Metonymy

Metonymy is a figure of speech that is closely related to metaphor, of which it is a kind. In metonymy, one word substitutes for a related word (Baldick). The replacement word sometimes is a part that stands for the whole (the replaced word), in which case the form of metonymy it called a synecdoche (Tufte 13). Newspapers commonly use metonyms in headlines, when they say, for example, that “Scotland Yard Investigates a Murder” or “The White House Defends Health Law”—in these cases, Scotland Yard signifies the British investigative police and the White House signifies the current U.S. president and his administration. An example of a synecdoche is when someone says there are a certain amount of “mouths to feed” (Baldick).

Metonymy as figurative language, especially in fiction, can be more abstract, for example, when Vladimir Nabokov writes in Ada, “She was exasperation, she was torture” (Tufte 13). It often involves using the verb to be to make equative metaphors. Metonyms also work as signifiers—in any form of narrative, they can be used to express more meaning than the word or words literally imply. Martin Amis and Virginia Woolf both take advantage of this useful function.

The narrator in Time’s Arrow uses Auschwitz literally, but it is likely that Amis suspects that the reader will use Auschwitz as a stand-in for the Holocaust in general, which makes the impact greater. A hint that he may be using Auschwitz metonymically is given when he writes, “Auschwitz lay around me, miles and miles of it, like a somersaulted Vatican” (Amis, 116). The Vatican is a common metonym for the Catholic Church, and so this comparison suggests that Auschwitz has a parallel deeper signification. Amis plays with other signifiers, like America and American (“affable, melting-pot, primary-color, You’re-okay-I’m-okay America”, Amis, 6). Often, in Time’s Arrow and generally, the lines of metaphor and metonymy blur—the subtle distinctions between the two have, indeed, been a major subject of inquiry, a question whom two influential critics, Roman Jacobson and David Lodge, have tried to address (Ronen, “Description, Narrative, and Representation,” 285).

Virginia Woolf uses metonymy more regularly than Amis. She uses Buckingham Palace (over a dozen instances) the Court (72, 95, etc.) as metonyms for the monarchy. She uses place names like Whitehall and buildings like Westminster as stand-ins for the British government and Parliament (49-50). But more importantly, for her characters, certain places serve metonym-like roles, conjuring memories or associations of the past. For Peter Walsh, India serves this function, also substituting for the dying British Empire in general (“…disliking India, and empire, and army as he did…”, 54). Meanwhile, for Clarissa Dalloway, Bournton stands in for her past—also representing her father and her childhood (57). Woolf relies on metonymy in her efforts to mimic real patterns of thought, because indeed when we think of a certain place or thing, it often means so much more to us, becoming a kind of stand-in for our own complex feelings, emotions, and desires. Woolf, Amis, and other authors have realized the power of metonymy in literature and narrative.

Works Cited:

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.

Baldick, Chris. “Metonymy.” Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Web. 19 October 2013.

Baldick, Chris. “Synecdoche.” Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Web. 19 October 2013.

Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In: Style in Language, edited by T. Sebeok, 350-377. New York: Cambridge, 1960. Web. 19 October 2013.

Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977. Print.

Ronen, Ruth. “Description, Narrative and Representation.” In: Narrative, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Oct., 1997), 274-286. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997. Web. 19 October 2013.

Tufte, Virginia. Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2006.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Harcourt, 1925. Print.

Focalization

Overview:

The relationship between the narrator, the focalizer and the focalized are essential in crafting a narrative that focuses on something.  Authors will strategically use the narrator(s), the focalizer, and the focalized to craft a narrative that has a specific focalization.  The term focalization was coined by Gérard Genette, a french literary theorist, in order to distinguish narrative agency and visual mediation. Similarly, point of view often confuses speaking and seeing, narrative voice, and focalization (Niederhoff).  The need for the term focalization arose from the need to describe, “the relations between the elements presented and the vision through which they are represented” (Austenfeld 295).

