Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction

2 Ethos as a Social Construction

21 1 Literary Interpretation, Ethos Attributions, and the Negotiation of Values in Culture And they [housewives, over tea] talked and talked, repeating the same things, going over them, then going over them again, from one side then from the other, kneading them, continually rolling between their fingers this unsatisfactory, mean substance that they had abstracted from their lives (what they called “life,” their domain), kneading it, pulling it, rolling it until it ceased to form anything between their fingers but a little pile, a little grey pellet. Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms The following chapter brings together insights from different theoretical frameworks. My intention is not, however, to suggest that such an eclectic juxtaposition amounts to a theory. My aim is, rather, to point out between these quite different frameworks transversal echoes that shed fresh light on narrative, interpretation, and in particular, ethos attributions . While this chapter’s wide-angle perspective seems to lead us away from the more concrete issue of ethos attribution in the context of literary narratives, it actually speaks to the broader relevance of my study, explaining why it is important to debate the authenticity of James Frey’s narrator or Houellebecq’s irony. These broader perspectives should also help me clarify what kind of approach narratology might develop toward the issue of ethos in narrative. Narrative Art, Play, and Interpretation as Cultural Metacognition Beyond differences in theoretical frameworks, methods, and argumentation styles, and despite daunting controversies over definitions and ap- 22 Ethos, Narrative, Social Construction proaches, there is some consonance across disciplines on both sides of Snow’s divide that culture involves or even amounts to what has been called the “social construction of reality” (Berger and Luckmann 1966). From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, Merlin Donald in turn defines culture as “a distributed cognitive system within which worldviews and mental models are constructed and shared by the members of a society” (Donald 2006, 5; Donald first developed his theory of culture in his Origins of the Modern Mind, published in 1991). From yet another angle, labeled as New Historicism,Stephen Greenblatt describes culture as “a particular network of negotiations for the exchange of material goods, ideas, and . . . people” (Greenblatt 1995, 229). As does Donald, Greenblatt highlights the role of artworks in the circulation of what he calls social energies. What these various understandings of culture have in common is the—admittedly very general—idea that culture requires the transmission and negotiation of ways of doing things, of preferences, values, and worldviews; and also the idea that narratives, and the arts, play a central role in this process.1 Both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, before such more complex practices as art, a central means for achieving cooperation and attunement of cognitions is play. The idea that art emerged from play has been defended by many, from Friedrich Schiller to Johan Huizinga or Donald Winnicott. Usually it is the imitative dimension shared by play and art that is highlighted, in connection to the faculty, broadly shared among species, to learn through imitation, which was already observed by Aristotle. The significant difference between animal and human play, however, is “the innate human capacity for self-observation,” or metacognition (Donald 2006, 6): only humans engage in play as a mimetic representational activity, allowing it to become a form of metacognition . Thus, while we can watch puppies and kittens play-fight, we won’t see them suddenly stop the game, disputing the rules, the impersonation of the thief, or the sense that yesterday’s game was a much better one. From an evolutionary perspective, art is indeed often considered to develop from and to improve on play. In his “biological” theory of narrative , Brian Boyd (2009, 95) interestingly argues that, through art as through play, humans coordinate their attention, they practice by imitative action the skills needed for survival, and they fine-tune their goals and their mental models. Art is described as a “set of activities designed Interpretation, Attributions, and Negotiation 23 to engage human attention through their appeal to our preference for inferentially rich and therefore patterned information” (Boyd 2009, 85; 101). In this description, two elements stand out. The first is this capacity of art to engage people in joint attention. This idea would partly explain why art is such an effective vehicle for the distribution of cognitions , as religious and worldly authorities, as well as their opponents, have always recognized. Likewise, arguably, practices of sharing interpretations...