ‘questions’ the speakers’ joint production. Indeed, when C attempts to inquire whether the children in the village could swim (lines 66 and 68), there is an unspoken ‘snub’ in D’s reply (‘They know [swimming] well’ line 69); D does not add, ‘but that’s not the point’, but it is implicit in the way he continues with his narrative (‘The young people in banana boats, somehow they had all to be taken to those big—big houses. Took them to one or two of these houses.’ lines 70–1). The subtext clearly is that it is irrelevant whether one can swim or not in this context; the point is to find a safe harbour, a piece of high ground or a big house. That is where the heroism of the rescue effort manifests itself. Consider D’s line 72, for instance: ‘Thousands and thousands of people were rescued, you know’. There is surely a hyperbolic element here when it is taken into account that D is talking only about his own village and of rescue by means of banana boats and rafts. Yet C’s ‘story-receipt’ in response is not in the least aggressive (line 77, ‘Oh, yes, yeah, there’s obviously been a lot of damage’). I would contend that this is so because of the strong combination of contextual knowledge (there is causal evidence of flood damage all around and the narrator is recounting a personal danger-of-death narrative) with cultural factors (this is an interruptive culture which permits as much space for joint-tellers as for listeners). In such a situation, it is not surprising that listener’s turns are actually given over to tellers. The natural logic of the cultural and contextual circumstances demand this specific ‘interruptive’ adjustment of the standard turn-taking mechanism of conversation. Distance lends Enchantment Most of the stories in the present chapter consist of first-person narratives told by people themselves affected by calamity (see Appendix I). On the whole, they offer perhaps a more homogeneous corpus than the one examined by Labov and Waletzky because while these researchers elicited an entire range of incidents in response to their requests for danger-ofdeath accounts, the stories here are all ‘spontaneous’ responses concerning
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a single event. I have begun by arguing that this uniqueness may have consequences for the presentation and ordering of the conversations in which these stories occur. They represent, as it were, a theoretical consensus within a community. Since these floods were the most severe in several decades, they were widely discussed in a variety of social settings. I therefore include in this chapter an example of a ‘metropolitan’ story of the flood recorded in Calcutta, by way of contrast. Then, by way of an even more egregious contrast, the chapter finally ends with a narrative about a flood recorded in the very different cultural environment of Cambridge, England—a tale which cannot under any circumstances be said to fall into the genre of danger-of-death narrative! We have observed how remarkable is the resourcefulness of storytellers, under circumstances which are so unusual that many of the conventions which constrain their everyday behaviour are temporarily ‘interrupted’. For instance, the narrative maxim commanding tellers to protect ‘fragile’ aspects of stories need not be binding on first-person stories told in a context where a disaster has actually taken place, since recipients are faced with massive evidence for much that a teller tells them. This is in marked contrast to more ‘removed’ stories of the flood, such as the following: c) i B
1 The other day, the boys were all standing on the banks of the Ganges, when they saw— S 2 On the Dunlop waterfront—in the Dunlop +area+ B 3 Yes—where Dunlop is—they say a refrigerator floated past ... VAR (laugh) B 4 Can a refrigerator float? ALL (laugh) S 5 Perhaps it can [with mild sarcasm]. B 6 Impossible [laughs]. 7A steel almirah floated past—do you hear?—[laughs]—8 The whole thing’s very amusing. S 9 Then, yesterday—yesterday, those boys said—10 I asked them, how did a steel almirah float—11 they said, it wasn’t a steel almirah—it was a kather (wooden) almirah, so for every question. ... R kather 12 kãcher (glass)? S kather 13 wooden.
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R 14 B 15 S 17 B 19 S 20 B 21 22 S 23 B 24 25 26 27 M 28 S 29 B 30 H 31 S 32 B 33 S 34 B 35 S 36 B 37 S 38 c) ii
K S B K
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S 8 R 9 S 10 R 11 M 12
kath er wooden kather 16 So. ... a steel almirah floats by, a refrigerator floats by ... Lots of people are [said to be] collecting+ things—18 beds, almirahs and so on, all these things. ... But yes, we did see ducks being collected next to our house. ... Many ducks Some—from some farm—perhaps the farm was flooded— So the ducks. that were in the farm, all of them floated down the Ganges. ... ˜ pæk, ˜ pæk, ˜ [imitating quacking] pæk, Pæk spirited imitations] ˜ pæk—pæk ˜ ˜ pæk ˜ pæk—[more ˜ ˜ pæk ˜ sound. When we got up in the morning, what pæk So they all caught them ... some with nets, some with nets— They came down to the edge. ... Came down to the edge, and ...? Yes—captured many ducks. Caught many ducks Were they rescuing them or did they want to eat them? No, no, no. No, no. They’re still there in the house next to ours. They’re there in the house next to ours, but the others who’ve caught them have eaten them They’ve eaten them up. [laughs] And what fish they’ve caught! [and, etc. ... ]. I see, 2 Yeah 3 S lost a lot of books and ... Yeah And hamsters What about the hamsters? 7 They must have been an irreplaceable loss Yeah Yes, one of the hamsters died off— Not as a result Not immediately but it was ill. They were floating around. 13 Those two hamsters— weren’t they—
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14 There were those two hamsters floating around in their cage. K 15 Well, they weren’t prepared for a Noah’s Ark. 16 you see, they’d <> with the best of intentions! VAR 17 [Laugh] R 18 Yes, it was a long time afterwards, that S came downstairs, about three hours later. S 19 I came downstairs after there was about a foot of water in the—20 I mean I was sitting upstairs and working and there was some shouting in the street but I didn’t think anything of it—21 I just carried on and it was only when I came down there was <<4 syllsomeone?>> much tailer than <<3 syllR?>>inside the room B 22 Oh dear! K 23 You thought it was your neighbours who had some trouble, didn’t you? S 24 Yeah, I thought it was my you know [.a.] that [a:] 25 because our neighbour thought C 26 [Laughs] K [Laughs] M 27 <<6 sylls>> the reaction people have to this sort of thing S 28 Yes. R 29 Yes, it is. 30 They had—they were actually sitting downstairs and he was gesticulating to people on the road, and they saw him and started laughing. S 31 You see—because you see—I think— VAR 32 [Laugh] S 33 Yes, well it is—it is a bit funny. Here is this man who is afraid to open the door and get out of the house. R 34 It was absolutely terrible. B 35 Naturally S 36 Because the water level is higher outside—37 if he’d opened the door it’d all come rushing—38- it << 2 sylls >>39 so he sat on top of a table, or he stood up on a table inside the house and you know, drew his curtains back and tried to appeal to the passers-by. ... R 40 [Laughs] S 41 ... to do something, and they found that sight funny, of a man trapped [laughs] inside a house with the flood waters swirling around, gesticulating you know—and trying to say something they didn’t quite understand ... B 42 [Laughs]
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S R S R
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I would have laughed you know. [Laughs] Well, I’m sure it is a funny sight. Well, you would probably have laughed and then gone there and tried to help. Well, yes, you know as I said I wish I were there. [Laughs] You wish you were there? [Laughs] No, I wasn’t there. You weren’t [Pause] there but you had to go ... Hm? You had to go? Yes, I had to go shortly afterwards but what I meant was you—you couldn’t have done anything ... [and etc.]
The first of these narratives was recorded in Calcutta, but the tellers A and B are recounting their experience in their home town in the Hoogly District where the floods caused some disruption but no devastation. The second conversation is recorded in Cambridge. Both examples share the feature in common with story b)i, that they have joint tellers who are Indians, marking again that concession to telling conventions in an ‘interruptive culture’ that I have commented on in the previous section. Unlike b)i though, the telling of each of these stories is designed to provoke laughter. A story, Sacks has suggested, is a package of information; it is selectively packed with features which the teller works to make ‘storyable’.9 Tellers sometimes design their stories so that they have the character of jokes or laughables (see example g) ii in Chapter 6). Being whimsical or witty in rendering an account of events seems to have the consequence that recipients do not question the story for being implausible or boring. In the first instance, B does take measures to protect his story about the refrigerator floating past by citing an eye-witness account—‘they say a refrigerator floated past’, and then questioning it himself , ‘Can a refrigerator float?’, but his selection of particular details ensures that people will laugh at his story. The rhetorical question, ‘Can a refrigerator float?’ does the job of eliciting laughter by drawing attention to the absurdity of the claim that a refrigerator was found floating down the river. Speaker S also cooperates with B in suggesting that the eye witness account of the flood 9Sacks H., ‘Aspects of the Sequential Organization of Conversation’, unpublished draft manuscript of book, p. 11.
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which they are repeating falls into the category of a ‘tall story’ (see S’s line 9, where she reports that she herself questioned the account given by ‘the boys’). This story is therefore presented so that S and B not only allow, but actively encourage recipients to laugh at their story, by pointing out the ridiculous features of the story. By taking over the task of questioning obviously implausible aspects of their own story, I would want to argue that tellers are again displaying their attentiveness to a cultural or implicultural constraint that privileges joint telling over recipient questioning. Recipients are then free to simply join the tellers in combined laughter, virtually smudging the difference between tellers’ and listeners’ turns—in my view a characteristic of the ‘interruptive culture’ that I have posited—a prototypically Vac culture as it were, in its propensity to recombine. While there are many bouts of laughter during this story, one feature of the sequencing strategy stands out. Except at one point where there is a concerted effort at linguistic coordination from one of the listeners, and a joint ‘correction’ by both tellers S and B (lines 11 to 15, where the words kather and kancher are confused), there are virtually no other questions or comments from recipients arraigning the story’s fragility during the telling of this first story. S and B’s joint second story about the ducks floating down the river is also designed to provoke laughter, though this time the technique employed is not the one of eliciting laughter by pointing to their story as a tall one. Instead S and B vigorously come together in successive turns to imitate the loud and distressed quacking of displaced ducks as they are carried willy-nilly down the river. Now, there is an obvious selfpreserving sense in which the distress of ducks is seen to be comical in a way that a massive displacement of human beings from their homes is not. Both events are ‘storyable’, but tellers’ techniques for presenting them as stories have to be very different. With first-person stories of a flood in an environment where a flood has actually occurred, I have shown that the stories were not only presented in a way that used the environment as a conversational resource, but also that the stories were constructed so that a particular point of view was put across to a particular recipient. That is, the stories in a)i and a)ii were addressed to government officials, and the tellers accordingly designed these stories so that they were specifically oriented to the officials’ concerns. Ordinary people, said Sacks, work conversationally at being ordinary. In the context we are discussing, this remark may be elucidated in the following fashion: participants in any conversation, however unusual the circumstances, assume that the cooperative principle
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of rational communication is being obeyed. Where the conversationalists involved are a government official and a village spokesman, their contributions to the ongoing talk-exchange are rational insofar as both participants orient to this fact. Both teller and recipient in example a)i are being entirely ordinary in that both recognize that A’s telling of his story is not quite gratuitous, and that the strategy which B follows in responding to A’s story is also one which must take cognizance of his own role vis-à-vis the teller; in this respect, therefore, it is true that their conversation is ordinary, normal, even banal. Stories about floods which just disrupt normal life without causing serious distress seems to require efforts at establishing a different order of ‘ordinariness’, namely camaraderie. They call for ‘packaging’ that will amuse recipients, especially if tellers are themselves directly involved in some way. In the present example, we have tellers who also have a first person account of the flood to offer but unlike the tellers in examples a)i and ii and b)i, they are not in an environment where they can point to any evidence for their story, nor have they been badly affected by the floods. Their strategy, therefore, is to select those aspects of the flood which might engage the interest of recipients because they are put together simply as a funny story or ‘joke’, thus distancing the event and warding off sceptical questioning by recipients. Any event is storyable but tellers have to make special efforts to render it acceptable to recipients. Tellers’ techniques, that is, for making the story into ‘something-for-us’ out of the ‘things-in-the-world’ which are disasters, depends very much on who the ‘us’ are, and what kind of a ‘disaster’ it is that they are making storyable. In the final example d)ii presented above, tellers S and R combine to tell a flood story about a neighbour on a Cambridge street who is stranded in his house and can’t get out. They stress how funny the sight must have seemed to others— ‘and he was gesticulating to people on the road and they saw him and they started laughing’ (line 29), and that anybody would have found the sight funny (see S’s line 33, ‘Yes, well it is a bit funny. Here is this man who is afraid to open the door and get out of the house’, and line 43 ‘I would have laughed, you know’). The story seems to be designed so that the ludicrous aspects of distress are focused on, and though teller R does remark in line 39 that it was ‘terrible’, the remark is not a wholly serious one, as B’s laugh after her, ‘Naturally’; following on R’s remark shows. The whole bantering tone of this conversation offers a great contrast to the conversations earlier in this chapter, though it is strikingly similar to c)i which also selects the funny aspects of a flood as ‘storyable’. Tellers S in c)ii, for instance, could have told a story about the books he
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had lost, since he was given a lead to tell such a story by participant K in line 3, but he simply responds to K’s prompting with a ‘Yeah’. The question K asks in line 23, however, does seem to evoke a much more favourable response from S, and the story about their neighbour finally gets told by R and S from R’s line 30 onwards. This last chapter, then, presents just a few of the many ways in which tellers and recipients can organize the activity of story-telling with extreme sensitivity to the environment, while at the same time being guided by the overarching principles of rational communication. It shows how resourcefully tellers utilize those aspects of an event, and their experience of it, which enable them to interact best with their recipients. In short, it appears that fine complexity of listener and teller coordination cannot be reduced to any simple schematic representation. Structural descriptions of narrative as a basic conversational genre or ‘discourse universal’ are useful because they hold the mirror up to narrative itself as a species of natural theory. However, the pragmatics of context puts constant pressure on our theories of the ‘self ’ as we articulate them in our ‘ordinary’ conversations, forcing moment-by-moment changes in the shape of the narratives we relate. That is why, in Miller’s words, we ‘always need more stories’. Maybe, the following cautionary Indian folk tale, which has an implicature requiring no elucidation, can act as a coda to bring us back to the issues of narrative paradox, which seem to have floated far away and almost out of sight in this chapter. A grammarian once embarked on a boat, turned to the boatman and inquired, ‘Have you studied the rules of grammar?’ ‘No’, replied the boatman. ‘Then half your life has been wasted’, declared the scholar. Meanwhile, the river grew very turbulent. The boatman shouted to the grammarian, ‘Hey, can you swim?’ ‘I never had time for that’, answered the grammarian, ‘O grammarian’, said the boatman, ‘then your whole life is naught, for this boat is about to sink!’
The communal boat of narrative is a leaky one and its planks are continually being replaced so that one is never sure whether one is in a new vessel or a very ancient one, or even whether one is going to sink or swim when one embarks on conversational seas. All the three paradoxes of narrative that I have dwelt on in this book make, in their own way, this point about the uncertain pragmatics of narrative. Starting out with Searle’s Paradox of Fictional Discourse, I suggested that Searle’s dilemma can be dissolved not by lifting the felicity condition on the ‘truth’ of assertions in fiction but by treating both fictional or factual discourse as narrative performatives. Dennett’s Paradox of the Authorless Narrator then puts a cognitive slant on the matter by arguing that we are genetically
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programmed to produce narratives. Although we might believe that we are intentional ‘selves’ producing our own stories, these stories are, in fact, being cranked out by a narrative programme. Such a narrative programme does not distinguish between fictional and factual assertions but simply attends to cultural self-preservation. Finally, my own Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick brings together Dennett’s cognitive emphasis with Searle’s performative one by analysing narrative as a fragile structure, its fragility mimicking the uncertainty, fragility and disaster-susceptibility of our own lives. All narrative is fragile insofar as its audience can question or put in doubt, the version of events given by the teller. Like the body of the goddess Vac, narrative is continually subject to both annihilation and reconstruction. What this book has focused on are the actual processes and theories which characterize that relentless break-up and gluing together, that gravitational attraction and centripetal disintegration of narrative parts. Narrative Gravity, in effect, has tried to extend the early notion of fragility as articulated in the ethnomethodological work of Sacks, by ultimately connecting it, via speech act theory, Gricean maxims and Lewisian conventions, to Dennett’s idea of a ‘self’ which grows through narrative accretion and meme-generation. Conversation, cognition, culture: three alliterative words that gravely weigh down the title of this book. Of these, conversation augments our sense of community and cultural belonging, while cognition or the psychological routines of inference-making and perceptual theorizing enables our sense of self. Amongst the many discourse formats invented by human cultures, narrative is perhaps the best adapted to allow every member of the species relatively safe, easy and regular practice in dealing with often very complex emotional states. It is also the chief conversational means by which we manage to give ourselves a causal, evidential, rational—even if necessarily illusory and fictional—account of the enigmatic fact of our existence. That is why this book has followed Vac in espousing the cause of narrativity, which is also, in the end, a narrative of causality.