Defining Focalization:

In a summary of Gérard Genette’s discourse on focalization, the definition can be summarized as, “a selection or restriction of narrative information in relation to the experience and knowledge of the narrator, the characters or other, more hypothetical entities in the story world” (Niederhoff).  This definition provides the framework for the literary method used in narrative, yet Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic elaborates on the definition set in place by the word’s creator:

“The focalizer is responsible for the operations that turn the fable into a story and the narrator for the ones that encode the story into the text” (Bronzwaer).

Internal, External, and Zero Focalization:

There are three common methods that authors use to craft a focalization: internal focalization, external focalization, and zero focalization.

Internal Focalization: Narrator = Character

This method of focalization means that the narrator says what a given character knows, this provides for a narrative with a ‘point of view.’ Events and thoughts are mediated through the point of view of the focalizer.  This method of storytelling takes on two different forms.  First, the author can use one narrator /focalizer to tell a story through. The second method of internal focalization involves multiple focalizers.  This allows the reader to interpret a story through multiple perspectives (Narrative Terms and Concepts).

Literary Examples of Internal Focalization

In the novel, The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver uses five female narrators to craft the story of a family who moves to the Congo as missionaries.  The five different experiences and perspectives allows the author to use very subjective historical accounts in order to, “achieve the desired effect of a balanced narration” (Austenfeld 294)

The Poisonwood Bible separates narrators by chapter breaks, whereas in the novel, Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf shifts focalizers often but keeps a constant narrator.  The narrator in Mrs. Dalloway is separate from the focalizer, yet because the narrator has access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters (focalizers), the literary method being used is also internal focalization.  An example of this can be found on page 15.

“And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had almost come to surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him” (Woolf 15)

In Mrs. Dalloway, the narrator has a mind of his/her own.  This fact, as well as the methodology of shifting focalizers, provides for a different type of internal focalization than the one the reader experiences reading The Poisonwood Bible.

External Focalization: Narrator < Character

The narrator says less than the character knows, this provides for an “objective” or “behaviorist” narrative.  External focalization, “has the narrator focus on visible, external aspects of events and characters in the narrative. The narrator, in this method, does not impart any information as to characters’ thoughts of feelings, but merely relates physically ascertainable facts to the reader.”  (Narrative Terms and Concepts).  This type of narrator who is outside the characters’ consciousness allows the reader to draw their own conclusions without the interpretation of the narrator.

 Example of External Focalization

Many movies are told through the method of external focalization.  The narrator is usually different than the characters (focalizers) and the viewers are set with the task of drawing conclusions based on what they see and hear. The narrator of the movie is not telling the viewer the emotions and feelings of the focalized, rather, the different scenes combined allow the viewer to understand how the narrator, focalizer, and focalized are related in order understand the desired focalization of the author.

Zero Focalization: Narrator > Character

This type of focalization denotes that the narrator knows more that the character and says more than the character knows.

Some believe that zero and external focalization could exist under the same definition because the story is being mediated outside of the character.  In external focalization, the narrator tells less than the character knows. In zero focalization, the narrator knows more than the character knows. Both provide a narrative where there is a separation between the focalizer and the narrator.

Works Cited:

Austenfeld, Anne Marie. “The Revelatory Narrative Circle in Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Posionwood Bible”” JSTOR. Department of English Language and Literature, Eastern Michigan University, 2006. Web. 21 Oct. 2013. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/30224649&gt;.

Bronzwaer, W. “Narratology III: Narration and Perspective in Fiction.” Poetics Today 2.2 (1981): 193-201. Print.

“Focalization.” Narrative Terms and Concepts. Georgetown University, 2008. Web. 21 Oct. 2013. <http://narrative.georgetown.edu/wiki/index.php/Focalization&gt;.

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998. Print.

Niederhoff, Burkhard. “Focalization.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. N.p.: Hamburg UP, 2011. Web. <hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de>.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Brace and, 1925. Print.

