Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction

Notes

249 On Narrative, Ethos, and Ethics The notion of ethos has been characterized by Ruth Amossy as a crossroads at which different critical approaches meet. I hope this book has highlighted the fruitfulness of making narratology encounter some perspectives focused on the social construction and negotiations of meanings and values. My own privileged image for readers’ ethos attributions and for their engagement with narrative more generally is that of the kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope stands for viewing from a certain angle, under a certain aspect, and for reframing a scene or a mental representation with the wonder of seeing configurations change before our own eyes. Among the framing acts that interpreters may share, or in which they may differ, I highlighted those of genre and reading strategies. These reading strategies root in normative conceptions of literature, conceptions of selves—and also, for narratologists and other literary professionals, conceptions of what is required in terms of scholarly knowledge and relevance frames. I hope to have shown that narratologists’ own prisms—some would call them biases—appear with particular clarity in their typologies and models for aspects of narrative that involve ethos characterizations. My aim has also been to bring out the hermeneutic orientation that complements, sometimes tacitly, narratology’s attention to textual devices , especially in the rhetorical perspective that is currently quite strong. Yet to expose narratology’s normative biases or interpretive inclinations is not, in this book, part of a striving for more scientificity. Rather, I have argued that much is to be gained from this paradoxical metahermeneutic attempt: to catch interpreters’ cognitive processes in the act, to reconstruct their pathways and their textual, extratextual, and even nondiscursive triggers—and to show that this holds for narratologists as well as, perhaps, for ordinary readers, though empirical research clearly is required to find out more about the latter. 250 On Narrative, Ethos, and Ethics This book itself also feeds on wishful thinking, values, and convictions , which may have been conspicuous all along, from my own discursive ethos among other clues. One core assumption is the idea that interpretation , as a social negotiation of meanings, exercises the reasoning we need to cultivate if we want to be creatures with more than episodic and mimetic modes of cognition (to refer to Donald’s terms). Thorough verbal metacognition is not something that comes naturally: it requires mental and verbal training in situations of social interaction or through practices of intensified self-scrutiny. Other such convictions are, first, the idea that theories of narrative fiction that elude the diversity of interpretive perspectives amputate themselves from a critical reflective dimension. Second, regarding narratives and narratology, I find appealing the idea that both the aesthetic and the ethical interests of narratives result from the multiplication of (conflicting or ambiguous) framings for issues with existential relevance. One can read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius as an autobiographic narrative, grippingly recounting a moving human experience; one can also read it as a narrative that frames such existential material in multiple ways, creating the kaleidoscope effect that puts readers’ minds at work in other than empathic ways, eliciting reflection on the meaningmaking paths themselves. Third, as a heuristics for close reading, narratology works, I’d like to argue, as a semiotic training simply by drawing attention to the expressive and semantic potential of narrative form (which is the tacit or avowed goal of many textbooks on narratology, stylistics, or textual rhetoric ). Close attention to narrative devices and aesthetic form, steered by some kind of systematic heuristics, can be argued to develop readers’ arsenal of strategies for meaning making and subsequent interpretation. Methodical textual scrutiny can give us some distance, increasing a text’s strangeness and hence the metacognitive effects of the reading experience . Far from representing a “merely” aesthetic kind of attention, such intensified attention to particulars of narrative and discursive form constitutes the first step of any careful ethical reading. This elucidation of some convictions underlying this book brings me to an issue that I have left unaddressed so far: how does the proposed framework for analyzing ethos attributions relate to ethical narratology or criticism? To start with, it should provide extra arguments for the On Narrative, Ethos, and Ethics 251 need to tease out narrative levels and perspectives, which is a prominent concern—and contribution—of rhetorical narratology. I hope to have demonstrated that interpreters’ framing of a work’s genre and priming communication situation determines...