Response to James Phelan

In his stimulating essay, James Phelan argues that characters sometimes function as tellers in scenes of character–character dialogue. He is not the only student of narrative to have discussed the narratorial dimension of dialoguing characters. In The Narrative Act, for example, Susan Lanser considers the role of the discourse of characters in delivering information and writes: "Theoretically, any persona who utters discourse on his or her own behalf may be called a 'narrator', though such a stretching of the term renders it rather useless" (137). Similarly, in the pages of Story and Discourse devoted to the speech acts of narrators and characters, Seymour Chatman notes that just as the narrators of, say, The Brothers Karamazov or Tom Jones can warn, apologize, intend, or generalize as well as narrate, characters can recount narratives within the diegetic world they inhabit as well as warn, apologize, or perform any number of other speech acts. But Chatman adds: "Clearly, intending and other such speech acts are ancillary to a narrator's central speech act, namely narrating. Contrarily, narrating can never be a character's central function without his thereby becoming a narrator, hence leaving the story and entering a secondary discourse. Characters use language to argue, to make love, to carry on business, to rhapsodize, to cogitate, to promise, to make commitments, to lie, and so on, always within the boundaries of the world of the story" (165–66).¹ Phelan no doubt finds Chatman's argument unpersuasive. In fact, he believes that devotion to the story-discourse distinction is what makes Chatman's narrative communication model deficient. He even calls the distinction into question, preferring to think of it as a "sometimes helpful—and sometimes not so helpful—heuristic" rather than as an "immutable truth about narrative." But a truth that is not helpful is still a truth. Besides, I cannot think of a narrative that does not involve story and discourse, a what and a way.

Whatever the merits of Phelan's view, it raises a number of questions that he does not answer explicitly (in part, I am sure, because of space limitations). For example, does any instance of free direct discourse (of immediate speech or thought) imply an author–character–audience channel of communication? What about instances of abruptive dialogue? Should nonabruptive dialogues made up of micronarratives be regarded as embedded narrators? How many dimensions would it take to diagram the rhetorical model proposed?

Instead of a diagram, Phelan presents a chart identifying the constant elements in narrative communication—the (actual/implied) author and the audience (authorial and actual)—as well as a Borgesian list of resources deployable by the author in connecting with the audience. This list, too, raises a number of questions. For instance, should the epitext, which is part of the paratext, be considered? And the constants themselves raise more questions. In particular, one may wonder about the difference obtained when authors appear in praesentia to tell a story to the audience.² One may also wonder about the extent to which the (implied) author remains the same from the beginning to the end of a narration. Moreover, one may wonder whether Phelan's own chart should not be altered to feature among the constants not only the actual author (the person) and the actual author's "second self" (the person as speaker, say, or as writer) but also a textually inferred author and not only a textually inferred audience and the actual audience (the person) but also the actual audience's "second self" (the person as listener or reader).

Though the audience, along with the author, is the most important element in Phelan's model, he pays little explicit attention to real receivers. Indeed, he does not consider the fact that actual audiences are often affected by authors and therefore are, to some extent, "produced" by them. Nor does he sufficiently take into account the fact that these audiences can be antagonistic, contrary, perverse, ill-intentioned or, more generally, that they have different dispositions, capacities, interests, and goals. Take the two dozen medical students mentioned by Phelan. None of them commented on...