Narrative Discourse

A narrative discourse is a type of discourse, which Michael Bamberg defines as “an exchange of referentially denoted information, ” the most basic discourse being a simple exchange of information, with more complex discourse approaching a kind of interaction between cognitive models (Bamberg 218). Discourse can also be defined as “the range of social practices, customs, and institutions surrounding a given subject matter” (Mikics 90). The Companion to Narrative Theory makes a distinction between story and discourse: story is composed of basic events and situations – the plot— whereas discourse is the composition of story elements into a plot (Phelan 21). Narrative discourse is a particular kind of discourse: an account of (usually) past events represented as having a causal relationship and which are centered around a specific agent or agents. Examples of narrative discourse include folk stories, historical events, mythology, and personal experience and are often characterized by a use of the first or third person as well as a chronological representation of events (LinguaLinks). Narrative discourse is often used in narratives which try to make sense of the ‘origins of things’, which is to say that narrative discourse attempts to organize past events into a sense-making narrative, which can then be useful to the narrator or story-teller. Some examples of how organizing events into a narrative discourse can be useful are in the representation of one’s identity, or in how a community represents relevant events as an expression of community identity.

The following excerpts, the first from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and the second from Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (a memoir) are examples of narrative discourse as the organization of past events into a useful narrative, which in these cases inform each character’s sense of self and identity.

Excerpt from Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (page 8-9)

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally, Seton – such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and the driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now in front of her… Did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to buts and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.

Excerpt from Lost in Translation, by Eva Hoffman (page 276)

Perhaps finding… a point of calibration is particularly difficult now, when our collective air is oversaturated with trivial and important and contradictory and cancelling messages. And yet, I could not have found this true axis, could not have made my way through the maze, if I had not assimilated and mastered the voices of my time and place – the only language through which we can learn to think and speak… It’s only after I’ve taken in disparate bits of cultural matter, after I’ve accepted its seductions and its snares, that I can make my way through the medium of language to distill my own meanings; and it’s only coming from the ground up that I can hit the tenor of my own sensibility, hit home.

Works Cited

Bamberg, Michael. “Narrative Discourse and Identities.” N.p., n.d. Web.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin, 1990. Print.

Mikics, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. Print.

Phelan, James, and Peter J. Rabinowitz. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005. Web.

Woolf, Virginia, and Bonnie Kime Scott. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005. Print.

“What Is a Narrative Discourse?” What Is a Narrative Discourse? LinguaLinks, n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.

Testimony

When examining the notion of testimony within a literary context, several major issues beg consideration; questions of narrative authority, judgment, and intended audience emerge as crucial to any attempt at understanding the term.  However, unlike mere “recollection,” which concerns itself largely with simply re-telling or revisiting past events, “testimony” revolves around and is driven by one major idea: truth.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “testimony” as “Personal or documentary evidence or attestation in support of a fact or statement” (OED); similarly, the Oxford English Dictionary of Law defines the term as “the evidence of a witness in court, usually on oath, offered as evidence of the truth of what is stated” (OEDL).  Testimony, whether in a courtroom (be it real or fictional) or in the structure of a text itself, suggests an overwhelming attention to the discovery, proclamation, or in some cases, denial, of truth.  Though a purely law-based consideration of the term neglects to address some of the structural and artistic aspects of fictional narration, the latter definition highlights some enlightening considerations regarding the act of testimony.

First, the definition calls to attention the relationship between witness/agent of action and audience.  Though one can certainly testify to oneself in the form of realization, epiphany, or acceptance (in his explorations of Spanish literature, Gonzalo Sobejano considers testimony to be a form of “self-narrative”) (Sobejano 176), “testimony” usually implies an external audience, which maintains an interest in deeming the narrating figure’s recollections of past events truthful or false.  For example, in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the narrator, Humbert Humbert, testifies to his interactions with Lolita in an attempt to relate to his fictional readers (the story is presented as a written account) the truth, the full, experienced reality of his interactions with Dolores Haze.  At the outset of the novel, he states, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied.  Look at this tangle of thorns” (Nabokov 9).  Not only does he bear witness to the events of his life as they occur, but in narrating them, in testifying them aloud, he offers them up for judgment.

