Resonance: A Reader's Perspective on Figurally Colored Narration

Joshua Parker

Fatih University, Istanbul

University of Cologne

Introduction

Figurally colored narration (Schmid 166), the "contamination" of a narrator's voice by stylistic markers of a diegetic character's voice, lends a "double-voicedness" to our reading experience of a text. Increasing "the difficulty of detection that arises" from the ambiguity between the narrator's voice and that of a character, this form of "textual interference" leaves readers with "the task of distinguishing the latent CT [character's text] from the narrative discourse" and, from there, leaving us to decide "what evaluative standpoint the narrator is taking up on the contents and expressions of the CT" (Schmid 174). Whether the typical reader does indeed go through these evaluative steps is not something this article will question - certainly many careful readers may. What I will suggest here instead is that a reader's attention in such a situation may possibly be quite simply focused elsewhere - not on what "evaluative standpoint the narrator is taking" toward a character, but perhaps more immediately on where the reader's own standpoint should align itself as part of his or her own dialogical relationship with various voices on various levels of the text.

As readers of fiction, we generally take it for granted that text set off by quotation marks represents words spoken in a diegetic story-world by fictional characters to other fictional characters. Indeed, reported speech has traditionally been defined as the only part of the fictional story-world presented to us with no explicit intervention or interpretation by the narrator (Genette 75). Figurally colored narration, meanwhile, is to be imagined not as the narrator's intervention in a diegetic character's reported speech, but rather the opposite - stylistic and other markers of a character's reported speech which "interfere" with and color the narrator's extradiegetic discourse. Despite this difference in outlook on which level of text does (or doesn't) influence the other, both Gérard Genette and Wolf Schmid, with an emphasis on the narrator's and the character's interference (or non-interference) in each other's voices, tend to focus on what Wolfgang Iser would call the "artistic pole" of the text, that of narrative intention, rather on the "aesthetic pole" of the reader's own experience and interpretation.

Here, I hope to suggest why a shift of focus toward this aesthetic pole of reading might be the next important step to take in evaluation of these "interferences" between narrative levels - and why contemporary American texts in particular call for a focus on this side of a literary text's dialogics. To do so, I outline how a "resonance" between fictional characters' story-level dialogue and the narrator's extradiegetic discourse may subtly blur barriers between narrative levels, guiding our perception of a text's focalization, and affecting how we position ourselves in relation to the narrator or to certain characters as we read. This "resonance" could be considered a special case of Schmid's "text interference" (or Leo Spitzer's "contagion" or "infection") - a case in which the focus is on the reader's perception of this effect - not as a clash between two ideological standpoints represented stylistically, thematically, ideologically and grammatically through Schmid's measures of theme, tense, orientation system, language function, lexis, or syntax, but uniquely on the links between grammatical second person address and evaluation. I hope to show how, in instances where a character's voice and a narrator's voice are already aligned in these two areas, the co-utterers of both diegetic and extradiegetic discourse share a similar rhetorical positioning. The reader, in effect, identifies, on the extradiegetic level, with a dialogical position already established in the diegesis, through similar grammatical features of person used in turns by the narrator and by a diegetic character.  

A focus on second person

Aristotle, in effect, posited that our most basic means of making sense of new ideas or situations is through analogy, in fiction as in life. Mimesis itself might be seen as dependent on analogy: one set of signifier/signified is as being reproducible through another medium. We see a relationship between two ordered pairs - here, the pairing of the relationship between narrator and narratee and between two speaking characters within the narrator's discourse. When what one character says to another mimics, rhetorically or in some way stylistically, the narrator's stance toward us, we assume a dialogical relationship between the narrator and narrative audience that is "the same" as between two diegetic characters. This, one would imagine, often includes a subtle nudge of our identification toward one or another rhetorical position - but perhaps also toward the character whose dialogical position corresponds most clearly or frequently to that of the narratee. This has applications for theorizing on why we sympathize with certain characters in fiction. I think it could eventually have interesting applications, too for how reported speech in news media and narrative tone in the voice of the media itself work together to create a resonance between our positions as news receivers and the positions of people involved in the story. 