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8
qQ CONCLUSION Final Narratives Sutras
‘I dwell in many places and enter into many forms’, declared Vac in the Rigveda. Today, as we surf through internet sites and hold polyphonic conversations with hosts of strangers, these ancient words seem to echo with a new intensity. For identity, it turns out, is wonderfully unstable on the net—a mode of communication that offers its users the opportunity to forge fresh narratives of the self, almost from minute to minute. Observe how quick we are, especially among the young, to succumb to this temptation—and the meme-etic adaptability of narrative appears obvious. Little further evidence is needed of the exploratory reach of narrative in theorizing various categories of ‘selfhood’. Net inhabitants routinely juggle—one might say ‘rig’—name, age, gender and location as they negotiate the chat-rooms of the world. Anyone who has conversed for intimate hours with, let’s say, a hermaphrodite called Robin Snakeskin aged 81 from Borobodur and then, sadly, drawn a total blank when she sought to resume contact with this fascinating creature, knows this to her cost. In the virtual universe of the net, there’s no doubt that body of Vac is being radically reconstituted once again—and how! says Vac. Yet, if Vac took it upon herself to initiate and direct the text of Narrative Gravity up to this point, it is now the turn of another speaker, equally steeped in antiquity, to close off the book. In the Sanskrit critical tradition, the word sutradhar (literally, ‘one who holds the thread or rope’) is a generic term for the chronicler or bard. John Garrett describes this ubiquitous figure in his A Classical Dictionary of India as a person ‘attached to the state of all men of rank to chaunt their praises, celebrate their actions, and commemorate their ancestry.’ The sutradhar, in short is a
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classical performer of the Indian Rope Trick, a cultural appointee whose job is to keep the narrative spirit alive by skillfully controlling the puppetstrings or sutras of narrative. And the word sutra itself has a double meaning here, as is evident in a more extended passage from Garrett: Sutra—‘(From the Sanscrit siv, to sew, literally, therefore, a thread or string) is, in Sanscrit Literature, the technical name of aphoristic rules, and of works consisting of such rules. The importance of the term will be understood from the fact that the ground works of the whole ritual, grammatical, metrical, and philosophical literature of India are written in such aphorisms ... The object of the Sutras is extreme brevity; and, especially in the oldest works of this class, this brevity is carried to such an excess, that even the most experienced would find it extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible, to understand these aphorisms without the aid of commentaries ... Though there is no positive evidence as to the cause or causes which gave rise to this peculiarity of Hindu composition, the method of teaching in ancient India ... renders it highly probable that these Sutras were intended as memorial sentences which the pupil had to learn by heart, in order better to retain the fuller oral explanation which his teacher appended to them .... The manner ... in which up to this day, the Hindus are in the habit of keeping the leaves of their books together seems to throw some light on the name given to this aphoristic literature. The leaves ... are piled up, and, according to the length of the leaves, pierced in one or two places, when, through the hole or holes, one or two long strings are passed to keep them together. The name Sutra was probably, therefore, applied to works, not because they represent a thread or string of rules, but on account of the manner in which these works were rendered fit for practical use; just as in German a volume is called Band, from its being ‘bound’. That a habit deeply rooted outlives its necessity, is probably also shown by these Sutra works; for while the oldest works of this class may be called Sutras by necessity, there are others which convey the suspicion that they merely imitated [my italics] the Sutra style after the necessity had passed away, more especially as they do not adhere to the original brevity of the oldest Sutra ... fixed by Max Müller from 600 to 200. BC ...1.
From Garrett’s description we learn that: a) the Sanskrit sutras were distinguished by their extreme brevity and were hard to explicate without the help of extended commentary; b) they consisted mainly of grammatical rules and are likely to have been mnemonic devices; c) a tradition of oral transmission ironically constituted the core of the written tradition of the sutra; d) the material culture of the sutra consisted in a ‘book’ of leaves piled up like an untidy Dennettian narrative of self and pierced through with a single ‘thread’ joining them together; and finally, e) the sutras had their share of ‘modern’ fake imitators.
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Surely, as Vac would not hesitate to point out, the parallel is obvious. As the grammar-obsessed sutradhar of Narrative Gravity, I do not just inherit and appropriate several traditions of learning, I also sneakily contrive to offer a commentary on these great masters. But, being a mere upstart, I seem to have got the whole story back to front. In this book, the commentary came first, spanning eight long chapters, only now to be followed by certain ersatz sutras. Before we come to these sutras, however, we must return for one last time to the gurus who headed the various sections of this book. Narrative Gravity explores the anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist idea that our stories make us up, rather than we (make up) our stories. This idea derives from Daniel Dennett’s insight that our basic identities are conferred on us by the myriad tales we hear and narrate throughout our lifetimes. The ‘self’, in this sense, is a ‘center of narrative gravity’ created by each individual at the intersection(s) where story-telling lines of force meet. Presumably, when these story-lines are physically erased in the brain by diseases like Alzheimer’s, there occurs a resultant loss of self-hood and a much ‘lighter’, almost negligible, sense of identity. That we do find such ghost-people amongst us strengthens Dennett’s case although he does not himself discuss these instances. Yet, even if it is true that we are born to weave stories, why is it that we are so ‘programmed’? Narrative Gravity attempted to answer this question by carrying the important but embryonic notion that stories are obsessive self-constructions to its (socio-)logical conclusion. My suggestion was that narrative—a universal genre found in every known human culture— functions as proto-theory. It works by introducing us to ‘primitive’ but foundational versions of biological theory (how the leopard got its spots); political theory (Robin Hood was a revolutionary who challenged the oppressive class-structures of a feudal society); moral theory (Cordelia’s ‘sin’ was to plainly tell ‘the truth’ and Lear’s to stubbornly refuse to hear it); aesthetic theory (the mirror on the wall in ‘Snow-white’ proved itself a dispassionate judge of beauty)—and so forth. That these one-line summaries are crude reductions of exquisite myths is not the point; the point is that the stories to which they refer perform, in essence, a function not dissimilar to the cultural ‘work’ done by, say, Darwinian theory for biology or Marxist theory for political science or Christianity for ethics or Platonic theory for aesthetics. That is, they present particular hypotheses about phenomena in the world and present a paradigm to explain them. Cognitively, narrative seems to have been designed as a evolutionary mechanism to probe experience and create competing theories about
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the world, especially the world of emotional experience, which is so crucial to cultural survival. What narratives do is provide us with relatively lowcost means of taking mental risks. Consider, for example, our physiological reactions when we read a ghost-story or adventure fiction. Our palms sweat, our pulse-rates shoot up and our throats go dry, even as we ‘know’ that the words on the page are pure make-believe. We don’t actually have to go and climb that cliff or love that bounder in order to realize the dangers and aches inherent in these situations. Just imagine, then, how infinitely useful the ‘lazy machine’1 of fiction is: it extracts intellectual labour from us while giving us the illusion of enjoying our leisure. In this book, I contend that the growth of narrative as a mental structure and of fiction as a form of the ‘lie’ provide tremendous selective advantages to our species. They tie in causal, logical explanations of actual concrete ‘events’ with emotional affect in a powerful way, so that the ‘lessons’ taught to us as children, and then throughout our lives through stories, lay the cornerstones for most of our crucial beliefs and reactions. The first step in this argument, of course, was to make the obvious claim that narrative capabilities and the unique specialization of language in humans are crucially linked. This is what I did in Chapter I. Language gives us the ‘gift’ which grammarians call ‘displacement’—the ability to summon up scenarios that do not exist in the here and now. It gives us access to memories, fantasies and the future. As symbol-using creatures, we possess, so to speak, two very effective mental tools that help us arrive at a sense of ‘self’: one, grammar; two, narrative. That is, a narrative embedded in a cultural conversation has the same psychological importance as the sentence in grammar, in the sense that, just as all language rely on sentences to ‘construct’ the world for them, they rely on narratives to ‘explain’ the world to them. Narrative, that is, is a structure that introduces the question ‘why?’ and the connective ‘because’ into the world. Time’s arrow may be a physical illusion but it is psychologically and experientially real and story ‘sequencing’ basically reinforces this ‘theory’ that we as a species hold about the nature of time and its interplay with causality. A chief theme in Narrative Gravity concerns the cognitive tensions that arise within cultures when the basic temporal, linear, monologic ABCDEF ... structure of narrative is sought to be incorporated into the a-temporal, alternating, dialogic ABABAB ... mechanism of conversation. In such a situation a story is, paradoxically co-authored by its listeners. 1This felicitous phrase is from Umberto Eco’s Six Walks Through the Fictional Woods,
1993, p 49. Narrative is called ‘lazy’ because its lets the listener/reader do most of the work of inference-making and knowledge-creating.
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That is why the book has as its subtitle the three inter-related words Conversation, Cognition, Culture. The ‘conversations’ conducted in the book are between contending theorists such as Searle, Dennett and, immodestly, myself. The various chapters of the book were thus linked for me via what I call the Three Paradoxes of Narrative—Searle’s (how do words in fiction both have and not have their ‘ordinary’ everyday meanings?); Dennett’s (can there be author-less narratives?) and mine (why are narratives so good at making us accept hypotheses that clearly challenge commonsense? why is it useful to hold ‘competing’ theories as they are presented to us through our narratives? what possible pay-offs could such a risky intellectual strategy have?). With respect to this third ‘paradox’, I would say that the core chapter of Narrative Gravity is probably Chapter 5, which presents my own attempt at producing a tentative cognitive grammar of narrative. Despite these efforts, though, the question remains: who is the reader of such a volume as this? Why should anyone, but especially literary critics, be tempted to ‘dialogue’ with the cognitively inclined thinkers whose thoughts are discussed in this book? In general, it appears to be the case that literary theorists and cognitive scientists are not on speaking terms, so that exciting debates in one area may go unheard in the other. Sociologists and literary people know all about Propp, Barthes, LeviStrauss, Bakhtin, structuralism and the dialogic imagination but very little about Labov, Searle, Grice, Dennett, speech acts or story-grammars, and vice-versa. Yet, as Victor Hugo once said, it is easier to stop invading armies than an idea whose time has come! I believe that the time has indeed come when textual theorists must talk to cognitive scientists, psycholinguists and philosophers who, in turn, need to be persuaded that their theories can be successfully propelled into the ‘soft’ areas of literature and cultural studies. Recent research in narratology suggests explicitly that ‘whereas narratology began as a sub-field within structuralist literary and cultural theory ... [it] should [now] be construed as [a] resource for cognitive science.’2 Conversely, specific findings in the cognitive sciences on, for 2See, for example, D. Harman (1999) who aims, in a survey article, to ‘sketch out some of the implications of recent work in the cognitive sciences for narrative theory [and] ... consider how, inversely, current modes of narrative-theoretical inquiry bear on the field of the cognitive sciences’. Using the entries in the MIT Enclyclopaedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) as his base, Harman shows how a number of the topics covered in MITECS (animal communication, folk psychology, theory of mind [TOM], evolutionary biology, social play, causal reasoning, etc.) might be illuminated by research in narrative theory—and vice-versa.
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instance, ‘mirror neurons’ in the F5 area of the brains of monkeys— roughly corresponding to Broca’s speech area in humans—seem to reinforce the idea, explored via the third ‘paradox’ in Narrative Gravity, that story telling could be a means of ‘reading the minds of others’. Narrative, according to this view, affords an inexpensive, everyday means whereby we may gain emotional practice at empathizing with others, as well as build a theory which ‘explains’ the future consequences of our acts. The fact that, in the higher simian species, the ‘same’ brain cells are activated both in the actual performance of an act and in just watching the action being performed, thus has enormous and exciting consequences for narrative theory and its embedding in human linguistic ability.3 In this book, I have tried to develop some of the basic arguments that might serve to shore up these vital links between the fields of cognitive science and narratology. For example, when I sought to produce original arguments that extend the scope of the Gricean theory of implicature to one of impliculture or the Austinian theory of the speech act to felicity conditions on the activity of story-telling, my aim was to modify these theories so that they could include narrative in a manner that interests philosophers of mind but does not bore literary people to death because the language used is too colourless and technical. To submit ‘hard’ cognitivist positions to a kind of Walter Benjaminesque reverie that might make them accessible and attractive to literary thinkers has been one of my main goals for this book. I do not imagine, of course, that I have succeeded but I did take the precaution of trying the book out among one of the hardest groups to please in contemporary culture—my graduate students (see Appendix V)—and found them, to my amazement, enthusiastically receptive. Such is the hold that narrative exercises. As I have already mentioned, my assignment in this ultimate chapter remains to knot together the book’s theoretical loose ends, a metaphor that the paradox of the Indian Rope Trick naturally suggests. To 3See in this connection, Gallese, V. and Goldman, A. (1998) ‘Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind Reading’ and Rizzolatti , G and Arbib, M. (1998) ‘Language within our Grasp’. According to V.S. Ramachandran, another researcher in the area, mirror neuron studies lead to fundamental questions about the acquisition of culture in human communities—‘their emergence and further development in hominids was a decisive step’. The current hypothesis in the cognitive sciences seems to be that ‘mirror neurons’ provide the brain architecture that might help explain why we can ‘feel what others feel’, the sources of our empathy with others. My own conjecture would be that these abilities also enable us to construct mental representations of ourselves as ‘intentional agents’ via the complex linguistic device, primarily, of narrative. Such a conjecture is keeping with the idea that humans as a species happen to be linguistic, story-telling beings who forge their individual and communal senses of selfhood via narrative performance.
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accomplish this task, I have chosen to call upon the textual device of the sutra. Finally then, the bits-and-pieces below are culled from the whole of Narrative Gravity and simply strung together for readers like my students, and unknown others, who constitute the multiple co-authors of ‘my’ narrative. Of course, the objections to this strategy are also obvious. Why these particular sutras and not others? What about the ‘other’ gurus, those mentioned in the book, but not given nearly enough space: Barthes and Bakhtin, for example? And how about the fact that mimicking the sutra methodology in a book like this involves so much pointless repetition, made laughably easy by the cut-and-paste methods of modern wordprocessing? Such repetition merely amounts to using the sutras like a student’s highlighter pen, but shouldn’t this high-lighting be left to the reader? The author after all has already had her say—and so forth ... Yet, to these protests, one might offer the rejoinder that a reader is quite free to leave the sutras below untouched and confine his criticism to the preceding text, if he happens to prefer the linearity of the gnomon to random gaps in a gnomic string. And who is the reader, anyhow, in a text that claims, in essence, to be co-constructed? In either case, what matters is the interpretative skill and effort that’s always needed to make patterned sense out of potential gibberish. Below then, the body of Vac, always a puzzle, to be reassembled—or not—as one chooses ... 1. Structuralism: the impulse to dissect and label the body of Vac, to impose order on ‘squirming facts’, motivates both our fascination with binaries, mirroring the alternating ABABAB ... structures of conversation as well as our strong intuitions about linear sequencing, reflecting the temporal ‘and then’ ABCDEF ... structure of narrative. 2. Within the context of a cooperative speech community, ‘two sources’ of ‘natural order’—the narrative and the conversational—are pulled together. Both resources are structurally open-ended and infinite. Departures from these dominant orders are ‘naturally’ noticed, since they demand extra cognitive effort at sense-making. 3. Narrative requires a meta-theory of time. Because we hold fast to the belief that, despite Einstein’s equations, perceptual and physical time both flow always forwards, we are able to play games with time—to cut up, re-sequence and re-label parts of the body of Vac and then recombine them in a linear mode. 4. If psychological experiments seem to confirm that events can ‘happen’ for us milli-seconds before we actually perceive them via our senses, this is so because we are already in the grip of some powerful narrative ‘theory’; on the other hand, if events happen
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to us seconds after, then the narrative theory we were operating with may have been too ‘weak’ to link the event-sequence we have experienced. Narrative is perhaps our most efficient way of packaging our perceptions of ‘selves’ as ‘strung together’ across time. Sorting events into the temporal format of stories enables easy storage, easy retrieval and easy cultural exchange thus confering a distinct evolutionary advantage. Should anyone try the Gedankenexperimente of attempting to construct that mythical Indian rope-trick of an extended sentence, she will end up before long, like it or not, with a compelling narrative turn to her sentence. This is a testable prediction. In the structural picture of narrative, both the external, political state of the world and the internal, plural state of mind, are factored out. Co-constructed stories are necessary to the resolution of the Indian Rope Trick Paradox of Narrative, because they yield the vital conversation resin (expressions of appreciation, you-knows, ums, and I means) that glue the sundered body of Vac together again Narratives are produced in multiple drafts but by multiple authors. Audience reactions, the twitters, chirps and trills of participation, do not just influence a teller’s story but are structurally a part of the story. Evaluative devices serve the function of answering the ever present question ‘Why are you telling me this story?’ The Labovian ‘Coda’ is an vital interactional device to return the narrative time to the ‘present’. ‘We find that most narratives are so designed as to emphasize the strange and unusual character of the situation’ (Labov and Waletzky). ‘It seems plain enough that people monitor the scenes they are in for their storyable characteristics. And yet the awesome overwhelming fact is that they come away with no storyable characteristics’ (Sacks). A conflict? Myths and legends cannot be just more ‘expert’ versions of stories in everyday talk. For, the story-teller in a face-to-face situation has to be alert from moment to moment. She has to be a ‘cog’ spinning in perfect unison with other cogs in the freewheeling conversational wheel. This requires extraordinary expertise. Story grammars cognitively reconstruct the point-of-view of the listener or story-recipient via the progressive inferences he makes during the telling of a story.
