Narrative Notability and Discourse Events between Rhetoric and Narratology

Gunter Martens

University of Ghent.

Introduction: Events, Discourse events, Discourse as event

In this paper, it is argued that stylistic and rhetorical features of narrative texts have an impact on the way we frame and detect events in narrative. I will try to substantiate this claim by giving some historical background to the dialogue between rhetoric and narratology. This should enable us to give a slightly different twist to the concepts of tellability and eventfulness that are at the centre of this special issue.

In her article on “Narrative” for the recent Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, Mary-Laure Ryan notes that the specific notion of tellability is closely intertwined with the broader notion of narrativity (as the product of minimal conditions). In this respect, she notes that narratives deficient in prototypical eventfulness “compensate for the subversion of story with an extraordinary inventiveness on the level of discourse.” (Ryan  348) This allowance ties in with recent tendencies in narrative studies, which tend to link the categories of classical narratology with narrative competence, context, diachrony and cultural memory. According to Herman and Vervaeck, one of the post-classical moves also consists in taking non-events into account. Such non-events may include e.g. “modal aspects [...] that do not occur as real events in the story but that are very important for the meaning of the story” (Herman/Vervaeck 155). In this view, eventfulness gauged in terms of temporal or causal connection is no longer a miniminal condition of narrativity As in the case of the postmodern (encyclopaedic) novel (T. Pynchon, A. Jongstra, A. Kluge), narrativity may also reside in “metaphorical and metonymical relations” (Herman/Vervaeck 13). This may seem to further deepen the rift between story narratology and “discourse narratology” (Pavel 14-15), the latter term often being called upon when dealing with the visual, theatrical, lyrical or pictorial in narratological terms. (Jahn 670; Vanhaesebrouck).

In this respect, recent research has been devoted to redefining the scope and agency of narrative relevance in terms of discourse events (Schmid; Meister; Hühn/Kiefer). A discourse event is minimally defined as an event affecting the narrator (or the narration) rather than the character. Events on the discourse level tend to be vague, are often set in a non-defined space and time, and hence less fruitful in terms of eventfulness, they are more directed towards self-thematization and metafiction. Consequently, decisive changes as a result of the narrative act itself are often redescribed as changes in the consciousness of the narrator and, ultimately, that of the reader (reception events). The main aim of this paper is to determine how such textual strategies often considered to be less central to narrativity (such as figurative speech, commentary, summary) afford additional means of modalizing the agency of narrativity. These elements constitute an alternative point of departure for linking tellability, the point of narrating (Hühn/Kiefer 257), with the reader-oriented (cognitive and phatic) dimensions of narrative communication. In order to model this, it is necessary to graft onto narrative theory concepts taken from neighbouring disciplines that study similar phenomena outside the constraints of institutionalized fictionality, such as rhetoric.

Barthes’ concept of notability

To give some historical perspective to the issues of tellability and narrativity, I will first relate tellability to Roland Barthes’ concept of notability. After having established a masterly example and an early hallmark of structuralist narratology with “L’analyse structurale du recit” (1966) and the analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine in S/Z, Roland Barthes became increasingly aware of subjectivity and the role of the reader in narrative. He grew especially wary of narrative as it comes to the fore in the novel. In Barthes’ view, the novel is blatantly steeped in Western philosophical and religious traditions and institutions. Its epic scope matches that of travel and biography, and thus fosters the individualist ideal of subject-constitution. The novel, when gauged in terms of eventfulness, inherits the religious conception of decisive change or conversio, the ensuing vita nova as the foundational myth, the post quem triggering the tellability of biography itself, which are deemed all too characteristic of the European rise of the novel. In Barthes’ view, the readerly novel amounts to a kind of studium, “the culturally sanctioned workings of public, contextual knowledge in aesthetic perception” (Roelofs 73). In classical narrative, the reader can safely assume that everything “noted is notable” (Barthes 1994/2 [1966]: 84]. By using the word “notable”, Barthes is of course punning on the homonymy between material (musical) notation and the adjective pointing towards notoriety, the implied social hierarchy so prominent in the novels of Proust, Stendhal and Flaubert. Gradually substituting the terminology of action, function and sequence for that of rhetoric, persuasion and seduction, Barthes brings the reader’s activity into play. He pitches against the thetic impulse of the novel’s proper names (particularly evidenced in the regime of third-person narration), the idea of “le romanesque sans roman” (cf. Mace) by insisting on the notability and narrative functionality of contingent, off-centre elements in the narrative. The psychoanalytical inspiration motivating Barthes’ shift to a poststructuralist approach to narrative cannot be explored here. What is of interest here is how the metaphorical and metonymical relations, formerly rigidly associated with the functions and indices as part of the story’s eventfulness, are wrestled free from that binary opposition, in order to allow for a more flexible approach to the concerns of the narrating agency, and ultimately, that of the reading subject. As such, Barthes’ recourse to rhetorical terminology opens up the possibility to take into consideration elements commonly credited with lesser or less typical narrative energy.