Of course, almost any stylistic similarity between narrator and character voice might serve to link our responses as readers to an ideology proposed by the text. A focus on deictics, and the stylistic markers of dialogical positioning is probably the most interesting place to begin looking - partly because parallels between the dialogical positioning of narrators, narrative audiences and characters are likely to call our own sympathy into action, and partly because they are, when indicated by use of second-person address or narrative apostrophe, among the simplest to pinpoint in a text. In short, to determine sympathy through stylistics, it would be fruitful to focus on analogies we construct in reading, and imminently practical to focus on analogies between narrator's apostrophe to readers and characters' reported speech to listeners - specifically when each addresses listeners or readers with the pronoun "you."

Mieke Bal has noted the "residual" character of the textual author, a figure located somewhere between the real author and the narrator. Katherine Passias has used the term "residue" to explain how the pronoun "you" can refer to a diegetic character while "residually" conserving its address function to a narratee. The concept put forth here is similar, but I wanted to move away from imagining this effect as a "residue." Much of "second-person fiction" theory has already uncovered how use of the pronoun "you" can metaleptically position the reader within the diegesis - and how this "trick" of playing with narrative levels, when extended for any length, is quickly "naturalized" by readers so that the "you" is quickly interpreted as a third person "he" or "she." Here, I propose to examine a more specific effect: situations where the second-person pronoun's referent has clearly changed, and in such a way that an echo of the figure it formerly designated remains, generating a discrete metalepsis that comes on us almost without our being aware of it, coloring our identification and sympathy first toward one specific figure in the text, then, by proxy, to another. A kind of unconscious analogy or blending is made between two figures, on two different narrative levels.    

Resonance is not the reader's sensation of being addressed at the same time as a fictional character, but of being addressed in the same way, and the reader's subsequent conflation of the character's and reader's positions. Resonance is our perception of anaphora not to a fictional figure, but to the relationship between two figures, one of whom's rôles we are belatedly, half-invited to play. And whose ideological standpoints we are all the more ready to accept because of similarities between our positions in relation to speaking figures on two discreet levels of the text.

An Example

One might consider the following as an example:

"Jorgeson would say, under his breath, 'You could get killed if you try that.' Or, 'Your ass is had, if you do that.' You got the feeling that Jorgeson didn't think loving the American flag and defending democratic ideals in Southeast Asia were all that important." (Jones)

In this excerpt from a contemporary short story, a narrator reports what a diegetic character, Jorgeson, typically says to other characters in the story-world. The narrator then himself summarizes and interprets Jorgeson's statements for his own narrative audience - in a sense, for us, the reader. Both the character's (Jorgeson's) and the narrator's voices employ a similar form of direct address to listeners, with their use of second-person apostrophe. I hope to show how this similarity of address can create a blending of the dialogical positions of the listeners, from the reader's perspective. As Schmid notes of free indirect discourse, an ambiguity "activates the reader and forces him to refer back to the context" (171). Situations where (as here) the context itself is ambiguous as well (is the narrator criticizing Jorgeson's attitude, or foreign policy?), however, leave us precisely where Schmid's discussion of figurally colored narration leaves us, with the fact that whether it, like free indirect discourse, "tends to serve empathy or criticism [of a character] has still not been resolved today" (172).

An aesthetic pole-oriented analysis might begin by focusing not only on which "texts" within the narrator's discourse can be ascribed to the narrator or to the character, but by also focusing on which narrative audiences (diegetic or extradiegetic) are targeted by these discourses coming from two different narrative levels of the text. In the above excerpt from "The Pugilist at Rest," for example, we can say that 1a) the character Jorgeson's reported discourse (whether or not reported directly and precisely by the narrator is not clear, as the narrator seems to be summarizing lines spoken over time:  "Jorgeson would say") is immediately followed by 2a) a section of the narrator's own discourse (whether or not and to what degree "contaminated" by Jorgeson's own discourse). But we can also note that, mirroring these utterances, are the positions of co-utterers who are also referred to directly: 1b) reference to a diegetic "you" character/narratee (other characters in the diegesis Jorgeson is speaking to when he says, "You could get killed if you try that," or "Your ass is had, if you do that."), directly followed by reference to 2b) an extradiegetic "you" narratee in the phrase "You got the feeling that Jorgeson didn't think loving the American flag and defending democratic ideals in Southeast Asia were all that important" (the narrative audience the narrator addresses - which is, to the extent we identify with this position as readers, ourselves).

