Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction

4 Key Concepts Revised

91 3 Narratology between Hermeneutics and Cognitive Science Hermeneutics is not . . . something one can do without (it is coextensive with all criticism), but merely something one can acknowledge or not. Jonathan Culler, “Prolegomena to a Theory of Reading” As has been amply observed, the current proliferation of narratologies did not exactly increase disciplinary consensus on terms and procedures. Concepts that involve ethos attribution, such as those of the implied author or the (un)reliability of narrators, play a central role in rhetorical, ethical, and other forms of critically engaged narratologies, yet there is not much agreement about even these core concepts. This should not come as a surprise, since such concepts bring into the open fundamental divergences of opinion and uncertainties about what narratology is or should be.1 The appeal to cognitive sciences has not really solved this problem, it seems. This chapter zooms in on narratology’s history of hybridity, always oscillating between developing general models of narrative and proposing tools and justification paths for interpretations. These various aims can be set out on a model, which, I argue, ranges from ambitions of scientificity to that of serving interpretation, with, somewhere in between, what I call a metahermeneutic intent. A History of Hybridity Interpretation was, right from the start, narratology’s bone of contention . Classical structuralist narratology, which aimed at being a “science of narrative” (Todorov 1969, 10) or at least a descriptive “poetics,” 92 Ethos in Narratology evacuated the flesh-and-blood agents involved in literary narrative communication and the activity of interpretation itself. For narratologists such as Greimas, Genette, or Tzvetan Todorov, James Frey’s intentions, for instance, would have been of no relevance in describing the meaning structures of A Million Little Pieces, since, as Gerald Prince sternly put it, “[n]arratology is not primarily the handmaiden of interpretation ” (Prince 1995, 130); but note the “primarily.” For some, the aim was rather, in line with the Russian Formalists, to contribute to a systematic and historical poetics, comprising the description of literary—or, broader , textual—devices and conventions. This interest was sometimes combined with attention to normative reading conventions, as in Culler’s and Peter Rabinowitz’s work, a perspective that I would define as metahermeneutic , as it seeks to understand and modelize the interplay between textual and interpretive conventions. In practice, structuralist as well as “poststructuralist” or postclassical narratology’s relation to interpretation has remained ambiguous until this very day. The test of narratology ’s relevance is often taken to lie in proposing tools that are used, first, heuristically, to guide the analyst’s textual analysis, and then to explain and justify the analyst’s interpretations. On closer scrutiny, moreover, the ideal of objectivity in textual description and analysis is hard to maintain , as has been pointed out often enough.2 From structuralist to rhetorical and other forms of critical narratologies—feminist or postcolonial, for instance—the shift was decisive , though its epistemological consequences were not always acknowledged . In rhetorical approaches, attributions of an ethos to characters, narrators, and authors became central concerns, since their reliability , sincerity, authenticity, or irony constitute grounds for ethical judgment , as outlined in Phelan’s 2007 book Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Emphatically repersonalizing textual analysis and reinstating ethical concerns alongside or over aesthetic ones, these approaches adopt an unmistakably hermeneutic stance, in contrast to the metahermeneutic (Genette) or outright scientific (Greimas) aims of structuralist narratology. In rhetorical and “critical” narratologies, author, reader, and critic are held accountable for their acts of writing and interpreting. Interpretive acts are now described in terms of events, highlighting their singularity—which does not mean, however, that these acts of meaning assignment are not share- Between Hermeneutics and Cognitive Science 93 able. Quite the contrary: an important function of such criticism is to propose shareable pathways for reasoning, and to demonstrate these in a compelling mode in interpretive and analytical practice. Let us consider, for instance, how Phelan discusses James Frey’s case. By inventing major events while presenting his text as referential (a “memoir”), Phelan argues, Frey “violate[d] the ethics of referentiality.” Phelan concludes that the work therefore loses “its reputation for being an honest confrontation of the difficulties of addiction and recovery and its status as a worthy aesthetic achievement. . . . [I]ts inventions made the book more embarrassing than compelling” (Phelan 2007, 216). Here the narratological-rhetorical model functions clearly in the service of...