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16. Three types of inferences are made during the telling of a story— logical, informational and evaluative. 17. Nietzsche’s towering superman is actually a fragile construct of subs, paras, metas, transes, alters, uns and semis. Much the same analogy holds for the ‘strong’ image of structuralism. 18. Far more cognitively salient than the core elements of narrative, it turns out, are its peripheral accoutrements. In conversational narrative, the structure of a story is actually fragmented so as to perversely give away some of the best performative parts to listeners! 19. The aesthetic of narrative, its cultural call for attention, is about a subversion of the natural order of happenings. It is an often violent unsettling of the logic of expectation. 20. Truth on one leg is a monument; on two, it is travelling theory. For this reason, it could be challenging to equip truth with that second leg, which is surely—fiction. Fiction is theory at its most untrammelled. 21. In general, pragmatic theories today (Relevance Theory, Gricean Theory, Classical speech act theory, a Davidsonian Theory of Metaphor, Brown and Levinson’s Theory of Politeness etc.) confront one crucial problem. How are R-intentions, or implicatures arising from (linguistic) communication, to be restricted? What principles or norms do human beings use to prevent an impossible proliferation of implicatures? 22. The basic unit of pragmatic study is the ‘utterance’, yet the notion ‘utterance’ seems too scattered, vague and impoverished to be analytically useful. An alternative unit which pragmaticists could consider basic is the narrative, constituting both the upper bound and the main structure of pragmatic analysis, just as the sentence works as the largest unit or boundary structure as well as the central object of grammatical inquiry. 23. What makes the narrative vitally different from the sentence is precisely its pragmatic propensity. It is a structure devised to probe into context. 24. Narrative sets in motion processes of hypothesis formation, premise correction and reasoning among Hearer/Readers, whose task it is to deduce the point of the story from the evidence that Speakers/ Tellers present to them by attributing intentional stances to them. 25. Fictions come in neat narrative packages. 26. All narratives work as ‘emotion prompts’ but most especially fiction. Fiction is conventionally associated with those leaky perlocutionary
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effects (curiosity, surprise, fear wonder) which seem to indicate that illocutionary boat is not so water-tight after all. Fiction is always ‘false’ or ‘pretended’ and therefore the prototype of the ‘parasitic’ speech act. Fiction is the most ‘performative’ of acts since its existence is typically predicated on its announcing itself as fiction, and that’s that, in the same way as a promise is a promise. So it falls into the mould of an ‘explicit performative’ quite easily, enabling strict ‘felicity conditions’ to be formulated for it. Fictions ‘make believe’ and thus constitute exploratory mechanisms in a way similar to scientific hypotheses. They enable us to investigate counterfactual worlds, without getting caught up in what Austin described as tedious and irrelevant questions of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’. Searle: Stories, fictional and factual, considered as illocutionary acts differ their direction of fit. Searle’s Paradox: If the meaning of the functional sentence is determined by the linguistic rules that attach to the elements of the sentence, and if those rules determine that the literal utterance of the sentence is an assertion and if there is a literal utterance of the sentence, then surely it must be an assertion: but it can’t be an assertion since it does not comply with those rules that are specific to and constitutive of, assertions. The true paradox of fictional discourse is the physical and psychological perlocultionary effects it has on us. Our hearts beat faster, our palms sweat, our feet beat a tattoo, while all the while we are fully aware that the experience we are going through is false. Our attention should be directed, not at the fiction/non-fiction nexus at all, but at the more crucial dichotomy between the act of telling a story, either fictional or non-fictional, and the act of making an assertion. Austin: Even an unwieldy genre like the novel can be a possible speech-act, where the phrase ‘A Novel’ indicates that a connected sequence is to follow. Narrative is a structure that converts talk into text. ‘Maximally effective’ communication in narrative routinely requires tellers to reflexively attend to a double goal of self revelation and self concealment; it would seem to be self-defeating to ‘tell all’. The keyword ‘interesting’ (as opposed to ‘boring’) in estimates of narrative is ‘interesting’ because of its very nebulousness. Sperber and Wilson: the world is full of bores. Narrative in conversation is always a spectator sport, where the
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speaker is required at all times to show awareness of being watched, heard, and assessed. Any attempt to resolve the problem of speakers’ and hearers’ access to indirect meanings must involve us in the painstaking endeavour of considering not just isolated individual speech acts such as greetings, promises and assertions, but the nested contexts in which they occur. One such ‘nest’ for any individual speech act is the conversation within which it is placed. Another much larger, nest could be the sets of cultural and normative beliefs that speaker/ hearers bring to the telling of a story or any other speech act. That is why we need Nair’s concept of impliculture in addition to generalized Gricean implicature. In what seems like an anachronistic mockery of the Principle of Expressibility, Nietzsche said—‘What can be thought must certainly be a fiction.’ The act of sharing makes a fictional thought ‘real’ since a speaker changes from an epistemic to an ontological stance when articulating her thoughts. Ethically, we’re into dubious terrain with recorded conversations because we are ‘eavesdropping; here, as it were, on private conversations, on personal evaluations, and turning them into ‘data’— the fodder of ‘theory’. How do we reconcile the need to consider not just the abstract attempts of philosophers at reconstituting ‘natural’ communication but conversationalists’ own finely honed skills with the need to minimize the invasion of private stories, private selves? The hearer’s task is not simply to recognize but to respond to the speaker’s meaning by extending its implications and scope. It is this ‘engagement with the present’ aspect of conversation that no researcher can replicate when studying the transcript of a story. The teller is absent, as in a literary narrative, and this severely alters the conventions of interpretation. And yet, a researcher is as unavoidably committed to interpreting the transcript of a narrative as is the hearer of a story told in real time in a casual conversation. Expressibility as a capacity of language to match the resources of thought is not an issue in Gricean theory; interactive notions like explicitness, explicibility and expressiveness, however, may well be. Explicitness, a criterion I derive from the Quantity Maxim, would require that a hearer settles on an interpretation of a speaker’s ‘meaning’ which minimizes the incompleteness and vagueness inherent in that utterance. Explicability, which I derive from the Maxim of Quality, would require
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a hearer to infer from any utterance of the speaker which she prima facie gauges as metaphorical or untruthful, some additional meaning or gloss consistent with the speaker in fact having been truthful when she appeared to be lying. Expressiveness, deriving from the Maxim of Manner, involves those features which Wittgenstein christened ‘imponderables’. Tone, gestures, facial expressions, quality of voice, as well as appropriate choices in vocabulary and sentence patterning, would all affect a hearer’s patterns of inference in this regard. Interpretation involves explaining the (linguistic) actions of others in terms of a schema of attributed desires and beliefs; in this sense, interpretation is a guarantor of ‘autonomy of meaning’, since there can always be more than one intended use’, in fact myriad uses, for any utterance. The speaker always gets the benefit of the doubt when her crime, so to speak, is communicative incompetence. This is where Davidson’s ‘principle of charity’ comes into play. Nietzsche: ‘Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.’ Austin’s inspired variation on this Pascalian theme is to close the gap between desire as self-motivated and force as other-initiated. In Austin’s analysis, desire is force; it is the spur to action. When the language game is narrative, the complexities of performativity and pleasure, fiction and fact, explicability and expressivity, desire and force, tend inevitably to overlay the more simplistic dichotomy between truth and falsity. Nietzsche recognized that the concept of truth becomes vital and interesting only when it is realized that there are at least two, and possibly several ways, of expressing a ‘truth’. My suggestion is that the form of narrative is felicitously adapted to exploring the multiple, often paradoxical, ways in which ‘truth’ is presented. Because narrative is the typical site of fiction, the ‘truths’ used by adults across cultures to socialize their children come encoded as narrative; and the ancient battle scars of communities, to which only fictions can do honour and justice, turn out almost always to be recorded in narrative form. Furthermore, the store of social wisdom— what we like to think of as wisdom rather than ‘knowledge’ or ‘reason’—is also made less dreary, more palatable, more plausible, through the intervention, specifically, of narrative fictions. Speech act theory is haunted by its Carnapian ancestry. The avenging
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ghost of grammar shows up each time pragmatics seeks independently to resolve its to-be-or-not-to-be Hamletian placement. Cabin’d, cribbed, confined by its philosophical antecedents, the Austinian performative simply cannot contain the endless supplements of meaning that Derrida wishes to stuff into it; nor can it hold all the literary baggage that Paul de Man wants it to. Nair’s reformulation of Derrida’s objections to Austin: Every performative comes with quotation marks round it. That is how we recognize it. Only because there have been previous instances of performance, can we recognize that the present instance is ‘infelicitous’. In this respect, the felicitous infelicity of ‘original’ ‘poetic’ language is no different from ‘ordinary’ infelicity. Ergo, Derrida can come to the satisfying conclusion that, given Austin’s own premises, there exists no such item as a ‘pure’, ‘original’ performative. The essential performative feature of perlocutions is that they have to be indirectly achieved. The fact of the matter is: one cannot frighten, annoy, amuse, people simply by declaring: I frighten/ annoy/ amuse you ...’ Try it!. All the long lists of emotion verbs in every human language just lie heavy and inert—sleeping beauties—until activated by ‘the kiss’ of narrative. Herein lies the cognitive value of the ‘simple’ story across cultures. If ‘disguise’ is such an essential feature of pretending, can fiction which wears its falsehood on its sleeve, really qualify as pretended assertion? What is being hidden? Plagiarism is literary theft, and it involves passing off someone else’s words as one’s own. In this respect, it is related to pretence in the way that Austin suggests the acts of ‘impersonation’, ‘imposture’ and ‘posing’ are. Authorship is typically erased in the large majority of narratives that circulate in a society. Even if one were to pretend, to one’s children for instance, that the strange terror of Hansel and Gretel was entirely the product of one’s own unique genius, this would not constitute an act of plagiarism. That is so because: where there is oral transmission, a story does not strictly retain an ‘original’ linguistic format; and where no exactly replicable linguistic format exists, there can be no rights of ownership; and where there is no ownership of words, no possibility of plagiarism exists. Conversational conventions concerning rights over third and first narratives—and narrative points-of-view—act as natural safeguards
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against plagiarism. The ‘I’ narrative can be said to have an ‘original’ linguistic format, but if it is reproduced by others, unless a wholly extraordinary memory for semantics, syntax and phonological surasegmentals is involved, there is no question of exact simulation. So in oral discourse, ‘authorship’, if any, can be said to attach only to the first articulation of a narrative, after which plagiarism, strictly speaking, is virtually impossible. And this in turn would strongly imply that each (re-) telling of a story is necessarily an ‘original’ act in and of itself. Anti-Derrida? The basic form of the illocutionary act is the simple F(p); and the five basic types of ‘illocutions’ or linguistic ‘acts’—directives, commissives, declaratives, exclamatives and representatives—make up the fundamental building blocks of intentional meaning across the languages of the world. If narrative qualifies as a speech act, its efficaciousness as a performative derives from its perlocutionary effects. As a conversational object, a story may be defined as a bundle of perlocutions. Narrative ‘power’ or ‘force’ comes, not from an ‘indirect’ imitation of the speech act of assertion, but from the special feature that it conventionally secures perlocutionary effects. Any narrative within a conversation could be viewed as a miniature three-act play, with a turn-taking sequence of three parts (preface or orientation, main turn or complicating action and resolution and/ or coda). And as with a play, applause is conventionally required, because the whole raison d’etre of this sort of performance is to gain the admiration of audience, for pulling off an unlikely, an almost magical stunt—that of showing, a la the Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick, that communication for communication’s sake is a logical possibility in which we take delight. Granted our weakness for other versions of ‘the truth’, it is not then surprising that we all, as Nietsche suggests, ‘sometimes tell a lie’. Narratives and ‘imponderable’ gestures which characterize the telling of stories, rehearse ‘truth’ for us in ways that hold our attention. Unlike illocutionary acts, which are allegedly ‘performed’ just by virtue of being appropriately uttered, implicatures and perlocutionary acts both depend crucially on the notion of ‘interpretation’. If Grice’s theory of conversational implicature is read as one of perlocutionary effect, this immediately puts narrative perlocutions in the context of a ‘talk-exchange’ where implicatures arise from conversationalists’ structure of expectations.
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69. The ‘Speakers’ and ‘Hearers’ that are among the main props of speech act theory, are conspicuous for their genderlessness, their classlessness, their absolute lack of dialectal and regional specificity and the flawlessness of their ‘performances’. 70. We explain textual details by adducing narrators and explain narrators by adducing qualities of real people. What is the status of ‘real people’ within the explanatory framework of the speech act? 71. If we try to think ourselves into the minds of our pets, or of animals to whom we attribute high ‘intelligence’ (vervet monkeys, chimps, dolphins etc.) the only way to succeed in this enterprise is via anthropomorphism. In this sense, to universalize is to ‘get personal’, and inevitably to be ethnocentric. 72. Pitting speech act theory’ against ‘Rhetoric Language’ in a de Manian sense presents us with a metaphysics. Mere human notions of the moral and the rational, such as sincerity, cooperativeness trust, tolerance, etc. come up against an uncanny force that cannot be ‘read’ at all in terms of these notions. 73. Readings of literary texts, above all, demonstrate the fundamental ‘unreadability’ of language. They reveal the aporias between the textual creation of meaning and the destruction, or at any rate undoing, of this meaning in any attempt to ‘understand’ it. Herein lies the deep connection between ethics and aesthetics—language at its most beautiful and seductive it is also unstable, unreliable, unreadable. 74. Note that we cannot (or do not?) prosecute ‘language’ for the crimes of, let’s say, plagiarism or perjury; we only indict persons A or B for these offences. 75. Deconstruction reinforces the reader’s sense of a ‘battle’ to be fought out between ‘theory’ (speech act theory in particular) and ‘language’ (especially literary language); between human ‘personality and linguistic ‘patterns’; between anthropomorphic ‘morality’ and ‘rationality’ and non-human ‘tropologies’ and ‘senselessness’. 76. A ‘self’ is socially exhibited through a range of speech acts. The asymmetry between ‘real’ first-person, face-to-face communication and ‘unreal’ third person authorial presentations may call up, not just different interpretative norms but also different moral conventions. If all our acts are displays of the self, they all involve role-playing and ‘imitation’, but the here-and-now ephemerality of the nonliterary speech act imposes a great urgency on conversationalists born of their shared knowledge that the present is fly-away, not possessed of narrative gravity.
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77. The non-preservability of our everyday speech acts, not excluding our narrative acts, dictates our attitudes to the ‘privacy’ of these acts. Precisely because their tellers and listeners were not aiming at public ‘display texts’, narratives privately exchanged can be said to reveal narrators at their most vulnerable, with their guards down and their personal preoccupations up front. Unlike the literary narrator, a conversationalist is not required, by convention, to ‘watch her words’. This is why the ‘right to privacy’ becomes a moot moral issue when analysing ‘real’ versus ‘literary’ narratives. 78. The ‘author’ of a literary text is, conventionally, not taken to be remembering and recreating, but creating and presenting (i.e. making ‘present’ to readers events not culled from the real past). Unlike the teller of a conversational story, she therefore cannot be indicted for her failure to remember the past ‘correctly’. As Roland Barthes puts it in another context, what distinguished a novel or a poem is that it is literally ‘about nothing’. Perhaps we could say—in literature everything is presented and nothing is remembered. 79. Exploring conversational narrative brings to the surface the submerged moral codes and judgements that underlie our everyday speech acts. Part of the function of story-telling is to unsettle, at least momentarily, some of our regulatory moral assumptions. It is in this connection that notions such as pretence, plagiarism, parasitic speech, equivocation, and dissimulation come up in relation to the fictional narrative act. 80. Argument from Burge: Since our explicational abilities do not exhaust the concepts they describe, we are always subject to social correction in our use of language to describe the world. In this respect, language is unquestionably social. 81. Looking to others to ‘set standards’ in language is a ‘psychological necessity’ for a species that has language as its chief means of presenting premises and drawing inferences for purposes of conceptualization. Without such social reliance, language would be a code whose meaningfulness remained vastly under-utilized, an ideal tool lying idle. Divested of its enormous communicative potential, language would also be pitifully reduced as a vehicle of thought. 82. Extending Searle’s Chinese Room argument: a programmed computer can manage to ‘tell’ a story but can it respond spontaneously and variably to listeners’ interventions, and extrapolations from its own text? Can it produce that magical binding glue of discourse required for any successful performance of the Indian Rope Trick?
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83. If we lived in a world where we could read each other’s thoughts— had transparent screens across our chests, for example, Grice’s Maxims of Quality and Quantity, which enjoin us to be informative and truthful respectively, would be rendered redundant. The price we put on a piece of cheese may be arbitrary but there is a non-arbitrary, rational relationship between the price of the piece of cheese, its weight and taste, and the fact that we live in a world where lumps of cheese do suddenly grow or shrink. Similarly, there is in the language games of our ordinary communication a relationship between the ‘arbitrary’ rules attaching to particular cultural games that we establish, and the ‘rational’ rules of behaviour that are forced upon us by the kind of world we live in, between the Lewisian concept of socially agreed conventions and the Gricean notion of naturally determined maxims. 84. Lewis: Use of language belongs to a class of situations with a conspicuous common character: they involve coordination problems. Conventions help solve coordination problems in language games by reducing the imperfectness of information regarding any recurrent situation S’ among members of a population P. 85. What is the main difference between conventions and maxims? Maxims are a privileged subset of the myriad conventions by which a culture lives. Conventions are convenience rules guided by mutual self-interest, whereas norms or maxims have an altruistic element. 86. There are loads of conventions which do not, on the face of it, qualify as maxims: eating with knives and forks, wearing saris not skirts, using a white flag to signal peaceful intentions, not pointing at people etc.; yet every convention always aspires to the status of a maxim, which would confer on it more meme-survival value in a culture. 87. Nair, after Barthes: Barthes suggests that every narrative text possesses the conventional structural capacity to contain periods of ‘rest and luxury’. These, presumably, are areas of the text where the reader can doze or relax on a ’park bench’ as it were. She is temporarily relieved of the need to pay stringent attention to the textual ‘action’. Barthes’ terminology of ‘catalysers’ and ‘indices’ versus ‘cardinal functions’ and ‘nuclei’ (conceptually similar to Labov’s distinction between the formal and functional elements of a narrative) is meant to reflect these differences in the pacing of a text. How we place our park benches within a story or the uses to which we put them, depend, of course, on the ‘arbitrary’ literary conventions established within cultures.