When considering notions of narrative authority and accuracy that arise from such “testimonial literature” (Sobejano 176), a second concept arises that closely aligns itself to the presentation of truth: morality.  One does not simply tell a story to an audience; one “provides evidence of the truth . . . usually on oath [my emphasis]” (OEDL).  Whether intentional or not, because of its legal connotations, “testimony” is inherently tinted by notions of “the ethical.”  Humbert not only tells his story with the simple aim of re-living it; rather, he testifies the accounts of his life in an attempt to defend his actions in moral terms throughout the novel, and in doing so, forces the reader to question his narrative reliability (much as a jury might doubt a witness’s accounts).  Similarly, in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, the narrating voice presents an overwhelmingly moral testimony of Tod Friendly/John Young/Hamilton de Souza/Odilo Unverdorben’s actions.  At one moment, when the narrator considers itself separated from, even external to its physical host, it states, “It would be criminal—it would be criminal to neglect the opportunity that Auschwitz afford for the furtherance . . .” (Amis 133), and in doing so, passes judgment not only on the “reality” of Odilo’s actionsbut also on their legitimacy.  In both examples, it is no accident that the narrating character–the “witness”—employs explicitly legal terminology; each offers up evidence of a claim for judgment, either by oneself or by one’s audience.

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Print.

Law, Jonathan; Martin, Elizabeth. “Testimony.” Oxford Dictionary of Law. Oxford University Press, 2013. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.

Sobejano, Gonzalo; trans. Tinkahm, Carol Anne and Turner, Harriet. “The testimonial novel and the novel of memory.” The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

“testimony, n.”. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2013. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Narrative Irony

Broadly speaking, narrative irony is a subversion of expectation. It is when something seemingly simple or straightforward is twisted or undermined—and oftentimes in a “subtly humorous” way (Baldick). When understood in this context, irony can manifest in many different forms: verbal, structural, dramatic, and cosmic irony draw attention to the myriad forms that irony can take in a narrative.

Arguably the “simplest” form of irony is verbal: Quintilian defines such as “saying what is contrary to what is meant” (Baldick, Colebrook 1) In its initial conception, it was primarily a rhetorical tool used to draw contrast to an intended truth. Critics trace the inspiration for this definition to Socrates, who oftentimes employs irony in Plato’s dialogues: Socrates feigns ignorance precisely when he wanted to emphasize his interlocutor’s ignorance. By repeating his interlocutor’s statements, Socrates appears sincere, but actually undermines the very words he utters. In this context, irony becomes a culturally subjective tool: Awareness of its presence requires the audience to understand both that the statement presented on the page cannot possibly be sincere, and that there is a more appropriate—and contradictory—understanding of the statement.

Structural irony abstracts this initial understanding by framing irony in the context of a character’s life or a text’s plot: the ironic twist contrasts the cliché. Time’s Arrow is a loose but fitting example of structural irony: the narrator’s life is reversed entirely, which causes the expected to become unexpected because of a chronological reversal. Mundane tasks eating and defecating become strangely surreal and vile; atrocious acts like murder become acts of kindness. In portraying Tod’s actions as new and kind, respectively, Martin Amis draws attention to the antithesis of such actions.

Especially in the postmodern era, irony has grown to become not just an element of literature, but also the foundation of it. As Claire Colebrook argues, the prevalence of irony is correlated with a cultural shift away from a commitment to sincerity. Furthermore, irony has become a judgment value in literary analysis: Colebrook observes that literature is oftentimes judged based on its ironic weight, “its capacity to mean something other than a commonsense or everyday use of language” (12). Reading between the lines and explicating the implications of a text has become a primary focus in literary analysis.

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. New York City: Harmony, 1991. Print.

Baldick, Chris. “Irony.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 3 (2012). Web. 18 Oct 2013.

Colebrook, Claire. Irony. New York City: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Plato. Laches and Charmides. Trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Print.

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is a branch of literary and historical interpretation that many different approaches fall under. Hermeneutics is both the philosophy of interpretation and the methods of interpretation themselves.

History

Hermeneutics began in Ancient Greece – the term originates from the Greek word for ‘translate’ – and developed slowly through the following centuries. Initially the field was didactic and practical. How does one communicate symbolically? What do symbols mean? Throughout medieval times, as illuminated manuscripts of the Bible became more widespread, these questions were crucial for biblical interpretation where the lines between symbolism and history were gray (Ramberg).

