The Rhetoric of Narrative:
Narrators, addressees, and reading the relationships between them
A central methodology for narrative theory is to attend to the rhetorical dimension of narrative, which is complex and sophisticated: complex in that there are many levels of audience and voice; sophisticated in that the many levels are all working at once to contribute to the experience of reading a narrative.
For James Seitz, to read the rhetorical dimension of a text calls for the reader to attend to "the relationships that readers create between themselves and the emerging possibilities which they anticipate in the text" (148). |
First, what is meant by "rhetorical dimension"? It means that someone, let's say a "narrator," at a particular time and place, addresses another. Furthermore, when anyone addresses another, there must be a purpose to the address, which purpose is to impact the "addressee," the person addressed, in some way. Any concern for impacting an addressed audience is always and already a rhetorical concern, whether from the point of view of the narrator working to impact her addressee, or from the point of view of someone watching, or rather, "reading" the moment during which a narrator addresses an addressee. During such moments, the actual reader must respond. The question we will examine will involve this spectrum of responses possible for an actual reader, from complete willingness to take up the role projected by the text, to total rejection of any such projected role to play.
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Engaging in this question calls for us to posit three principle "characters": a narrator, the narrator's addressee (or narratee), and the reader reading the relationship between the two, a relationship that is characterized by a rhetorical struggle between divergent controlling values.
James Seitz names this readerly role "the capable reader," which is also quite complex due to the polyphonous (many voiced) spectrum of virtual roles the capable reader might play. This polyphony includes a range of internal "voices" that struggle with each other until that provisional (temporary) moment congeals called "getting the text." This range extends from the submissive to the resistant. To submit to the text involves a creative act, wherein the capable reader creates a role that best fulfills the role the text asks/projects its reader to play. To resist the text means resisting the role(s) the text asks its reader to play. I want to stress the creative act of submitting to the text. On the surface, submitting to play the role the text invites us to play might sound like the easiest thing to do, but if our rhetorical stance diverges to any degree from that stance a submissive reader must assume to "get the text" on its terms, then we are to that degree predisposed to resist playing that role. Because readers bring with them, according to Seitz, "other already established 'texts' or cultural paradigms" (147), we are often predisposed to respond to our unquestioned projections rather than the text--often without even knowing we are projecting. As the addressee of the text, we take the text to have said what justifies our response to the text, and it is only with some degree of critical reflection that we, as the capable reader, might emerge and observe the struggle between what the text projects and the manner in which the addressee takes up the projection. Willing or no.
Authentic versus inauthentic reading roles
To repeat: rather than submitting to the possibilities of the text (the roles it asks us to play), which may very well pose unexpected challenges, more often than not, according to Seitz, readers "attempt to convince the text (and themselves) that it has presented itself in the very way they have read it" (142). If the reader stops there, I would call this inauthentic resistant reading, wherein one refuses to take up the role of the submissive reader from the beginning, and so finds good reasons to reject the text without ever having entered the role the text projects for its reader. If a rhetorical stance is "inauthentic" when it is, as a cultural paradigm, merely assumed without question and mechanically applied, then an authentic rhetorical stance requires us to create it for ourselves, to make it our own. Consequently, authentic resistant reading is only possible after having created and played the role of an authentic submissive reader.
Likewise, for those texts we quite easily submit to, I suggest that we do so inauthentically. That is why it is important to practice reading texts that will challenge you to create alternative rhetorical stances, or new virtual readerly roles. Indeed, the more practice you have creatively and authentically submitting to roles of a variety of texts and genres, the more access you will have to a wide spectrum of virtual readerly and writerly roles. |
A capable reader, according to Seitz, follows the text while at the same time jumping out ahead of it to take "inferential walks" (146), and then "persuade themselves that a particular interpretation of the text is preferable to others" (147). "All readings are themselves narratives, consisting of characters (that is, virtual readers) who work to persuade the reader that the text should be read in the light of a particular set of values" (Seitz 151). In his book Studies in the Way of Words, Paul Grice provides a set of maxims that comprise our everyday expectations concerning communication. When someone "flouts" any of these maxims, something rhetorical is at work, namely, the trope called irony.
Quantity: Quoted in Rhetorical Narratology by Michael S. Kearns (18)
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Good writing anticipates its being read: Interpellation
In any case, good writers work to account for the gap between the reader's initial rhetorical stance and that rhetorical stance a submissive reader might "stand" in. Ideally, such writing might also bring us to explore the possibilities of being the capable reader, beyond mere submission or resistance. Ordinarily, writer's work to structure the text in such a way that anticipates how readers will likely fill in these gaps, constructing meanings from juxtaposed elements (words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.), and then building expectations that they measure against units of the text that follow (see "Reading for"). Some writers also provide clues that awaken readers to further possibilities beyond the mimetic and the thematic, to what is called the synthetic, or figural art of the writing itself. Yet, even if writers do not intentionally leave such clues, by attending to the "surprising" in the text (Gallop), we may still find them.
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"The most exciting possibilities for reading lie not in the earnest attempt to wrench from the text what the author supposedly 'put' there, but in the ability to play a whole repertoire of readerly roles whose engagement with the text will produce various results" (152). |
I need to introduce and define a key term that will help us to grasp this moment of a narrator addressing her addressee. Writing always and already involves a future of being read, and toward this purpose writers write roles for their readers to play. This act of calling an actual reader to play a certain readerly role is a kind of "interpellation," a "hailing," very much like when someone appears to call out to you: "Hey you!" When that happens, when we hear such a call, and if we hear the call as addressing us, we turn to face the caller and the caller's projection onto us. We take on the role, if but temporarily, that the caller requests us to inhabit, along a spectrum from complete submission to total resistance. Peter Rabinowitz posits a question the actual reader must answer with an act of belief, namely: "What sort of person would I have to pretend to be--what would I have to know and believe [and value]--if I wanted to take this work of fiction as real?" (128). For Rabinowitz, this role is called the narrative audience, and it is a role distinct from that of the authorial audience, the audience the implied author addresses through the act of narration itself.
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For instance, if we are in a fearful mood, much appears in a threatening light. Consequently, we are likely to respond to any appearance of threat with defensive moves, and counter attacks, even preemptive ones. In such moments when we project onto someone the role of being fearsome or threatening, they either submit to the role or resist it. |
Telling functions
As James Phelan argues in the introduction to his book Living to Tell About It, there are at least two dimensions of this act of telling that calls forth readerly roles, especially within narratives wherein a character narrates to a narratee (or addressee). Essentially, there is an author/writer who addresses her authorial audience indirectly through having a character-narrator narrate to a narratee. The direct address from a narrator to a narratee Phelan calls the "narrative function," while the indirect address effected through the narrator's act of interpellating the narratee is called the disclosive function of narrative. The capable reader plays both roles simultaneously, and this is precisely what this method is meant to produce: a critical awareness of the gap between these "telling functions."
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