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88. Taken together, Gricean maxims and Lewisian conventions offer a model which characterizes most of the features of story-telling observed through conversational analytic methods. 89. Grice’s four Maxims are denoted by the pseudo-Kantian categories of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner: Searle’s suggestion is that Grice’s account can be amended by adding to it rules that make explicit the ‘literal’ meaning of an utterance as well as its non-natural meaning. 90. Levinson: Grice’s maxims do not on their own provide the ‘knowledge that is necessary to make the appropriate inferences’ from particular activities in talk, since these maxims ‘are supposed to hold across different types of activity’. 91. For Grice, the concept of rationality is itself deeply implicated in a code of social obligations. The pattern in the Gricean formula is: rationality implies cooperation; cooperation implies obedience to the reciprocal moral imperatives of the maxims; reciprocal obedience in turn implies that morality is to be understood as fundamentally social, rather than a matter of purely individual vision or choice; and, thus, finally, that the psychology of rationality, its mental status and moral hold over us, can be deduced from the social phenomenon of everyday conversation. 92. Dennett presents a paradoxical situation where it is possible for a tale to be produced without a teller who must take responsibility for it. Dennett’s clever scheme does, however, need an intelligent listener. And it is here that Grice comes in, with his emphasis on a smart listener who can ‘make sense’ of almost random information. 93. Corresponding to each of Grice’s four maxims, there are those peculiar to narrative. The Super-maxim for Narrative: ALWAYS PROTECT THE FRAGILITY OF YOUR NARRATIVES BECAUSE YOU ARE THEREBY PROTECTING YOUR VULNERABLE ‘SELF’. Corresponding to Grice’s Maxim of Quality or Truthfulness is the Narrative Maxim: BE PLAUSIBLE, EXPLICATE! (provide orientations, engage in ordinariness, make your stories ‘something for us’). Corresponding to Grice’s Maxim of Quantity is the Narrative Maxim: BE SUMMARY AND EXPLICIT (provide abstracts, didactic, proverbial or other generalizations as required, so that people ‘get the point’ of your story). Corresponding to Grice’s Maxim of Relevance is the Narrative Maxim: BE INTERESTING AND EXCITING (locally occasion your stories, produce tellables and include story-internal evaluators, allow listener participation in the turn-taking sequence).
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Corresponding to Grice’s Maxim of Manner is the Narrative Maxim: BE MEME-CONSCIOUS AND EXPRESSIVE (produce culturally appropriate narratives, be as ironic, reflexive and ‘literary’ as required, so that your story, which is an extension of yourself, is as well adapted as you can make it for social survival and transmission). One way to conceptualize these Maxims of Narrative Exchange is to think of them in relation to a cline of hearer-judgements from least to most implausible, boring and irrelevant. 94. Impliculture versus implicature. What does the idea of ‘impliculture’ buy us? Briefly, it allows us to focus on the relations between: i) cultural specificities ii) those things left unsaid within a cultural community iii) the community as a holistic, meme-sharing conversational group.
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Because the Gricean system encourages one to think in terms of universal deductive implicatures, it minimizes attention to social differences. My concept of impliculture, or cultural implicativeness, is one through which we can theorize particular cultural communities as groups engaged in a complex polyphonic conversation. A great deal depends on conveying the unstated, or the understated, in such an ongoing group conversation since insider status within the community would come from listeners’ picking up specific implicultural meanings, rather than simply deducing the general Gricean meaning implicatures. Implicature prevents outsider ‘freeloading’ and thus safeguards cultural wealth. Paradoxically, it appears that a study of ordinary narratives proves that ‘undesirable’ maxim violations and ‘desirable’ perlocutionary communication are inseparable. This is what gives narrative its double power and its durable complexity. The noun ‘narrative’ both contains, and is bounded by, the noun ‘native’. The ability to create and comprehend stories is a species-ability with enormous social consequences. How do stories confer identities on ‘selves’? And how do the ‘selves’ iterated in our stories contribute to the meme-status of stories, their cultural survival? A narrative grammar must explain issues of coherence, formulaic repetition, expectations of chronology, causality and affective tension among audiences, as well as culture-specific differences in semantic interpretation. Such a grammar—structuralist or speech act—stories the status of a specialized discourse.
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99. Inferencing by listeners gives consists in active interrogation of tellers’ narrative strategies. The structure of a story is understood not so much as a retrospective given as a creative challenge to both listeners and tellers. 100. Implicatures are worked into conversations by tellers; inferences are worked out from conversations by listeners. This is a basic division of labour in all communicative activity. 101. Thinking about the notion of inference, we could begin by referring to an etymology suggested for another key word—cognition, deriving from the Greek ‘gnomon’ which means ‘sundial’. Reading time—whose linear structure we know to be of utmost importance in decoding any narrative—off a sundial means setting in motion a chain of inference. It means having to infer a quite abstract entity—time—from nothing more than a pole, its shadow and the positioning of the sun in the sky. 102. Every narrative has, so to speak, a gnomon coiled within it. As the narrative unwinds in its structural linearity, this gnomon of time lets loose dynamic implicatures which listeners must infer in order to derive pleasure and profit from the story. How do these inferences alter the structure of the world for human beings making their interlocking moves as ‘cogs’ communicating through the machinery of conversation? 103. Narratives offer a natural harbour, a kind of safe house for the memes of a culture. 104 Narrative is a fertile breeding ground for fictions, but of all the fictions that narrativity fosters the most persistent, according to Dennett, is the fiction of ‘the intentional stance’. The paradox of the authorless narrative that Dennett relates is specifically directed at defusing this fallacy. 105. Dennett: Whether we intentionally choose to tell stories or not, we end up telling them, because that is what we are genetically programmed to do. In this sense, all narratives are authorless. 107. Just as the spread of specific cultural memes mimic the laws of genetic behaviour, so story-telling by individuals only enacts a preset programme. 108. Unlike Chomsky on sentences, Dennett stresses the activity, or performativity, of story-telling, as much as its abstract structure He sees all classes of narrative as performing a psychological ‘trick’, not dissimilar to my own ‘paradox’ of the Indian Rope Trick. Narratives, according to Dennett, creates the illusion that there is an authoritative ‘self’, a ‘central meaner’ who is the ultimate pro-
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ducer of the strings of narrative that each of us endlessly ‘extrude’. 109. Where there is no real centre of ‘selfhood’, our stories help us imagine a centre—of narrative gravity. 110. Nair’s model of narrativity suggests a shift towards a consideration of some main types of temporal, causal, evaluative and informative inferences themselves as constituting the central nodes of a narrative tree. This rather radical alteration permits the incorporation of elements of cultural differences in genre and allows for cognitive shifts in perceptions of semantic/pragmatic appropriateness, while retaining the advantages of a ‘grammar’. A set of inferential rewriterules for narrative might read: N(arrative) TS IS C(ausal) I(nference) I(nformational) I(nference) E(valuative) I(nference) X,Y A,B,C, P,Q,R
→ T(emporal) S(tructure) + I(nference) S(tructure) → X and then Y ... n → (CI)->(II)->(EI)->(CI) ... n (recursively) → X cause Y, Y cause Z ... n → A,B,C ... n connect X,Y,Z ... n → A,B,C, and/or X,Y,Z connote P,Q,R ... n → any clause or phrase within the sequence of the candidate N → any clause or phrase outside the candidate N
111. The genres of ‘the short, short story’ and ‘the tall, tall tale’ is a useful group of formally contrastive narratives with which to illustrate the theoretical speculations on offer. 112. Minimal narratives, because of their generic brevity, require extensive inference-making on the part of listeners. Likewise, tall tales which are deliberately implausible, require inferences of a special sort by listeners. 113. Inferring an evaluative judgement from the story, when it is not made explicit by the teller, enables the listener to: a) actively participate in the construction of the narrative b) display her cultural knowledge and membership-status, her meme-awareness c) cooperate with the teller in resolving inherent textual enigmas. 114. A crucial difference between Nair’s and the earlier story grammars is that it does not simply assign propositions in a given story to nodes such as Orientation, Complication, Resolution on a set tree.
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It allows for, indeed depends on, fresh inputs from the listener to keep the story moving. It is this adoption of a listener’s or hearer’s perspective that helps set narrative processing within a broader Gricean framework of communicative cooperation in general. A schema which emphasizes the listener’s role in creating and ‘gluing together’ the parts of a narrative through her active inferences is in keeping with Dennett’s idea of ‘authorlessness’. The onus is shifted here from the narrator’s shoulders to those of the listener. It is she who carries the burden of establishing narrative connectivity, of proving to herself that she has ‘got the point’ and the body of Vac is rendered whole again. Labov: The listener’s job is continually ask of the story-teller—what’s the point, why are you telling me this? The hearer’s job is to ward off this question. Herein, the import of ‘danger of death’ narratives. It’s always relevant to say: ‘I saw a man fall off a bridge today ...’ There is a qualitative contrast between the functions of left hand and right hand nodes on Nair’s inferential tree. The latter moves the story on, the former is a vast mnemonic storage bin. Iteration or repetition plays an incalculable part of the inferencemaking process, as well as in structuring narrative. The puzzle is simple: since repetition presents redundant information, why repeat? Why waste cognitive effort? Well, repetition basically says: ‘Look again. You may have missed something the last time!’ Repetition also forces us to reconsider first mention within the text rather than outside it. It thus calls for structure-internal reorganization of the conversation or ‘story’ as well as a contextual search when it occurs. There are two fundamental reasons why speakers might want to indicate the opposite of what is said. First, these strategies allow listeners much greater scope for interpretive play; by complicating the conversational situation, tellers heighten the interactional stakes. Talk is thereby turned into ‘text’—a possible meme-structure that can subsequently be passed on by listeners as a joke, a witticism, a story, or some other ‘tellable’. The second reason is that narrative imaginatively reconstitutes our workaday world. By doing so, it momentarily ‘challenges’ logic and enables both tellers and listeners, for a fragment of time, to hold contradictory beliefs in mind. It is this capacity to evoke the thrill of the ‘in two minds’ cognitive state that the device of repetition, so common in stories, shares with narrative as a structure.
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123. Repetition is an inference forcer, a tug at the listener or reader’s mental sleeve. This is what gives repetition its power as a literary device, or in the vocabulary of story-grammars, its potential as ‘evaluation’. 124. There are marked and unmarked instances of repetition. The distinction between these is culturally learnt. 125. Repetition formally looks like a 4th order inference which simply duplicates information already presented; as such, it is overdetermined and redundant. 126. A successful narrative is one where tellers’ implicatures and listeners’ inferences dovetail in obedience to the Maxims of Conversation. 127. Sperber and Wilson: context is a notion cognitively defined in terms of the knowledge a hearer already has and which she uses to interpret all utterances, not just those which ‘violate’ some conversational norm. The Principle of Relevance is always in operation and governs all our speech acts. 128. There could be a distinction between Grice’s cooperative principle which may well be psychologically motivated (or substituted by the even more psychologically rooted principle of relevance in an ‘improved’ version of Gricean theory, as Sperber and Wilson suggest), and the socially motivated maxims. 129. To ask for a tall story in the face of imminent death is an act of psychological self-preservation. 130. Fiction, as the Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick asserts, perennially reassures us. By making other worlds dramatically ‘real’, stories persuade us that all may not be lost. Maybe, even dying and pain are illusions that can be substituted by other more entrancing illusions. The ‘self’ is free in a narrative universe; it can wander eternally where it pleases and thus defy death. 131. Stories are fragile, according to Sacks, to the extent that listeners can question their veracity and tellability. The first strategy enables listeners to arraign the implausibility of the narrative, the second strategy allows listeners to be critical of the boring qualities of the tale, its unexciting ordinariness. 132. Narrative can be graded by listeners along a cline of fragility, ranging from the weakest narrative (most implausible and boring) to the strongest, riveting narratives (neither implausible nor boring). In an ‘inferential’ grammar of narrative, it is possible to relate this cline of ‘fragility’ with the ‘degrees’ of inference postulated by the storygrammarians. These run from first order (least constrained) to fourth order (most constrained). Matching up these two gradations we get:
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NARRATIVE FRAGILITY
INFERENTIAL CONSTRAINTS
Weakest Story: Boring and implausible
4th order inferences Duplicate information, overdetermined and unimportant 3rd order inferences: Irrelevant, determined but not logically important 2nd order inferences: Relevant and determined, important to the progress of the story Ist order inferences: Elaborative, underdetermined by the text of the story.
Next Weakest: Boring but not Implausible Somewhat Stronger: Implausible but not boring Strongest Story: Neither implausible nor boring
133. Inferential moves—evaluation implicated in informational sequences, information indicated in causal sequences, causal sequences following from temporal assumptions, and then recursively, informational sequences generating causal ones—are vital to a narrative grammar. 134. Our competence as ‘narrative speaker/hearers’ as well as ‘native speakers/hearers’is attested by the ingenuity and cultural skill with which we decode story inferences. Inferences, on this view, are to be regarded not as the incidental by-products of a narrative system, but as constitutive of the system itself. Not only are we narrativeextruding pasta-machines in the Dennettian mould, but we are also inference-making machines. 135. The attraction of an inferential model lies in its attempt to mimic the flexibility which tellers, listeners and analysts display in their interpretations of narrative form. The image of narrative projected by such a model is that even the most minimal of stories can be analysed with maximal complexity, given a theoretical approach that values inferential enrichment over interpretive economy and partial indeterminacy over absolute predictability. 136. Stories are food for the ‘epistemic hunger’ of our species. This metaphor is, however, obviously incompatible with the notion of ‘perfect fulfillment’. Just as we cannot be ever satisfied with a single meal, or even multiple ones, even if they are absolute gourmet delights, but have to keep eating at regular intervals all our lives, so we cannot ever be fulfilled by binges of narrative activity. 137. As a species, we are not meant to suffer from narrative bulimia, although some of us do. This is so as long as we have a ‘self’ to sustain and do not move into autism, Alzheimer’s or other similar selfdeleting conditions.
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138. If it true that our ‘selfhood’ is sustained by narrative, then the demand for ‘morals’ from our stories, those precepts by which we may ‘live’, seems more explicable. Morals in a narrative are the mental equivalent of the nutritional value of a meal. 139. Conversation somewhat like sex, is an interlocking device for selfperpetuation. Apropos of hunger and the life-sustaining properties of those materials we classify as ‘food for thought’, the alternating rhythm of the conversation-machine could be likened to the jaws of a perpetually famished shark—forever moving in an open-shutopen-shut, ABABAB ... movement, always ready to take in more feed. There is no end to our appetite for talk, indeed can be no end, structurally speaking. 140. Conversational analysis (CA) is essentially a methodology—an ethnomethodology. It consists of highly specialized techniques for exhibiting that conversational materials of practically any sort are ‘orderly’, that is, ‘methodically produced by members of a society for one another’. 141. Schegloff and Sacks: ‘A problem is proposed as a problem for conversationalists; we are not interested in it as a problem for analysts except insofar, and in the ways, it is a problem for participants.’ 142. The aim of CA is to develop methods analogous to those used by conversationalists themselves, as sensitive and methodical, so as to make explicit the ‘problems’ faced and tackled by conversationalists. 143. Conversational analysts relate the ‘local’ tendency towards sequencing in set pairs to the ‘overarching’ pairing established in the abstract by the ABABAB structure of conversation itself. 144. The ethnomethodological understanding of conversational structure offers a striking illustration of the manner in which a method, as well as an ideology, of analysis can be founded on the use of a new technology. It appears that, not only are the human species story-telling inferential machines, but they also perceived through their machines. 145. Conversely, the ethnomethodogists did not just use a machine— namely, a tape-recorder—for their researches. They also suggested that the object of their studies—namely, conversation—was itself a machine. 146. Note the analogy here with Nair’s metaphor of human beings as communicating cogs in the factory of culture, churning out all sorts of memes to serve our ‘illusions’ of selfhood. 147. Cassette tape recorders in the sixties changed the way in which one could observe a conversation; it was no longer necessary to
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rely on individual or collective memory in order to reconstruct what had been said. Now every conversation could be replayed exactly, as many times as necessary for analytic procedure. The conversational analysts’ reams of tape showed that precisely those parts of a speaker’s ‘turn at talk’ that were naïvely imagined to be dispensable are in fact crucial to sustaining its structure and momentum. The pauses, the ums and ers, wells and you knows, lapses into silence, reformulations and overlapping speech that we would automatically ‘erase’ from an ideal representation of our linguistic performance turn out to be really important in ‘holding a narrative together’, as well as in structuring the changeovers between speakers and hearers in a conversation. One could conjecture that these intervening bits and pieces make up that elusive and ‘invisible’ magic glue with which the magician in the ‘Indian Rope Trick of Narrative’ binds again the severed parts of the goddess Vac. They are the solution to the mystery of reincorporated structure. A story in conversation is ‘an extended object’, meaning that it is distributed across several turns in a conversation, some of which belong to the teller and some, equally, to the listener(s). Hence, it logically has to be controlled by all the participants in a conversation. Conversational analytic manoeuvres with tape-recorders—memorymachines—were meant to sustain their claims to manufacture a theoretical ‘apparatus’ not by ‘imagining’ them, but on the basis of recorded ‘facts’. These facts about the enjambment of sentences into a complicated conversational structure force us to reassess the manner in which we extricate theoretical concepts such as ‘sentences’ and ‘words’ from evidence, while allowing concommitant concepts such ‘utterance’ and ‘turn’ very little power, although they seem to possess as much ‘factivity’. Three African proverbs: ‘Talking with one another is loving one another’; ‘He who begins a conversation does not foresee its end’ and ‘A proverb is the horse of conversation: when the conversation lags a proverb revives it’. Lewis again: ‘A convention of language is a regularity restricting one’s production of, and response to, verbal utterances and inscriptions.’ The trick is use the pre-existing ABABAB turn-taking system precisely like a Lewisian convention—that is, as a pattern of behaviour so regular that it constrains the choice of ‘moves’ by conversationalists when a ‘language-game’ such as story-telling is played out within its confines—and thus actually facilitates coordination.