In the 18th and 19th centuries, influenced by German romanticism, hermeneutics underwent a huge development. Initiated by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and better defined by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), the field became more philosophical, especially in regards to the question: what is communication? The broadening scope of hermeneutics and the move away from its didactic function continued when Martin Heidegger published Sein und Zeit. From that point on, hermeneutics was used as an exploratory mechanism for questions as broad as “what is human existence?” (Ramberg).

Still, the basic tenets of Hermeneutics have built on each other throughout the centuries.

Interpretive Qualities: Circle, History, and Internal Logic

Most importantly, Schliermacher suggested what has come to be known as the hermeneutic circle. The circle is a metaphor for understanding texts and media as “an internally consistent whole” that is “checked with the constituent parts” (Holcombe). Or, as A Dictionary of Media and Communication puts it, “we have to refer to the whole to understand the parts and the parts to understand the whole” (Chandler).

It is difficult to find examples of hermeneutics in literature because, by definition, hermeneutics is a certain kind of analysis of literature – not literature itself. Many people employ hermeneutics without even knowing it, however. Take this poem for example (Murray):

The

sleek

black

bat

sailed

high

into

the

air

finally

landing

at

the

feet

of

the

batter.

Initially, the bat seems to be an animal – even the verb “sail” evokes the idea of a wing. The poem is only meaningful, however, if the initial clause is modified by the knowledge of the second clause. In other words, the reader benefits in his or her meaning-making of the poem is assumed to be circularly coherent – so that the beginning fits the ending and the ending explains the beginning. This is one way to see the hermeneutic circle.

While a circular argument is problematic in logic, Schliermacher believed that a true interpretation of literature or biblical text should reveal them to be circularly coherent.

Hermeneutics posits that such coherence requires understanding the historical and cultural context of the document and author, rather than just a blind reading. Again, this is a practice familiar and unconscious to the modern student. Take Constantinos Proimos’ analysis of Rembrandt’s “Prodigal Son.” The painting isn’t just a picture of a figure kneeled in front of an old man. Rather, it derives its meaning from an understanding of the history, culture, and belief system of Rembrandt and his time. Proimos’ writes:

“The artist depicts the final and culminating point of the story: the prodigal son is portrayed on his knees, having just returned home and having just met his father, in front of the dimly lit arched doorway of the house… The son is seen from the back, slightly turning his head to the right and resting it on his father’s chest, full of repentance and guilt. The father’s glowing red cape and rich outfit contrasts with the son’s ragged garments full of holes, his worn sandals and his scarred feet. The warm tones in the clothing of both father and son contribute to a harmonious whole but also mark with poignancy the contrast in roles. The father is compassionate, for he is strong and still sovereign despite his age, as the red cloak, a sign of majesty and power, does not fail to indicate. He is thus able to forgive the wounded son who, in his weakness and humility, is asking for forgiveness. The short, expensive sword on the right side of the prodigal son is the only remaining marker of the status he once entertained, as a son of a noble landowner, and a sad reminder of his arrogance that once led him to question his father’s rule. It is practically the last and only equipment distinguishing him from common beggars of his time” (Proimos).

Dilthey asserted that this internal interest was the very difference between science and the humanities. “Science aimed to explain, and did so by recognizing laws exterior and indifferent to man: invariant, mathematical, ahistorical. The humanities aimed to understand, and retained what was relevant to the individual man: his life experiences, affections, character, social and historical setting” (Colin).

While hermeneutics is unscientific to the extent that it is internal, it is scientific to the extent that it asserts a logic or calculability to human interaction. Peter Winch (1926-1997), in particular, purported that “understanding other people is not based on sympathy but on knowledge and expectations — on rules, in short” (Colin).

All of this allows people to bridge gaps and explain symbols by inferring things like motive and reasonable response – ultimately aiding in meaning-making.

Works Cited

Chandler, Daniel, and Rod Munday. “Hermeneutic Circle.” A Dictionary of Media and Communication. Oxford University Press, 2011. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Holcombe, Colin J. “Hermeneutics.” Text Etc. N.p., 2013. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Murray, Kris A. “Hermeneutics (Herman Who?).” Sauk Valley Community College, 12 Jan. 1998. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.

