Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory

CHAPTER 2. Language Peculiarities and Challenges to Universal Narrative Poetics

In the early 1960s through 1970s, classical narratologists primarily sought to establish a universal grammar of narrative and a poetics of fiction. Although postclassical narratologists have increasingly engaged in narrative criticism, they have continued seeking to establish various models of narrative poetics, though with more modest claims—“about ‘most narratives’ or ‘narratives of a certain historical period’ rather than about ‘all narratives’” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2; see also Shen, “Why Contextual ”). In either case, little if any attention has been paid to multicultural particulars. But narratives in non-Western cultures may have various features closely associated with language peculiarities that defy accommodation to a more or less universal narrative poetics. Revealing these features may help us to see more clearly the characteristics of narrative traditions in different cultures. This essay will investigate how certain peculiarities of the Chinese language lead to narrative modes not found in Western narratives. Interestingly, peculiar linguistic and narrative conventions that tend to remain opaque within the boundary of a single culture may figure prominently when two languages and two narrative traditions meet and conflict in the process of translation. This essay will demonstrate such prominence through an investigation of translation from Chinese to English. Chinese Peculiarities and Modes of Speech or Thought In narrative fiction, a character’s speech or thought may appear in a range of reporting modes, with different communicative and expressive functions, that form important means for the narrator to vary point CHAPTER 2 Language Peculiarities and Challenges to Universal Narrative Poetics dan shen 18 Dan Shen of view, tone, and narrative distance. In the 1960s through the 1980s, modes of speech or thought presentation attracted a lot of attention from narratologists and stylisticians, who offered diverse classifications.1 Leech and Short (318–324), for example, suggest a classificatory scheme that includes the following: Direct Speech (DS): He said, “I’ll come back here to see you again tomorrow.” Indirect Speech (IS): He said that he would return there to see her the following day. Free Direct Speech (FDS): (a) He said I’ll come back here to see you again tomorrow. (b) “I’ll come back here to see you again tomorrow.” (c) I’ll come back here to see you again tomorrow. Free Indirect Speech (FIS): (a) He would return there to see her again tomorrow. (b) He would come back there to see her again tomorrow. Narrative Report of Speech Act (NRSA): (a) He promised to return. (b) He promised to visit her again. For thought presentation, the modes remain the same, but the norm of presentation shifts to a different mode: indirect thought is the norm for thought presentation, whereas direct speech is the norm for speech. The numerous classifications made by Western scholars differ in various aspects, but as far as the distinction between (free) direct and (free) indirect modes are concerned, the criteria of differentiation invariably include tense, personal pronoun, and subordination, among others. Chinese narrative fiction employs not only all the modes appearing in Western narrative fiction but also various additional modes that lie between or outside Western classifications. A most notable feature of Chinese is its lack of tense markers; grammatical time is thus not easily discernible. In this language, that is, there is no “backshift” in tense when the mode shifts from a direct to an indirect one, nor does one use the subordinating conjunction that or capitalization. So except for the personal pronoun, which is sometimes left out in Chinese—a language characterized by frequent subject and determiner omission—there can be no perceivable linguistic difference between (free) direct discourse and (free) indirect discourse or even narratorial statement.2 Such a peculiar mode of speech or thought presentation, one that is open to two Language Peculiarities and Challenges to Universal Narrative Poetics 19 or more interpretations and that lies outside Western classifications, requires a new name; I call it “blend” (see Shen, “On Transference” 397). It should be noted that blend occurs in English, too, where it seems to be limited to two particular cases. One is that of a moodless clause (or a clause with a tenseless modal verb) interpretable as either free indirect discourse or free direct discourse (especially when immediately preceded by free indirect discourse). The other case involves the ambiguity between narratorial statement and free indirect discourse; when the tense and the pronoun selection are appropriate to either, both interpretations...