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155. It is a general rule about conversation that it is your business not to tell people what you can suppose they know. So if one asserts a fact one can assume the listener knows one is obviously pointing to the relevance/significance of the fact, not telling him the fact itself. 156. Sacks: The kind of lessons that stories often contain can be delivered perfectly well in the form of a lesson, a proverb, an idiom, a general expression, a general truth, like, ‘make hay while the sun shines’. 157. Generalizations, like metaphors and proverbs, encapsulate the collective wisdom and moral apprehensions of cultures. They represent the store of experience that a senior member of the community may have to offer. 158. Hedges around the teller’s utterance are not irrelevant; they reveal an awareness that a sharp ‘unhedged’ response might follow. The hedges highlight this contrast of mental attitudes; they demonstrate that the dynamics of the conversation does not just consist of wooden generalizations and prepared responses but is extremely flexible in its sensitivity to the cognitive states of participants. 159. Stories are subject to a linguistic law of ‘necessary incompleteness’. This is so because all discourse genres, of which narrative is arguably just the most prototypical example, are embedded in the cognitive context of conversation. 160. Language may primarily be a tool of solitary thought but discourse genres—jokes, riddles, lectures, novels, poems, rap, tall tales etc.— cannot but be at least ‘two-party’. They are specifically designed to turn talk into text—that is, to call up perlocutionary inferences. No audience, no narrative completion, as the Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick stresses. Consider the following Abstract (often consisting of a generalization): Orientation: Complicating Action: Resolution: (may involve a generalization) Evaluation: (may include generalizations and several turns) Coda: (often consisting of a generalization)
Typically a teller’s turn Often a shared turn Typically a teller’s turn Typically a teller’s turn Typically a listener’s turn Typically a listener’s turn
161. If the ‘self is a centre of narrative gravity’ that there are likely to be at least two cognitive categories of narrativity—stories to the self and stories to the other, the daily and the daylight.
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162. Ordinarily, the routines of our day to day activities make up stories not worth telling to others, yet central to our sense of self or ‘the way our world is organized’. These ‘hidden’ narratives form a cognitive substrate to the narratives that we do share with others. 163. Being ordinary is a normative, Lewisian concept. The task of ‘being ordinary’ is one we engage in at all times, whether alone or with others, while ‘doing being ordinary’ involves the additional burden of interaction. 164. Sacks: It is an interesting fact to consider that recipients can apparently decide that a story was correctly told without going out and checking the actual circumstances in which it occurred ... That is to say, recipients do not feel at the mercy of the teller to decide what the world is about. And apparently tellers have ways, and need to employ ways, in order to produce a story that is recognizably correct or at least plausible. 165. Nair: A story is plausible insofar as it is credible, probable, likely, possible and/or convincing; it is true insofar as it is verifiable, factual, correct and/or demonstrable. And given that most recipients cannot ‘go out and check the actual circumstances’ in which a story occurred, it is the former set of criteria which are standardly used to judge a story. 166. Whereas a strong case can be made for the ‘truth’ of a story being independent of whether recipients believe it to be true or not, a story cannot be said to be ‘plausible’ unless recipients in particular conversational contexts judge it to be so. 167. Tellers must weigh down their wild, flyaway stories with the ore of everyday fact, give it gravity as it were, otherwise their stories are in danger of being stricken by an unbearable lightness of being. They become ‘too interesting to be interesting’. 168. Over-emphasis on the extraordinary by story-tellers often has the paradoxical consequence that recipients are bored. 169 If the teller constantly stresses the fantastic nature of the events or experience he is recounting, recipients’ responses, deeply dependent on presumptions of ordinariness, are hampered. They lose interest in the language-game because their moves become limited to gasping ‘How astonishing’ or ‘goodness me’ in every turn; their whole inference-making process is wrecked and they can no longer participate actively in the telling. 170. Since stories typically put the ‘selves’ of teller and listener into conversational contact, they offer a series of glimpses into the
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organization of inner landscapes. Mental territories are opened out and we get to compare how weirdly similar our minds are, how extraordinarily ordinary. Good adaptive self-preserving behaviour would consist in running in the opposite direction when confronted with a bore. At the same time, situations routinely arise when interaction is unavoidable. Ideally, the maxims and rules of communication should equip one with the cognitive wherewithal to protect oneself if pinned against the wall by a mega bore, or even a minor one. The only really foolproof preventive against boredom is to provide ample space with the turntaking system for genuine inferences— that is, to activate in listeners’ heads’ the right-hand arm of Nair’s inferential model of narrative. The best, ‘least fragile’ stories (interesting and plausible), leave plenty of ‘slots’ for recipients to make elaborative inferences. The triad of concepts, ‘fragility’, ‘plausibility’ and ‘boredom’ are interactional in the basic sense that recipients are required, by the obverse corollary of the Super Maxim of Narrative commanding tellers to protect their stories against listeners’ charges of implausiblity and/or boringness, to identify the points of fragility in a story. Being a ‘good listener’ consists in having excellent vigilance reflexes. The same continuum of reflexes that allows a listener to go into a ‘automatic’ story-appreciation mode when hit with a boring story, also alerts her to possible violations of, say, the Maxim of Quality, when an over-ambitious story is placed on the conversational counter. The great pleasure that ‘good’ narratives give listeners is that they can truly ‘get into’ the story. By monitoring its points of fragility, they can get to the non-fragile core of the narrative—its ‘point’. It is a common cognitive stance: to be ‘desperately desperately keen’ and show it by shoving fantastic stories down the throat of one’s prospective audience. This creates ‘trouble’. It arouses in listeners an instinct for self-preservation, when a teller’s stories overwhelm one to the extent that one can no longer ‘bear it’. The inferential system is simply overloaded. Given that story recipients are presented with a number of particular ‘facts’ which are not immediately verifiable, the quality of ‘plausibility’ on the part of tellers is the only rational alternative to the quality of ‘truthfulness’. The ethnomethodological analysis of narrative deals, in essence,
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with the methods which members of a culture use to work themselves into that culture from day to day, from moment to moment. Whether we consciously will it or not, our psychological propensity to turn our narratives into morality engines is what in the end drives that troika of conversation, communication and culture which is our chosen vehicle in this book. Nair wants to replace Dennett’s multiple drafts by a single self to co-constructed drafts by multiple authors. These endow a ‘talk-text’ with multi-dimensionality and give to what Ochs calls the ‘rough drafts’ of an individual’s ‘story’ the ‘authority’ of community. Narratives of the self grow by accretion, accumulation. They enable us to rehearse what we learn about the world. These are the hundreds of narratives that we repeat daily to ourselves. They are easily forgotten and seldom consciously articulated. However, most of the explanatory and interpretive activities that we engage in are guided by the structure of expectations that self-narratives engender. Narratives to the other are collectibles, tellables. They are the coins of social exchange. As artful forms, they enable us to exploit, in subtle and powerful ways, the narratives to the self that we have already acquired. A corollary: had we no self-narratives, it would be extremely unlikely that we would have other-narratives. Self-narratives are hidden, meant for learning and storing patterns of experience, while other-narratives are manifest, ‘display texts’, meant to be appreciated by others. Both kinds of narrativity are crucial to the formation of a self, but they are not, in general, interchangeable. In other words, if one were to narrate one’s daily routines from brushing ones’ teeth in the morning to changing into a nightdress one would have a prescription for friendlessness! Self-narratives only become salient ‘insofar as they depart from the baseline of our ordinary experience’ (Chafe). It goes without saying that what constitutes ‘ordinary experience’ in one culture, may not be so in another. Nevertheless, if one were to generalize, one could maintain that the most obvious forms of narratives of the self are a) dream sequences and b) quotidien business like eating, sleeping, making love, talking to friends, smiling, being annoyed or in pain etc. A tempting hypothesis is that self-narratives of type a) correspond to the genre of the fictional; and those of type b) to the genre of the factual narrative.
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187. Narrative to the other are also either fictional or factual. If fictional they tend towards the ‘literary’, i.e. texts which exist for purposes of interpretation and hypothesis formation; if factual, they tend towards the ‘extra-ordinary’, i.e. texts which confirm that an unexpected event has occurred. 188. Narratives of the other often function as counter-examples to the store of experiences built up in narratives of the self. Danger-ofdeath narratives, which deal with a predicament that is finally to be experienced by all of us, but which is resistant to routinization, are therefore an excellent example of narratives to the other. 189. All talk or conversation can be defined as an interventionist structure wherein speakers’ intentions and hearers’ interpretations collide. A continual tension exists between the structure of conversation which has an alternating ABABAB ... interchange between speakers and hearers, and the structure of narrative which is linear and sequential, with a progressive ABCDEF ... concatenation of units. 190. The teleology of narrative and that of conversation are at odds; therefore, problems arise when narratives have to be ‘fitted’ into conversations, or vice-versa. Interpolation as well as interpellation are thus normative in a conversational narrative. 191. A narrative is a natural meme-holder and meme-generator. This is its evolutionary purpose. 192. Narrative fiction is a culturally legitimate form of the often stigmatized activity of lying. As basic human abilities, lying and pretence find their most elevated expression in narrative form. In cases where these abilities are impaired, as with autistic individuals, there is an accompanying loss of socio-cultural intimacy. The ‘self’ nurtured through narrative play and pretence, is typically isolated in autistics. 193. The cognitive value of narrative is that it performs ‘binding’ functions and ‘projects’ back and forth in time, as well as ‘spatially’ between an individual’s experiences and those of others, thus helping him to ‘read’ them correctly and develop a full-fledged theory of mind. 194. Narrative links the cognitive worlds of verbal and non-verbal experience; as an aide memoire, it provides logical templates for the storage and explanation of ‘illogical emotional reactions’. 195. Has narrative theory any voice at all within the fraught domain of politics? 196. The dismemberment of the body of Vac is often gruesomely real. In the wake of an influential historiography based on the belief
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that a postcolonial state is designed to disinherit, and possibly assault, the very people who are its supposed protegées, theorizing from a safe distance about ‘boring’ and ‘implausible’ stories may simply be inadequate. For a better historiography, it is important not only to recognize marginal discourses but also long-standing and deep cultural affinities between those discourses. In order to grasp the full force of the violence perpetrated today against large sections of humankind, it is crucial to concede the relationships that exist between seemingly independent categories of calamity—the ‘natural’ and the ‘denatured’. Although no human agency can be blamed for the suffering inflicted by a natural disaster, insofar as these incidences are a) increasingly predictable and thus preventable, and b) traumatic for large numbers of people, any modern government which does not work to ameliorate their effects becomes a morally indictable agent. Very different kinds of agency are involved in ‘natural kind’ and ‘nominal kind’ disasters, yet the responses of a postcolonial state tend to reduce them to one narrative format, thereby strategically reaffirming its ‘impartiality’, while simultaneously absolving itself of guilt. The philosophical categories ‘nominal and natural kind’ direct inferences in relation to three inter-related levels of narrative. In disaster narratives, three strands of story: the official, the localized and the historical—plait, and then curl away from each other The official or grand narrative of disaster is deliberately constructed in order to distance the state from the particularities of pain. Disastertime is that estranging time when history is forced to recognize the special character of those victims to whom the state is handing out its ‘aid’. Only true victims are to be granted aid; not all subalterns are in these special circumstances equally privileged. The point of the subalternist argument is that during the plague years the human body became a metaphoric as well as physical site of conflict between the colonial state and a subject people. Disasters, natural and nominal, seem to affect the same segments of Indians repeatedly—the economically deprived urban lower classes, often migrants from an India-wide hinterland, and the rural poor. Their narratives are the narratives of a brave and stubborn survival against great odds, and are structured entirely differently from official accounts.
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204. Women’s subjectivity is narrativized around a thematics of survival rather than of self-expression. These voices seem to be heard only in times of dire calamity, when they are, ‘instantly’ historicized by a self-serving interpellation on the part of the state. 205. The genderlect of women in contemporary rural Bengal confronting the kind of archetypal ‘act of god’ that a flood is, exemplifies distinctive linguistic features. These characteristic linguistic markers enable us to make connections between affect or emotivity in the causal structure of narrative and the cultural role that women’s narratives may have in controlling and conditioning others’, including the state’s, attitudes towards suffering. 206. Nair’s tape-recordings show that women’s speech displays, in contrast to men’s idiom, the following features: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)
more exclamatives (ore baba, ma go, ki bhishon, bap re bap); more comparators (khub, bhishon, boddo); more silences, breaks, reformulations; more interruptions, resulting in more joint tellings; more politeness forms, address and agreement markers (ki didi, boshben naki, ektu jol khan) 6) more deictics (eta,ekane,eidje)
207. In short, women have ‘more of everything’. This bundle of conversational features may be seen as a cultural guide to woman, and the role she plays in narrativizing her community. 208. How do you recover a lost past? Only through words, words that recall and sometimes enrich and amplify the memories of the possessions, emotional as well as physical, that one held in the antediluvian past. 209. Floods of stories are often produced in response to requests for stories of floods. 210. In the case of a flood or fire, the physical evidence has vanished forever. All has been devoured by calamity. In this tabula rasa world, therefore, infinite imaginative possibilities are opened up—one can, so to speak, theoretically remake oneself through one’s narratives. Yet, the situation is far from being one of painless makebelieve. The calamity itself is historically attested. State, institutions, news agencies, all work it into their operations. 211. Narratives accounts of both Partition and flood constitute a community’s fragile resources for recuperating historical agency— and they display one shared characteristic. Both ‘nominal kind’
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212.
213.
214.
215. 216.
217.
218.
219. 220. 221.
222.
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and ‘natural kind’ narrators invariably treat the government, even when it has been elected by them, as a power as unpredictable and unknowable as God. The ‘simple’ narratives of the people turn out to be extremely sophisticated in their modes of subversion. They express anger, pain and frustration while at the same time managing to contain and conceal these wrenching emotions. On this depends their precarious survival. People supposedly robbed of agency by historical forces and by historians’ representations, can produce subtle narratives which in their turn rob their oppressors of person-hood and individualism, by, for instance, the ironic device of turning them into pseudo-gods. Disasters are unpredictable, if not by definition then at least by implication. They constitute a sudden violent disruption of the even tenor of existence, hence their status as enigmatic ‘tellables’. A plurality of disasters, all disasters—past and future nominal and natural—can be condensed into one event in history: The Disaster. Quotations, inserted forcefully into the body of a text can themselves be regarded as repeated metaphors of violence—both violating the text, as it were, and gendering it. If Althusser’s focus was on interpellation, then Blanchot’s might be said to be interpolation; Blanchot enters the postcolonial narrative brandishing, as he himself phrases it, a ‘radical unquotability’. The academic historian cannot help but mimic in significant ways the narrative stance of the government official. That is, he is usually at a considerable distance from the pain and agony experienced by the victims of disaster and thus faces a challenge in attempting to provide an adequate representation of their suffering. Can a historian in the pursuit of his profession ever manage to obey Blanchot’s italicized admonishment: Learn to think with pain? Within your own community, your suffering is already ‘known’, experienced; there is thus no explicit need to ‘tell’ shared pain. The paradox is that fiction can and indeed must describe individual protagonists, if it is to move hearts. Disaster assumes identity in a creative text, comes to have what Shakespeare called ‘a local habitation and a name’. History, on the other hand, necessarily involves numbers. Numbers make history, as every historian recognizes—so many hundred killed in an earthquake, so many murdered in a riot. But in order to render emotion, you need the individual mode, which can only be literary and artistic. That is the paradox.