Proimos, Constantinos V. “Forgiveness and Forgiving in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668).” Art, Emotion and Value. 5th Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics (2011): 291-300. Web. 21 Oct. 2013. <http://www.um.es/vmca/proceedings/docs/27.Constantinos-Proimos.pdf&gt;.

Ramberg, Bjørn, and Kristin Gjesdal. “Hermeneutics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University, 9 Nov. 2005. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Thomas, Robert L. “Literary Genre And Hermeneutics Of The Apocalypse.” The

Master’s Seminary Journal (n.d.): 79-92. Web. 20 Oct. 2013. <http://www.tms.edu/tmsj/tmsj2e.pdf&gt;.

Mimesis

At a very basic level, “mimesis” can be understood as the representation of reality, but this simple definition is packed with meaning. In the journal Poetics Today, Meir Sternberg clarifies an understanding of mimesis while also elucidating some of the tensions inherent to defining the word: “Mimesis…presupposes a world out there (actual or fictional) to be imitated and a discourse that imitates it by fashioning an image, a coded (re)semblance…And in practice, the degree of resemblance will freely shift (as well as the code type) with the goals behind the semblance” (Sternberg 296). This definition highlights mimesis’ imitative, or transformational, qualities, to be contrasted with attempts to capture perfectly the details of reality.

It is this transformational power that finds The Republic questioning the ethics of mimetic narrative. Plato believed our phenomenological world to be derived from higher forms, with such a transformation necessarily losing quality and leaving our world inferior to the higher. Art representing reality is therefore an imitation of an imitation, becoming doubly alienating (Puetz). In such art and especially dialogue, the mimetic narrators feared by Plato would offer a transformed and mediated insight into a psyche, potentially inducing an undesired multiplicity in the audience (Halliwell ¶6).

However, this power to allow readers or audiences insight into the psyches of others is why many critics have found mimesis to be so meaningful. Erich Auerbach, writing in the seminal text Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, describes this sort of narrative construction as being “fraught with background” (Auerbach 11-12). In his reading of Homeric and Biblical epic, Auerbach describes how the narration of Homer leaves “thought and feeling completely expressed” in a perpetual present, while the Elohist’s stylistic choices grant the character of Abraham a history and a psychology that is revealed in what is not said as much as what is, requiring a more dedicated attempt at interpretation and understanding from readers. Mimesis, then, for Auerbach finds value in the capacity for directed narrative to inspire meaningful reflection on the self and other through representations “fraught with background”, empathetically portraying temporal selves and psyches.

This more or less goes back to defining mimesis as the representation of reality. But the concept’s empathetic capacities are highlighted in a text like Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, where a portrait of London is lovingly crafted through the relationships, minds, and histories of her imagined characters. The reader is offered numerous perspectives that elucidate each other, giving the novel a permeable and insightful aesthetic. Such representations can also be used to affect disorientation, such as in David Fincher’s Fight Club. Much of the film situates the viewer in the perspective of the narrator, indicated by a detached voiceover and camera shots that always follow him and depict his perception of reality. However, when a plot twist reveals a major character to be a figment of his imagination, he and the viewer are left disoriented as Fincher depicts the narrator alternatively punching his antagonist and himself, thereby attempting to mediate two contradictory realities. Such examples show how mimetic narrative can produce different affects in a reader by use of different formal techniques.

 

Works Cited:

Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Print.

Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Edward Norton, Brad Pitt. 20^th Century Fox, 1999. Film.

Halliwell, Stephen. “Diegesis – Mimesis.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology, University of Hamburg, 17 Oct. 2012. Online.

Puetz, Michelle. “Mimesis.” Theories of Media Keywords Glossary. The Chicago School of Media Theory, Winter 2002. Online.

Sternberg, Meir. “The ‘Laokoon’ Today: Interart Relations, Modern Projects and Projections.” Poetics Today 20.2 (1999): 291-379. Online.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Inc, 2005. Print.