While tellability almost inevitably seems to invite a discussion in universalist terms, its original (socio-)linguistic version is a thoroughly agonistic notion based on its actual performance. It is concerned with the struggle for conversational turn-taking, the effort the legitimate the interest and the point of the narrative prior to narration through abstract, evaluation and orientation (Labov). In fictional narrative, all of this is often assumed to be absent or merely present in a de­pragmatized way (Zipfel 130). I will argue, however, that especially with rhetorical means, the interestingness of a single and isolated event can also be enhanced by introducing it into an (often implicit) series of discourse events. The material, rhetorical notation can accrue narrative function when it is brought to bear on our estimate of the event as (un)eventful or (un)tellable. Notability thus translates in patterns of more indirect, rhetorical emphasis (especially visible in textual strategies of naming, summarizing, iterative characterisation, or in the display of the decision not to tell something). These patterns prefigure the reader’s reception and construction of appeal on the discourse level. As such, notability is a coding at the level of discourse, deliberately departing from and not motivated by the narrated event itself. In discourse events, agents are not so much prerequisites for the event, they are being shaped and brought into play by rhetorical aspects of narrative. Especially in overt and digressive narration, the verbs of perception and reporting are not simply “typified” (Fludernik) markers which bracket and signal embedded talk or action. Their elaborate and often hyperbolic impetus reflects on and thematizes modes of causality. Taking our cue from Roland Barthes’ usage of classic rhetorical terminology to analyse narrative, we will investigate this additional rhetorical code by means of two examples. 

Reporting the uneventful

Let us first consider the challenge to tell the inherently uneventful by taking a look at a collage which is to be found in Karl Kraus’s journal Die Fackel 657 (1924: 132). This picture shows Tirpitz, the former German admiral and doubtful World War I hero (spokesman of the unrestricted U-boat warfare and ultimately responsible for the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915), while attending the funeral of Hugo Stinnes, a conservative industria­list who had become a newspaper magnate in the twenties and used his media influence to attack the Versailles treaty. The Austrian polemicist Karl Kraus, writing in the first half of the 20th Century, reproduces the picture not only to satirize these “notable” representatives of the establishment; he also mocks the fact that such highly symbolical events are mainly represented by invariably showing politicians arriving or leaving in cars, shaking hands (or refusing to do so): “Concerning politicians, we are mainly being told that they can walk at best.”¹ In his satirical writing, Karl Kraus often criticizes such empty reports because they create events rather than to report them, by emphasizing the reporter’s presence on the scene or the media’s ideological allegiance. In turn, Kraus engages in an alternative, though minimalistic ekphrasis of the picture that rids the representation of its symbolical and ideological value. The title reads “Have never laughed so much”. What causes the observer’s disrespectful scorn is that the picture actually freezes walking people into a transient position (on one leg) that would be quite hard to realize as isolated body position. For Kraus, this constitutes the punctum of the picture. In a related satirical observation of this phenomenon, Karl Kraus tags the portrayed action with a number of possible, yet completely inappropriate attributes, dragging the solemn realm of political representation into the incompatible sphere of artistry and carnivalesque, or into the materiality of bodily movements.

This square dance of pace-makers getting ready for St. Vitus’ dance, succumbing to epilepsy, being ravaged by Beriberi’s disease or simply wanting to do gymnastics, a knee bend or similar frolicking, lines up at every possible occasion. This is what all notable persons, whom the photographer has met on the street, have in common: They are not serious, they are mere jokes. […] (Kraus, Karl: “Der Weltspiegel”, in: Die Fackel 474 (1918),127; my translation)

Instead of the notorious persons meant to be celebrated, Kraus’s highlights what the pictorial representation involuntarily adds to the material, autonomous jumble of feet, hands, gestures and other bodily extremities. Through the juxtaposition of dancing and spastic movements, the alternative interpretation of the photography rids the scene of its symbolic qualities. In addition, states and medical conditions are represented as activities, as things that one can either perform, willingly embrace, whereas most of the medical conditions mentioned are highly involuntary, spastic movements. The portrayal and suggestion of dynamism² (further heightened through caricature) is a euphemistic prop which leaves the social status quo untouched. The newsworthiness of such uneventful stasis often amounts to saying that the only event taking place is the news report itself, or to signal the massive interest of other observers etc. The eventfulness of the event turns out to be staged. Kraus repeatedly singles out how such reports circulate a lot of social energy, and how this actually involves rhetorical operations.³

Given the intermediality and the non-fictional nature of the example, its tellability can only be defined in a transmedial way. (cf. Herman 2004) Considering the classical tripartite emblematic structure in terms of its implicit shift in “textual voice” of course relies on paying attention to what transpires of the image in the text through ekphrasis. In this case, the point of telling is diverted and emphasized by the conciseness of the caption, which in its naming (without titles, epithets and appositions, see also Lensing 567) constitutes a degradation of social notability as well a rhetorical praeteritio displaying the decision not to engage in further narrativisation of the event. In terms of appeal and performance, the operation of shifting socio-political notability into the materiality and corporeality of the notation is carried out mainly through paratextual framing, dissonant paraphrase and quotation. In quasi-colloquial manner, the agent of laughter is subtly bracketed out, thus stressing the autonomy of the overall procedure.