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223. The tension that exists between history and literature involves generic differences of scale, and of interiority. One is centrally concerned with the description of mammoth events, and the other with representation of individual emotion. Perhaps this is too simple a turn, but it does show why the dilemma of ‘the historian with a heart’, is inherent; it can never be completely resolved. 224. Disasters, natural and nominal, by reason of their scale, are the stuff of history. 225. Agency is a slippery customer, going underground in most ‘onrecord’ narratives. 226. When natural disasters will happen again may not be entirely predictable, that they will is. 227 From the fearful iteration of tense, the past recurrently predicting the future, comes the tension of flood narratives, their ancient place in the literature of most cultures. Literary renditions of disaster from the epic of Gilgamesh to the legend of the god Krishna who held up Mount Govardhan to protect the inhabitants of Braj from the flood waters, seem to have a teleology, a deontology, an ethical purpose. 228. The role of the copious narrativization that surrounds disaster in all societies is not to be understood as merely instrumental—that is, as achieving straight-forward political or pragmatic ends. Rather, these narratives are primarily theoretical. 229. Resistance may paradoxically be expressed as much through ‘keeping up’ a conversation as through silence. Conversational cooperation is never to be misread as ideological cooperation. 230. Conversational cooperation is often explicable in terms of ‘care of the self’, the motivations of self-interest and self-preservation, that pre-programmed survival instinct so central to Dennett’s Paradox. 231. Disaster-narratives can be seen as explanatory paradigms setting out the human consequences of disaster, and suggesting its causes. They are not so much explained by their tellers intentions as explanations for them. 232. The extreme sophistication that marks the oral narratives of flood produced in the villages of West Bengal—an enduring sophistication that seems to mimic the myths of flood that characterize many early cultural accounts of creation itself—stem from a basic impulse towards theory built into the ‘linear’ structure of narrative and supported by the ‘argumentative’ structure of conversation. 234. While we may infer ‘ political resistance’ in these narratives what is truly exciting about this resistance is that it is actually a resistance to other theories about the causes and consequences of the disaster
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235. 236.
237.
238.
239.
240.
241.
242.
243.
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being explained—the colonial theory or ‘narrative’ about the deltaic floods in Bengal for example. Narrative speech acts are also speech pacts. Narrative is a species of natural theory; when it is embedded in a conversation, there is the added advantage that often we witness a critique of the explanation in offer. Recipients agree, via the turntaking mechanisms of conversation, to give a particular ‘theory’ a hearing, so that they may exercise their rights to knock it down. In an environment where scenes of recent disaster are plainly to be seen by recipients, tellers do not always tell stories which simply outline the actual circumstances of the disaster, because this would, in Gricean terms, be redundant. Rather, they resourcefully use an unusual advantage that they happen to possess in these circumstances. They can actually point to the evidence. Deixis thus becomes an important explanatory aid. Invisible evidence of long term devastation can still be conversationally pointed at, and pointed up. There is, literally, more to such utterances than utterance than meets the eye. Conversations reveal how adaptable tellers are, how attuned to making the best use of environmental conditions. Rather than concentrate on the single aspect of the misery and damage caused by the floods, narrators can simply use gestures of witness in order to corroborate, legitimize and sustain the logic of their narratives. Narrative helps us to survive and preserve our essential identities at times of the gravest physical and mental danger by creating logical solutions to the problems presented by our surroundings. Thus they conform to the contours of both Dennett’s paradox and that of the Indian Rope Trick in that they literally offer structural, logical and psychological lifelines to those in danger of drowning. Naïve ‘theories’ developed through a ‘villagers’’ narrative can turn out to be exactly in keeping with the latest trends in academic thought. Cultural habits have structural repercussions both for the theoretical design and performative strategies adopted by narrators so as to prevent their ‘alien’ recipients—government officials, research students—from questioning their ‘fragile’ stories. Our stories are a measure of exactly how fragile and how tough our ‘selves’ within a culture are. Conversationally, there may exist ‘interruptive cultures’. For example, in the pan-Indian cultural context, there seems to be a high structural
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tolerance of interruptions and joint performances. Subcontinental speakers are, ceteris paribus, less likely to assert their right to a turn by saying ‘Let me finish, please!’ than speakers in, say, ‘Western culture’. Interruptions are read as signs of cooperative behaviour—i.e. helping the speaker along—rather than rude attempts to cut into someone else’s conversational space in such societies. 244. Interest is likely to diminish exponentially if every danger-to-death story makes the same point over and over, however poignant. So we are back to the insight that it is imperative that tellers use whatever resources they possess to make their stories into ‘something for us’ over and above their interest as dire first person narratives of disaster. Tellers use the structure of conversation as well as cultural resources in tandem to achieve this difficult task. 245. Most tellers ‘allow’ recipients to talk interruptively throughout their extended turn for the obvious reason that these interruptive moves within the telling sequence serve the function of demonstrating their continued participation in the conversation, and their interest in the story. 246. Interruptive moves, which function as evaluations of the story and articulate the perlocutionary effects of the story on recipients, are thus fairly important within the ‘speaker’s’ telling sequence, despite the fact that recipients often use these moves to arraign fragile aspects of a teller’s story. 247. By taking over the task of questioning implausible aspects of their own story, tellers display their attentiveness to a cultural or implicultural constraint that privileges joint telling over recipient questioning in some societies. 248. Joint co-constructed and supportive witnessing by tellers help avoid both Labov’s ‘so what?’ question and indictments of the tale as possibly false; in story-telling as in life, there’s strength in numbers. 249. Recipients are free to simply join the tellers in combined laughter, virtually smudging the difference between tellers’ and listeners’ turns in an ‘interruptive culture’—a prototypically Vac culture as it were, in its propensity to recombine. 250. Communal narratives, jointly told, represent a theoretical consensus in a culture. 251. The narrative maxim commanding tellers to protect ‘fragile’ aspects of stories need not be binding on first-person stories told in a context where a disaster has actually taken place, since recipients are faced with massive evidence for much that a teller tells them.
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252. Sacks: a story is a package of information, selectively packed with features which the teller works to make ‘storyable’. 253. Stories about floods which just disrupt normal life without causing serious distress seems to require efforts at establishing a different order of ‘ordinariness’, namely camaraderie. They call for ‘packaging’ that will amuse recipients, especially if tellers are themselves directly involved in some way. 254. Any event is storyable but tellers have to make special efforts to render it ‘an object of desire’ for recipients. Tellers’ techniques, for example making the story into ‘something-for-us’ out of the ‘thingsin-the-world’ which are disasters, depends on whom the ‘us’ are, and what kind of a ‘disaster’ it is that they are making storyable. 255. One of the most frequent ways in which tellers seem to protect fragile aspects of their ‘danger-of-death’ narratives is present their material as quite unremarkable. Another way is to compress length and detail so that recipients have fewer opportunities to challenge them. 256. The communal boat of narrative is a leaky one and its planks are continually being replaced so that one is never sure whether one is in a new vessel or a very ancient one, or even whether one is going to sink or swim when one embarks on the conversational seas. All the three paradoxes of narrative that I have dwelt on in this book make, in their own way, this point about the radically uncertain nature of narrative. 257. Searle’s dilemma in his Paradox of Fictional Discourse can possibly be resolved, not by lifting the felicity condition on the ‘truth’ of assertions in fiction, but by treating both fictional or factual discourse as narrative performatives. Dennett’s Paradox of the Authorless Narrator puts a cognitive slant on the matter by arguing that we are genetically programmed to produce narratives. Although we might believe that we are intentional ‘selves’ producing our own stories, these stories are in fact being cranked out by a narrative programme that does not distinguish between fictional and factual assertions but simply attends to cultural self-preservation. 258. The Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick connects Dennett’s ‘cognitive programme’ with Searle’s ‘performative hypothesis’ by analysing narrative as a fragile structure, its fragility mimicking the uncertainty, and susceptibility to disaster in our own lives. All narrative is fragile insofar as its audience can question or put in doubt, the version
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of events given by the teller. Like the body of the goddess Vac , it is continually subject to both annihilation and reconstruction. 259. Narrative is perhaps the chief conversational means by which we manage to give ourselves a causal, evidential, rational—even if necessarily illusory and fictional—account of the enigmatic fact of our existence. As Vac might put it—the cause of narrativity is also, finally, a narrative of causality. And here, at the odd number 259, the sutradhar tosses Vac once more up into thin air. Narrative Gravity ends; the Indian Rope Trick begins ....
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8
qQ APPENDIX I The Flood
The following is a brief extract from the official description of the floods which form the chief topic of conversation in the data presented in the ‘guru-less’ Chapters VII–VIII: Floods in West Bengal—Statement by Chief Minister in the Legislative Assembly—20 November 1978 We have re-assembled in the shadow of the greatest natural calamity to befall this State in living memory. Honourable members will kindly remember that we decided to adjourn this House in the second week of September because we all felt the need to disperse into the countryside and participate in the work of relief and rehabilitation then going on in the wake of the floods which had affected five districts in the State since early August. Little did we then anticipate that a third spell of the floods would soon ensue, the devastation caused by which would be several times greater than what has taken place earlier. The memorandum, Floods in West Bengal: third phase, which we have submitted to the Government of India and which has been circulated among honourable Members, contains details of the havoc rendered by this phase of the floods. Even, so I am taking this opportunity to place before this House a short narration of the course of events since we adjourned—the measures we have adopted to cope with the situation and the problems which continue to confront us. With effect from the midnight of September 26–7, there was massive rainfall in the upper as well as lower catchment areas of the Mayurakshi, Ajoy, Damodar and Kangsabati rivers accompanied by a high tidal influx. In most of southern Bengal, as much as 30 inches of rain fell in
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the course of 72 hours. This was responsible for devastating flooding in as many as nine districts of the state. The city of Calcutta too was not spared. As honourable Members will recall, during the first two phases of the floods, five districts had been affected. All told, nearly one and a half crores of people in twelve districts have thus suffered the ravages of floods and rains during the past three months. Unusually heavy discharges occurred from practically all the river basins in the southern districts during the last week of September. The maximum discharge from both the Durgapur and the Tilpara barrages approximated to 400,000 cusecs; the releases from the Kangsabati dam and the DVC system too were inordinately high. The discharge from Shilavati, Dwarakeswar, Ajoy, Siddheswari and a number of other rivers also surpassed past records; the smaller tributaries were equally affected. Numerous big and small breaches took place along river embankments, leading to the inundation of thousands of villages. The left afflux bund of the Tilpara barrage belonging to the Mayurakshi system was either washed away or heavily damaged over a considerable length; the left guide bund and the left flank wall too either totally collapsed or were severely breached at a number of places. The Hinglow dam similarly suffered heavy breaches. The Ajoy changed its course at several places and established links with the Kunur river. The protective embankment of the Bhagirathi at Kalna was badly affected. The devastation caused in the districts of Birbhum and Burdwan apart, the collapse of the Tilpara barrage system, coupled with the floods in the Banga and the Padma systems, contributed to extensive flooding in the district of Murshidabad. In the district of Midnapore, the flood water breached several river embankments including those of the Rupnarayan and the Shilavati, the embankments of all the main canals in the northern and central parts, as well as most of the protective circuit embankments. In the district of Howrah, the Rupnarayan left embankment was breached at numerous places. The Damodar right embankment was under deep water for a number of days. High tides breached the right embankment of the Hooghly; the embankments of the Dwarakeswar, Damodar and Mundeswari rivers were also breached. Heavy congestion in the Ghia, Kunti, Dankuni and Saraswati river basins resulted in extensive inundation of the industrial belt of Hooghly for a number of days. The district of 24paraganas was similarly effected by the high water levels of the Hoogly and Ichamati rivers, leading to overtopping of major embankments. In Nadia, each of the four rivers, namely, Bhagiurathi, Jalangi, Churni and Ichamati, was in spate, resulting in heavy flooding. In the district of Bankura, the Maliara drainage channel spilled over and breached the right efflux
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bund of the Durgapur barrage. A cyclonic storm, ferocious in its intensity, added to the sufferings in the district. The major parts of the city of Calcutta and its suburbs were under deep water from the night of September 26–7 for a number of days. The entire metropolitan areas, including its industrial belt, was severely affected. The high tide on the Hooghly during October 4–5 further contributed to the difficulties. A large number of slum settlements in and around the city, particularly in the eastern parts, were inundated. The flooding of the Palta and the Tala pumping stations led to widespread disturbance in the supply of drinking water in the metropolitan area for one full day. Of the 17 sewage pumping stations in the city, 6 were completely submerged, resulting in serious damage to pumps and motors and consequent suspension of pumping operations for varying periods. City roads, including major arterial roads, suffered extensive damage. In the districts, close to 70 municipal areas have been affected by the floods, about half of them very severely: substantial damage has been caused to the water supply and the sewerage system as well as to roads and houses. With the abatement of the floods, the major problems that await us are those of reconstruction and rehabilitation. The overall loss to the State’s economy as a result of the floods has been colossal. According to confirmed figures, 918 lives have been lost: even now final checks are being made with regard to some persons who have been accompanied by wholesale destruction of dwelling units. On a rough reckoning, about two hundred thousand head of cattle have been lost; post flood diseases have disabled perhaps an equal number. According to preliminary estimates, close to 18 lakh huts of which at least 11 lakhs belong to the landless labourers and poorer farmers and artisans have been either destroyed or damaged. The aggregate loss of crop-field as well as orchard, over an affected area of 34 lakh acres, would exceed Rs. 200 crores, affecting the livelihood of nearly 15 lakh small and marginal farmers and 20 lakh landless labourers. Large-scale capital losses have occurred, including loss of personal capital, working equipment and implements of small artisans and cottage craftsmen. The economic infrastructure has been badly eroded, affecting particularly the irrigation and flood control works, the water supply system, roads and a wide variety of other public amenities. Thousands of tube-wells have gone out of order; many of them will need re-sinking. There has been damage to the lift irrigation and other minor irrigation systems, including to deep and shallow tube-wells. Installations belonging to the State Electricity Board have been similarly affected. Schools, colleges, hospitals and health centres have had their buildings submerged in hundreds of places and would need extensive repairs.
APPENDIX I
Breaches in Embankments: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Name of the districts Number of breaches due to flood Number of breaches repaired so far Remarks
Malda .. .. .. .. 13 – All works taken up and would be completed within a short time. Murshidabad .. .. .. 223 – Ditto. Midnapore* .. .. .. 5,535 4,788 Initial closing done. Irrigation started from Midnapore canal. Hooghly* .. .. .. 357 173 Burdwan .. .. .. 817 799 Nadia .. .. .. .. 36 – All works taken up and would be completed with in a short time. Birbhum .. .. .. .. 800 350 Howrah .. .. .. .. 1,008 640
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Bankura .. .. .. .. 303 272 Purulia .. .. .. .. 1 1 24-Parganas* .. .. .. 346 346 Calcutta* .. .. .. .. The four districts where I recorded flood narratives are marked with an*.
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8
qQ APPENDIX II Transcription and Translation
In view of the fact that most of the stories told in English were taken from the volume A Corpus of English Conversation edited by Svartvik and Quirk, and that Svartvik and Quirk expressly state that their ‘audiotape cannot be made available’. I have adopted almost entirely their own very minute and detailed transcript notation myself, except for fall-rise patterns. Wherever I have used English data from sources other than Svartvik and Quirk’s corpus, I have acknowledged this clearly in footnotes. Below is a relevant list of the conventions used in the corpus. Speakers: A Speaker identity A,B A and b (example) VAR Various Speakers ? Speaker identity unknown a Non-surreptitious speaker (example)
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Transcription conventions: + yes + Simultaneous talk (laughs) Contextual comment << yes >> Incomprehensible words [?] Glottal stop TONE UNIT x End of tone unit (TU) || Onset {} Subordinate TU STRESS ‘yes Normal “yes Heavy PAUSE Yes. yes Brief pause (of one light syllable) Yes-yes Unit pause (of one stress unit of ‘foot’)
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Simultaneous talk is indicated by pairs of asterisks or plus signs, and it occurs in various combinations: A *...* B *... A *... B *...* A...* A *... B *...* C...* A *... B *...* C...* D...*
)Everything from the first to the last )asterisk occurs simultaneously, i.e. )also C’s talk. )
A..*...*.. B *...+*....+ C +....+ ‘Contextual comment’ indicates non-linguistic activity, such as (laughs), (coughs), (enters), (telephone rings) or technical mishaps, e.g., (gap in recording), (10 seconds untranscribable). Note that ‘ . ’ and ‘-‘ here mean length of contextual comment, e.g. (.laughs), (-coughs), (--giggles), etc. The ‘tone unit’ (TU) is the basic prosodic unit in the analysis. The ‘onset’ is the first prominent syllable in a tone unit. It is possible for a speaker to complete another speaker’s TU. e.g. B ||and they ‘sort of ‘REINFORCE’ one {an||other’s [ :]. <<sort of>> D ∆EGOSx}x
(S.I. 12 TU 989–990)
The peak of greatest prominence in a tone unit is called ‘nucleus’. The nucleus symbol has been placed as follows. In words with a single vowel: YES, YES, YES; in digraphs: READ; in words with a mute vowel: GUESS; in words with a semivowel: BEAUTIFUL, EUROPE but QUITE, CHOIR.
