Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction

5 Whose Ethos?

100 4 Key Concepts Revised Narrative and Communication, Embeddedness, Intentionality, Fictionality, and Reading Strategies [I]s narratology a tool, a method, a program, a theory, or is it indeed a discipline? Jan Christoph Meister, “Narratology,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology Should the debunkers of Frey’s “fraud” have done their narratological homework better? Would any of the current branches of narratology, each of which claims to analyze how we make meaning from narrative texts, have helped explain the bewilderment that for some readers, like Oprah, followed from Frey’s exposure? Perhaps, to the extent that narratologies offer heuristic procedures and concepts to tease out stances conveyed in narratives. Not really, or not yet, because narratology, though concentrating on textual features, insufficiently takes into account the conventions through which these features are invested with narrative functionality and meaning. The following chapter tries to sort out some issues that, like interpretation , seem as fundamental to narratology as they are controversial: literary narrative and communication, the embeddedness of narrative voices, intentionality, fictionality as a form of framing, and reading strategies. One’s stance on these issues determines how one speaks about the ethos of characters, narrators, and authors. Literature as Communication A focus on ethos, with respect to narrative, inscribes itself in a rhetorical perspective on literature, which considers literature as a form of communication. In line with linguists such as Sperber and Wilson, I will assume in a rather minimalistic way that literature belongs to Key Concepts Revised 101 “ostensive-inferential communication”; this is the process whereby “the communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest, or more manifest, . . . informative intention, and communicative intention” (Sperber and Wilson 1995, quoted in Walsh 2007, 24).1 This assumption carries with it the idea of a communication contract, a concept nicely captured also by Doležel when he describes a text as a “set of instructions [submitted by author to reader] according to which a fictional world is to be recovered and assembled” (Doležel 1988, 489). Genre indications arguably form a crucial element of such instructions, determining the kind of communication contract in which the reader feels engaged. Such assembly instructions , however, can be unclear or deceptive, creating for the reader a categorization problem, which triggers the search for clues as to the author’s ethos and intentions. On the idea of literature as communication, as well as on the questions of who is involved in communicating and which aspects of this communication should be objects of theorizing and in which disciplines, communities of scholars have been split. The grounds for this division lie in different understandings of the notion of communication, as well as in competing normative conceptions of literature and of narratology . The various models and metaphors that define literary (non)communication bespeak their allegiance to such value-laden conceptions. Literary writing, indeed, has been variously defined, not just by writers and critics but also in different narratologies, as a dialogue with an actual , personalized, implied, anonymous, or collective author; as not involving communication at all; as a rather spectral communication, with both author and reader declared dead or absent, dispossessed of themselves , or disseminated; or as a mere “echo chamber” in which heterogeneous sociolects resonate. Such different understandings have consequences for whether, and how, one would construct an ethos for the author of a narrative. Despite their different signatures, (neo)structuralists such as Genette, Todorov, Seymour Chatman, or Schmid, speech act theory and rhetoricoriented scholars such as Booth, Phelan, Pratt, Susan Lanser, or Michael Kearns, and cognitive narratologists such as Herman or Palmer all assume that literary narrative is appropriately treated as communication. 102 Ethos in Narratology There are, however, important differences in what is meant by communication and who is considered to communicate. For Genette, whose stance has been influential, whatever their importance in actual literary communication, the real author and reader do not belong to literary narratology’s concerns. Neither do the author’s ethos-fashioning or a reader’s interpretive acts, since narratology concentrates on intratextual communication.2 Instead, rhetorical, ethical, feminist, and other critical narratologies usually defend a more inclusive communication process, the “triangle” of author, text, and reader (Phelan 2005, 18). Their author is mostly the “implied” version, and connections to the biographical or public author are hardly explored, while their reader is mainly the scholar...