Conspicuous Silences: Implicature and Fictionality in the Victorian Novel by Ruth Rosaler (review)

In Conspicuous Silences: Implicature and Fictionality in the Victorian Novel, Ruth Rosaler defines “implicature” as “the aspect of an utterance that relies on the utterance’s relationship to its context, rather than on its semantic import, to communicate meaning” (2). The term was coined in 1975 by the ordinary language philosopher H. P. Grice, who defined the principles that he claims regulate all functional conversation and guarantee its rationality. Grice’s neologism, implicature, takes place when a speaker “flouts” one or more of these principles by “BLATANTLY” failing to fulfill it (Grice qtd. in Rosaler 17). Perhaps his most recognized example is that of a philosophy professor who has been asked by a graduate student to recommend him for a job teaching philosophy. The professor writes, “Dear Sir, Mr. X’s command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc.” (Grice qtd. in Rosaler 17). According to Grice, the writer of this letter thinks that the student does not excel at philosophy, and believes that the recipient will deduce that the professor is recommending against hiring him.

It is clear that Rosaler’s use of the term implicature is less specific and much broader than Grice’s original meaning (and rarely as harsh). She claims that her book is about “the way in which . . . authors [and particularly Victorian authors] communicate narrative propositions without explicitly stating them” (2). Part of what Rosaler sets out to prove is that “sometimes what is implicated by an utterance (or, in other words, discernible only through hearer inference) far outweighs what is explicitly expressed through its semantic import” (2). Her task is to demonstrate how that happens and why it matters.

It is obvious that authors or narrators can imply rather than state explicitly otherwise narratable information in order to leave hints, to foreshadow future events, to mislead or deceive readers, to express ironic or derisive judgment of characters, or to voice derisive judgments about the readers themselves (for example, in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair [1847–48]). Implicature may also be used for its own sake, simply for the pleasure that it affords the author, narrator, or readers. (I think this is one of Rosaler’s best but underdeveloped ideas.)

Rosaler is particularly interested in demonstrating that fictionality should be thought of as a context rather than as a genre. For her, fictionality itself is a primary generator of implicature. Even though implicature occurs any time language is employed, Rosaler finds that its most fertile field is in fiction, where it plays a significant role, and that Victorian fiction provides a particular proof of this idea. Rosaler maintains that part of her book’s originality is its contention that almost all literary critics have failed to take advantage of this insight. Critics tend not to recognize “how a reader’s assumption of a text’s fictionality may transform his or her perception of that text from an otherwise incoherent narrative into a display of ostensive-inferential communication” (23). Even though there has been work on the associations of fictionality with narration, much of it has only “addressed the fiction author’s ability to exploit readers’ expectations of narratorial omniscience in a limited way” (27).

Literary critics dealing with fiction, says Rosaler, “have not discussed narrative indirection as a technique used for its own sake, and they have shied away from discussing how a narrative is affected by having its central action narrated through implicature” (29). Although it may seem that Rosaler has a great number of complaints here, one can discern a thread of commonality running through all of them: that of literary critics’ treating the creation and function of implied information (implicatures) as identical in fiction and nonfiction, failing to recognize that fiction is more of a context than a genre, and that that context lends itself to creative implicature. The main job of her book is to...