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A consonant can also take nucleus, e.g. OK, [m]. Throughout this book the word carrying the nuclear tone is printed in small capital letters except for ‘words’ appearing within square brackets. Bengali Transcription Although my transcriptions, with detailed phonetic notations, of the original Bengali data have not been included in Narative Gravity, owing to constraints of length and readability, these are available in my Cambridge thesis ‘The Story in Conversation: Towards an Integration of Speech Act Theory and Conversational Analysis’ (1982). For accuracy and readability on these transcriptions, I consulted Sutton–Page’s classic An Introduction to Colloquial Bengali; Dimock, Bhattacharji and Chatterjee’s ‘An Introduction to Spoken Bengali, as well as the I.P.A. guidelines. The thesis also contains details of the rise-fall patterns of speech from the Svartvik–Quirk Corpus which have not been included in the present work. Bengali Translation In translating from the Bengali, I have tried to keep as close as possible to the literal sense of speakers’ utterances without losing the colloquialness of the utterances. The English translations are numbered. Wherever Bengali speakers have used English words, for example ‘most’ and ‘make’, I originally transcribed these with pure vowels as they were actually said except when speakers emphasize the words, when they do use the diphthongs [ou] [ei]. As the I.P.A. points out ‘stress is not strong [in Bengali]’ and I have not included stress, but only marked by underlining words which are emphasized. Note that only translations and not transcriptions are included in Narrative Gravity, except in one illustrative instance to be found on pp. 264–265. List of Sources of Data in Cambridge Thesis (inclusive of the data in this book), other than my own transcriptions: Chapter I
p. 39, Example g) Svartvik and Quirk p. 84, S.1.3 p. 39, Example h) Svartvik and Quirk p. 369, S.1.14. p. 40, Example i) Svartvik and Quirk p. 639, S.2.10 p. 46, Example j) Svartvik and Quirk p. 322, S.1.12
Chapter II
p. 119, Example a)i Svartvik and Quirk p. 692, S.2.12 p. 121, Example a)ii Svartvik and Quirk p. 695, S.2.12 p. 124, Example a) iii Language Laboratory, Cambridge.
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p. 125, Example a)iv from Sacks, in Bauman and Sherzer (eds) p. 126, Example a)v Svartvik and Quirk p. 358 S.I.14. p. 127, Example a)vi Svartvik and Quirk p. 362 S.I.14. p. 129, Example a)vii Language Laboratory, Cambridge. p. 130, Example a) viii Svartvik and Quirk p. 569. S. 2.7. p. 131, Example a) ix Svartvik and Quirk p. 223. S. 1.9 Chapter III p. 161, Example e) i Svartvik and Quirk p. 244. S. 1.9 p. 166, Example e) ii Svartvik and Quirk p. 242. S. 1.9 Chapter IV
p. 182, Example a) i Svartvik and Quirk p. 687. S. 2.12 p. 182, Example a) ii Svartvik and Quirk p. 323. S. 1.12 p. 183, Example a) iii Svartvik and Quirk p. 170. S. 1.6 p. 187, Example a) iv Language Laboratory, Cambridge. p. 197, Example e) ii Svartvik and Quirk p. 248 S.1.10 p. 203, Example e) ii Language Laboratory, Cambridge. p. 206, Example e) iv Svartvik and Quirk p. 638. S. 2.10. p. 213, Example f) i Svartvik and Quirk p. 370. S. 1.14 p. 218, Example f) iii Svartvik and Quirk p. 499. S. 2.5 p. 220, Example f) iv Svartvik and Quirk p. 647. S. 2.10 p. 235, Example g) Svartvik and Quirk p. 367. S. 1.14 p. 245, Example g) i Svartvik and Quirk p. 559. S. 2.7 p. 247, Example g) ii Svartvik and Quirk p. 569. S. 2.7. p. 256, Example h) i from Jefferson, in Schenkein (ed.)
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8
qQ APPENDIX III Putative Emotive and Emotional Registers: An Evolutionary Perspective
A classic text recently republished—namely, Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)—calls attention to the way in which certain reflexes like, say, blushing—culturally categorized today as a coy reaction associated with love and modesty—reflect an interior emotional state. Darwin was convinced that at some stage in our evolutionary history, blushing functioned as a warning to other members of the community that the person who was blushing was not to be trusted; s/he lacked inner confidence and was unsure of her place within the community. In other words, Darwin surmised that blushing marks an insider/outsider, public/private social boundary. He also noted that the characteristic of blushing was apparently not found in the animal kingdom. But what has this long digression on blushing have to do with the concepts of language, emotions, lying and narativity which are the themes of this book? Well, the issue turns on the matter of trust. Liars, as we know from the spectacular Bill Clinton case amongst others, are in the popular imagination regarded at betrayers of trust, like the blushers of Darwin’s paradigm. And trust is important because it indicates bonding—in particular emotional bonding and the ability to survive and ‘hold one’s own’—within a community. Trust, in short, is an emotional barometer. How then do we read the barometer of emotions in a community? Largely, we do so linguistically and through narrative practice. In our heads, that is, we carry language-based experiential charts of, very, very roughly, the following kind.
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APPENDIX III
TRAITS
FEELINGS
EMOTIONS
Patience Selfishness Stupidity Kindness Generosity
Love Affection Hatred Sorrow Friendship
Anger Jealousy Irritation Boredom Annoyance
MOODS
SENSATIONS
QUALIA
Depressed Energetic Worried Solemn Ecstatic
Pain Pleasure Ticklishness Warmth Thirst
Seeing red Hearing thunder Tasting sweetness Feeling water Smelling eucalyptus
INTUITIONS
IMPRESSIONS
INFERENCES
About danger About truth About grammaticality About logic About right & wrong
From art, films From music From the weather From expressions From the scenery
From linguistic usage From dress or appearence From professional conduct From gender or age From race or colour
NEEDS
DESIRES
For food For water For shelter For sleep For sex
For wealth For approval For progeny For immortality For consumer goods
INTENTIONS/ AMBITIONS To visit your aunt To be rich To be a cinema star To study management To solve an equation
Some combination of the features listed would inevitably yield what in folk-psychological terms might be called the ‘character and personality’ of an individual. Since the permutations and combinations thus engendered are endless, we can have very large or small variations of personality from individual to individual. Moreover, we can have extremely rich and teeming interior worlds or relatively limited and impoverished ones according to the specific ways in which we make inter-connections between all these cognitive parameters—moods, instincts, feelings, desires etc. in a narrative to the self and to the other. To the extent that we believe that animals do not share this—or even a similar—typology of feelings, nor that they have brains specialized for symbolic/ linguistic representations, their interior worlds must, in principle, be unimaginably different from ours. As the philosopher Ernest
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Nagel put it, we can never know what it is to feel like a bat, or for that matter a cheetah or a chimp. One absolutely fundamental way in which our internal representations differ from those of animals is that we constantly make connections between fictional worlds and the mental universe of the emotions. Animals do not, as far as we know, habitually lie or create fictions. And if they do not, it follows, animals do not use fictions as an important learning or cultural device, whereas humans consistently do. There is no society in the world which does not utilize the ‘literary’ format of story-telling as a basic communicative tool and no culture where children are not introduced to the world through the methodology Pablo Picasso referred to as ‘the truth of our lies’. As the ‘meme-carriers’ of culture, our ‘lying tales’ encapsulate, often in seductively emotional and exciting ways the ‘truths’ that the larger communities in which we live feel are necessary for cultural ‘survival’.Thus, unlocking the ‘black-box’ of the brain must involve at least the following four cognitive factors which make human beings unique as a species: A. Language in the left brain: Broca’s and Wernicke’s Areas. These levels of language are conventionally held to be: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Phonetics and Phonology (sound systems) Morphology (meanings of words) Syntax (sentence structures) Discourse (communicative language)
B. Complex emotions: the emotional range engendered by chemical/ electrical changes in the amygdala, cerebellum, hippocampus, limbic system and forebrain. C. The capacity to tell lies and to imagine scenarios not actually present—i.e. the ability called ‘displacement’ by linguists. D. The types of memories that we possess: these seem to enable us to store and bind together in our brains not just facts and perceptions but narrative fictions—in a way that other species do not. UNIVERSAL ELEMENTS OF ANY NARRATIVE ACCORDING TO LABOV: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Abstract Orientation Complicating Action Evaluation Resolution Coda
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UNIVERSAL GOAL OF ANY NARRATIVE ACCORDING TO ARISTOTLE: Catharsis: to arouse the emotions (pity, fear and awe are such protypical emotions) and then to purge them through the playing out of the narrative action. NAIR: THE JOURNEY FROM CATHARSIS TO CRISIS, MIMESIS TO MEMES IN NARRATIVE CULTURE Crisis: to perceive or ‘create’ a problem—and, by implication, to think of a solution. Narrative is an essentially emotive learning device in culture, contributing to the theory of mind (TOM).
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8
qQ APPENDIX IV Placements
Narrative as a genre stands at the nexus of critical enquiry from several disciplines—psychology, literary studies, sociology (especially ethnomethodology), philosophy and linguistics. The following interdisciplinary typology, which can hardly help being both somewhat idiosyncratic and controversial, attempts to trace some of the main trends in narrative studies. A few of the several hundred terms which have proliferated in the field of ‘narratology’ are also listed, just in order to give a flavour of the scope of current inquiries into narrativity. Indeed, the swathes of metalanguage that narrative studies seem to generate so effortlessly adds weight to one of the main arguments of this book—that practice with the narrative genre trains the mind to be acutely self-reflexive, to drive those wedges between ‘world’ and ‘words’ which are the essence of self-consciousness. As the still nascent field of cognitive studies in narrativity develops, it will no doubt generate its own vocabulary, as well as borrow abundantly from previous theoretical endeavours. My own contribution is now added to the glimpses below of metalinguistic awareness in academia—though not without a sense of the gravest irony. Typology of Narrative Theories Narrative Syntagmatic (story-grammars)
Semiotic (semantic models)
Labov(1973)
Todorov(1966)
Speech Act (performance Aspects) Austin(1962) (contd. on next page)
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Rumelhart(1977) Prince(1973) Barthes(1977) Banfield(1981)
Levi Strauss(1968) Propp(1968) Greimas(1976) Fludernik (1996)
Forster(1974) Rimmon Keenan(1983) Kundera(1986)
Searle(1965) Sacks(1972) Pratt (1974) Maclean (1988)
Bakhtin(1973) Genette(1972) Toolan(1987)
Cognitive (mental representations) Dennett (1991) Ochs and Capps (1996, 2000) Nair (2002)
Terminology 1. orientation 2. setting 3. complicating action 4. resolution
genre analepsis/prolepsis closure
5. 6. 7. 8.
defamiliarization repetition/frequency implied reader super reader/ r-response focalization point of view/voice functions
degree of belief felicity conditions narrative fragility turn taking
transformations operations enchainment/ embedding deletion
side sequences membershipping ratified participants conversational floor
character
regulative conventions
reflexivity
communicative codes
evaluation coda rewrite rules nodes/nuclei
9. sets of expectations 10. temporality 11. inferences (causal, logical, etc.) 12. catalysers 13. indices 14. mimesis 15. free indirect discourse 16. speakerless narratives 17. histoire/
enigmas/lacunae/
speech act F(p) locutions implicatures/ intentions world to words fit
sequenced objects oral strategies pre-/post-sequences
396
story diegesis 18. recit/text 19. narration/ extradiegesis 20. homo/hetero/ hypodiegesis 21. narrative clauses 22. displacement sets 23. conversational historical present 24. episodic structure 25. scripts, plans, goals
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rupture stasis
the dialogic principle textual polyphony
heterology
meta-/inter-/pre-text
linearity mediative interrogation actualization
chronotope enactment
seme agents/patient
illocutionary force perlocutionary effects
repairs
APPENDIX V
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8
qQ APPENDIX V A Possible Course on Narrative Based on this Book
I have actually taught the course suggested below under the following rubric: HU 981N Elements of Narrative Art
IITD Pre Ph.D. Course/rbn2000
The aim of this course is to: a) familiarize ourselves with various theoretical perspectives on narrative; especially those relevant to current research in the area; b) analyse texts on the basis of such theories; c) develop an ability to intelligently critique and add to an already existing body of theory; d) have fun! 1. Introduction: The Search for Narrative Universals from Aristotle to Austin 2. Narrative Structure: Is there a basic structure common to all stories? How do we differentiate between form and function, structure and context and other binaries in analyzing stories? — — — —
Conversational Narratives (William Labov and Sociolinguistics) Mythic Narratives (Claude Levi-Strauss and Anthropological Studies) Literary Narratives (Roland Barthes and Textual Analysis) The Grammar and Semiotics of Narrative (Mandler, Johnson and Psycholinguistics/AI)
3. Narrative in Philosophical Discourse What is a speech act? Do stories qualify as speech acts? What logical differences exist between fictional and factual narratives? — Felicity Conditions on Narrative (J.L. Austin, Nair) — Logical Conditions on Fiction (John Searle)
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— Implied Conditions on Narrativity (Paul Grice; D.K. Lewis, Nair) — Narrative Effects and Emotion: Aristotelian Poetics Revisited (Martha Nussbaum) 4. Narrative in Literary Theory: What is the deconstructionist position on narrative? Does the rhetoricity inherent in language pose a threat to narrativity through the processes of self-erasure? — — — —
The Purloined Letter and Literary Detection (Lacan and Derrida) The Treachery of Language and Rhetorical Aporias (Paul de Man) The Anthropomorphic Narrative of speech act theory (Jonathan Culler) The Ethics of Narrative Research and Theory (Jacques Derrida, Culler, Nair)
5. Narrative in Ethomethodological Research: What ‘glue’ binds bits of a narrative together? Why do we always need more stories? How do we systematically use the story-talk to ‘solve’ everyday problems in communication? — Narrative as Purposive Problem Solving through Turn-Taking (Harvey Sacks, Nair) — Narrative as a Telling of Jokes, Riddles and Other Genres (Gail Jefferson) — Narrative as a Solution to the Incompleteness of our Lives (Hillis Miller, Michel de Certeau) — Narrative as a Developmental Necessity in Child Language ( Michael Toolan; Alyssa McCabe) 6. Narrative in Cognitive Studies: Are we as a species defined by the compulsive need to ‘narrativize’ ourselves? — Narrative Gravity as an Anti-foundationalist Anchor of the ‘Self’ (Daniel C. Dennett, Nair) — Narrativity and Cognitive Relevance (Dan Sperber and Diedre Wilson) — Narratives as the Vehicle and Transmittor of Memes (Richard Dawkins) — Narratives as Generic, Stylistic and Biological Mechanisms (Tzevan Todorov, Paul Ricoeur, Nair) 7. Narrative within the Postcolonial Paradigm: How far is narrative a powerful instrument of exploitation and domination? Can the colonial narrative be rewritten? — — — —