Narrative Voice

Narrative Voice. Defining what it is not may be a good place to start. It is not the voice of the author, which can be determined by the attitude, style, or personality (Baldick). It is not point-of-view. It is not perspective. These moods could easily be confused with narrative voice and they answer the question, “Who sees?” When trying to define “narrative voice” one must answer the question, “Who speaks,” by way of first answering “how?” (Aczel). How does the narrator address the reader? How does the narrator (and the author) present the sequences of events? (Or to be more specific, how does this presentation affect the characterization of the narrative’s personalities?) How does the author choose to express each characters’ individuality through their thoughts and speech?

Narrative voice is how, in whichever manner, the author chooses to convey the story. These choices of characteristic speech and thought patterns, which could be determined through “tone, idiom, diction, speech-style” (Azcel), establishes the narrator and the characters, guiding us in the right direction for answering, “Who speaks?”

Virginia Woolf tells the story of Mrs. Dalloway through third-person narration in the mode of both indirect speech and free indirect speech (Jones 70). With the exception of lapses into memories, the timeline of the story’s events progresses forward chronologically. However, the narration curves and flows over, but still with, time’s straight line, moving through the consciousness of each character. As the narrator takes on each consciousness, speaking to the reader, we are given access to their subjective thoughts, their choices behind their actions, and affective associations with their environments. Woolf slips seamlessly in and out of each consciousness, almost too seamlessly. However, through each character’s narrative voice, the reader is able to identify the speaker and “distinguish it from other competing voices” (Aczel).

“They had just come up-unfortunately-to see doctors. Other people came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads came “to see the doctors. Times without number Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, handsomely upholstered body…” (Woolf 6).

In this short passage, the speaker switches from the perspective of the omniscient narrator to Clarissa to Hugh to a detailed description of Hugh by the narrator (Jones 74). With the help of context inference and dialogue cues (“Hugh said”), the reader is able to determine the voice of each speaker through speech-style, diction and thought pattern. Previous access to Clarissa’s thoughts reveals that her voice is precise, short and to the point. She does not drift too much into analysis and conclusions. In contrast, the narrator’s evaluative description is more detailed, running on and on until it makes its connection. For this reason, the reader can determine, without quotations, that Clarissa said, “Was Evelyn ill again?” and the narrator made the comparison of, “…intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, handsomely upholstered body.”

Mrs. Dalloway’s character-specific narrative voice allows the reader to distinguish who is speaking when the narrator switches so quickly between them. The narrative voice present in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow allows the reader to identify the narrator as a speaker separate from the body in which it inhabits. We are not reading from the perspective of Tod/John/Hamilton/Odilo. The narrative voice is established as something comparable to his conscience or soul with the help of the first person’s “I.” The thought patterns are fragmented from the Tod’s decisions and actions. We, the readers, can deduce that if the “I” narrating the story can intrude upon Tod’s visual perspective while having an interior dialogue that differs from the decided actions of Tod’s body’s that the narrative voice belongs to some sort of conscience.

Works Cited

Aczel, Richard. “Hearing voices in narrative texts.” New Literary History 29.3 (1998): 467-500.

Amis, Martin. Time’s arrow. Random House, 2010.

Baldick, Chris. “voice.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. : Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Date Accessed 20 Oct. 2013 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-9780199208272-e-1216&gt;.

Jones, Gloria G. “Free Indirect Style in Mrs. Dalloway.” Postscript 14 (1997): 69.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Broadview Press, 2012.

Diegesis

Diegesis comes from the Greek verb diegeisthai, meaning “to lead/guide through”(1). It denotes indirect representation of actions or thoughts by the narrator, as opposed to mimesis, a direct representation resembling a show on a stage (2).

Historically, it appears first in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics. For the ancient authors, the identity of the speaker was a determinate factor, with the voice of an authorial narrator corresponding to diegesis and the voice of other agents in the text to mimesis. Diegesis was a category that included both plain diegesis, told by a single narrator, and diegesis by mimesis. The meaning of the word has undergone some changes over time, so that the diegesis/mimesis dichotomy has evolved from meaning two modes of telling to telling and showing, but voice still plays an important role in understanding diegsis. Told by the narrator, diegsis is a summary of events, inevitably filtering out chunks and pieces of the actual happenings from the narrator’s perspective (3).