While quotation marks indicate that the source of the voice has changed (however polyphonic its tone and however various its own sources), no such clear indication is given through any immediate context of a corresponding change of the figure addressed. What I would propose is that one of our first instincts in interpretation is thus likely through anaphora - the referral of a pronoun back to its most recent object. And if these two "you"s are not referring to the same figure in the text (as clearly, being on two different narrative levels, they are not), then are they not referring to a similar dialogical position that has now been set up in relation to the discourse? Put in another way, if textual interference or "contamination" between the narrator's and the character's discourse functions here in the speaker's position, then does the "contamination" not also carry over into the listener's position, too? The effects of this resonance between listening positions at the aesthetic pole of the text have not, as far as I know, received extensive study. But I suspect that they may lead us as readers to infer a similarity between 1) our own projected position as part of the narrative audience and 2) the position of the listening character in the diegesis who is being addressed in a similar way.

The narrator's comment following Jorgeson's reported speech is, of course, ironic. But how to read the irony? As a criticism of Jorgeson's patriotism? Or, rather, as a mockery of the very politics which offers such notions as that of "defending democratic ideals in Southeast Asia?" On whose side does the narrator stand? And, as he includes "us," in this apostrophic aside, on whose side are we supposed to stand? We first read what the narrator reports "Jorgeson" to have said to another character - only to find stylistic indications the narrator has taken up Jorgeson's own mode of discourse. If the narrator's relationship to us and Jorgeson's relationship to his listener, we sense, bear a stylistic resemblance, are we not tempted to react to both in the same way, as if both voices were combined or accorded as a single ideological source - with, perhaps, a single narrative audience?

Interestingly enough, in a case study published by Richard Gerrig and Deborah Prentice, about 65% of readers took Jorgeson's side in an ensuing argument with another diegetic character after reading this passage. Of course, a resonance between the narrator's rhetorical strategy (or apostrophe) and Jorgeson's would only be one of many factors influencing a reader's expectations or sympathy, including plot and other forms of characterization. Still, it should not be discounted as minor, particularly in an Anglophone context where an "indefinite you" more and more often replaces "one," increasing narrative apostrophe to the reader/narratee (Hyman).

Conclusions

Basically, we, as readers can, and do, identify which level of the narrative (diegetic, extradiegetic, etc.) quoted dialogue belongs to, even though

"[d]ifferent linguistic and stylistic forms may be said to belong to different systems of languages in the novel. [.] It is impossible to lay out the languages of a novel on a single plane, to stretch them out along a single line. It is a system of intersecting planes. [...] Therefore, there is no unitary language or style in the novel. But at the same time there does exist a center of language (a verbal-ideological center) for the novel. The author (as creator of the novelistic whole) cannot be found at any one of the novel's language levels: he is to be found at the center of organization where all levels intersect. The different levels are to varying degrees distant from this authorial center" (Bakhtin 48-49).

Resonance is the echo of this center of organization's relationship to us on various other levels of the text. In perceiving resonance, we compare the distance between two voices - in terms of tone, in terms of the grammatical form of address, and in terms of their physical distance from each other on the lines of the page. When their distance and dissonance are not so great, we tend not exactly to collapse them into one or approximate their source as a more or less unified figure, but to approximate their dialogical relationship to our own.

In the excerpt above, there is no clear indication of a shared ideological stance between the narrator and the diegetic character, Jorgeson. Yet a similar use of apostrophe and second person address indicates that the dialogical relationship between a) Jorgeson and his own diegetic narrative audience of other characters, including the homodiegetic narrator/character and b) the extradiegetic narrator and his extradiegetic audience are similar. The idea of resonance might be a useful way of looking at figurally colored narration of this particular type, from a reader's perspective, and from a perspective of dialogical relations between rhetorical positions that do not limit themselves to one narrative level, but transgress them to create a gestalt-like dialogical partner for the reader who encourages our sympathy at two points, both in and outside the story-world.   

Of course, resonance could easily exist without metalepsis - with other similarities of voice between two characters, or between two narrators. But I think the cases which have the most interesting implications for how narrative voice works to position readers by heightening our identification not only with certain characters, but more usefully with the positions they occupy, come when this effect synthesizes our own sense of relationship to narrators and characters. When, as in the excerpt used here, a character is placed in a diegetic dialogic position that parallels our own position as narrative audience. For while quotation marks may indicate that the person addressed is not us, at the same time, a combination of anaphora and our own easy habits of identifying with the dialogic position of the narratee both suggest to us that, in some sense, he is.

References