Narrative and Orientalism (Edward Said) Narrative and Gender (Gayatri Spivak, Salman Rushdie, Nair) Narrative, Nation and Postmodernism (Homi Bhabha, Antony Appiah) Narrative, Postcolonial Fiction and Pre-colonial Folklore (A.K. Ramanujan, Nair)
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8
qQ INDEX
Abbott, H.P. 25 Abstract, function of 42–7, 51, 53–4, 367 Adams, Jean-Michel 246 Althusser 293, 305, 374 Appiah, Antony 398 Arendt, H. 288, 290 Aristotle 147, 217, 231, 246, 393 Arnold, David, 296–7 Arnold, M.B. 63–6 Aspects of the Novel 246 Assessments 48 Augustine, Saint 16 Austin, J.L. 4, 9, 69–70, 72, 75–6, 82, 84, 87, 112–15, 122, 126–7, 130–41, 145, 148, 152–4, 157, 161, 165, 179, 231, 350, 352–3, 394, 397 Authorless narrative 6, 179 Authorless narrator of Dennett 20–1 Avnet, John 236 Bach, K. 70–2, 186 Baker 168 Bakhtin, M. 6, 22, 26, 217, 231, 345, 347, 395 Banfield, Ann 395 Barthes, Roland 3, 31, 163, 227, 231, 345, 347, 356–7, 395, 397
Bauman, R. 207, 234–5, 238, 240, 246, 248 Bengali transcription and translation 388–9 Bennett, Jonathan 113 Berger, John 13–14 Bernard 275 Bhabha, Homi 398 Bhattacharji, S. 388 Blackemore, D. 207 Blanchot, Maurice 304–7, 374 Bolinger, Dwight 129 Boredom, narrative fragility and 275– 81, 369 Bosanquet 167 Briggs, C.L. 207 Broca 392 Brown 349 Brown Book 172 Burge, Tyler 169–70, 294, 356 Butalia, Urvashi 298 Calamity narrative, see, Disaster narrative Calvino, Italo 8 Campbell, P.N. 152 Capps, L. 395 Carnap, Rudolf 70, 130, 132, 136–7
INDEX
Carr, E.H. 308 Carroll, Lewis 122, 249, 287 Chafe, W. 207 Chatterjee, Partha 300 Chatterjee, S. 388 Chatwin, Bruce 13 Chinese Room argument 356 Chomsky, Noam 1, 110, 130, 205, 360 Classical Dictionary of India 341 Classical speech act theory 73, 87, 349 Clauses, sequence of and narrative 34– 6, 39, 89, 91 Clinton, Bill 390 Co-authored stories 32 Coda, concept of 40–2, 47, 51–4, 59 Labov on 51–4 Colby, Rumelhart 55 Coleridge 11, 108, 151, 278 Communicating cogs 21, 65 Communication, concept and theory 3–5 Conrad 245 Contemporary political stances, towards disaster 291–2 Contrast narrative 5 Conventions 175–9, 193–4, 255, 281–7, 366 Conversation, concept and theory 3–6 Conversational analysis (CA) 365–6 Conversational generalization 254–63 Conversational implicature, theory of 209, 229 Conversational impliculture, theory of 182–3, 187–8 Conversational narrative 36–9 Cooperative principle 116–28, 175–9, 189–90, 229, 337, 363 Coulthard, M. 190 Culler, Jonathan 12, 155–62, 398 Cultural repertoires 297–303 Danger-of-death narratives 42, 312, 329, 333, 362, 378 Danger-of-death stories 97–9, 116, 142, 151, 274
419
Darwin, Charles 390 Davidson, Donald 79–81, 125, 138, 149–50, 294, 352 Davidsonian theory 73, 79–81 Davis, Steven 153 Dawkins, Richard 204, 237, 241–2, 398 De Certeau, Michel 398 De Man, Paul 10, 12, 129, 131–6, 155, 158, 398 Deconstruction, and narrative speech act 129–66, 355 Default and contraction rules 225–6 Deixis, and evidence 316–25 Dennett, Daniel C. 6–8, 18, 20–24, 122, 169, 179–80, 183, 201, 204–5, 212, 214, 236–7, 241–2, 246, 250, 254, 275, 287, 315, 325, 339–40, 343, 345, 358, 360, 362, 370, 375–6, 378, 395, 398 Derrida, Jacques 1, 12, 69, 109, 126, 131–3, 136, 158, 353, 398 Dickens 308 Dimock, E.C. 388 Disaster, contemporary political stances towards 291–2 narratives 17–20, 106, 294–310, 313, 372–6 Drabble, Margaret 240, 278–9, 282 Dummett 168 Eco, Umberto 8, 202, 207 Einstein 29, 347 Eliot, George 311, 314 Eliot, T.S. 104 Emotional registers 390–3 Enchantment in narratives 332–40 Epistemic hunger 364 Ergo 133, 353 Ethics, and speech act theory 155–66 Ethnomethodological analysis, of narrative 249–87, 365, 369 Euripides 93
420
N A R R AT I V E G R A V I T Y
Evaluation, paradox of 42, 47–51, 53–4 Evaluative inferences, and story endings 226–7 Event structures 56–7 Evidence, enigmas from 311–40 Expectations 56–7 Explicature 229–34 Explicit performative 136–7 Expressibility, principle of 93, 116–28, 184, 240–2, 351 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 390 Ezekiel, Nissim 311–12, 314 Fairy-tale and myths 52–3 Felicity conditions, narrative fit 84–5, 185 on putative illocutionary act on narration 85–112 Fiction, expressibility and cooperative principle 116–28 felicity conditions and narrative fit 84–112 form of 75–6 historian’s dilemma and 305–10 illocutionary force of 74–84, 151 pragmatics 70–4 pretence, plagiarism and narration 137–47 putative illocutionary act 85–112 speech act theory 70–4, 112–16, 350 Fictional discourse authorless narrative 6–12 logic of 77–80 paradox 179, 339, 378 searle’s paradox 8, 137 Floods, narrative about 316–28, 333– 40, 380–4 Fludernik M. 395 Forster, E.M. 89, 246, 395 Foucault’s Pendulum 203
Fragile narratives 237–43, 263–81, 285–6, 363–4, 369, 376, 378 Framing the Sign 155 Fried Green Tomatoes 235–6 Garfinkel, Harold 55, 251 Garrett, John 341–2 Generalizations 254–63, 367 Genette, G. 395 Glenn, C.G. 57, 60–1 Gnomons, 203–6 Goddess speaks, paradox of 20–5 Goffman, Erving 251 Gora 308 Gorgias doctrine 275 Govindpuri jhuggi fire narrative 295– 7 Grammar, and context of narrative 26– 8 Grammatical rules 57–8 Granta Magazine 13–14 Green, G.M. 67 Greimas 395 Grice, H.P. 4, 7, 63, 70, 74, 83–4, 101, 111–14, 120–2, 152–4, 165, 167–9, 173, 175–85, 189–91, 198–9, 206, 209, 211, 228–31, 233, 239, 243–4, 247, 255, 279, 345, 354, 358–9, 363, 398 Gricean concept of implicature 19 Gricean cooperative maxims 55, 63, 83 Gricean theory 5, 73, 111–12, 120–2, 124–5, 152–3, 165, 176–8, 180, 228–31, 233, 346, 349, 351, 363 Grimshaw, A.D. 110–11 Hardy, Thomas 249, 286 Harmish, R.M. 70–2, 186 Harrison, Bernard 112 Heart of Darkness 245 Hedges 367 Hippolytus 93
INDEX
Historian’s dilemma and fictionality 305–10 Historical agency, and narrative mysteries 312–16 How to do Things with Words 133, 135, 137, 148 Hugo, Victor 345 Human frailty, and narrative fragility 263–75 Hunting Down a Theory of Communication 4 Hymes, Dell 35, 111 Illocutionary act 85–112, 115, 134–6, 145–6, 151 perlocutions and 134–6 Illocutionary force, of fiction 74–84 Implicature 188–200, 229–34, 359–60 turn-taking rules and regularities 188–200 Impliculture 179–88, 224–34, 359 maxims for 179–88 notions of 224–9 Indian Rope Trick, paradox of narrative 12–16, 23, 28–9, 53, 55, 65, 67, 147, 171, 179, 205, 209, 236, 247, 253, 262–3, 340, 342, 346, 348, 354, 356, 360, 363, 366– 7, 376 Inferences 59–66, 203–6, 361–3 Inferential grammar, of narrative 241–2 Inferential model of narrative 211–30 application of 217–29 Inferential tree 224–5 Informational inferences 61 International Decade of Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) 291 Interpretation, and speech and theory 155–66 Interruptive culture, narrative sequence in 325–32 Introduction to Colloquial Bengali 388 Introduction to Spoken Bengali 388 Iteration and narrative tension 243– 38
421
Jakobson, Roman 26–7 James, William 114 Jefferson, Gail 96, 102, 178, 188, 190– 1, 253–5, 282, 286, 328, 398 Johnson, N.S. 31, 54–7, 59, 397 Joyce, James 181 Kant 165, 180, 183 Kapucinski, Rysard 13–14 Kasher, Asha 70, 73–4, 112 Katz, J.J. 130 Keenan, Ochs 4 Keenan, Rimmon 395 Kinder und Hausmärchen 142 Kintsch 67 Kipling 309 Kishwar, Madhu 297 Kripke, Saul A. 80, 294, 296 Kundera, Milan 8, 395 Labov, William 19–20, 26, 31–4, 42, 45–8, 50–4, 59, 61, 65–6, 88– 9, 95, 116, 163, 185, 207, 213, 215, 217, 231, 246, 259–60, 262, 264, 274, 329, 331–2, 345, 348, 357, 362, 377, 392, 397 Labovian schema 31–2, 66 Labovian story grammar 18 Lacan 398 Language, concept of 168 conventions 175–9 cooperative principle 175–9 functional psychology 170–2 game 172–6, 179, 190, 194, 257, 331, 352, 357, 366 mind, social context and 168–72 philosophy of 2 rules and rationality 173–5 transcription and translation 385– 9 Lanigan, R. 151–2 Lanser, Susan 161 Leach, Edmund 217 Levelt, J.M. 28, 55, 67, 206
422
N A R R AT I V E G R A V I T Y
Levinson, S.C. 63, 178–9, 349, 358 theory of politeness 73 Levi-Strauss, Claude 26–7, 345, 395, 397 Lewis, David K. 4, 7, 83, 113, 127, 173– 9, 187, 190–2, 198, 255–6, 357, 366, 398 Linearization concept of 28–9 Listeners grammars 57–9 Logical inferences 60–1 Maclean, M. 207, 246, 395 Mandler, J.M. 31, 54–7, 59, 397 Manoeuvres 281–7 Marvell, Andrew 25 Maxims for narrative and implicature 179–88 Maxims of quality, quantity etc. 173, 177–8, 182, 184, 190, 192, 194, 198–9, 229–31, 239, 244, 260, 280, 285–6, 351–2, 357–9 McCabe, Alyssa 398 Memes 203–6 Metaphore, Davidsonian theory of 73, 79–81, 349 Midnight’s Children 120 Miller, Hills 246, 249–50, 255, 262– 3, 339, 398 Mind, and social context of language 168–72 Minksy, M. 60 Mishra, Dinesh Kumar 322–3 Morgenstern 176 Morris 136–7 Mysteries narratives 312–16 Myths, and fairy tale 52–3 Nair, Bhaya 246 Nair, R.B. 21–2, 53, 65, 211, 241–2, 351, 353, 357, 361, 365, 368– 9, 393, 395, 397–8 Nair’s communicating cog 21 Narrative analysis 32–41 authorless 6–8, 20–2
care of self through 19 cause of 311–40 clause 34–6, 39, 89, 91 co-authored 22 cognitive implications of 28–9 contrast narrative 5–6 conversation and 28 course of 397–8 cultural memes in 201–48 definition of 34, 40 of disaster 17–20, 294–305 dynamic structure 5 ethnomethodological analysis of 249–87 evaluative analysis 33 fictional discourse and 6–12 floods 316–28, 333–40, 380–4 formal analysis 33 fragility 237–42, 263–81 functional analysis 33, 41–7 gender and 297–303 grammar and context of 26–68 implied meaning of 167–200 Indian Rope Trick Paradox of 12– 16, 23, 28–9, 32, 53, 55, 65, 67, 147, 171, 179, 205, 209, 236, 247, 253, 262–3, 340, 342, 346, 348, 354, 356, 360, 363, 366– 7, 376 inferential model of 211–17 as instrument of self-protection 18 interactional concept 10 as linguistic structure 14 maxims for 179–88 mental codes in 201–48 as mode of self-creation 18 morals in 250 mysteries 312–16 paradoxes of 6–12 perceived self images in 18 as perlocutionary act 147–54 politics of 288–310 pretence, plagiarism and 137–47 psychological validity 31 referential analysis 33
INDEX
sequencing 325–32 as speech act 69–128 strands and state of story teller 292–3 structural simplicities in 26–68 sutras 3, 20, 79, 341–79 takeover over meaning implications of 30 tension and iteration 243–8 theory of 18–19, 29–30, 33, 394–5 theory typology 394–5 thought experiment 30–2 universal elements of 392 Narrative Gravity 7–12, 17, 19, 32, 65, 110, 183, 231, 246, 313, 330, 340–1, 343–7, 379, 388–9 Natural order, story grammers and 54– 5 Nicholas, D.W. 56, 60, 62, 65, 206, 213 Nietzsche, Friedrich 66–7, 69, 119, 127, 132, 147, 349, 351–2 Nodes 59–66 Non-propositional attitudes 228–9, 233 Nussbaum, Martha 398 Ochs, E. 395 Odlin, T. 67, 202 Oedipus Rex 246 Oral narratives 31 Orientation 42–3, 46–8, 51, 53 Ostensive inferential communication 206–11 Pandey, Gyan 306–7 Pascal, Blaise 126 Pateman, T. 169 Penrose, Roger 209 People’s narratives 297–303, 306 People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) 295 Performativity 130–7, 205 deconstructive critique of 132–7 Perlocution, definition of 153
423
illocution and 134–6, 145–7, 151 narrative as 147–54 Perlocutionary acts, conditions for 153 as narrative 147–54 Phaedra 92–4, 96 Philosophical Investigations 168, 172 Picasso, Pablo 392 Pitting speech act thory 355 Placements 394–6 Plagiarism 137–47 Plausibility, and fragile narrative 275– 81, 286, 314, 369 Polanyi, L. 4 Politeness, Levinson’s theory of 73, 349 Pragmatics, phenomena required for 73 speech act theory and 70–4, 112 Pratt, Mary Louise 163, 207, 246, 395 Pretence 137–47 Prince, G. 395 Propositional content, condition for 85–6, 88–9 Propositional inference 233 Propp, Vladimir 27, 345, 395 Protagoras doctrine 275 Psycholinguistic story grammar 18, 31 Pulman, Stephen 294 Putnam, Hilary 294 Quirk, R. 181, 385, 389 Racine 93 Ramanujan, A.K. 398 Rationality, of language 173–5 Recanati, F. 4 Regularities and implicatures 188–200 Relevance Ostensive inferential communication and 206–11 theory 73, 349 Relevance 206, 209, 279 Rewrite rules 57–9 Ricoeur, Paul 288, 290, 303, 398 Rieger 62
424
N A R R AT I V E G R A V I T Y
Right of privacy 162–6 Rigveda 1 Ritvo, Harriet 18 Rorty, Richard 307–8 Rules of language 173–5 Rumelhart, D.E. 55, 395 Rushdie, Salman 15, 120, 288–9, 298 Sacks, Harvey 27–8, 43–5, 47, 51, 66, 99, 188, 190–1, 207, 240, 246, 254–8, 262, 274, 276, 278, 280– 1, 284–5, 287, 328, 330–1, 336, 340, 348, 365, 367–8, 378, 395, 398 Sahni, Bhisham 308 Said, Edward 288, 398 Salience, principle of 66 Salient paradox 66–8 Saussure, Ferdinand de 26 Schank, R.C. 60 Schegloff, E.A. 102, 188, 190–1, 254– 5, 365 Scheherazade 14 Schenkein, J. 286 Schiffer, S.R. 4 Schwartz, S.G. 294 Searle, J.R. 1, 4, 8–12, 21, 24, 44, 69– 70, 74, 76–85, 87–8, 93, 101– 2, 113–20, 122, 130–2, 137–40, 144–5, 147, 149–50, 152, 157, 168, 171–2, 177–9, 181, 184– 5, 231, 240–2, 246, 254, 257, 275, 278, 339–40, 345, 350, 356, 358, 378, 395, 397 Searle paradox of fictional discourse 8–12 Searlean performer 21 Self-narratives 370 Shadows of the Mind 209 Shakespeare, WIlliam 129, 161, 308 Short story 234–7 Simple episode, structure of 58 Sinclair, J.M. 190 Slots 59–66 Snakeskin Robin 341
Songlines 16–20 Speech act conditions of narrativity 89–91 Speech act scheme (SAS) 70–2 Speech act theory 9–10, 69–75, 82, 84– 5, 87, 101, 112–16, 118, 129–31, 144–5, 155–66, 181, 349, 352 interpretation and ethics 155–66 pragmatics and 70–4 scope and interpretation of 112–16 scope and use 155–6 Sperber, Dan 4, 7, 9, 63, 66, 70, 113, 122, 129–30, 169, 180, 204, 206, 209, 211–12, 216, 228–9, 233, 236, 244–5, 247, 252, 279, 350, 363, 398 Spiro 56 Spivak, Gayatri 300, 309, 398 Spontaneous narratives 31 Spontaneous stories 65 Stark 168 Stein, N.L. 57, 59, 61 Stevens, Wallace 26–7, 30, 43 Story-grammars 27–31, 41, 213–14, 241–2, 348 Story-imports 65 Story-schemata 56 Storytalk 3–6 Storyteller, expert knowledge 294–7 myths 16–17 narrative strands and states of 292–3 natural and nominal kind 294–7 Street, B.V. 246 Structural simplicities, in narratives 26–68 illustrations on 32–41 story grammars 27–30 thought experiment 30–3 Structuralism 26, 347 Sutton-Page, W. 388 Svartvik, J. 181, 385, 389 Swift, Jonathan 167 Syntactic embedding 39
INDEX
Tagore, Rabindranath 308 Tale of Two Cities 308 Talk-exchange, Grice’s analysis of 120 Talking into tape recorders 251–4 Tall tale 234–7 Tamas 308 Tannen, D. 61, 207, 246 Tape-recorders, talking into 251–4 Tempest 160–1 Temporal sequence 36, 39 Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) 63 Thirwall 275 Thought experiment 30–2 Todorov, Tzevan 231, 394, 398 Tolstoy 308 Toolan, Michael 395, 398 Trabasso, T. 56, 60, 62, 65, 206, 213 Transcription and translation 385–9 Turing, Alan 207–8 Turing test 208 Turn taking rules and implicatures 188–200 Turner, Roy 199
425
Ulysses 181 Value inferences 61 Von Neumann, J. 176 Waletzky, Joseph 19, 31–4, 46–8, 50, 52–4, 59, 61, 65–6, 89, 185, 331–2, 348 War and Peace 308 Warren, W.H. 56, 60, 62, 65, 206, 213 Wedding Guest 11 Wernicke 392 What is History? 308 Wilson, Diedre 4, 7, 9, 63, 66, 70, 113, 122, 129, 169, 180, 204, 206, 209, 211–12, 216, 228–9, 233, 236, 244–5, 247, 252, 279, 350, 363, 398 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 133, 147–8, 167–74, 310, 352 Wollaston 167 Woolf, Virginia 201–2, 205–6, 236 Writing of the Disaster 304