Event-construal of the untellable

A second example pertains to the relation between eventfulness and the untellable. Untellable are events which resist simultaneous or retrospective narrativisation. For that matter, I will briefly turn to a narrative of illness, to wit Cancer Zone of No Return, written by the German-Israeli literary scholar Jurgen Nieraad. Even apart from the interaction with Hammerman’s post-factum report, Nieraad’s account is striking in more than one aspect, since it opts for a third-person narrator, an option which aims to distance the traumatic events through narrative distancing. The alter ego Georg faces the diagnosis as follows: “He was told that he suffered from an acute myeloid leukaemia, which meant that sheer anarchy reigned in the cell reproduction vital to the system.” (Hammerman/Nieraad 83; my translation) Georg is then elaborately informed about cancer’s impact on immunity, the seven subtypes of blood corpuscles and erythrocytes and about the impossibility to treat them without destroying other vital parts of the body. The extensive verbatim quotation of the doctor’s scientific terminology refutes the suggestion that scientific-medical terminology is normally absent or repressed in narratives of illness (Vandamme 212). According to a widespread opinion, narrativity prototypically involves the “reshaping of universal claims, collective entities, and abstract contexts into particular characters and events” (Prince 387). This judgment, however, tends to downplay the importance of conceptual and essayistic writing and collective entities in the (post)modernist novel . Yet, the author’s alter ego is less interested in individual stories and his fellow patients’ precedents sketching out typical courses of events associated with this “myelopoetic growth”. The protagonist goes on to recompile this terminology in a more poetic way:

“Georg, drifting into sleep, imagined his Minoan leukaemia, riding on a cancer, surrounded by various cystic and bawdy bubbles [Zyten und Zoten], viciously grinned at by globoids, poetic proliferation, ruddy-cheeked hematomata, aggressive monoblasters.” (Hammerman/Nieraad 83-84; my translation)

What we witness here is not a reappropriation in terms of a narrativisation of the abstract medical terminology; the actual phrasing testifies to an intricate layer of alternative rhetorical coding: The text – playfully? – insists on bringing micro-patterns of rhetorical euphony (especially alliteration, homonymy) into the jungle of medical conceptualisation, which despite its predictive value remains inconclusive as to the specific causality (why?) and the outcome. The display of rhetorical awareness is not the philologist’s attempt to evade reality, its retelling as wry adventure quest aptly foregrounds the paradox (ideological) fashioning of the “patient” as both agent and patient, as the following scene suggests: “He was greeted back as hero”, he was told to be “a lochem, a fighter”. His fellow patients told him “in the tone of the converted that it was the human will that counted for 50% percent of the recovery.” (Hammerman/ Nieraad 84; my translation) I cannot completely analyse this passage here nor do justice to the book’s intertextuality and narrative lay-out as such, but one could state that the rhetorical coding of this passage (mainly visible in the German original) insists on basic contiguity and randomness of the phenomena rather than on the temporal and causal impulse of medical language. The subliminal attempt at casting this abstract fear as an event sequence is refuted by the overall suspicion of emplotment.

That event construal is ultimately unavoidable, is not in contradiction with this micro-narrative resistance to emplotment. It is an almost traumatic concern in such essayistic and hybrid modernist novels as Musil’s The Man With qualities. This “business of serving as the ‘stuff of history’” (Musil 391) or the “serving as subject matter for the story” (my abridged translation) also infuriates the protagonist of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, whose scepticism leads him to stress the sense of virtuality and artificial retrospective emplotment surrounding even well-documented historical events:

“We could safely say of this or that event that it had already found its place in history, or certainly would find it: but whether this event had actually taken place was not so sure! Because for anything to happen, it has to happen at a certain and not at some other date or even not at all; also, the thing itself has to happen and not by chance something merely approximating it or something related.” (Musil, The Man Without Qualities, 390)

Likewise, Kafka may be said to insert this uncertainty into almost every speech act and event.  The event status of dismissals, employment, invitations and initiations is inherently flawed and uncertain, as it is a site of shaping and subjecting the agent rather an action carried out by an agent.

Conclusion

More recently, the rhetorical analysis of event construal has mainly been carried out by cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguists indeed use the term event-construal to point out that a particular event in the real-world is construed via textualisation. (Bednarek; Coulson & Van Petten) Especially evaluation and dramatisation are considered to enhance the impact of the report, but the very linguistic terms for that (like stance, appraisal) amount to a very resultative approach to what narratology subsumes in a much more differentiated and dynamic way under perspective. Notability points to a micro-narrative shift both in tellability and in the agency of observing and reporting the event. From the vantage point of narratologies mainly preoccupied with fictional narrativity, such patterning may appear mainly ornamental or descriptive. Some of these rhetorical patternings relevant to narrative speak to the eye more obviously than others: even structuralists will admit that patterns like chiasmus at least suggest an alternative distribution of predicates. Other patternings are more subtle and thus more difficult to pin down in terms of narrative function. Further research will be required to establish the degrees of markedness of such micro-narrative coding. This rhetorical coding does not simply change our view of the agents involved, it will effectively change our view of the events reported.

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