Gerard Genette explains diegesis in a different manner. For him, diegesis means a level of narration; the extradiegetic level is above the main story and its world, the diegetic level consists of the main story, and the hypodiegetic level is for stories inside the main story (4). The extradiegetic level serves as an outward limit to the extent of the diegetic level of narrative (3). It is the level in which a narrator outside the world of the characters in the narrative describes things from a distance.

An example encompassing both dimensions of the word can be found in James Joyce’s “The Dead”.

“It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember; ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr Fulham, the cornfactor on the ground floor. That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day.” (5)

An omniscient narrator, or at least one that moves nimbly across the minds of many characters, is describing a scene here. In summarizing the events of the story, the narrator colors the facts with his voice: “always a great affair”, “as long as anyone could remember”. He decides for himself that the annual dance was a great affair, for instance. The narration is mostly at the extradiegetic level, but the diegetic level, that of the characters, can be observed from some parts of the narration that feel intimate, as if a direct reflection of the thoughts of the characters. “That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day”, for example, seems to come straight from the minds of some of the characters.

Another example comes from Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day:

“When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. So at least he thought, and there was a certain amount of evidence to back him up. He had once been an actor—no, not quite, an extra—and he knew what acting should be.” (6)

Works Cited:

(1)   Halliwell, Stephen: “Diegesis – Mimesis”. In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. URL = http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/diegesis-–-mimesis [view date:20 Oct 2013]

(2)   Bunia, Remigius. “Diegesis and Representation: Beyond the Fictional World, on the Margins of Story and Narrative.” Poetics Today 31:4.Winter 2010 (2011): 679-720. Print., 688, 681-2.

(3)   Herman, Luc, and Bart Vervaeck. Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2005. Print. 14-15

(4)   Baldick, Chris, and Chris Baldick. “Diegesis.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. N. pag. Print.

(5)   Joyce, James. “The Dead.” Dubliners. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin, 1993. Print. 175

(6)   Bellow, Saul, and Cynthia Ozick. Seize the Day. New York: Penguin, 1996. Print. 3

-Yebin J

Metafiction

Metafiction is “literally fiction about fiction” (Neumann and Nünning). This is fiction that has an inherently self-conscious attitude in its construction and acknowledgment of itself as a piece of fiction; by drawing attention to its status as an “artifact,” the work raises “questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 2). Metafiction takes as its subject the very process of creating fiction, which explores “a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction” (Waugh 2). The reader, in this way very much aware of the story’s fictional status, reaches a greater level of engagement through a heightened sense of awareness of the existence of a relationship between reader and story. In this way, the dialogic possibilities of the metafiction create complex possibilities for exploring the “possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text” (Waugh 2).

The term was first coined by William H. Gass in his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” to address the rising need for a term to address the “emerging genre of experimental texts that openly broke with the tradition of literary realism” (Engler). Though there are suggestions of the presence of metafiction in ancient works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, metafiction has most prominently come to feature in literary works of the past 20 years and is closely associated with modernist and postmodernist novels.

In Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, the reader finds him or herself immediately inserted into the story as a character. “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade” (Calvino 1). The first line of the book narrates the very process that the reader undertakes to read those first few lines, resulting in an increasingly self-aware text that questions not only it’s own existence, but the reader’s experience of existence.

In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut both comments on the creation of his own writing and inserts himself into the course of the story itself:

“I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book” (Vonnegut 5)

“’Mary,’ I said, ‘I don’t think this book is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away’” (Vonnegut 6)

“That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” (Vonnegut 160)

Some other examples of metafictive devices include: characters writing novels, a novel within the novel, commenting on the story while telling it (perhaps in footnotes), and a character’s realization that they are creations of the novel.

 

 

Works Cited

Bernd, Engler. “Literary Encyclopedia.” Literary Encyclopedia. N.p., 17 Dec. 2004. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Calvino, Italo, and William Weaver. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Print.

Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. “Metanarration and Metafiction.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology, University of Hamburg, 3 Dec. 2012. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. [New York]: Delacorte, 1969. Print.

Waugh, Patricia. “What Is Metafiction and Why Are They Saying Such Awful Things about It?” Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984. Print.